by Andy Mangels
Phlox clasped his hands behind his back tightly. “Putting aside the absurd notion that there has been a conspiracy to make Commander Tucker only appear to have died, the second notion strikes me as equally absurd. At least until you exhibit other symptoms of having experienced a break with reality.
“I must also point out to you that denial is one of the stages of mourning that people commonly experience after the loss of a loved one.” He paused, and modulated his voice. “Why do you think he isn’t dead?”
“There are…things we shared, which have forever linked us,” T’Pol said.
He could tell that she was holding something back, and wondered if she was talking about a mind-meld between Trip and herself. He stayed silent, though, and resolved not to pry into that deeply personal aspect of their relationship, even though he found the Vulcan practice of telepathic linkage and fusion a fascinating concept, one that he hoped to explore for a future medical paper now that mind-melders were becoming more socially acceptable on Vulcan under Minister T’Pau’s new government.
“Beyond that, perhaps it is because I was not allowed to see the body—”
“At Commander Tucker’s request,” Phlox said, interrupting.
“And today, when I touched the torpedo casing that contained Trip’s remains, I felt nothing but…cold. Absence. Though I know it is not logical, all my instincts told me that he was not inside the torpedo.”
“He wasn’t,” Phlox said.
T’Pol looked at him inquisitively.
He stepped closer to her. “The body that was in that tube was not Commander Tucker. The essence of what Trip was still exists out in the universe. He is still out there,” he said.
“More importantly, Trip is also here,” he said, touching a finger to T’Pol’s forehead. “And here.” He touched the right side of her ribcage, where he knew the Vulcan heart to be located. “And he will be with us forever.”
T’Pol stared at him, the area between her eyebrows twitching and wrinkling as she struggled with the maelstrom of emotion that was clearly roiling within her. And then, abruptly, her forehead smoothed, and she nodded.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said.
Half an hour later, alone in sickbay, Phlox looked up from feeding his Aldebaran mud leeches. He realized, in a flash, that although he had managed to talk to T’Pol without telling her any bald-faced lies, she, too, might have pulled a canny maneuver on him.
Not only had she never said whether she actually believed that he, the captain, and Lieutenant Reed really had conspired to fake Trip’s death and conceal the truth from her, but she had also avoided revealing whether her discussion with him had allayed her fears, or confirmed her suspicions.
He considered the conundrum that T’Pol presented for several more minutes, then smiled.
“Whatever she knows or believes, I think I can trust her to do what’s best,” he said to the hungry leeches squirming in the liquid-filled container below his fingers.
Twenty-Six
Friday, February 21, 2155
Rator II
“THE GOOD DOCTOR IS IN HERE,” Ch’uihv said, pressing his thumb on the biometric keypad mounted on the wall beside the door. The door slid open obediently.
Beside himself with anticipation, Trip stepped toward the open door, with Phuong a step or two behind him, when the Vulcan double agent suddenly stepped into the open aperture, blocking their path.
“I must caution you, Cunaehr: Ehrehin has been rather withdrawn of late, and he has been only…intermittently rational. I fear that he has begun having second thoughts regarding his defection.”
Trip nodded, not much liking the way the other man seemed to be scrutinizing his face. Had he finally noticed that he wasn’t actually Cunaehr?
Or worse, was he finally remembering him, the way Trip had remembered Captain Sopek?
“I understand,” Trip said at length. “Perhaps seeing me again will help Doctor Ehrehin become…better grounded emotionally.”
Ch’uihv—or Sopek—nodded, though his expression remained as grave as any Vulcan’s. “That is my hope as well,” he said before stepping aside.
Trip led Phuong through the open doorway and into the darkened chamber that lay beyond. The door whisked closed behind them, and Trip squinted as his eyes slowly adjusted to the lower light levels inside the room, which carried the heavy scents of medicines and cleaning chemicals.
He came to a halt as he saw the silhouette of what appeared to be someone seated in a chair that was facing obliquely toward the small room’s far corner.
