Immune- Chapter 14

Immune

by Trinneergirl

Disclaimers in Chapter 1

Chapter Fourteen

Two hours later there was total silence in the room where they all stood or sat. Trip, in his preoccupation with the ship, had not turned off the cameras that Crewman Wilkinson had keyed in to follow him everywhere. Captain Archer, Sub Commander T'Pol, Lieutenants Reed and Griffith, and Ensigns Sato and Mayweather along with Doctor Phlox, had watched in horror as the footage played on a huge viewscreen in the large tier-seated room where the Dryalians usually watched their versions of movies whilst off-duty. From the moment when Trip had sadly given the unconscious Malcolm the Bridge, to the moment when the Commander had ceased to live, the important moments of the past three weeks were relived. Hoshi broke the silence first, her soft crying snapping the collective frozen state in which the Starfleet officers had been left.

Jonathan Archer was torn in so many directions he didn't know what to feel. Trip had fought like a tiger for their lives. The workload, Jon had known, would be crippling for any one man. Trip had, no doubt about it, worked miracles. On top of everything he needed to accomplish, the deliberate attempt to drive the young Commander insane, his having to cope with the sabotage and the bombs, it had made Trip a wreck. The skeletal, pale, drawn figure crying on the Bridge deck just before he died bore almost no resemblance to the handsome, athletic, golden man that Jon remembered. Seeing Trip being knocked unconscious, coming to, only to be beaten by Wilkinson. Hearing the allegation that he, the Captain, was having a sexual relationship with Trip, seeing the Commander have to go along with that and pretend to prostitute himself in order to survive it, shocked Jon deeply.

The hatred Wilkinson had for Trip was frightening. And Jon could perceive no reason for it. Yes, Trip was handsome and bright, but he had got to the rank he held because of hard work, application, and determination. The idea that Trip had slept his way to the top angered and disgusted Jon. He had thought long and hard about giving the Chief Engineer's job to Trip, because of their friendship, but had decided that passing over the best engineer in the fleet because of potential backbiting gossip would have ultimately been self-defeating. Archer had known some people would think the relationship they had was the reason Trip had got the job, but never had Jon imagined that they would think that Trip had paid with his body for his meteoric rise in the Starfleet ranks. The secret filming of Trip's most intimate off duty moments, the video meant to destroy his career, the fake footage designed to show him as inept and corrupt... Jon had no problems understanding why Trip had thrown up in disgust when he'd found out, the Captain could feel his own gorge rising in revulsion.

Watching what Trip put himself through to keep sane, to fight for survival, his and the crew's, to get them and Enterprise here and safe, beggared belief. The injuries, the lack of sleep, the loneliness, Jon couldn't believe one man could take so much. He wanted to go and hold Trip close one last time. He wanted to go to Kurt Wilkinson and strangle the man slowly. Captain Archer stood, holding a chair-back so tightly that his knuckles shone white. The guilt about the way he'd isolated Trip seared through him. The last check of the crew taken before the engineer died was branded into Jon's memory. Trip had stared down into the stasis pod and a gentle, rueful smile had touched his lips, his tired eyes full of memories. Then the shoulders had drooped, the smile faded, and the eyes dropped away. Jon hadn't realised until he saw the footage that Trip blamed himself for the distancing in their relationship. That the young man had gone to his death wondering what he'd done wrong.

Sub-Commander T'Pol was trying to figure out Kurt Wilkinson's logic and only partially succeeding. When Commander Tucker had been appointed Chief Engineer of the Enterprise and she had been foisted onto the ship, one of her missions was to discover the extent of the relationship between him and the Captain and to ascertain if there was any sexual content to it. It had taken her no time at all to find out that, close and deep though the relationship was, both men were heterosexual, Trip to excess in her opinion. She couldn't fathom the exobiologist's reasoning. She, Archer, and Reed had remained standing at the back of the seating area for the two hours the video footage had taken.

"This Crewman Wilkinson. He passed the psychological procedures to become a member of Starfleet?" she asked the Denobulan physician seated in front of her.

"Yes," Phlox assured her. "And all his subsequent evaluations. His madness was so isolated to his hatred for Commander Tucker that it never came out."

Lieutenant Reed, revolted by what he'd seen and heard on the video, determined that no-one outside of senior staff would EVER have access to the cameras on the ship again, and turned to Lieutenant Griffith.

