The Ring of Truth-Part 10

Fix the Finale Fic

The Ring of Truth

By Evalyn A.

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: All Paramount’s – or is it CBS’s? -- not mine, though they really really don’t deserve it now .

A/N: Moving on from TATV – for those of you who insist it’s canon … well, read on.

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Chapter 10

In the 37 hours since she had arrived at the Europa facility, T’Pol had encountered few obstacles to a successful integration into the engineering team. She had worked side-by-side with Tucker essentially non-stop from the time they had left Brodeur’s office, and while there had been no breakthroughs, they had made some small progress in understanding subsidiary functions of the Stage II device, and had also greatly improved the constant monitoring of critical functions so that nothing important would be missed when the next stage implemented.

However, two hours ago Brodeur had insisted that they both get some sleep, and had escorted T’Pol to her new quarters. A pair of simple coveralls and some personal toiletries had been all that was required to meet her basic needs for the time being.

Except, of course, for one very basic need that still went unfulfilled.

As she laid in her bunk, attempting to fall asleep, her brain continued to whirl, the events of the past few days mixed into a maelstrom of memories and emotions. Knowing that her telsu was nearby was both a relief and an agony. Her soul was now content, for she could feel his presence almost constantly, and her unsettling physiological symptoms had largely subsided.

Largely, but not completely. While the mental side of their relationship was following the Vulcan way, the physical side seemed more to parallel human norms. And the bond made the physical connection they shared even more difficult to ignore.

Meditation, unsatisfactory to start with due to the absence of the ritual candle, had failed to quiet the intense need she felt for his touch, or to suppress the vivid imaginings she had of being alone in his presence. She knew that her thoughts were inappropriate to the circumstances – as Chief Engineer of the facility, his involvement with her would be difficult to justify or explain without going into the details of their union, which would be both an unnecessary distraction, and bad for discipline. And yet the simple fact of his nearness, just a few doors down the hallway, was an even greater distraction.

After perhaps an hour of tossing in her bunk, her covers tangled about her naked form in a most un-Vulcan manner, T’Pol abandoned her attempts to sleep and padded over to her monitor. She settled down to absorb herself in reading the remainder of the reports that she had not had time to review on her first sitting in Tucker’s office.

Just then, however, her door chime sounded. She did not need the bond to know who was there. She quickly pulled on the coverall Brodeur had provided and opened the door, allowing Trip to slip through, a sheepish expression on his face.

“I shouldn’t be here.”

“Probably not,” she agreed. He paced across the room, and then turned.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Nor could I,” she admitted.

They stood facing one another, briefly at a loss as to how to proceed. Then Trip suggested, nervously, “Maybe we could talk? Or something?”

She indicated that he should sit on her bunk beside her. After a momentary hesitation, he acquiesced, and seated himself.

After another awkward moment of silence, they both began to speak at the same time, and stopped just as quickly. He gave her one of his most endearing, shy little grins, and gently caressed her hand, saying, “Ladies first.”

She took a breath. “Perhaps you should start. Communicating is still not easy for me.”

He nodded, understanding. “I guess what I need to know is, how do we go ahead with this? I mean, for the next little while we probably need to stay below the sensors, but maybe that’s a good thing, since we need to figure out just what’s going to happen anyway.”

She frowned slightly. “On Vulcan, we rarely know our chosen mates at all well, before the marriage ceremony. Typically, the mated relationship involves first, the marriage, then time spent becoming acquainted with one’s mate, forming the rudiments of a bond, followed hopefully by the development of some affection and friendship, and eventually, when appropriate, a physical union.”

“Once every seven years,” Trip interjected dryly.

“Usually,” she agreed.

“Well,” he said, ticking off on the fingers of his left hand, “No official marriage, but I gather that’s kind of a formality at this point. We’re pretty well acquainted, I think, after 10 years? And the friendship is pretty solid. Maybe with a little work on the communication side.” She nodded. “And judging from what I can feel through the bond, I’m pretty happy with the status of the affection.” She felt the bond tweak with his mental caress. “We’ve done the bond. And the physical union thing.” At this point he’d more than run out of fingers, so he waved his hand questioningly. “So what’s left?”

She shook her head. “I am not sure.”

