5A question for my readers (answer via PM, if you will): What character needs an episode next? This has been kind of a Malcolm episode. I want to do episodes fleshing out all the characters who were kind of set-pieces in the original show: Travis, Phlox, Hoshi and others. There will be a third episode focusing on Phlox in the aftermath of this two-parter, and then I have nothing specific planned for episode four. So your choices are a Travis character episode, a Hoshi one, or another Malcolm one. What do you all want?
Episode 5x02: Hosts (Part 2 of 2)
LAST TIME ON STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE:
Reed could not believe his eyes when a small shield appeared to block his beam. Phlox wheeled around. There was a blank look in his eyes and an odd, inhuman will to his movements. As Reed watched, something burst through the skin of the doctor's face, then split open. It was metallic, flower like and appeared razor-sharp.
Reed felt his hands move in trained patterns without his conscious intervention, even without his full consent. One hand flew to brace the other's wrist, as the first set the phase pistol to kill. Again, the beam died on the shield, though it appeared to increase the energy required to block it. Phlox moved towards him like a shambling zombie. Reed's thumb set the gun to its top setting: total disintegration. He fired.
There was a flash, as of a ship's shields being overwhelmed in a haze of torpedoes. Phlox's arms flung out from him like a man being crucified. He slowly fell backwards and hit the ground with a sick, quiet thud.
AND NOW THE CONCLUSION:
Reed lowered his phaser and put the safety on. "God," he said. He was sure he'd killed Phlox. Suddenly another sick thought went his mind, compounding the feeling of horror that filled him: what if I killed Phlox but not the thing inside him.
He put that aside and, working quickly, found a powerful paralytic agent and estimated the dosage based on ten-year-old basic emergency medical training. He crept up to Phlox's body on his knees, hesitated, and finally put the hypodermic sprayer to Phlox's carotid and pulled the trigger. He dropped the injector on the ground and felt the artery. Feeling a pulse, he breathed a massive sigh of relief.
"Reed to Bridge. Phlox has been taken over by a hostile entity! Emergency medical personnel to the sickbay! Security to sickbay!"
Yoshikawa was first on the scene. He walked through the door, seemingly calm, but Reed knew that he must have sprinted most of the way. "What's going on?"
"He was infected by the cybernetic lifeforms. We thought his immune system had fought them off."
Yoshikawa recoiled. "We didn't think to make sure?"
"If those things can reproduce from a single nanite… I don't know how we would."
As they watched, nurses and Dr. Chilton scrambled in and loaded the unconscious doctor into the scanning tube.
Finally, Archer stepped in. "What's going on here, Malcolm?"
"It's an emergency, sir. We have to quarantine this ship immediately and get away from the station. There may be other hostiles on board!"
It's been a long road…
The King of the Trill was on the main viewer. "What do you mean? This is nonsense!" he was yelling. He was just a boy, sitting in robes that looked like silk, with a large red gem attached to his forehead somehow. Like Varell, he appeared human, but had spots or tattoos running down the sides of his face and neck.
"Unforeseen cirumstances, your Majesty," Archer said, flatly. "We have an advanced, intelligent disease on board, and it must be contained. Your station may be contaminated if we don't leave now. If your station is contaminated it must not spread to the surface. Your Majesty, we must act together to quarantine both. We will back off to several hundred kilometers from the station and attempt to find a solution. I suggest you send your top medical scientists to the station and let no one leave."
"An outrage!" the thirteen or fourteen-year-old Trill Vatesh on the screen yelled, his voice cracking.
Archer sighed, straightened his uniform, and said "Archer, out."
I shouldn't have done that, he thought.
He turned to address the night-shift bridge crew. "I know this is stressful, but the problem is worse than we thought. We will remain at tactical alert until further notice. When McGee goes off duty we won't have an acting chief engineer on deck. At that time, I will address all pressing engineering concerns myself."
"You, sir?" Reed asked.
