Placing the action figure to one side of the case, he saw that directly atop the uniforms lay a framed photograph of a triumphantly grinning Trip. Trip was holding one of Charles’s own heavy-duty, duranium-reinforced fishing rods, along with a glistening marlin that had to have weighed nearly as much as a man. Elaine had taken that photo when they’d gone deep-sea fishing off the Gulf Coast not long before Trip had accepted his assignment to Enterprise. That entire day came back to him in a flash: the smell of spray and sunblock as they’d fished, the taste of the hush puppies and fried catfish and beer they’d had for dinner that night.
The sight of Trip’s wide smile.
Charles felt Elaine take his hand and squeeze it tightly, as though she were gripping a lifeline. He recalled how hard he’d always tried to surround Trip with laughter rather than tears. Despite that, more tears rose, threatening to displace the ones that had already taken up residence in the corners of his eyes. Simple hydraulic engineering, he thought. Liquids can’t be compressed. Trip would appreciate that.
Still hand in hand with his wife, Charles turned away from the open case so that he faced Archer and T’Pol. “Thank you,” he said, after he’d finally found his voice. “I think we’re ready to find our seats now.”
Let’s hope the future Archer invited us to witness is worth it, he thought.
And then the tears spilled over the brink, and kept coming in torrents.
Mom and Dad must have arrived by now, Trip thought, standing in a small vestibule adjacent to the auditorium’s broad corridors and seats. Dressed again in a simple, dark Vulcan traveler’s robe, he felt reasonably unobtrusive as he swept his gaze across the crowds that were quickly accumulating everywhere in the old stadium, from the field-level seats to the bleachers, and all the way up to the skyboxes. Anyone who saw him would assume he was just another of the hundreds of Vulcans currently living on Earth, or perhaps one of the hundreds more that had arrived just this week specifically to observe today’s formal signing of the Coalition Compact, and the forging of galactic history.
Trip had to admit to himself that he was half-hoping to see his parents, or perhaps his brother Bert, somewhere in the crowd. He felt certain that Captain Archer would have moved entire worlds to make certain that everyone in his family was given seats in one of the auditorium’s best VIP boxes. And while he ached to see his folks and his brother again, and wanted nothing more than to reassure them, part of him was glad that he hadn’t encountered them, and actually hoped that he wouldn’t; he simply didn’t trust himself not to reveal his presence to them, and with the Romulan threat still gathering on the horizon, he knew he didn’t dare risk doing anything that might compromise his usefulness on that front.
Although his parents’ faces, thankfully, didn’t pop out of the crowd as he scanned it, he did unexpectedly recognize a different pair of faces. Though they wore civilian clothes rather than the MACO uniforms that had become so ubiquitous aboard Enterprise during the darkest days of the Xindi crisis, Trip immediately recognized the luxuriant long black hair of Corporal Selma Guitierrez and the strong cleft chin of Sergeant Nelson Kemper. Guitierrez wore a denim baby-carrier that contained an infant, blissfully sleeping despite the noise and tumult of the still-settling crowd.
That must be their little girl, Trip thought, working hard to suppress an extremely un-Vulcan smile as the young couple and their child walked directly past him without taking any apparent notice, evidently on their way to their seats. Trip recalled that Guitierrez’s pregnancy, which had occurred during Enterprise’s Xindi hunt in ‘53, had been the reason both she and Kemper had subsequently left the service. Their little girl- he wasn’t certain, but he thought he recalled hearing that they’d named her either Ellen or Elena- had to be close to a year old by now.
Although the Kemper family quickly passed out of his view and into the milling crowd, the child had remained in Trip’s sight long enough to churn up the painful memory of standing with T’Pol in the parched, red Vulcan desert to bury little Elizabeth. At that instant, all the tragic might-have-beens he’d either faced or turned his back on throughout his life returned to him at once, threatening to bury him in an emotional rockslide. Not wanting to allow anyone to see a weeping Vulcan, he stuffed his rising agony back down as best he could.
