Chapter Text
Light seared his eyes.
“Wake up!” A scared female voice was hissing in his ear. “Lieutenant, you’ve got to wake up!”
He thrust up a hand to come between him and the light. Sand showered from it, but fortunately he closed his eyes in reflex before any could get in.
Sight was the thing he could least afford to lose. With his other hand he swiped the sand from his face before cautiously opening his eyes again, still shielding them from the glare.
The sun was shining directly on to his face from a slit of a window, high up in the opposite wall. Hoshi Sato (of course!) was kneeling beside him. Her face was grey with shock and fear.
“A little background information might come in useful,” said a hated voice. Q was lounging in Malcolm’s office chair in a darkened corner. “Your survival skills will come in useful here. You’re quite the expert, after all – though I imagine this experience will be a novelty, even for you.”
“Wait–!” The lieutenant tried to sit up; his head was pounding. “You can’t do this to us– You can’t–!”
“Oh, but I can.” Q smiled charmingly. “And moreover, I have. I’ve put you in a situation where you can get what you want – if, of course, you survive. I’ll be intrigued to see how you get on.”
Malcolm glanced at Hoshi; she was staring from him to the corner and back again, her eyes wide with alarm. The picture seared itself into his brain.
“No!” he shouted. “Do what you want with me, but not her!” His left foot got traction on the stone floor beneath the dirty, sand-caked straw on which he was lying, and he lunged forward, but even before he’d got his other foot underneath him there was a flash of light and the corner was empty. His outstretched hands just about fended him off from crashing into the wall.
“Sir, who–?” Her voice was trembling slightly, and she paused, biting her lip to steady herself. “Who are you talking to? And where are we?”
Bastard. Fucking bastard! Assorted creative variations of this theme in several languages ran through his mind as he rested his aching forehead briefly against the wall, but it was now his turn to bite his lip. Conduct becoming an officer and all that, and his secondary responsibility now was to provide support for his junior officer in any way required. His primary one, of course, was to see that both of them got out of this alive, as quickly as possible – or if it was necessary that only one of them could, that Hoshi would be the survivor.
“The ‘who’, Ensign, is a being who has arranged for us to be transported here for ...” He paused. ‘For his warped entertainment’ might be true, but it was hardly likely to calm Hoshi’s fears. “For some kind of experiment. His name is apparently Q. He materialised in the Armoury some minutes ago. I take it you couldn’t see him here.” Pathetic as it might be, he couldn’t help sending her a searching look. “Did – did anything strange at all happen on the Bridge?”
Her surprise was apparent, and as she shook her head, a part of him was conscious of a wave of sickening relief. If his supposed visit to the Bridge in his Section 31 guise had been an illusion, perhaps this was too.
‘If I were you, Lieutenant, I really, really wouldn’t take that risk,’ said a voice in his head.
He struck his temple hard with the heel of his hand, partly trying to knock some sort of order into it and partly in the hope that the blow would transmit to the bastard who apparently had free access to it.
But though the impact did indeed go some way towards clearing his mind, he realised with a sinking heart that he really didn’t dare take the risk. He had no certainty that this was an illusion too. And if it wasn’t–.
He stood up straighter, steadying himself against the wall, and began taking stock of their surroundings.
As he’d already surmised, they were in a cell, perhaps five metres square. Floor, ceiling and the walls on three sides were of pale grey stone. The only things in it apart from themselves were a heap of filthy-looking rags that was presumably a bed of sorts, and a covered pail in one corner.
The third side was composed of metal bars with a securely locked door built in, and faced a corridor. The wall on the other side of this at first appeared to be of the same blank stone, but on closer inspection, a few paces to left and right there were what were presumably other cells. It was probable that the whole length of the ill-lit passage – it appeared to be perhaps fifty metres or so – was devoted to alternating cells.
The slit window was in the wall directly opposite the corridor. Immediately he assessed it as an escape route, but had to discard it; it was hardly a quarter of a metre wide. An undernourished child might have been able to wriggle through it, but it wouldn’t accommodate an adult body, even if it had been possible to reach it.
As a matter of course he examined the soundness of the locks and the bars and the places where they were bedded into the walls and floor. Unfortunately, he hadn’t so much as a piece of wire with which he could have attacked the locks – which were of some kind of crude, heavy padlock type – and although the bars looked quite old they were extremely well made. There was a grille low down on one side, presumably where food was pushed through, but like the slit window this was far too narrow to admit anything wider than an arm.