"Taught by the best. Let's hope I remember some of it. Now, Travis, let's see if we can back out. Thrusters only this time. There needs to be a rule about that."
Travis was visibly shaking. "Aye, sir. Clearing moorings and going to minimum thrusters astern aye. Port and starboard thrusters to stationkeeping. Seven hundred meters from entrance."
"Stern cameras onscreen," Archer said.
The main viewer showed a huge round aperture growing as the ship slowly moved backwards towards it. In the opening was the blackness of space, the Trill homeworld in the distance, and a few scattered stars.
"Go to three quarters astern, Travis."
"All astern three quarters, aye."
Reed mopped his brow. "This is going to be tight."
"Just like backing a boat down a ramp," Archer said.
"I've never done that, Cap'n," Travis said. His hands were tight on the manual yoke.
But as they watched, Travis precariously brought the Enterprise out the aperture with less than six meters clearance on each side of the saucer section.
As soon as the ship was out in clear space, the comms officer said "the royal palace is hailing again…" he trailed off as he saw the look on Archer's face.
"Alright, Wolowitz, transmit a distress call to Starfleet, inform them we're under quarantine. I'll be in my ready room."
Archer got to his desk and buried his face in his hands. He hit the intercom. "Hail the station, ask them to scan for our missing people. No, wait. We have better sensors; just… just scan it directly."
Reed revisited Soval, who had been sitting in the interrogation room since Reed and Yoshikawa had been called away. Reed apologized awkwardly for the wait.
"Well," he said at last. "I suppose you're absolutely clear now, sir."
"Yes," Soval said, as impenetrably as ever.
"I've been informed, ambassador, that you've applied for asylum from Vulcan. The Cap'n says it's been conditionally accepted."
"On what condition?"
"As you are the first Vulcan ever to do so, well, ambassador… it seems that you are now wanted by the High command. The United Earth Government will guarantee you protection on any planet or other territory, with the exception of territories with a Vulcan embassy."
"What?" Soval said, a little more loudly, seeming to show real emotion for only the second time in Reed's experience.
Reed sighed. "Nearly all of them."
"Precisely all of them, Mr. Reed. Every sanctioned colony has an official Vulcan presence."
"The Cap'n seems to think… you might want to stay on Enterprise. You would have a position as an observer and advisor… if we survive current events, that is."
"Mr. Reed, I do not know that it matters much where I spend my exile."
"I sympathise, sir." Reed turned and left, feeling like he hadn't been very smooth.
Dr. Chilton furrowed her brow as she surveyed the two transparent printouts, which she was holding above her next to one of the fluorescent lights in the new open-plan sickbay. They showed concentrations of nanomachines in Phlox's body. She was a small, middle-aged woman with short, professional hair, wearing the new medical uniform of shirt, trousers and Starfleet-blue labcoat. Reed looked at her anxiously.
"Bad?" he asked.
"Of course it's bad. It's one of the most horrific infections I've ever seen. Not a millimeter of his body is unaffected, from the outermost layers of skin to the glial layers of his neural clusters."
"Neural clusters?"
"Neural clusters are what Denobulans have instead of brains."
"He doesn't have a brain?"
"He does, it's just distributed and very redundant. Very tough possums, these. But it's just not enough."
"Possum?"
"A figure of speech. He was so resistant to the nanoprobes the first time—the Denobulan immune system makes us all look like invalids. It's strongly linked to the higher nervous system. His unconscious mind would have actively and intelligently strategized in defeating any pathogen. Some of them are even consciously aware of their antibodies. When he was first infected three years ago, the nanites were unable to overwhelm his entire nervous system, and so they lost and he went into full remission. If only he'd stayed that way…"
"What changed?" Reed asked.
"You'll laugh."
Reed looked almost comically serious.
"He had a cold. It's the first time he's really been sick since then. His immune system was suppressed just enough… He'd literally filtered his blood through the infirmary bioreactor three times to try and purge those nanoprobes. Apparently a couple of dozen individual probes slipped through."