"Did he show any sign of this before?" he demanded to know. Griffith shook his head.

"Nothing," he replied sadly in his gentle Welsh accent. "He was always the quiet one, you know, a bit sulky. Preferred to work on his own, but he never showed the slightest sign of hating Commander Tucker or wanting to hurt him. When the illness started, after Kurt broke the Dryalian sample, well we did think, like apparently we were supposed to, that Mister Tucker's bio-filters weren't up to much. Kurt espoused the idea more than anyone, I remember. At the time I supposed that he was just trying to shift blame from himself."

"I just can't understand what he hoped to gain," Travis cried angrily. He was seated between Phlox and Hoshi, his arm around his fellow Ensign, who was still weeping copiously.

"I believe I can," T'Pol hesitantly offered. All eyes, Human, Denobulan, Dryalian, were on her.

"As far as I can ascertain from the twisted rantings and the timings, Crewman Wilkinson's initial hatred of Commander Tucker came because of a group of things. It's clear that while the Crewman envied the Commander, he wished to be like him. When he failed to get his promotion for a second time at forty one and Commander Tucker received his promotion to full Commander at thirty four, it seemed to trigger his lapse into insanity. Under normal circumstances, Crewman Wilkinson would have reacted like Ensign Mayweather. Admiring the Commander and determining to emulate his fine example. Instead his madness and jealously made him wish to, at first, humiliate the Commander."

"All that horrible stuff he made up to smear Trip!" Hoshi was getting angry past her tears now. "How could he place cameras in Trip's quarters? Fake footage and doctor the rest to make Trip look so bad?"

"He must have seen our visit to Dryalia and the soil samples as his chance to destroy Trip's career," Reed interjected.

"Yes," T'Pol agreed. "His initial plan was to break the soil samples inside and outside the bio-labs, for Commander Tucker to take the blame for the failure of the bio-filters and then for his doctored footage to be sent to Earth."

"Trip would have been crucified." Mayweather was awed by the thought of the public humiliation Trip would have endured. Trying to imagine going through such castigation himself made his stomach clench in panic.

"The normal process for Dryalian Meningitis is for headaches, irritation, and irrational anger and, I'm sorry to say, chronic diarrhea." Phlox revealed. "It rarely mutates into this more serious form."

"So we're angry, ratty, and we've got the squits and Trip would have been straight in the firing line for blame," Malcolm spat angrily. "How many of us would have felt like standing up for him when that video of lies hit the fan back home?"

Everyone realised Lieutenant Reed was right. The isolated Trip would just have been allowed to fall to his degrading court-martial without a friend to turn to.

"When we became much more seriously ill, and instead of going down with the virus, Commander Tucker was not only immune, but needed to be strong enough, heroic enough if you will, to get us back to Dryalia, Crewman Wilkinson, in his madness determined that none of us would make it," T'Pol explained. "He synthesised a vaccine and removed himself to the stasis pods having programmed in that he would wake up in the Vort Cloud. He tried to drive the Commander to the edge by sabotaging the scrubbers and using the Captain's voice to make him think he was going insane."

"And that almost worked," Mayweather angrily put in.

"Indeed," T'Pol acknowledged. "However as far as I can understand it, Crewman Wilkinson knew that wouldn't kill the Commander. He was meant to fix the air, to find the computer in the Crewman's quarters, and to find the evidence. I believe that the explosion in the bio-lab was meant to kill him."

"He never factored in the idea that Trip, already suspicious, would wear an EVA suit when he went to the labs," Reed realised aloud.

"Which is one of the reasons why Trip is a Starfleet Commander and Wilkinson is not," Archer spoke grimly. "Because he's smart on every level."

"When Wilkinson woke to find the Commander still alive, he carried out the attack in the cargo bay. He would have killed the Commander if he hadn't been shot first," T'Pol continued. "Once he had killed Mister Tucker, the Crewman would have had time to doctor footage to show the Commander going insane and deliberately murdering the crew before destroying himself and the ship. What excuse he would have made I don't know, but one solitary shuttlepod or escape pod would have made it through to Dryalian space and eventually Starfleet would learn of our demise at the hands of the deranged Commander Tucker. For all time his reputation would have been that of murderer." There was a small silence as they contemplated the fiendish, insane plot.

