STAR TREK: Enterprise - Shockwave

by Paul Ruditis (Novelization)

  What if Daniels’s plan doesn’t work and I’m stuck here forever? Will Daniels be the only other person I see for the rest of my life? The only person I speak to? The only person who exists?

  [177] A thorough search of the living area and sleeping quarters showed no sign of the metal. He moved into the kitchen, figuring that that would be the most likely place to find what he was looking for. Curiosity drew him to what he assumed to be the food storage area. He braced himself for whatever foul items could be inside. Archer had no alternative; he needed to know. A quick look—and a quick smell—confirmed his suspicions. Whatever had happened on the planet had occurred before the residents had a chance to empty their refrigerator. Archer closed the door, but the stench lingered for a few minutes.

  What will I do?

  The apartment search proved fruitless and Archer stepped back into the hall. He looked left and right and noted that there were roughly the same number of doorways on either side. Some had doors still hanging in the frames while others were entirely open to the world. He moved to the right, continuing his search.

  Daniels had set to work on a device that might help them restore the timeline. He stood in the midst of the ancient rubble that according to his memory had looked quite different mere hours ago. He had carefully removed the guts of Archer’s equipment and spread it out on a ramshackle table along with some other components that had been collected. The grime clung to his sweaty body as he worked over the devices, repositioning circuits and delicate components with the makeshift tools.

  [178] A short time later Archer entered through what was left of the doorway. He was carrying a wooden ladle with an intricately decorated handle wrapped in a substance that had the brownish-green patina of tarnished copper. It appeared that his search had apparently been successful, but at a price. He was just as much a mess as Daniels.

  “I can’t be sure, but I think this is copper,” Archer said as he handed the ladle over.

  Daniels touched the handle to his tongue, testing the material. “Well done.” He kept working as he dictated his instructions. “I need you to unwrap it and pound it into small strips no more that a millimeter thick.”

  Archer scanned the room for a tool. He picked up a piece of concrete that had once been part of the wall. Its edges were jagged and hard to hold without digging into the skin, but Archer knew it was the best thing available. He held the sharp end of the piece against the end of the ladle and set to work pounding down the copper.

  On the captive Enterprise, Reed was pacing his quarters, restlessly. The small cabin felt like it was shrinking, closing in with each step. As Enterprise’s tactical officer, he bore the full weight of responsibility for the overrun ship even though there had been nothing that he could have done to stop it. Reed was not handling the inaction well. He needed to get out. He needed to retake the ship.

  His mind was so filled with frustrated thoughts that at first he didn’t hear the static sound piercing the silence of [179] his cabin. Once he realized that the sound was not in his imagination he wondered if some piece of equipment was malfunctioning, perhaps the lights or environmental controls. But it slowly became evident that the noise was not just some arbitrary sound; it was repeating in some kind of pattern.

  Reed stopped his pacing and listened. He was able to trace the static to the small panel beside the door. Leaning his ear closer to the panel he thought he could make out something buried in the static. A voice. Someone was trying to communicate with him.

  “Hello?” he said tentatively into the panel.

  A burst of static came back at him, carrying with it an unintelligible voice. He couldn’t even be sure if it was male or female.

  “Please repeat,” he said, clearly annunciating each word. “I can’t understand.”

  The static changed, but the voice remained incoherent.

  “I still can’t hear you,” Reed said. “Try modulating the sub-carrier wave.”

  “Malcolm, it’s me—Trip.” The commander’s voice fritzed in and out as he spoke. “Can you hear me?”

  “Barely,” Reed replied. “You’re going to need to boost the signal.”

  Reed waited for the adjustment.

  “Any better?” Trip asked, his voice coming through considerably more clearly.

  “Yes, I thought the com was offline,” Reed said.

  “It is,” Trip replied from his quarters. “I’m routing the [180] signal through the EPS grid. I can talk to any doorbell on B-deck.”

  Trip was standing by his own door using a thin instrument to tweak a jumble of circuitry hanging out of the small open panel he was speaking into. The circuitry had been jury-rigged and reconfigured to work in a way it was not originally intended.

  “Are you all right?” Reed’s slightly staticy voice came through the panel.

  “Same as you, I guess,” Trip replied as he looked around his cramped quarters. The Helix could be seen out his port. “Locked in tight.”

  “How about the others?”

  “I can’t get in contact with T’Pol for some reason,” Trip said, trying not to worry again about why the sub-commander had not replied when he had made contact with her doorbell. “Hoshi and Travis are on C-deck.”

  “Any thoughts about how we’re going to get rid of these Suliban?” Reed asked with anticipation.

  “One step at a time,” Trip replied. “First thing I need to do is figure out how to tap into the door-coms on C-deck. I’ll get back to you. Sit tight.”

  “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” Reed replied.

  Chapter 18

  Admiral Forrest turned down the lights in his office, relishing the first moment of silence he’d had since receiving Archer’s news about the Paraagan Colony. His headache persisted. It had gone away for a brief period after Archer told him the evidence to clear Enterprise. Then it returned with a vengeance around the time the Vulcans informed him that Archer and his crew had inexplicably cut off communication.