"Will he rally?"
Chilton looked at him with a trace of exasperation. "Probably not. He's in cellular stasis but it barely affects the probes. They have less to work with but they're spreading. I give him a day, unless we come up with something better. He's not pretty: more implants have formed and sprung out from—" She realized that Reed was turning green.
Hoshi came over the Ready Room intercom. "Scans of the Trill Space Platform came up negative, Captain."
Archer rested his eyes and sighed deeply. "Can you scan the planet from here? They have to be close by."
A frantic male voice was the next thing he heard. "It's Lieutenant Sato sir. She just… faded out in front of me."
"Are shields holding?"
There was a moment of silence, long enough for a man to run the length of the bridge twice. "Yes, sir. 110% normal power output, polarized inward."
"They must be aboard the ship, then. We have to search it again. Send Yoshikawa to the Ready Room."
"Aye, sir."
Security teams swarmed through the ship for not even the second time in two days. The entire ship was searched in hours, except for certain engineering spaces that were too hot or too irradiated to enter. Again they found nothing. After rechecking some of the inter-deck spaces himself, Yoshikawa reported to the captain. "I have every reason to believe they're off the ship, sir."
"Impossible. And assuming it were, what do propose? Search the station?" Archer's voice said over the intercom. He sounded ruffled. "Easier said than done."
"Nevertheless, Captain."
"I'll see what I can do, Colonel. I have every reason to believe they're on the ship."
In the Ready Room, Archer was developing a headache. Assuming it were even possible to beam through shields, he was convinced that sensors would have detected the cybernetic life-forms by now. After all, the Trill Station was unshielded and made of nothing heavier than concrete and steel—practically transparent to the newest Bausch and Lomb sensors. Still, anything was possible, and he needed to keep all the bases covered.
He walked onto the bridge. "Hail the Trill Government again."
No one on the bridge knew how, so he did it himself with a little trouble and some grumbling.
The King of Trill came on the screen. "Well?"
"At this point, your majesty, we have found nothing to rule out the idea that your station may be…"
"Infected? If it is, I'll break you on the wheel."
Archer channeled not his father this time, but his mother. One time, Soval had stepped on Archer's father's dreams of flight pretty hard, and his mother had lit into him. "I am not a diplomat, so forgive me if this is not diplomatic." Archer said at last, and then raised his voice and said what his mother had said to Soval. "Get over yourself." He saw that the King was stunned, so he went on. "I am offering to help you. You need help. Moreover, it's my people that may have been beamed onto your station—"
"We need help," the boy said, spitting copiously and hissing a little through oversized teeth "with a problem you gave us! How convenient for you! Leave my space, do not transport anyone to the Platform, and keep my nephew and his farmer friends! I don't need your disease on my world; Begone!"
The signal ended not with the cessation of the signal, but with a real and calculated attempt to blow Enterprise's comm circuits, a surge of directed microwave energy on the same frequency that the ship's computer had to reroute into a main bridge breaker box, which promptly exploded, showering Archer with sparks.
"Travis, take us to Warp 2 out of the system. There are some decent-sized phase cannons on that station and I don't want to find out if they're big enough to hurt us.
"Why not Warp 5, Captain?"
"To show that we're not scared. If I'm right, they have some business in their culture about saving face. Also, if we lost confinement at Warp 5… there's only one man that could save us from a warp core breach."
"Understood, Captain."
They jumped past light speed. Time passed.
Travis fiddled with the controls. "Captain, did Trip really adjust the engines just for me?"
"Explain."
"Remember how it used to pull to the left at warp?"
Archer thought back to the last time he'd taken the helm in an emergency. It had indeed pulled to port. He tried to remember what the imbalance had been. "There were some… hull patches stored in the port nacelle catwalk. It reduced the field efficiency on that side by about a tenth of a percent."
"Yes sir, the ones that are in the new shuttlebay now." Travis nodded, not looking back from the controls. "Well it took me a minute to notice it because I was so used to it before the refit. But she's doing it again. More."
