Realizing that he was no longer in any condition to speak, Charles felt enormous gratitude toward both Archer and T’Pol when they seemed to wish to do the bulk of the talking.
“Within a few minutes, you both will be conducted to seats in the VIP section,” T’Pol said.
Archer nodded. “I wanted to be sure both of you got to see and hear as much of today’s ceremonies and speeches as you wanted. I know that Trip…” He paused for a moment to compose himself. “He would have wanted you to see the future that his sacrifice will help the rest of us build.”
The Vulcan woman raised the small suitcase she carried, then set it down almost reverently on a nearby conference table.
“I have gathered Commander Tucker’s personal effects,” she said.
Charles walked to the table. Like a man dreaming, and therefore not entirely in control of events, he laid the case flat and thumbed the simple latch mechanism, popping the lid open.
Atop a neat blue pile of folded Starfleet uniforms sat a small articulated toy replica of Doctor Frankenstein’s monster, patterned after Boris Karloff from the ancient flatscreen movies. Karloff had been a favorite of Trip’s from about the age of seven, even though those grainy old black‑and‑white movies sometimes gave him nightmares. Charles smiled as he picked up the figure and held it up to see it more closely. For nearly four years, this little prop had accompanied his son across countless light‑years. What had it represented to Trip? His ability to face without flinching the things that scared him the most? Charles looked to Elaine, saw the tears streaming down her face while his own remained poised at the brink.
Placing the action figure to one side of the case, he saw that directly atop the uniforms lay a framed photograph of a triumphantly grinning Trip. Trip was holding one of Charles’s own heavy‑duty, duranium‑reinforced fishing rods, along with a glistening marlin that had to have weighed nearly as much as a man. Elaine had taken that photo when they’d gone deep‑sea fishing off the Gulf Coast not long before Trip had accepted his assignment to Enterprise.That entire day came back to him in a flash: the smell of spray and sunblock as they’d fished, the taste of the hush puppies and fried catfish and beer they’d had for dinner that night.
The sight of Trip’s wide smile.
Charles felt Elaine take his hand and squeeze it tightly, as though she were gripping a lifeline. He recalled how hard he’d always tried to surround Trip with laughter rather than tears. Despite that, more tears rose, threatening to displace the ones that had already taken up residence in the corners of his eyes. Simple hydraulic engineering,he thought. Liquids can’t be compressed. Trip would appreciate that.
Still hand in hand with his wife, Charles turned away from the open case so that he faced Archer and T’Pol. “Thank you,” he said, after he’d finally found his voice. “I think we’re ready to find our seats now.”
Let’s hope the future Archer invited us to witness is worth it,he thought.
And then the tears spilled over the brink, and kept coming in torrents.
Mom and Dad must have arrived by now,Trip thought, standing in a small vestibule adjacent to the auditorium’s broad corridors and seats. Dressed again in a simple, dark Vulcan traveler’s robe, he felt reasonably unobtrusive as he swept his gaze across the crowds that were quickly accumulating everywhere in the old stadium, from the field‑level seats to the bleachers, and all the way up to the skyboxes. Anyone who saw him would assume he was just another of the hundreds of Vulcans currently living on Earth, or perhaps one of the hundreds more that had arrived just this week specifically to observe today’s formal signing of the Coalition Compact, and the forging of galactic history.
Trip had to admit to himself that he was half‑hoping to see his parents, or perhaps his brother Bert, somewhere in the crowd. He felt certain that Captain Archer would have moved entire worlds to make certain that everyone in his family was given seats in one of the auditorium’s best VIP boxes. And while he ached to see his folks and his brother again, and wanted nothing more than to reassure them, part of him was glad that he hadn’tencountered them, and actually hoped that he wouldn’t; he simply didn’t trust himself not to reveal his presence to them, and with the Romulan threat still gathering on the horizon, he knew he didn’t dare risk doing anything that might compromise his usefulness on that front.
Although his parents’ faces, thankfully, didn’t pop out of the crowd as he scanned it, he did unexpectedly recognize a different pair of faces. Though they wore civilian clothes rather than the MACO uniforms that had become so ubiquitous aboard Enterpriseduring the darkest days of the Xindi crisis, Trip immediately recognized the luxuriant long black hair of Corporal Selma Guitierrez and the strong cleft chin of Sergeant Nelson Kemper. Guitierrez wore a denim baby‑carrier that contained an infant, blissfully sleeping despite the noise and tumult of the still‑settling crowd.
That must be their little girl,Trip thought, working hard to suppress an extremely un‑Vulcan smile as the young couple and their child walked directly past him without taking any apparent notice, evidently on their way to their seats. Trip recalled that Guitierrez’s pregnancy, which had occurred during Enterprise’s Xindi hunt in ’53, had been the reason both she and Kemper had subsequently left the service. Their little girl–he wasn’t certain, but he thought he recalled hearing that they’d named her either Ellen or Elena–had to be close to a year old by now.
Although the Kemper family quickly passed out of his view and into the milling crowd, the child had remained in Trip’s sight long enough to churn up the painful memory of standing with T’Pol in the parched, red Vulcan desert to bury little Elizabeth. At that instant, all the tragic might‑have‑beens he’d either faced or turned his back on throughout his life returned to him at once, threatening to bury him in an emotional rockslide. Not wanting to allow anyone to see a weeping Vulcan, he stuffed his rising agony back down as best he could.
He started walking toward one of the STAFF ONLY entrances, grateful that the skill set of a competent spy overlapped considerably with that of a decorated Starfleet chief engineer. His path took him directly past one of the VIP skybox seating areas, where he saw some other familiar faces, the sight of which filled him with still more wistful thoughts. T’Pol wasn’t among them, making him both glad and disappointed. But there was Malcolm, who knew the truth about his “death,” seated next to Hoshi and Travis, who didn’t. Whatever grief his absence had caused them appeared for the moment to have been subsumed by their eagerness to hear Captain Archer’s upcoming speech.
None of them had looked in his direction, and if they had, all they would have seen was yet another Vulcan observer. Just another alien face, in a sea of alien faces.
Trip moved on, more determined than ever to do what he’d come here to do. His parents might not have been sufficiently trained in the art of keeping secrets to allow him to risk revealing himself to them today. But T’Pol was a different matter.
Of all the people he cared about–and had been forced to deceive so cruelly, thanks both to the Romulans and Section 31– shewas certainly capable of handling the plain truth.
“Therethey are,” said Albert Edward Tucker, stabbing his left index finger into the general direction of the VIP boxes adjacent to the one in which he sat.
“What?” said Miguel Cristiano Salazar, who was seated beside Albert. He strained to see whatever or whoever it was that his partner was trying to call to his attention.
It was obvious to him that Bert’s grief over the loss of his younger brother was still eating him alive. Over the past week or so, as the date of the Coalition Compact ceremonies had drawn close, that grief seemed to have begun to metamorphose into an almost incandescent rage.
“ Enterpriseofficers, I’m pretty sure,” Tucker said, pointing again for emphasis.