Chapter 20: Salem One

T'Pol awoke with a slight disorientation. Even though they had been living in the captain's quarters on Salem One for three days now, she still felt slightly disoriented in the mornings, waking up in a room that was even more spacious than their quarters on Enterprise. All that, however, was not the reason for her premature return to consciousness.

Waking up to the sensation of being in a firm hug from a semi-naked or naked engineer was the rule rather the exception, but today he had woken her up by being unusually restless.

Before T'Pol could come to a conclusion or even a working theory about what could have caused the restlessness of her mate, he darted out of bed, muttering, "That's just wrong!"

"Trip, you should... ," T'Pol said.

Running out of the door in his alarmed but unfortunately not quite fully awake state, Trip had forgotten a little detail. He was reminded of it by the shocked shriek of an unfortunate female Security crewman on night patrol, who had been bumped into by a stark naked chief engineer.

" ... dress," T'Pol finished her unheard warning.

Her beet-red mate returned inside and quickly closed the door, but he was too alarmed to process the embarrassing situation of moments ago.

"Tucker to Engineering," he barked into the com device. "Take those engines offline, NOW!"

T'Pol still looked at him in a mixture of disbelief and expectation after that rather bizarre performance in the middle of the night, while her mate hectically tried to jump into a uniform.

"Someone tinkered with the engine," Trip explained, veritably horrified. "If it was one of our engineers, this station will be orbited by that engineer very soon," he growled and was gone.

"Engineering to Commander Tucker!" the com blared just moments after he had run out of the room.

On his way from Engineering to breakfast with T'Pol, Malcolm, and Hoshi, Trip wondered if it would have been better to alert T'Pol to the gravity of the situation that had come up in the night. On one hand, she was the captain and as such should be alerted to it as early as possible, on the other hand she had been under enough stress lately. Supervising the reconstruction of the station, all the while using her recently Coridan-acquired skills as a counselor to keep the distressed Vulcans halfway sane until the healers arrived, had left her very exhausted, even if she wouldn't ever admit it. No, he convinced himself, it was better to deliver the news now rather than in the middle of the night. It wasn't as if they could change anything now anyway.

Enterprise's chief engineer knew the day would be a very long one when he heard the giggles and chuckles in the mess hall. Since they did not have the luxury of their own dinner table in their quarters on Salem One, breakfast with Malcolm and Hoshi was in the captain's mess, and that meant running the gauntlet through the mess hall.

But the real ambush happened as soon as he entered the supposed safety of the captain's mess. Before he knew what hit him, he found Hoshi wrapped around him, running her hand over his chest, purring suggestively. "Well, hi there stud..."

Maniacal laughter from Malcolm and that all too familiar tingling of Vulcan amusement in his mind were clear signs that T'Pol and Malcolm were in on the act. They must have been anyways, as that was the only way that Hoshi wouldn't find herself at the receiving end of a Vulcan nerve pinch. Very close friend or not, such a brazen move would have fired all reflexes in a Vulcan bond mate had she not known and approved of it before.

Trip shook off Hoshi's faux advance.

"I'm never going to live that down, am I?" he stated in frustration.

"Not a cat in hell's chance," Malcolm quipped with a shit-eating grin. "I remember someone delivering a few quips about Hoshi's nude sunbathing on Vulcan. You'll never hear the end of it, mate, believe me."

"Fine, can we discuss the little, unimportant fact that it wasn't just an act of spontaneous exhibitionism, but that the engines were no more than thirty seconds from blowing up?" Trip asked seriously.

In a heartbeat all teasing was forgotten and the giddy mood was gone.

"What happened?" Malcolm asked, while Trip finally managed to take his seat.

"Remember the routines the Klingon augments smuggled in - the ones that nearly blew up Enterprise?"

Malcolm nodded, even though he had spent most of that time in the brig.

"Did that happen here, too?" Hoshi asked with a horrified look.

"Worse," Trip explained. "These didn't have any parameters. They were just programmed to blow the engines up about 12 hours after going online."

"Who would use a fuse that burns for twelve hours?" Malcolm asked.

"Someone who is exceedingly well informed about our current status," T'Pol explained her spontaneous theory. "Someone who knows that we are not under pressure and that a normal human shift is at maximum 10 hours long. Someone who knows that the engines would most likely be going online under the supervision of the chief engineer..."

"Who therefore wouldn't be around to notice the discrepancy when it arose twelve hours later," Malcolm concluded the sentence in a dark voice.

"I doubt you made it back to dress and then to engineering in time. So what happened?" Malcolm asked.

"Luck favors fools – and we had a ton of luck tonight..."

"ETA?" Lorian asked Karyn Archer, who had the helm. Even though it was the ship's night time, the captain had manned the bridge with the Alpha shift, as docking to a badly damaged space station that had only recently been seized from enemy occupation was nothing to be left to the most inexperienced shift.

"Two hours at present speed."

"Mr. Sato, Hail Salem One."

"Salem One, this is NX-10 Endurance requesting approach vector for convoy V-15."

"This is Salem One. Permission to approach on Vector 243 mark 32."

Instead of answering in the affirmative, Lorian froze and squinted his eyes in concentration.

"Salem One for Endurance, did you copy?" came the reply from the station.

"Be quiet!" Lorian demanded loudly, which stunned the com officer on the station and the officers on his bridge into shocked silence.