He started walking toward one of the STAFF ONLY entrances, grateful that the skill set of a competent spy overlapped considerably with that of a decorated Starfleet chief engineer. His path took him directly past one of the VIP skybox seating areas, where he saw some other familiar faces, the sight of which filled him with still more wistful thoughts. T’Pol wasn’t among them, making him both glad and disappointed. But there was Malcolm, who knew the truth about his “death,” seated next to Hoshi and Travis, who didn’t. Whatever grief his absence had caused them appeared for the moment to have been subsumed by their eagerness to hear Captain Archer’s upcoming speech.
None of them had looked in his direction, and if they had, all they would have seen was yet another Vulcan observer. Just another alien face, in a sea of alien faces.
Trip moved on, more determined than ever to do what he’d come here to do. His parents might not have been sufficiently trained in the art of keeping secrets to allow him to risk revealing himself to them today. But T’Pol was a different matter.
Of all the people he cared about- and had been forced to deceive so cruelly, thanks both to the Romulans and Section 31- she was certainly capable of handling the plain truth.
“There they are,” said Albert Edward Tucker, stabbing his left index finger into the general direction of the VIP boxes adjacent to the one in which he sat.
“What?” said Miguel Cristiano Salazar, who was seated beside Albert. He strained to see whatever or whoever it was that his partner was trying to call to his attention.
It was obvious to him that Bert’s grief over the loss of his younger brother was still eating him alive. Over the past week or so, as the date of the Coalition Compact ceremonies had drawn close, that grief seemed to have begun to metamorphose into an almost incandescent rage.
“Enterprise officers, I’m pretty sure,” Tucker said, pointing again for emphasis.
“Where?”
“There.” Bert sounded impatient, exasperated, but Miguel knew it was only the pain talking. Still, it could get tiresome. “There, in the box that Vulcan guy in the robes just passed.”
“Oh,” Miguel said, finally picking the three dark blue uniforms out of the still settling crowd. “I see them now. And stop pointing, Bert. This isn’t a World Cup match.”
Bert stopped pointing, but his mood didn’t become any more pleasant. “If they’re sitting in one of the VIP boxes, then they must have known Trip pretty well.”
“Wouldn’t Enterprise officers have been able to get better seats than that?” Miguel said.
Bert answered in an unintelligible mumble and continued staring daggers at the trio of Starfleet officers who might or might not have been Trip’s shipmates.
Miguel wished that Bert had made his decision to attend today’s event when some of the better VIP boxes- like the one near the stage, where Bert’s parents had been seated- had still been available. That way, Bert might never have even caught sight of Trip’s alleged colleagues.
Of course, better seats would have put Bert that much closer to Captain Archer. Miguel felt grateful, at least, that Bert had declined the captain’s invitation to meet with him today backstage, to receive Archer’s personal condolences. He certainly didn’t want to have to manage that confrontation.
Finally tiring of watching Bert glare sullenly in the direction of the Starfleet people, Miguel said, “It’s not their fault, you know.”
Bert turned that harsh glare upon Miguel. “Isn’t it, Mike? Any one of them could have been the one to die. Why did it have to be Trip instead?”
Miguel had tried to be patient, but Bert was pushing him to his limit. “That’s not fair. The galaxy is a dangerous place.”
; “You’re goddamned right it is. And Trip might still be alive if Starfleet wasn’t out there sticking its head into the lion’s mouth. Lizzie, too.”
Folding his arms across his chest, Miguel said, “Why don’t you just start up your own Terra Prime cell, then? I hear they’re looking for a new leader now that Paxton is in jail.”
Bert reacted with speechless incredulity, as though he’d just been slapped across the face. “My God, Mike. Is that what you think of me? That I’m some sort of racist isolationist?”
Miguel regretted his words the instant they’d left this lips. After all, hadn’t Terra Prime wounded Bert as well? The death of the half-Vulcan child that Paxton’s terrorists had created, in part, from Trip’s flesh, was no doubt also still an open wound.
