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What Does Not Kill Us - Chapter 2

Author - Thalia Drogna
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What Does Not Kill Us

by Thalia Drogna

Rating: R
Genre: Action/Adventury, Angst, Hurt/Comfort

Disclaimer: I don’t own these characters, I’m just borrowing them

~~~

Reed and Romero returned to Enterprise as quickly as they could, not even bothering to say goodbye to the aliens. They made their way to the bridge as quickly as they could.

“What happened over there?” asked Archer.

“We boarded the vessel and found engineering fairly quickly, so we left Commander Tucker effecting repairs while we searched for the biosigns we had detected,” said Reed. “We found the owners of the ship locked in one of the cargo bays. They told us the ship had been attacked and they were locked in the cargo bay by the attackers. The Universal Translator had trouble with the language and that took a while to get through and then it struggled with the name of who they’d been attacked by. They neglected to mention the fact that the intruders were still there. We immediately contacted the Commander, he answered but then broke off. He didn’t answer any more of our hails. By the time we got down to engineering Commander Tucker had gone. We followed him to the docking ports and felt the shuttle lifting off, which was when we contacted you.”

“T’Pol, can you track them?” asked Archer.

“Perhaps,” said T’Pol, “but I will need a little time.”

“Don’t take too long, Sub-commander,” said Archer. “How was a ship the size of that shuttle able to go to warp?”

“I think we can assume that the Xindi have superior technology in a number of areas,” said T’Pol.

“This must have been a trap,” said Reed. “They knew that we would answer that distress call and take our Engineer with us. They wanted Commander Tucker.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions Lieutenant, so far this is just a coincidence,” said Archer.

“Sir, if they didn’t know who he was then they would have just killed him,” said Reed in a very insubordinate tone. Reed knew what that meant for Trip and he was sure Archer would too. The Xindi wanted information and they wouldn’t be worried if they had to hurt Trip to get it.

Archer’s face lost its colour. “The Xindi obviously want technical information on Enterprise. Who better to provide them with that than the Chief Engineer. T’Pol we need to track that ship now!”

“I have isolated the ion trail of the Xindi warp engine,” said T’Pol, “I believe we can follow it.”

“Mayweather, set a course as per the Sub-commander’s instructions,” said Archer.

“Yes, sir,” said Mayweather.


****


Trip had been working on getting the engines online when Reed had called him. Reed said something about stopping whatever he was doing and then Trip’s world went dark. When he woke up again he knew he wasn’t on the alien ship anymore. His head hurt like hell, which he knew meant that someone had decided to knock him unconscious. He hoped he didn’t have a concussion because that would have just added insult to injury. He tried to move, but after careful testing he found his arms had been tied behind his back at the wrists and his legs were tied at the ankles. The bindings were tight and bit into his skin.

“He’s awake,” said a voice. Trip prised his eyes open and blinked to clear the fog. He looked up from the floor into the face of a Xindi reptilian. He wished to the bottom of his heart that it hadn’t been a Xindi.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Trip, indignantly.

“Shut up, human,” said the Xindi.

“Enterprise will be following us you know,” said Trip, “you can’t grab the Chief Engineer of a starship and expect to get away with it.”

“We expect them to follow us, human,” said another voice, this was a Xindi humanoid. It was just then that Trip noticed through the window that they were approaching another ship. Trip felt his heart sink, Enterprise could follow an ion trail but if they changed ships Enterprise wouldn’t know which of the two trails to follow. An engineer knew that all ion trails were slightly different, changed by the engines that produced them, but he couldn’t guarantee that Enterprise would think of it. T’Pol would work it out, thought Trip, she had to.

****

T’Pol had indeed worked out that all ion trails had their own signature. Each engine was tuned slightly differently and produced slightly different impurities in the ion trail. The only problem was that the ion trail of the Xindi ship led to a space port. Hundreds of ships docked with the space port every day and so many ships meant that the ion trail would disappear into a mass of other ion trails. If space was a pond then the waters had been well and truly muddied.

“What do we do now, Sub-commander?” asked Archer. He and T’Pol were standing in his ready room. Archer was staring out of the window at the busy space port that they were moored at.

“I believe that I can discern the ion trail we are looking for with some analysis but we have no guarantee that they did not transfer Commander Tucker to another ship. I suggest that we question the local merchants to find out whether they have seen any Xindi here,” said T’Pol.

“T’Pol, they’ve already had Trip for five days. We’ve got to find him soon,” said Archer.

“I have asked Lieutenant Reed to prepare a security report on how Commander Tucker’s technical knowledge could be used against us,” said T’Pol.