Archer scratched his head. "That shouldn't be possible, Travis."
Travis shrugged, carefully, as his hands were both on the controls, compensating, in fact, for the drag. "I can't figure it out either, Captain."
"Archer to Reed."
Reed's voice sounded over the intercom. "Reed here, sir."
"Have the catwalks been searched?"
"Which ones, sir?"
"The nacelle catwalks, Malcolm. Have you searched them?"
"Sir," Reed said, tactfully. "the temperature in there should be… I don't know what it is now, but it's very hot."
"We're dealing with a powerful enemy, and we have reason to believe that they might be in there. We'll drop out of warp in ten minutes and I want you ready to take a team in fire suits in there."
"Is that safe?"
"If not, wait until the moment it is. And Malcolm?"
"Sir?"
"Make sure it's the port nacelle you go in."
Reed clenched and unclenched his fists inside the massive insulated gloves. He was as nervous as he'd felt during the last few days of the Xindi Crisis. It was ironic, he though: no personal attachments. That was what he'd been taught, what he'd always told himself, and here he was, five years into his first major deployment and not only had he fraternized extensively, but he couldn't even remember the moment that the rule—his father's rule—had gone out the window. Among the missing people, there were several that were like family to him now. He had to resist the urge to say stupid things out loud in front of his men: "I'm coming for you" or "stay alive, dammit" or the like.
The room he and the assembled bulk of the MACOS and Starfleet Security – as many as were left – were gathered in was the nacelle ramp inside the port engine pylon. It was a wide corridor with a low ceiling and a plasma conduit running through the middle of it at waist height. At one end, it adjoined to a side room off of main engineering, and where the the two floors met at sharp angle, their respective gravity fields interacted in a way that made Reed woozy whenever he had to walk through it.
The moment the captain announced over the intercom that the ship had dropped out of warp, Reed put on the helmet of the fire suit, checked the seals, and tried the door himself. It was an imposing door, next to the place where the conduit ran into the wall: it was like a bank vault's, with a huge crank-wheel in the center. When he opened it a crack, the wave of heat made itself felt through the suit. He slammed it shut. His dosimeter showed a higher dose of gamma than he wanted to expose his men to as well—for him, after a less-than-charmed five years in space, a drop in the bucket, but not healthy, by any means.
"Captain," Reed said, over the fire suit's internal com, "it'll be some time before we can enter, unless Trip can—" he caught himself too late "—unless you or McGee can figure out a way to vent the heat, sir."
Archer's voice was loud and crackly in his ear. "We're going to be out of warp for fifteen hours anyways. I can't risk bringing the engines back online without a cold restart. I figure you can enter the catwalk in about an hour, unless I've misplaced a decimal pla-" His sentence ended abruptly.
"Captain?"
"Sir, the captain's just vanished."
"Dammit!" Reed thought for a moment, and then signaled the security forces to stand well clear. He opened the door just far enough to slip through and ran in pell-mell. The heat was overbearing, heating the air in the tank fast enough to make breathing immediately difficult. As he ran deeper into the nacelle, he found that he was running through the symptoms of heat stroke, again and again.'
But it was clear that the chamber was empty. No cyborgs or missing persons were in evidence.
Reed sat in the captain's chair, without any relish. He was the only senior officer left. The captain's chair felt huge and cold as he sat down. He looked around the nearly-empty bridge with a sad and anxious eye.
Yoshikawa looked at him expectantly.
"Bring me the Vulcan Ambassador, Minato," Reed said, in a strange tone of voice. He hoped it came across as a power move.
The colonel bristled for a moment, then said "yes… yes, sir."
Five minutes later, Soval arrived on the bridge.
"You called for me, Mr. Reed?"
"Consider yourself acting science officer."
"I fail to understand."
Reed fidgeted. "I once heard that a Vulcan primary student's science education is better than an Earth PhD in physics."
"That seems possible."