"I don't know... if I could have coped the way Trip coped," Malcolm revealed.

"I KNOW I couldn't have," Mayweather asserted forcefully. "All that work to keep the ship going, plus what that madman put him through!"

"You have to remember that Kurt Wilkinson is a very sick man," Phlox tried to palliate.

"Right now, Doctor," Archer responded in a voice of steel, "no one here is interested in finding sympathy for Crewman Wilkinson."

"Damn straight," Put in Hoshi viciously. "He's a bastard!"

"What I fail to understand is why, when Wilkinson had the Commander at his mercy in cargo bay two, that he allowed himself to be led into giving the advantage to his quarry," T'Pol confessed. "Why Commander Tucker's going along with the Crewman's allegations of prostitution made him react the way he did." Captain Archer answered the Vulcan on behalf of the rest of the crew.

"Wilkinson had sexual feelings for Trip and a need to see him humiliated. He also wanted more than anything to have confirmed his hatred-led suspicions that Trip wasn't worth the rank he held. Trip understood that. When the man threw at him that he was my... lover and got his rank and status through sex with me, Trip saw a way to distract him. He satisfied the sexual side of Wilkinson's psyche by offering sex, satisfied his need to see Trip humiliated by watching him beg for it and strip for him, satisfied his need to belittle by hearing Trip say he'd got everything he had by using his looks and his body to pay for it." Archer was white with anger at the remembrance. "I expect Wilkinson saw no harm in raping Trip a few times before killing him. I'd be surprised if his fantasies didn't include making Trip his sex slave. Trip caught him off guard with his act and when he was off guard, Trip knocked him out cold."

"Cracking punch," Reed considered. "I'm surprised it didn't split his knuckles."

T'Pol raised an eyebrow, glad to have Crewman Wilkinson's, to her, odd behaviour in the cargo bay explained. Archer took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then he spoke.

"Doctor Phlox, Sub-Commander T'Pol, I want you to work with the Dryalians in trying to bring Trip back from death. Lieutenant Reed, work with the Dryalian security teams in finding evidence for this foul set of crimes."

"Yes, sir," Reed replied.

"Lieutenant Griffith, Ensign Mayweather, I want a damage report and I need to know if Trip's fears were right and if the food on Enterprise is contaminated. Then Travis I want you to work on the computers to find all the information you can about Wilkinson's movements in the past three months."

"Aye, sir," Travis acknowledged and Griffith nodded.

"Hoshi you will coordinate liaising between us and the Dryalians," Archer commanded.

"Yes, Captain," Hoshi replied.

Archer turned and faced Captain Dan'een, who took one look at the boiling anger and grief in his Starfleet compeer's eyes and nodded to his crew to go along with the Human's orders. As Sau'mara moved away with Phlox, Mel'tar with Malcolm, and Hoshi, Mayweather, and Griffith with Science Officer Chau'tara, T'Pol's voice stopped them all.

"What are you going to do, Captain," she asked. Jon looked down at his hands and noting his red fingers and white fingertips and knuckles he made himself let go of the chair-back he had been gripping.

"I'm going to spend some time with Trip," he revealed, his voice tight in his throat." His hazel eyes met her brown gaze steadily. "Time I should have spent with him before it was too late." His First Officer nodded.

"And Crewman Wilkinson?" she requested.

"I think he can wait until we know for sure that he's facing a charge of murder," Jon revealed grimly. "Right now, Trip is our top priority, then Enterprise. In my judgement Wilkinson comes a very poor last."

A lot of things about the information contained in the recordings made on Enterprise were much clearer to Sau'mara than previously. Captain Archer and Commander Tucker were clearly friends and for some reason that friendship had been absent previous to the illness. Trip Tucker had blamed himself for this, but Sau'mara could see that no one else did, least of all Captain Archer.

"We will not stop until there is no hope, Captain," the Dryalian CMO promised. "And your officers’ help will be most gratefully received." Jon nodded absently.

"I'll take you to Commander Tucker now," offered Captain Dan'een. Jon turned immediately.

"You have your orders," he reminded his staff, and he left the room in Dan'een's wake. Everyone went about following the Captain's commands, hoping that Trip could still be saved. Not wanting to face life on board Enterprise without their Chief Engineer. Without Trip.

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