He took her hand again, and brought it up to his lips. “Well, it has been seven years …” His eyes twinkled as he watched for her response.

Her lips twitched as she returned his gaze, and then she closed her eyes as his lips dropped to hers. He pushed the coverall off her shoulders, revealing entirely bare golden-hued flesh beneath.

“Mmm,” he murmured, “Glad you were expecting me.” He moved his lips gently on down her jawline, her neck and across her shoulder. She managed to keep her hands steady as she undid the zipper on his coverall, and pushed it off his upper torso, revealing a taut gray t-shirt beneath. She pushed him away, to permit her to put her hands beneath the front of his t-shirt, palming his chest, and then yanking the shirt off unceremoniously over his head. Another minute of concentrated effort had them both quite naked on her bed.

Their coupling was fierce and joyous – only their second, in a relationship that had endured seven years of emotional and physical drought. As she lay in his arms some minutes later, her head pillowed on his chest, she felt more than heard his chuckle.

“What do you find so amusing, t'hy’la?” she enquired.

“You make me feel like a fifteen year old,” Trip replied. “That wouldn’t exactly make the record books for stamina.” He sensed her puzzlement through their bond, and continued. “It’s normally expected that a fella will spend a little more time,” he explained. “Work up to things.”

“Surely it was evident to you that everything was entirely satisfactory,” T’Pol replied, splaying her fingers across his abdomen. “And I can assure you that seven years is quite long enough to ‘work up to things’. Had you taken any longer I should have begun to be concerned.”

His laughter resonated in her ear as it pressed against his chest. “Your sense of humour really is improving, darlin’.” Her mental amusement radiated back to him. After a few moments, he sighed. “You know, I can’t stay.”

“I know, t’hy’la,” she replied. “It would not be proper under the circumstances. And if you do not go now …”

He sighed again and kissed the top of her head. “One of these days, we’ll have the time …” She moved off him and gently pushed him off the bed. He tugged the covers back over her, and then pulled his clothes back on. She observed with ill-concealed pleasure the movement of his muscles as he pulled his t-shirt over his head.

Dressed, he leaned over again to kiss her gently on the lips and caress her cheek. “Still time for a few hours of sleep. I’ll stop by to pick you up at 0600.” She nodded, and watched him depart with a pang of regret. A longer period of time spend together would have been pleasant, she thought, as she turned off the lights and rolled over. However, she found herself drifting off to sleep almost immediately, a pleasurable ache suffusing her body.

******************

“It’s not an inductor, that’s for sure,” mused Chief Engineer Tucker, crouching in front of the large, irregularly glowing object that sat exposed before them. “Not much in the way of capacitance. The energy flows are immense. Occasional bursts of mid-range particle emission, no apparent pattern. Even more occasional tachyon bursts. What can it possibly be doing?”

T’Pol stood behind him, her arms folded across her chest, a severe expression on her face. It was apparent that she disapproved of the device, or at least of its unwillingness to behave rationally. “Perhaps if we list all of the things it is not, it will become more apparent what it is?”

“Okay,” Tucker agreed, rocking back on his heels. “It’s not a source of power, even through it’s routing a lot. The energy it’s routing appears not to be used, so it’s currently not doing whatever it would normally do that would use it.”

T’Pol nodded. “Unless it is a power transmission device. Which it cannot be, as it appears to be at the end of the circuit; the energy is being routed back to the source.”

Tucker frowned. “No, wait, you may be on to something. If it were a power transmission device, and it appears to be unconnected by conventional means, then maybe it’s meant for remote power transmission.”

T’Pol squinted at the item. “I suppose that is possible. But it does not appear to be connected to the main transmission array. Why would they transmit remotely from here, when a conventional connection to the array would be more efficient? And how could it transmit without a small local array?”

Tucker started to push himself up off the floor. Halfway up, the ground beneath them began to rumble with a deep vibration that momentarily knocked him back onto his rear. “What the …” he expostulated, scrambling back up to his feet. The room suddenly was a hive of activity, people rushing to their monitoring stations

T’Pol scrutinized the status display in front of her. “See here,” she pointed.

“Damn thing’s kicked in again,” Tucker said, trying to mask his anxiety with anger. “Another stage.”

“We will have more information this time,” T’Pol assured him. “The monitoring in place is much more detailed than before.”