"Well, the senior staff is missing and this is an emergency. Consider this your first act as a member of the crew."
Soval hesitated. "I will help to the best of my abilities."
Three hours passed after the last known abduction. Reed was in command and Soval had made a few discoveries. He had worked out the approximate range of the cyborg's short-range transporter, shorter even than some of the conservative estimates McGee had made before she disappeared.
Additionally, Soval discovered that one of the human military officers, Yoshikawa, was going around behind him, keeping tabs on everything he did. In a rare moment of almost emotional intuition, he realized that Reed's motivation for assigning him to be acting science officer had been suspect, and everyone but him had known it at once.
He wondered, however, what that motivation might be.
Meanwhile in the sickbay, Chilton was almost to the point of screaming, or taking shots from Phlox's bottle of Cognac that he kept in his office. She considered what she would say if she had to write his eulogy.
"A man," she found herself muttering under her breath, "who dedicated himself to life in all its forms, for no other reason than for life's sake."
She suddenly had a thought. "Chilton to bridge."
"Bridge here," Reed said over the intercom.
"I need to speak to Ambassador Varell."
"Why, doctor?"
"He may have the key to saving Phlox."
"What, really? Of course! Go, go now!"
Chilton ran to the conference rooms where the ambassadors were confined. Inside, she spoke frantically. "Which one of you is Varell?"
The female trill spoke. "He's in the next room."
She burst in to see the aristocrat sitting with his cape off and his head in his hands.
"Mr. Ambassador, I'm a doctor," Chilton said, "and I need to ask you some questions. A life may be on the line."
"On the…" he seemed catch the meaning after a moment. Without raising his head, he nodded.
"Is it true your species does not suffer from… most forms of illness?"
"Ugh," he said. "Mostly just the one. You know the one."
She raised an eyebrow. "Ambassador?"
"Vertically transmitted at a rate of 100%, mother to child…"
"That's terrible."
"Morality rate of 100%..."
"Wait, how does that…"
"And you and I… well, fellow sufferers, at least."
She finally caught his meaning. "With respect, Ambassador, Phlox is in much worse a situation than either of us. If you want to feel sorry for yourself, could you do it in five minutes?"
Finally, he raised his head and began to explain, for the first time, the biology of the True Trill.
Finally, she was done with her scans of Varell. He had grumbled but been very cooperative overall. He sat up from the bed in sickbay, rubbed his back and sighed.
Chilton had her face deep in the viewer of the Denobulan microscope. She had very carefully taken a sample of the nanoprobes and placed it in a Petri with some of the antibodies she had taken from Varell.
"This is fascinating. They're fighting the nanoprobes with some efficiency. I… they're dying, but they're taking a chunk of the nanoprobes with them."
"Can you develop a cure from my blood, then?" Varell said, absently.
"I can slow it down long enough to work on one."
"Well, I have a religion, you know. How much do you need?"
Chilton looked at him and tried to make sense of what he had said. "Thank you," she said at last. "You're wonderful."
The man rubbed his spots. "I am not. Get it over with, will you?"
In the main conference room, Reed rubbed his hands and looked around the table. Yoshikawa was again steepling his fingers in front of his face. Soval sat upright and placid. Ensign Mayweather, Lieutenant McGee and Dr. Chilton sat with matching expressions of fear. Each expected to be transported away at any second to be assimilated by the cyborg menace.
Reed began without preamble. "McGee, is there anywhere, and I do mean anywhere that the cyborgs could be hiding that we haven't visually inspected?"
"Yes. They could be located in…" she counted on her fingers. "Thirty-two different spaces between the inner and outer hull. Now, they would be jammed together pretty tight, but they could be inhabiting some or all of them."
"Why weren't they searched, Lieutenant?" Reed snapped.
"No way to. They're filled with argon and welded shut."
"Can we transport in in EV suits?"
"If you know of a way to transport someone so they land safely in a gap of two feet between two six-inch-thick bulkheads, sure, Lieutenant."