  Jonathan would never kidnap T’Pol, he thought. The admiral didn’t have to convince himself of that. He knew the man well enough, Forrest had also gotten the feeling from Archer’s more recent updates that the Vulcan woman had become more integrated into the crew. But not so much that she would blindly ignore her superiors for days. Something is definitely wrong.

  The door chime sounded. Forrest allowed a moment to [182] pass before answering. He wasn’t ready for his headache to intensify.

  “Yes?” he replied.

  His aide entered through the open door. He was prudently carrying a steaming cup of something that was obviously intended for the admiral.

  “Coffee sir?” he offered. “I was thinking the caffeine could help.”

  “It certainly couldn’t hurt,” Forrest replied, relieved over the fact that it wasn’t another problem walking in the door. He accepted the coffee with a nod of appreciation.

  “Begging the admiral’s pardon ...” the aide started, standing nearly at attention. “But, um, permission to speak freely?”

  “Why so formal?” Forrest asked. He knew that he scared the kid at times, but they rarely fell into the clipped type of banter he usually expected from cadets. “Sit down.”

  “Sir,” the aide replied as he took a seat. “I was wondering. We were all wondering. What happens now?”

  Forrest knew that the “we” the aide was referring to was not just the admiral’s staff. The question was on the lips of everyone in Starfleet.

  “Now, you go home,” Forrest replied, knowing that wasn’t what the kid was asking. “The day’s over. There’s no schedule for tomorrow because we don’t know what’s going to hit the fan yet.”

  “No, sir. I meant ...”

  “I know,” Forrest replied, knowing that he could [183] continue to evade that question; he had been doing so all day. He told his aide the truth, “I don’t know what’s next.”

  “We don’t have any idea where Enterprise is?”

  “No,” the admiral replied. “And w
e have no way of finding out either. At least not without the help of the Vulcans.”

  “Doesn’t Starfleet have some kind of contingency plan?” he asked. “Some way to get to the crew if there’s a problem?”

  “This was our first test of the warp-five engine,” the admiral said, knowing that his aide already knew that. The kid just wanted reassurances that Forrest couldn’t give. “We have no other ships that can go out as far as Enterprise. At least not in a timeframe that would do them any good.”

  “What about civilian ships?” the aide suggested. “Transports? Cargo ships?”

  “We’ve tried contacting everyone we had a record of in that part of space,” the admiral said. “Even several alien races. I’m afraid at the moment, we’re at the mercy of the Vulcans.”

  The admiral could tell that his aide wanted to speak freely, but the kid was too well trained.

  “It’s okay,” Forrest said. “It’s just you and me. You can say it.”

  “Well, wasn’t it a little premature of us to send Enterprise out there totally on its own?” The aide was practically squirming in his seat. Sure, he was just repeating the buzz that had been going around the building, but now he was relaying it to the highest ranking officer around. “I mean, we have no recourse to help in emergencies.”

  “That’s the thing about exploration,” Forrest replied. [184] “The risk is oftentimes as great as the benefits—greater. Think of the early explorers sailing off into the unknown. They were told they could fall off the edge of the Earth, but it didn’t stop them. Archer and his crew knew the risks when they accepted the mission. True, they weren’t prepared for all the danger they would encounter, but they certainly were aware of the fact that they were on their own.”

  “The Vulcans think ...”

  “Every member of that crew is a hero,” Forrest interrupted, not caring to hear about what the Vulcans thought. “I have no doubt they are doing whatever they can to get back in contact with us. I have the utmost faith in Jonathan Archer.”

  Almost a thousand years in the future, Jonathan Archer was having a difficult time keeping faith in the man he knew only as Daniels. He wasn’t even sure if it was the man’s real name. Archer watched as the collection of circuitry and scavenged parts began beginning to take the shape at Daniels’s hands. He still wasn’t exactly sure what they were doing, but he wasn’t about to ask for an explanation. Aside from the fact that he already knew Daniels was not exactly generous with information, he suspected that he wouldn’t understand much of whatever Daniels was willing to divulge. It would be the equivalent of Archer trying to teach Ben Franklin how to build a medical scanner. Sure, the old guy was intelligent enough, but the amount of technological advancements in the years [185] between them eradicated any chance for a productive discussion.

  Instead, Archer busied himself by pounding down another strip of copper with the chunk of concrete. He had already been rather productive and a number of thin strips were laid out in a row in front of him. It still wasn’t clear if they would be used as casing for the device or some kind of antenna, but Archer continued pounding away, beating out some of his feelings of frustration over being so helpless.

  “Any luck?” Archer asked as he looked over at the partially constructed device.

  “I still have the spatial coordinates of Enterprise,” Daniels replied. “But without a quantum discriminator it’s going to be very tricky to contact the ship on the same day you left.”

  “I thought you built these things in high school,” Archer said with a smile, tweaking the man.

  “Where quantum discriminators were on every desk,” Daniels replied with a light sense of smugness.

  Archer took a break from the pounding. “Why is the same day so important?” he asked. “What would be wrong with making contact a week before I left, or a month before?”