“Doctor Ehrehin?” said Phuong, who had come to a stop beside Trip.
The form in the chair stirred slightly, but made no move to rise to greet his visitors. A gruff, aged male voice emanated from the corner. “Who wants to know?”
“My name is Terha,” Phuong said.
“Never heard of you. Go away.”
Phuong continued in a gently insistent tone. “Sir, I’ve brought someone with me whom I believe you will be very pleased to see.”
The old man touched a control of some sort on the arm of his chair. With a faint mechanical whirr, the chair slowly turned to face Trip and Phuong. Trip could see the old man’s white hair and wizened features fairly clearly now, despite the obscuring semidarkness of the room.
“Do you know what I’d be very pleased to see right now?” Doctor Ehrehin said in a querulous tone. “The inside of one of my laboratories, for a start.”
Trip noticed that the old man seemed to be studying his face carefully. Looks like it’s finally showtime, he thought. Better knock him dead with the first performance, or else we’re both liable to end up that way.
Aloud, he said, “Don’t worry, Doctor. Soon you’ll have all the lab resources you could ever want.”
Ehrehin responded with an almost cackling laugh. “You mean after I defect to one of those so-called Coalition planets? Is that what they’ve told you?”
Trip felt confused, and noted that his discomfiture was slowly escalating. This man wasn’t speaking like a defector. In fact, he sounded more like a prisoner. Of course, Ch’uihv had warned them that Ehrehin might not be entirely rational. But still…
He took a few more steps toward the aged scientist, as did Phuong. Trip saw that Ehrehin had continued squinting up at him all the while.
A look of recognition, mixed with equal parts hope and fear, crossed Ehrehin’s face as Trip came to a stop less than a meter away.
“Cunaehr?” Ehrehin said in a quavering voice. “Is that you?”
Trip swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s me.”
The old man looked toward the ceiling. “Computer, turn up the lights by twenty percent.” Fixing his gaze back upon Trip as the light level increased, he said, “Come closer. Let me get a better look at you.”
Trip knelt beside the old man’s chair and let the scientist examine his face more closely. With a tremulous hand, Ehrehin gently brushed his rough, gnarled finger-tips across Trip’s cheek. Here’s hoping the Adigeons gave us our money’s worth, he thought, his heart in his throat.
“It is you,” the old man said at length, leaning back in his chair so as to get a better look at his visitor. “But how is that possible, Cunaehr? I saw you die.”
Trip put on the most disarming smile he could muster. “Are you sure about that, Doctor? I’d like to think of my presence here as empirical evidence to the contrary.” Sure hope I sounded enough like a scientist to fool a scientist, Trip thought.
Ehrehin squinted up at Trip for another protracted moment, then shrugged. “I suppose I can’t argue with empirical evidence.” He pushed against the arms of his chair, rising to his feet with what Trip judged to be a good deal of pain. “Now help me get out of here.”
Trip rose and allowed the frail scientist to lean on his arm. “Ch’uihv says that a transport will be coming for you in just a few eisae.”
“A few eisae,” Ehrehin repeated, almost mockingly. “I suppose that bastard Ch’uih
v thinks that’ll give him all the time he needs to finish getting what he wants out of me.”
“I don’t understand,” Trip said, though he feared that he did indeed understand what was really happening here all too well.
Ehrehin stared at Trip as though he were a willfully obtuse schoolchild. “You really don’t think he intends to just hand over my knowledge of avaihh lli vastam to others without first taking it for himself, do you?”
It took the electronics mounted in Trip’s inner ear an additional moment to process the unfamiliar term Ehrehin had used: avaihh lli vastam, which translated from the Old High Rihannsu still sometimes used by academics as “warp-seven capable stardrive” in the current vernacular.
“You have to help me get away from these people, Cunaehr,” the old man continued. “Before they finally do succeed in breaking me. It’s really only a matter of time, and Admiral Valdore’s forces might not find me before it’s too late.”