Reed had this image of his friends turning into those mechanical beasts, worming through a maze of ungodly machines in a space ten by ten by two. "Can we scan them?" he asked at last.
"Of course we already have. But this species could be advanced enough to present false sensor images; you know that."
"But dammit, can we get better sensor readings? Get as close as possible to each space and scan it in detail?"
McGee stood up and adopted a mock-serious attitude. She took out her engineering tricorder, and pointed it at the ceiling, then ostentatiously read off its display, which, Reed assumed, showed nothing besides argon.
"I… I get the point. Sit down, Lieutenant," Reed said, at last, clearly a little hurt.
"What about the hydrogen tanks?" Chilton said.
Yoshikawa scoffed. "I personally entered three of them in EV suits, and one of my MACO's did the same on the other side. All six were completely vacant."
McGee rubbed her forehead. "Unless they're transporting rapidly from one tank to another, staying ahead of you."
Yoshikawa through his hands up. "What a preposterous idea…" He went on like that.
Mayweather leaned in close to Reed. "If you ask me, I think they're probably in the other warp nacelle."
"What?" Reed asked, rather loudly.
"I mean, they would have to compensate for the drag on the warp coils to stay hidden, sir. What if they overcompensated?"
Reed stood up. "McGee, is the starboard nacelle cool?"
The security team and the remaining MACOs assembled again in the opposite nacelle pylon ramp, this time in tactical gear, with phase rifles set to a random frequency and a few projectile railguns.
Reed felt like a general addressing an army, though there were less than thirty men and women standing in a loose clump in front of him. Yoshikawa stood to his side, uneasy at attention with a railgun hanging in a sling, and the door to the nacelle catwalk was to his back. "All phase rifles set to kill. Railguns, shoot to disable, shoulder, knees. Close ranks and prepare to enter, on me. Do not fire until I say. Understood?"
As a body, they said "aye, sir" and variations.
Reed turned around and walked to the door. The crowd tightened at his back. With sweaty hands, he struggled with the crank. Finally, it came undone and he opened the door. The air inside was still hot, almost 40 degrees. He stepped inside, followed by Yoshikawa and random MACOs.
He crouched, drew his phaser and looked both ways. Instantly, he saw what he was looking for. To his right, that is, to aft, he saw a massive, cancer-like growth of machinery about fifteen meters down the walkway, big enough that one would have to squeeze past it on one side. It touched the warp coils on the other. Lights glowed green.
Reed advanced towards it, gun ahead of him. He lowered his night-vision eyepiece and found that it revealed nothing he hadn't already seen, and walked on. Reaching the machinery, he squeezed past it, half-sitting on the railing to keep from touching it. Yoshikawa came next, his finger resting on the trigger guard of his railgun.
Over Reed's earpiece, a junior bridge officer's voice suddenly broke the silence. "Sir, Ambassador Varrell just disappeared."
Reed sighed. "Acknowledged. Status on Phlox?"
"One moment, sir. Chilton says he's stable, but still infected."
"Acknowledged."
They continued deeper. Tubes and exposed wires came close to their faces, and flashing lights shone occasionally in their eyes. Smells of oil and chemicals drifted to them. Strange noises put Reed's teeth on edge.
Finally, they came into an open space. Reed's blood ran cold: standing around a central area inside a hollow in the machinery, Archer, Hoshi, T'Pol, the froglike Trill… seemingly everyone who had disappeared, a total of thirteen people, standing in chillingly zombie-like posture. Their uniforms were ripped, and some of them had implants visible outside their skin. The Trill was manipulating some sort of tool that seemed to be attached to his hand. On a table in front of him, Solim Varell was unconscious and strapped down.
The assimilated crew members barely acknowledged Reed and Yoshikawa. As they watched, the Trill extended his free hand, fist balled up, towards Solim's neck, and two long, pointed tubes shot out from beneath the skin of his hand and into the other Trill's neck, among the spots.
Nothing happened.
Time passed as Reed watched.