Archer nodded miserably. As much as he knew Trip wouldn’t give them any information willingly, Archer doubted that he could hold out forever. Archer knew that writing the report wouldn’t be a pleasant task for Reed either, he and Trip had become very close. Archer couldn’t think of a worse task. Unfortunately he couldn’t think of a better man for the job and they had to know just how much trouble this could place them in. To T’Pol he said “Assemble an away team, I want to know everything about any Xindi ships that have come through here, where they were going and where they came from.” To himself he said, just hold on a little while longer, Trip.

Reed sat in his cabin writing the hated report. The worst thing about it was that he knew Trip would hold out for as long as he could no matter what it cost him.

Everyone had been on edge recently. Hoshi had snapped at him that morning at breakfast. Mayweather had just pushed his food around his plate. Reed looked down at the padd. There are days when I hate my job, I hate putting duty in front of my friendship for Trip and I hate the fact that I have to think about how much Trip could tell an enemy under torture. I should be on the space station with T’Pol shaking down the lowlifes for information about Trip. He dropped the padd on his desk, he’d finish it later. Right now he needed to be doing something less cerebral, he hoped that T’Pol wouldn’t mind his tagging along on her away mission, because he was going whether she wanted him or not.


****


Trip thought that he’d been on the Xindi ship for five days, it was hard to judge because there was no day and night cycle that he could work from. His Xindi captors had transferred him to a larger ship and then they had obviously decided to start on extracting the information they had come for. They had dragged him out of his cell and beaten him until he lost consciousness. They had wanted to know about Enterprise’s engines. When he had refused to tell them about the engines they asked him about the weapons.

His interrogators varied, they each seemed to have their own specialities, some of them liked to hit, others liked to break things. They all wanted to know the same things. How far could Enterprise travel? How fast could it go? How long did it take to start the warp reactor from cold? What was the range of the torpedoes? Just answer one question they said and we’ll stop. We don’t want to hurt you, but our superiors haven’t given us any choice, we have to get this information and this is the only way we know. Make things easy on yourself, just give us one fact. Every time he didn’t answer they hit him again.

Trip said nothing, he knew better than to even give in on one thing. Once you gave in on one thing it became easier and easier to tell them other things, things that would harm Enterprise in a big way. He was pretty sure that they must know what Enterprise’s top speed was, but if he’d tell them that, then they knew it would only be a matter of time before he’d tell them the more important stuff. Apart from exclamations of pain and the odd expletive, he kept his mouth shut. After five days of beatings he was beginning to wonder why they didn’t just give up and kill him.

His cell was cold. He knew they had carefully calculated the temperature so that he wouldn’t die of hypothermia but so that he wouldn’t be comfortable. They gave him a little food and a little water each day, again just enough to keep him alive but enough so that he also knew he was starving and dehydrated. Some days just moving enough to get the food to his mouth was almost too much pain to endure, but something inside him told him he needed the food to keep his strength up. Sleeping was hard. Getting comfortable enough to sleep was almost impossible with the number of bruises that he was collecting. They hadn’t provided him with a bed or any blankets so the hard floor was all he had.

He was fairly sure that they’d broken a rib on the second day of beating him, that had been the most painful part of his experience until day four when they had broken his right arm. He really thought that he would die at that point, or maybe he only wanted to die. They had worked out early on the fifth day that the broken arm was very painful for him even if they only squeezed it. When they hit it he passed out and woke up back in his cell again.

He lay on the floor, shivered and carefully pulled the broken arm into a less painful position. He had tried to set it himself but it was just too painful to manipulate it, he suspected that it was a compound fracture. The only saving grace was that the bones hadn’t broken the skin. Come on Jon, he thought. I know Enterprise must be looking for me. Just look a little harder. Hoshi’ll kill me if I don’t turn up to make up her Mah Jongg four soon. She’d been so intent on teaching them that damn Chinese game and he’d been so flippant about it. He was regretting that now and for the first time he realised that that regret could possibly be because he might not ever see his friends and Enterprise again. He tried not to think like that though, if he started that line of thought it led to despair and if that happened he’d never get through this.

He seemed to be cocooned in a haze of red pain. He took stock of his injuries. None of them were life threatening, or at least not yet. He wasn’t breathing well, but that was probably due to the broken rib. The arm hurt but it wasn’t going to kill him. His face was a mass of bruises, as was most of his body, and he bled from several cuts. There were burns as well, he didn’t like to think about those too hard, they’d hurt too much at the time and thinking about them brought back the memory of pain. The problem was he could feel himself getting weaker everyday, if he stood any chance of getting out of here he needed to move soon.


Continue to Chapter 3

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