Trip exchanged a brief glance with Phuong, whose expression revealed as much perplexity as Trip himself felt. Focusing his gaze back upon Ehrehin, Trip said, “I don’t understand, Doctor. I thought you’d gone willingly with the Ejhoi Ormiin.”
Ehrehin’s eyes were now wide and pleading. “I’m sure that’s what they told you, Cunaehr. Just like they also must have said that I might start raving, saying things that don’t make sense.”
Trip nodded. “They warned me that you might not be…quite yourself.”
“If that’s true, then you can no doubt chalk that up to my having been kidnapped from what was supposed to be a secure military safe house, then interrogated night and day ever since. They’ve even been using psionic probes on me.” Ehrehin pulled back the sparse white hair that hung across his forehead, displaying a series of overlapping, vicious-looking circular scars that were scabbed over with dark green blood.
“The Ejhoi Ormiin want to take the secret of the avaihh lli vastam for themselves,” Trip said, suppressing a horrified shudder at the repeated, brutal violations that the old man had revealed. How much more punishment could the fragile scientist take before his sanity—or perhaps even his life—was in real jeopardy? It came as something of a surprise to feel such compassion for a Romulan—until he realized that the impulse probably spoke rather well of his own humanity, even if no one in the Romulan Star Empire ever came to appreciate it.
Finger-combing his hair back over his scars, Ehrehin scowled deeply and disgustedly. “Didn’t I just say that?”
“We thought that the Ejhoi Ormiin were primarily interested in keeping the new stardrive out of the hands of the Romulan military,” Phuong said, his brow furrowed almost as deeply as Ehrehin’s was. “In order to halt the Praetor’s plans for conquest and expansion.”
“That’s only about half right. They certainly don’t want the military to possess the advantage of the new drive, because that would interfere with their own plans for conquest. Once the technology is in Ch’uihv’s hands, he plans to use it to oust the Praetor and have the Ejhoi Ormiin stage a coup that will place them firmly in control of the imperial government.”
“I thought you weren’t all that comfortable with the Praetor’s ambitions yourself, Doctor,” Phuong said.
“That’s never been a secret,” said the old man. “If the military hadn’t needed my expertise so badly, I would almost certainly have been imprisoned or executed for having spoken my mind on the matter. But at least the Praetor always had the virtue of a certain… predictability. There’s no way to know for certain exactly what the Ejhoi Ormiin radicals would do with my technology.”
Trip looked over to Phuong while Ehrehin was speaking. The Section 31 operative seemed almost to deflate before his eyes as he no doubt was coming to the awful realization that the intelligence the bureau had gathered concerning the Ejhoi Ormiin was at best badly incomplete, or at worst flat-out wrong.
It was easy for Trip to imagine what Phuong must be thinking, since the shock of the same realization was settling over him as well. I guess this is the kind of intelligence failure that’s toughest to avoid, Trip thought. Especially when you’ve got to run all your information through the filter of secondhand facts and bribable third-party information brokers like the Adigeons.
“Help me, Cunaehr,” the old man said, almost begging. “Help me get out of here, and back to the protection of Admiral Valdore’s fleet.”
Trip exchanged another wordless glance with Phuong, who gestured with his head toward the door. He needs to talk with me, but he can’t do it in here, Trip thought, understanding that the room had to be crawling with listening devices.
“I promise you that we’ll do whatever we can to help you, Doctor,” Trip told the old man. “But first, I’d like to know exactly what you’ve revealed to Ch’uihv so far.”
With tears pooling in his eyes, Ehrehin nodded, then began speaking in a low, halting voice….
“I did warn you that Doctor Ehrehin might not be entirely rational,” Ch’uihv said, his expression dour as he and a pair of his grim uniformed guards escorted Trip and Phuong back to the quarters they had been issued for the duration of their stay at the Ejhoi Ormiin facility. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he blamed us for the harsh treatment the Romulan military visited upon him in order to ‘motivate’ his research.”
Trip nodded to Ch’uihv as they walked, but he schooled his face into blank impassivity. He simply wasn’t buying Ch’uihv’s story; the old man’s wounds had appeared far too recent to have been inflicted by the Romulan military to which he was so eager to return.