Finally, the assimilated Trill ripped into Varell's chest with the tool attached to his hand, something that appeared to have no comprehensible purpose until it was rending the flesh of the man's chest. Reed almost lost his lunch when he saw sternum and ribs.
The assimilated Trill extended the hypodermic tubules again and squirted black liquid directly into Varell's wounds.
"Now," Reed whispered, trying not to retch. He jumped into the chamber, phaser firing.
Archer turned to him, an eerie green light flashing in his eyes from somewhere in the machinery. He extended his arm, with some sort of ripping tool on it. A metallic flower sprung from beneath the skin of his cheek and opened up.
Reed gasped and turned his phaser on the captain. He shot a continuous beam at Archer's chest.
Sickbay was flooded with ghastly-looking bodies. T'Pol, Archer, Tucker, two Trill and the rest. Chilton and the nurses were all in biohazard suits.
Chilton was standing on a stepladder, performing some kind of rapid-fire visual triage and shouting to all the nurses. "Alright, Varell is in the worst shape. I need him prepped for surgery stat. Inject all the humans with the maximum dose of Solution C, and start giving T'Pol small amounts, increasing every fifteen minutes, monitoring for reactions. I suppose there's no harm in doing the same to the other Trill. As they start to reject the implants apply topical anaesthetic. If bad, get them into stasis. Now help me get him up on this table. Oh, Lieutenant Reed!"
Reed was standing near the door. He looked exhausted. "Yes, doctor?"
"You got them here in time. They're not as far gone as Phlox. I think we can save them."
Reed raised an eyeball. "What are you giving them?"
"A soup of antibodies from Phlox and Varell, if you'll believe that. It's been very effective in slowing the nanoprobes in tests."
"More than I needed to know, Doctor. Phlox?"
She hesitated. "He wants to pull through. I have no idea, though."
She turned her back and started sterilizing her hands. "Alright, well, if you could give us the room? I'm about to have to perform trauma surgery on the ambassador."
Reed got out of quarantine. He walked down the corridor, with his uniform unzipped and the sleeves tied around his waste. He made his way to the mess hall, which he found empty. He got into the galley and made himself a tall coffee with cream and sugar, and took it to the captain's ready room, where he spiked it heavily by skimming from three different bottles of whiskey from under the Captain's desk, feeling oddly like he was thirteen and stealing from his father's liquor cabinet again.
He ended up in the conference room with his coffee.
Finally, he paged Soval. The ambassador responded instantly, so Reed guessed he hadn't been asleep.
"Are you occupied, Ambassador?"
"Not at all, Mr. Reed," the sober, restrained voice of the ambassador said over the intercom. "Am I required on the bridge?"
"No, but if you want to come to the conference room, I could…" The words came hard to Reed. He had been raised not to say these kind of things out loud. "I could use someone to talk to."
"I will be there shortly," Soval said, as flatly as ever.
"There's really no…" he realized the link was no longer active "…rush."
Finally, the Vulcan arrived. "You wished to speak to me, Mr. Reed?" he said, as he sat down, opposite Reed.
Reed sighed, doubly ashamed to be showing emotion, and to be showing emotion in front of a Vulcan. "Have you ever been in command of a starship?"
Soval managed to blink in a way that conveyed the same kind of stiff-upper-lip stoicism that Reed himself was struggling with in that moment. "Many times," he said, with tone that spoke neither to long years, nor to difficult decisions, nor to anything else but the pure sounds of the words. As Solkar's apprentice, he had been on Earth longer than Reed had, and his English was, Reed felt, elegant and unaccented.
"Is command… always like this? So difficult?"
The Vulcan rubbed his mouth. "Consider your position, Mr. Reed. You would hardly be in command if there were not a crisis."
"If only it were T'Pol and not me. She wouldn't feel a damn thing right now, Ambassador."
"That is untrue, Mr. Reed. To a Vulcan, emotions are always… may I enquire as to your religion?"
"Anglican," Reed said, raising an eyebrow. "That's a type of Christianity," he added.