Her assurance was correct. The information poured in within the first few minutes, overwhelming the capacity of the automatic systems to sort and process. Tucker divided the engineering teams into several sub-teams, each trying to compile and summarize the data relating to specific aspects of the device’s behaviour. Some hours later, after several team meetings in which information was swapped and chewed over, Trip and T’Pol retired to his office to further mull over the observations.

“So,” Trip said, rubbing his eyes wearily. “Some form of information transfer.”

“Agreed,” T’Pol replied. “But not just abstract information, I think.”

“No,” he agreed. “Too much energy involved. Information transfer as in molecular reconstitution. A giant transporter,” he summarized. “No, not giant. Mammoth. Gargantuan. On a scale we’ve never imagined.”

“Large enough to potentially transport and reconstitute megatons of matter,” T’Pol continued. “With Europa as the source of supplemental materials and energy.”

“They could never hope to contain the energy involved in reconstituting that much matter from scratch,” he acquiesced thoughtfully. “So they used Europa as a source of selected raw materials – use the transporter to pull in extra atoms locally as needed. With Europa’s combination of frozen surface, and molten core, a good chunk of the atoms needed, light and heavy, are available right here.”

“And what is not directly available is created from energy, as our transporter does. An ingenious combination.”

“But the energy requirements should be phenomenal,” Tucker pointed out.

“Indeed,” T’Pol nodded. “That does not seem to have bothered the designers.”

“No, whatever energy source they’re using, there seems to be plenty to spare,” he agreed. “If we could figure out what they’ve tapped into … okay, wait a minute. Maybe it’s not that they’ve got a special energy source. Maybe they’ve just figured out how to use it better. It’s got to have something to do with the tachyon emission,” he mumbled, scrutinizing the chart that plotted tachyon energy vs. time. “Maybe … maybe they figured out how to convert space-time energy fields through projection!” This revelation caused him to run his fingers through his hair, grown somewhat long after his prolonged stay on Europa, leaving it spiking in several different directions.

T’Pol resisted the urge to smooth it down. “You mean project time and space along different axes?” she queried, trying to follow his line of thought.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Bear with me here. Normal space-time has four dimensions, x, y, z and t. Each variable has to be positive at all times.”

“There is no such thing as negative time or space,” T’Pol summarized.

“Right. But we have no problem with deltas on the spatial axes that are negative; space can expand or contract in theory. But time – time can only go in one direction, so far as we can manage it.”

“Hence the Vulcan science academy and time travel …” T’Pol commented dryly.

He grinned. “And, as we know, 'it ain’t necessarily so.' But we’ve never figured out how to do it. How to make delta t negative.”

She frowned slightly. “Project along different axes.”

“Mm hmm. Right now, we can change the apparent dimensions of space by rotating it; x gets longer while y gets shorter. It’s all just a projection, of course, and the total is conserved. We haven’t broken any laws, it just looks like it if you don’t take the whole into account. So if we knew how to include time in the projection …”

“Then the total would still remain a constant, and no laws would be broken. Time could be negative …”

“Or, alternately, hugely positive,” he continued, his excitement growing. “Which could decrease space along one axis more than we’ve ever been able to achieve.”

“Making transport over long distances possible with less energy than we’ve previously postulated …”

“Provided you’re willing to wait a few decades for the transport to occur.” He smacked his hand in frustration on the desk. “That makes no sense, who’d have any use for a transport that could take decades, when you could send things directly through space faster than that?”

“Perhaps you should not be thinking of this in those terms,” T’Pol mused. “This facility could represent something that has a relatively unique function. What if the builders were prepared for that delay? This structure was built thousands of years ago,” she pointed out. “And has been sitting dormant for all that time. Perhaps a transport that took decades would be a relatively minor delay, on the scale of things.”

“Triggered by something,” he pointed out. “What?”

“That seems fairly obvious,” she replied. “Human activity.”

He did some rapid mental calculations. “The research and construction stations,” he said, dismay spreading across his features.

“Indeed,” she agreed. “Human activity this far out in the solar system has only existed for the past few decades. Suppose this station was designed to respond only to signs of intelligent life.”