Trip was absolutely convinced that Ehrehin was indeed here entirely against his will, just as the old man had said.
And as he followed Phuong into the spacious guest suite they were sharing, Trip was just as certain that Ch’uihv—or Sopek—had listened to every word of their exchange with the elderly scientist, no doubt hoping that he and Phuong would unwittingly function as Ejhoi Ormiin interrogators, using Cunaehr’s privileged relationship with Ehrehin to entice him to divulge some previously hidden fact regarding the new stardrive.
“Well, what do we do now?” Trip asked Phuong once they were alone together in the suite’s common area.
Phuong tipped his head to one side, as though listening to voices that no one else could hear. Trip realized that he must be consulting the microelectronic gear sewn into his clothing, checking the room for listening devices.
“At least we can speak freely here,” Phuong said at length. He looked Trip squarely in the eye, his face pale even for a Romulan. “I think we screwed up badly in trusting these people.”
Trip’s brow furrowed. “‘We’?”
“I mean the whole bureau. All right, me. They followed my recommendations, after all.”
Holding up a placating hand, Trip said, “I’m not keeping score. At least we were both completely right about at least one thing.”
“And what’s that?” Phuong wanted to know.
“The fact that the Romulan Empire really is the biggest danger facing Earth right now. The only real question is which Romulan regime is going to take charge of going to war against us.”
Phuong chuckled, but the sound contained no mirth. “That’s pretty cold comfort.”
Eager to rescue his partner from a funk that wasn’t going to do either of them any good, Trip decided to change the subject. “At least we’re pretty sure we know how much Ch’uihv knows so far.”
Phuong shrugged. “Thanks presumably to Ehrehin’s contacts in the Romulan military, we know that a Romulan admiral named Valdore is planning to launch an attack against some unspecified Coalition planet—most likely Coridan Prime—in the very near future. One of their goals is no doubt to discourage the upcoming signing of the Coalition Compact. But that really isn’t much more than we knew or suspected already.”
“At least the old man hasn’t drawn diagrams of the new space drive for Ch’uihv’s people,” Trip said. Yet, he added silently, feeling a distinct chill at the notion.
“That’s according to Ehrehin,” Phuong said, still sounding disconsolate.
Determined to keep Phuong focused on keeping them both alive, Trip said, “As I think I heard somebody say not very long ago, we have to make our leaps of faith somewhere. Speaking of which, I’m guessing you’re taking the rest of Ehrehin’s claims at face value.”
Phuong nodded emphatically. “I don’t believe what Ch’uihv says about Ehrehin being only ‘intermittently rational.’ I’ve seen enough prisoners—hell, I’ve interrogated enough of them—to know the difference between a lie, a delusion, and the plain truth. That man is as rational as you or I, and I believe he’s telling the truth.”
For a moment Trip wondered how much that opinion was worth; after all, it was obvious that Phuong had begun to question his own ability to read people accurately. And we both voluntarily marched right into this situation, he thought. Just how “rational” does that make either one of us?
And something else was gnawing at Trip as well. “At least he seems rational now,” he said. “And frankly, I have one major doubt about even that.”
Phuong raised an eyebrow quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that it seemed a little bit too easy to convince him that I was his assistant, miraculously returned from the dead. If Ehrehin was really on top of his game, wouldn’t he have asked a few more questions? If it were me in Ehrehin’s situation, I’d just assume I was dealing with somebody who’d been disguised as Cunaehr.”
A thoughtful look crossed Phuong’s face, then he shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good. Maybe we were just fortunate enough to stumble onto an advantage that we can exploit once we get Ehrehin out of here.”
Trip nodded, though his engineer’s instincts rebelled against the whole concept of relying on luck. On top of that, he wasn’t feeling at all sanguine about taking advantage of the grief and hope of such a frail, vulnerable old man—especially someone who had already suffered such barbaric treatment as Ehrehin had already endured at the hands of the Ejhoi Ormiin.