“You tell me, Bert,” he said, trying to shift to a more conciliatory tone. “Look, I know you’re in pain. But here we are, among thousands of people who’ve come from all over the planet- a lot of them are even from other planets- to celebrate the arrival of the future.”
A future that just might make your family’s sacrifices worthwhile, he thought. He knew he couldn’t utter the thought aloud- at least, not yet.
Bert merely fixed him with another hard stare that seemed to last for hours.
Finally, Bert’s expression softened. “I’m sorry, Mike. I know you’re just trying to help. I guess I’m just not in the mood to celebrate. At least… not yet.”
Miguel nodded, and gave Bert a gentle hug. He knew that the grieving process always took time, just as it had for Bert after Elizabeth Tucker died in the Xindi attack. And he understood that some wounds could tear the scabs right off all the older ones.
But he also knew that there were only two directions in which one could look: forward and backward. As he tried to focus his attention forward, onto the distant stage from which the future was to be summoned today, he noted that Bert had turned in his seat, to resume staring in the direction of the three Starfleet officers.
Backward, at least for now.
Miguel sighed. It was likely to be a very long afternoon.
The box in which Malcolm Reed found himself seated was so high that he half expected to succumb to explosive decompression at any moment. Or at least a real gully-washer of a nosebleed.
With Hoshi Sato and Travis Mayweather seated to his right, he looked below and saw a carpet of seats and boxes, occupied by both ordinary civilians and official delegates from worlds across the sector and beyond, spreading downward and away into apparent infinity.
And just beyond lay the stage, which supported the raised, brightly spotlighted dais where galactic history was to be made beneath an impossibly distant backdrop of blue-globe-and-laurel-leaf Earth flags, complemented by the multicolored banners and symbols of three other worlds. Unlike the stadium’s multitude of seats, boxes, and viewing stands, the dais remained empty as yet. The air seemed charged with anticipation.
But not quite enough to ameliorate Reed’s annoyance at the all but cosmic distance that separated him and his colleagues from the dais from which their captain was to give his address.
“Are you certain these are the right seats?” Reed asked no one in particular.
“Yep,” Mayweather said, speaking just loudly enough to be heard above the murmurs of the not-quite-settled crowd.
Reed harrumphed under his breath. “They don’t seem very ‘VIP’ to me.”
“I’m sure the admiral wanted us to have a view that took in the scope of the occasion,” Hoshi said with what might have been the merest ghost of a smirk.
Reed wasn’t quite certain whether or not she was being ironic, although he had assumed that Admiral Gardner had put them up here as a passive-aggressive way of punishing both Captain Archer and his command staff for having attempted to intervene in the Coridan Prime disaster rather than proceeding immediately home to Earth, per Gardner’s initial orders.
“From this distance you can’t tell an Andorian from a Tellarite,” he grumped.
After Phlox conducted Trip’s grieving parents toward one of the VIP boxes, Archer returned to his ancient, crumbling dressing room to finish making the final preparations for his speech, for better or worse.
When he opened the door, he found a black-robed male Vulcan waiting for him.
“Can I help you?” he asked, wondering how his visitor had gotten past the security personnel who had been hovering nearly invisibly nearby ever since Archer and his crew had arrived at Candlestick.
Archer’s jaw dropped like an anchor when the Vulcan responded with an incongruous ear-to-ear grin- and spoke with a voice that he had half expected never to hear again.
“Cap’n, it’s me. It’s Trip.”
Archer’s bemusement quickly gave way to a broad smile of his own. He walked over to his old friend and grabbed him in an unself-conscious bear hug.
“Easy, Captain. In spite of how I look these days, my ribs are still only human.”
Archer released him and took a step back, studying his old friend’s surgically altered features, his dark hair, prominent brow, and upswept eyebrows. Most striking of all were Trip’s elegantly tapered pointed ears. He doubted that Trip’s own parents would have recognized him, but he also had the grace not to utter that particular thought aloud.
“So you’re a Vulcan now,” Archer said with a wry smile. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, Trip… but why are you here?”