“Signs that that life had spread beyond its birthplace, out into the solar system,” he picked up. “The station was placed here at about the time that humanity started to show signs of technological growth. As a monitoring station, in the first place. And once that technological growth had spread well past the planet of origin …”

“Then the next phase of the response could be triggered,” she continued. “Response that involves an elaborate transport system, capable of moving large masses of objects into place, but taking decades to do so.”

The horror on his face was now even more pronounced. “Any civilization prepared to monitor us for a few thousand years, wouldn’t care if it took a few decades to implement their response.”

“No,” T’Pol agreed, “it would normally take considerably longer than that for any species to pose a significant threat to its region of space after achieving warp-capability.”

“And large masses of objects …”

“Would potentially imply a response involving a good deal of force,” she concluded for him.

“Maybe we’re overreacting here,” he said, once again wiping his hand over his face. “Maybe this is just a tool for first contact, a way to make sure they’re ready to communicate with us when the time comes.”

“Transport of large masses would likely not be required as a first response,” T’Pol replied. “First contact through remote communication would be much more effective, and less expensive.”

“The Vulcans did it in person,” Trip pointed out. “Maybe this is just their way of putting a ship into place …”

T’Pol shook her head. “Unlikely. Vulcan was nearby, and we did all of our monitoring with spacecraft, manned or unmanned. That would not be practical at great distances. And this device is designed to work over great distances indeed …”

He groaned. “So. If we’re right, two possibilities that we can see. One, this is a staging ground for first contact …”

“Or two, this is a staging ground for pre-emptive destruction of Earth by a species of vastly superior technological achievement,” T’Pol concluded for him.

Part 11

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A whole mess of folks have made comments

Oh! Finally, finally! That´s

a)finally a new part and b)finally some long anticipated (((((TnT))))) "action"!

Thank you!

I'm loving this story... the "staging ground" is very cool, and I can't wait to meet the builders... is there a black monolith and a monkey troop hiding in there somewhere? :)

I was hoping for a bit more than a quickie after all the UST, but you gave us a very nice conversation between T&T. Love the mental tweak, and "drought" references.

This story is really excellent. Being more into history than science it took me awhile to take everything in, but sometimes it's really nice to have the science put back into science fiction. I do think that Trip and T'Pol need to spend a little more time together, though.

How fortunate that last night I chose to reread chapter 9, and then to wake up this morning and see the next chapter. I agree, more TnT loving would have been nice, but I understand why there wasn't more. And a giant transporter that can possibly be used to bring a large number of ships to the area--yikes. Definitely not a pleasant thought. Can't wait to see what happens next.

Now THIS is science fiction. I am totally caught up in the science here. I wish I could be so scientifically believable in my fics. Don't think you needed to rate this NC-17, though. Even R would be stretching it some. If you'd gotten as detailed with the lovemaking as you got with the science... well... then that would have been a different story. I like the way you did it, but I agree with Dinah, et al. I'd love to see more lovin'.

Yay! A new chapter! Some T/T nookie! More into the mystery of the facility! I'm curious to see who built it. I hope the next chapter comes out soon.

I'm no good with the rating - I did it at 2 o'clock in the morning (where I am at the moment, I was up writing because my bio clock said it was suppertime!) and afterward realized I picked the wrong one. Our ratings system is different, so it doesn't come naturally ... next chapter should be soon, I expect more insomnia tonight.

PS I love doing the techno-babble, I'm a scientist. So the ratio of techno-babble to luvvin' is expected to be high in my fics. :-) I don't usually let myself off the leash because I figure most readers here don't enjoy it really, but I'm glad to hear at least a few do!

I wholeheartedly agree about the science. Awesome job and very enjoyable to read. I've heard that authors should write what they know and you're doing a very enjoyable job so far. Very much looking forward to the next chapter!

Fantastic!! Cant wait for the next part. Soon Please.

This is great! I may not understand all the science, but it sounds good. The characterization is wonderful and I can't wait for more!

It's great you finally updated! All the science talks makes it a real Star Trek story - since StarTrek was always about science and exploring. More, plz!

Yay! More! I can't wait for another chappie, I just hope it's longer! Great stuff, keep it coming! (I use a lot of excalmation points, don't I?) ;)

I've been waiting for the continuation of this story forever!! Thanks for updating! Hope the next chapter won't take too long and please make it a looong chapter. I love this story :)