"Emotions are always lying at the door. And you shall be their desire, and you must rule over them," Soval said, with a singular impenetrability of tone.
"I'm trying to remember what that is," Reed said, taking a large sip of the quite alcoholic coffee.
"It is from the Book of Genesis. Chapter… four, I believe. I take it it is evocative of my meaning?"
"So T'Pol would be feeling the same thing as I would right now."
"Worse. Fire. Fever. It is distasteful to us to discuss it. Emotion runs deep in the Vulcan psyche. We are a people who evolved in the presence of stressors your arboreal ancestors could hardly dream of. We are the second intelligence to evolve on our world, and the first was a predator that hunted us. While the path of convergent evolution, as guided by the Great Ones, has led us to the same physical form, even the same layout of neural pathways as humans, we are not alike. Without the strictures of logic, we would be as raving madmen compared to you. T'Pol is a child of about fifty. She is extraverted, something of a sexual pervert, and deeply in love with both her captain and her partner, your engineer. I think bearing command in this crisis would have broken her mind. The universe placed you in command, Mr. Reed. Do not wish for it to be otherwise."
"I see… But at least you're trained to deal with your emotions."
"And you are not? When I met you, Mr. Reed, I almost enquired whether you were raised on Vulcan. You seem… controlled, for a human."
"And yet…"
"Yet nothing. You struggle with your emotions, exactly as T'Pol, or I."
"'Keep a stiff upper lip.'"
"I am aware of the phrase."
"I once had a quarrel with another officer, Soval. We beat each other to a bloody pulp. Severely reprimanded. It's in my file. I might never make Captain because of it."
"I told you something earlier, Mr. Reed. I said I had never considered the practicalities of murder. That was a lie. I have desired the death of many, plotted their undoing in my head in great detail, and come close to making the first move. Do you understand?"
"I think I do, Ambassador."
"Do you know Archer considers me his uncle? I could not teach his father control, and I could not teach him control when he was young enough to learn. He is impulsive, ruled by a singular passion for knowledge, like Ulysses or Faustus of your myths."
"A grey spirit," Reed said, solemnly, "yearning with desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star."
"…beyond the utmost bounds of human thought. But you, Mr. Reed, you have the foundation of a Vulcan education, somehow. Stiff upper lip, did you say? I could teach you."
"I would—"
The intercom beeped. Chilton's voice came over, fatigued but strong. "Lieutenant Reed?"
"Aye?"
"The humans and T'Pol are stable. The implants will take time to remove, but we have them in stasis and they're mostly clear of nanoprobes. I expect they will all make a complete recovery, and the same for this aquatic Trill."
"Varell?"
"I think you better get down here, sir. And you better get the rest of the delegation in here soon. They ripped his chest right open."
"I was there," Reed said, flatly.
"He's dying, sir. It nicked one of his circulatory organs, and somehow, he's gone septic. I suspect it wasn't just a heart. It must have had some of the functions of a kidney or liver."
"I'll be right there, doctor."
Varell looked pathetic. His chest was covered in bandages that almost matched the wrapping he wore over his stomach and waist. A big red-brown stain had soaked through them, though, and Reed could tell at a glance that, if he were close enough to a human, he was a goner.
"Ah, well. It was a good body," he said, looking deep into Reed's eyes, deeper than Reed would have liked. "And Solim was an interesting one. He was only my second, do you know?"
"Your second… host?" Reed asked, tentatively.
"Yes. I've been Solim for only a year. Before that it was Ezri Varell, a fine woman, if a bit wide at the hips."
"And I suppose it'll be someone new next," Reed said.
"I have decided, if he consents. I have reason to believe that I… meaning Varell… can join with your doctor Phlox. It may be his only chance of beating the infection."
Reed thought about this for several seconds. Finally, he called Chilton over. "Can you wake Phlox?"
"I… I imagine I can, for a few minutes. Why?"
"Because… because this man wants to help him."