“I figured you’d be nervous about delivering your speech, so I won’t stay long. Written it yet, by the way?” Trip’s grin broadened.
Archer made a mock frown as he picked up the padd that contained the text of his speech, along with an intimidatingly vast amount of source material drawn from the historical records of four planets. The device now displayed the surprisingly profound words, first uttered centuries ago, of Shallash, the second Liberator of Tellar; Archer was determined to find a way to work them into his own presentation somehow.
“Still working on it,” he finally said noncommittally.
“I came to wish you luck, Jonathan,” Trip said. Archer couldn’t remember the last time Trip had addressed him by his first name, but he knew that his old friend had more than earned the right. Besides, Trip was no longer his subordinate. He was simply a friend, and an ally.
Trip reached into his black robe and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper, which he placed carefully in Archer’s hands. “I also came to ask you to deliver this to T’Pol before you give your speech,” he said. “I’d tell you to knock ‘em dead, by the way, but that would probably be in poor taste. So how about ‘break a leg’ instead? I’ll be watching.”
With that, Trip turned and exited through the same door Archer had used to enter. Still carrying his padd, Archer tucked the note into his jacket, then followed Trip’s footsteps back out into the corridor.
He wasn’t a bit surprised to find no trace of his friend.
Raising his padd to resume his eleventh-hour revision of his speech, Archer walked down the corridor and entered a backstage anteroom adjacent to a staircase that led upward to the raised speaker’s dais on the auditorium’s wide stage.
Looking up briefly from the padd, he saw that T’Pol and Phlox were already awaiting him there, the latter offering a broad smile, the former bearing a disapproving scowl. Once again, T’Pol strode up to him and began adjusting his collar, making him feel like a little kid who’d just been caught sneaking away to the playground while still dressed up in his Sunday best.
“Please stand still,” she said sternly. With an involuntary roll of his eyes, Archer complied while still trying to see the text on his padd.
But T’Pol evidently wasn’t quite finished upbraiding him. “If you hadn’t waited until the last minute, you would have had time to memorize your speech.”
His gaze still on the scrolling text, he murmured, “You sound like my ninth-grade teacher.”
Archer glanced away from his display and saw that Phlox was examining a padd of his own. The doctor seemed quite
impressed by whatever he was reading.
“There are dignitaries here from eighteen different worlds,” Phlox said in his customarily punctilious but upbeat tones. “It’s a good sign. I wouldn’t be surprised if this alliance begins to expand before we know it.” He paused to fix his azure-eyed gaze firmly upon Archer. “You should be very proud of yourself, Captain.”
Archer waved his padd in the air, then returned to studying his speech. “I’ll be proud of myself if I get this speech out in one piece.”
Phlox shook his head in gentle reprimand. “That’s not what I meant.”
Archer allowed the hand that held the padd to drop to his side momentarily, and met Phlox’s mild gaze. “I know what you meant, Phlox. And I appreciate it. But this is not about me.”
T’Pol looked annoyed, at least for a Vulcan. “Why do so many humans refuse to take credit where credit is due? There are times when modesty and humility are quite illogical.”
Archer noticed some movement in his peripheral vision. He turned toward the stairs that led up to the dais, and saw a young, shaved-headed male Starfleet ensign walking resolutely down the steps toward him.
“Whenever you’re ready, sir,” the ensign said after coming to attention before him.
Archer nodded to the ensign, dismissing him, and the young man immediately disappeared back up the steps, no doubt to join the detachment charged with guarding the various dignitaries and speakers who would be using it throughout the day as the formal Coalition Compact signing ceremony neared. Beyond the anteroom, Archer could hear the murmur of the crowd receding as his date with destiny approached. They were waiting for him.
“Well, I’ve got three wives waiting,” Phlox said, walking toward Archer. “I’d better go and join them.” He paused beside Archer for a moment and placed a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “I’d wish you good luck, Captain, but you’ve always had an ample supply.” Phlox’s warm smile stretched until it became impossibly broad.
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