  Daniels looked up from his work. The expression on his face served as a needless reminder of the seriousness of their situation. “I made the biggest mistake in the history of time travel this morning,” he said resolutely. “I don’t intend to make it any worse.”

  The words hung in the fetid air for a moment. Archer pushed past his own emotions to imagine what Daniels had been going through. It was one thing for Archer to [186] realize that this bleak future was the result of his being pulled out of time. It was quite another to have been the person doing the pulling.

  The men returned to their work with a renewed sense of diligence.

  A pair of armed Suliban soldiers accompanied a semiconscious T’Pol to her quarters. The drugs were still in her system and she was having trouble staying up on her feet. She needed to lean on her captors for support. The haze in her field of vision made it difficult to traverse the halls, but she tried to collect any information she could from the trip. Other Suliban passed them as they made their way through the corridor. Some carried their weapons at the ready while others had them holstered. She wondered just how many soldiers were still on the ship.

  T’Pol was unaware of the fact that they had reached her quarters until the door was opened and she was dragged inside. The two soldiers roughly deposited her into a chair. It felt good to sit without being restrained. She hadn’t realized how much she had been straining the muscles in her legs to simply walk.

  The Suliban left the room without comment. Content to see them go, T’Pol remained slumped in her chair, shivering slightly. She tried using a meditation technique to focus her drug-clouded mind, but could not remember how to begin the procedure.

  After a brief rest T’Pol pulled herself back up to her feet. Her body was still shaking and it ached to stand. She tried [187] not to stumble as she carried herself into the bathroom, activating the lights as she entered. Her eyes refocused on the room as she stepped over to the sink and tapped the controls.

  She leaned forward, hoping to splash some water on her face, but her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn’t manage to cup them to hold the liquid. The water just poured through her fingers and disappeared into the drain. The motion of the flowing water nearly hypnotized her.

  Eventually T’Pol gave up on the fruitless endeavor and turned off the spout. She pushed her way back into the room, noticing the Helix outside the port for the first time. That was where they took me, she remembered.

  She wanted to go over to the port to see just how dire the crew’s situation was, but her legs could not carry her any farther. T’Pol collapsed onto her bunk. The withdrawal from the truth serum hit her hard as she lay there, trembling.

  An odd modulating sound rang through her ears. She assumed it was another side effect of the drugs that had been pumped through her system and tried to ignore it, but the sound refused to go away. As her mind began to clear, T’Pol realized the sound was not in her head. She turned an ear away from her pillow, trying to discern the direction from which the sound was emanating. It was above her.

  T’Pol squinted her eyes to focus on a pulsing yellow light that had appeared on the overhead. She watched in a daze as the light gradually took on the shape of a humanoid [188] face, staring down at her, although she could not make out the features. The modulating sound slowed into a rhythmic pattern. Someone was speaking to her. The flickering image on the ceiling continued to sharpen. It was beginning to look familiar to her. The voice, she remembered, was that of a friend.

  Jonathan Archer’s face hovered above her, his visage heavily distorted and almost spinning. The voice was barely understandable as he spoke. “... Captain Archer. Can you hear me? T’Pol this is Captain Archer. Can you hear me?”

  T’Pol stared at the strange, swirling image. Her mind was clear enough to worry about the fact that she was hallucinating. The concerns that she had for the captains safety had obviously manifested into the vision above her.

  “T’Pol, this is Captain Archer. Can you hear me?” the image asked again.

  Archer’s image seemed to turned away from her.

  Where are you going? she thought.


  “I don’t think it’s working,” he said to some unseen person.

  T’Pol looked for someone else in the room, but it was just her and the floating head. She waited for the other person to respond, but heard nothing. Suddenly the image in front of her began to sharpen.

  Archer turned back to her. “T’Pol this is Captain Archer. Can you hear me?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” she responded, thinking this was another of Silik’s tricks.

  “You don’t know where who is?” Archer’s face asked back.

  [189] T’Pol remained silent.

  “Sub-Commander, this is Captain Archer,” he persisted. “I’m having trouble understanding you.”

  “Captain Archer’s gone,” T’Pol insisted through her daze. “A temporal reading in the turbolift. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Daniels brought me to the future,” he explained. “That’s what the temporal reading was about.”

  She continued to stare at his image, focusing on Archer’s increasingly familiar features as she tried to orient herself to what was occurring. The haze slowly began to lift.

  “Are you all right?” Archer asked.

  “The Science Vulcan Directorate has determined that time travel is ... not fair.”

  The haze had only lifted so far.

  “Whatever you say,” Archer tried to move their conversation to more logical topics. “Just tell me—are you all right?”

  “We’re all confined to our quarters.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I told you,” she insisted, “in my quarters.”

  “No, I mean Enterprise,” he said. “Where’s Enterprise?”

  She groggily turned her head to the side. “There’s a Helix out my port.”

  “Listen to me, T’Pol,” Archer said firmly, hoping that she could focus on his voice. “I need your help. You’re going to have to find a way to get to Daniels’s quarters. Do you understand me?”