"Salem One, your engines are in critical condition!" Lorian yelled. "Take them offline, alarm Commander Tucker and prepare for emergency docking!"

"Dock three, 255 mark 3," came the surprised reply and the connection went dead.

"Lieutenant, Maximum warp!" Lorian barked and punched a button on his captain's chair. "Kov, give me all you have, drain anything short of life support!"

"Lieutenant," Lorian half alerted half asked Karyn Archer for a report, without waiting for a reply from Kov.

"Warp six point oh two, holding, three minutes to critical approach."

"Ride 'er like you stole 'er," Lorian drawled - an occurrence even rarer than his occasional jokes. Falling back into his father's dialect was reserved for when things were really bad.

The captain ran off the bridge towards the airlock.

Crewman McElroy waited at the small view port for the arrival of a star ship expected to perform an emergency docking maneuver. He still tried to work out what that was all about, and why a young girl from security had just sped past, sporting a rather unhealthy crimson face color and was almost hyperventilating. But he immediately forgot about that and stumbled backwards when a huge NX class ship came out of warp at what looked like way past the last possible moment and was brought about ship with maneuvering thrusters screaming at full output.

With a loud bang the huge ship slammed into the docking port. A second, smaller bang indicated that the airlock had been pressurized explosively by blowing out the other ship's airlock door.

"What sort of maniac... ," McElroy growled, but before he could say anything further, the airlock was forced open from the inside by a hastily entered override code. A Vulcan in Starfleet blue ran into the station at break neck speed.

"Engineering, where?" the Vulcan asked.

"Just around the corner to the left," McElroy stammered.

The Vulcan ran off.

"Permission to come aboard granted," the shocked crewman said, too baffled to do anything than stare after the intruder.

Anna gritted her teeth. Where was Trip when you needed him? In her hectic state she didn't realize that it had barely been 20 seconds since she had gotten the call from her CO. Everything seemed to happen in slow-motion. Since all attempts at initiating a shutdown procedure had been thwarted by the compromised computer – even initiation of a warp core ejection had been futile – she was prepared to try the last option, and pointed her phaser at the main computer, ready to melt it into submission.

"NO, ANNA!" she heard someone yell from behind. Turning around, she saw a Vulcan advance with what could only be described as a haunted look. She stared open-mouthed at him as he ran past and jumped at the ladder that led to the top of the main reactor.

She had often heard about the superior strength of Vulcans, but this was the first time she'd actually seen it in person. The Vulcan, whom she only now recognized as Lorian, Trip's son from the different time line, landed halfway up the ladder. With no more than two additional steps he was on top of the engine. She felt immediately reminded of the time that the boss had started the fireworks in engineering to recycle the engines in under two minutes, but unlike Trip back then, Lorian didn't come running back down the stairs surrounded by fireworks – he came flying in a massive wave of sparks.

With a loud thud Lorian landed on the floor not far from Anna, while a rather haggard looking Chief Engineer came running in.

"We must..." she heard him yell, but the rest was drowned out by the horrible whine of the engine shutting down completely.

"What the hell?!" her boss asked.

"Hi to you too, Dad," Lorian groaned sarcastically, while Anna helped him up. She couldn't quite believe that he had survived such a fall with not much more than a few bruises.

"Lorian? What are you doing in here?"

"I took the liberty of shutting down the engines," Lorian explained, dryly. "Either someone from your team is the most useless engineer in Starfleet or the engines have been sabotaged."

Malcolm shook his head.

"So basically, we now have a fried engine, a bashed in docking port, and no clue who tried to blow us to kingdom come?"

"Yep," Trip said grimly. "Thank God for Hoshi's repairs to the com system. Had Lorian not heard that the engine was running like crap over the com-link, we'd be space dust now."

"Somehow, I'm not hungry anymore," Hoshi moaned and pushed her plate away with a shocked look.

"Was that why you woke up?" T'Pol asked.

"Yeah, I always wake up if the engine sound's not right," Trip said. "But I never would have made it in time. I'd say a wrecked docking port is a small price to pay for still being here. He has one hell of a helmsman to dock the ship like that."

"Leaves the question of who did it," Hoshi said and looked at Malcolm. "Do you think we have another traitor in the crew?"

"It can't have been any of our crews," Malcolm said. "After the Masaro debacle the background checks on all deep space personnel were taken to paranoid levels. Even Harris was part of them, and trust me, if you ever did as much as missing a high school date you're not going to get near any NX class. They barely found enough personnel with white enough vests to man the completed ships."

"That leaves the Andorians and the Vulcans," Trip concluded.

"I'm afraid it's got to be the Vulcans," Malcolm said with an apologetic look at T'Pol. "Only the Vulcans had the full reports of our encounter with the Klingon augments and could therefore know about this weakness."

"That doesn't mean it must be the Vulcans," Trip countered in defense of his mate's species.

"I agree with Malcolm," T'Pol said. "Only someone with detailed knowledge of the reports would be able to exploit this or would even get the idea to sabotage the engines this way."

"Shran?" Trip asked, not yet comfortable with the thought of being disappointed by a species that he had come to value a great deal since his bonding to T'Pol.

"Even if Captain Archer told Shran about the encounter at one point, he lacks the necessary engineering expertise to use this knowledge," T'Pol disagreed.

"And his former crew?" Trip insisted.