Throughout his examination Hoshi had been just behind him and to his left, watching what he did but making no effort to engage him in conversation while he was concentrating – a sensible policy, which moved her up a rung in his professional estimation. He was quite aware that she was extremely frightened, and the temptation to ask questions must be extremely strong, but she was holding herself together well. Particularly considering she’d just seen her sole companion and supposedly rational senior officer talking to someone who wasn’t there and then smacking himself in the head for no apparent reason, which couldn’t have been all that comforting.
He himself was conscious of the rising tide of fear. Being imprisoned like this brought back far too strongly the memories of that occasion when he and Captain Archer had been suspected of being enemy spies by one of the protagonists in a planetary civil war. Rather than tell the truth, and thereby affect the aliens’ cultural development (if being involved in a civil war could be described thus), the captain had decided his and his tactical officer’s lives were expendable. They’d spent a long afternoon and evening in just such a cell as this, waiting for the summons to the gallows.
That, however, was something he must push to the back of his mind. Right now the future, not the past, must be his concern – a future that was utterly unknown, but from which he must somehow wrest survival. If such a feat was possible.
Escape apparently being out of the question, at least for the present, it was time to find out whether Hoshi could contribute anything to the sum of his information.
Not much, as it turned out. According to her account, she’d been working on the Bridge as usual. It had been quiet; Enterprise was on course towards a distant pulsar that the Science team were interested in studying, and T’Pol and Travis had been discussing the gravimetric distortions that might affect the ship when they came within the star’s influence. There had been no warning at all that anything out of the ordinary was going to happen. “One minute I was listening to T’Pol telling Travis that this particular pulsar was what Earth scientists term a ‘black widow’ type, and the next – I woke up here in this cell, and I’ve no idea how I got here!
“And then I found you were lying next to me,” she added on a note of relief. “I don’t know how you got here, sir, but I’m glad I’m not alone.”
He supposed her reaction was complimentary, but her evident faith in him as a protector was an additional burden. He must justify it somehow.
“I wonder if we’re alone in here,” he said, low-voiced.
“No, sir.” His companion answered equally softly. “I’ve heard voices – and noises. I’d estimate there’s at least twenty people in here.”
“Any guards?”
“I haven’t seen any.”
They were standing beside the metal bars. He pressed his head against them, trying to see as far as he could up the corridor. Nobody was visible looking out in the same way. “Did you recognise the language?”
She hesitated. “I’ve heard something like it. On Risa.”
“Risa?”
“Risa attracts people from all over the quadrant,” she said, with the hint of a smile in her voice. “That was one of its attractions, from my point of view: the different languages you could hear. I appreciate it wasn’t what everyone went there for.”
He coughed. “Indeed.” It certainly hadn’t been what he and Trip had gone there for, but then, neither had been getting so brain-fucked on MaiTais that he’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book and ended up getting robbed of everything bar his underwear and tied up in a basement with his superior officer. Presumably Hoshi had used her precious two days of shore leave to better effect.
“I don’t know what planet they were from, or what they called themselves,” she went on, serious now. “There were three or four of them in the same hotel I stayed at. I thought they were traders. They spent a lot of time in corners, talking.
“They probably didn’t mean to be overheard, but – with my hearing, I can hear things better than most people can.” She coloured slightly. “It wasn’t that I deliberately eavesdropped. It was just that sometimes, when one of them spoke more loudly than usual, I heard them. Not that many sentences, not enough to understand a lot of what they were talking about – but it gave me a feel for the language.”
“I wouldn’t imagine for a moment that you deliberately eavesdropped, Ensign,” he said levelly. “But any information you managed to acquire, even accidentally, could be extremely valuable in our present situation.”
“They were using the word azoí, which in context I think is ‘merchandise’. They seemed to be worried about a delivery that hadn’t arrived. Of course, they didn’t say a delivery of what exactly.” She frowned, clearly trying to recall any more information that might be useful.
“On Risa, it could be pretty well anything.” In search of anything at all that might give them information, he cast a close look for the first time at what both he and Hoshi were wearing: no longer their Starfleet uniforms, but long loose tunics of undyed wool, not particularly clean. Although grubby clothing was hardly their most pressing concern at that moment, he had to suppress a small fastidious shudder at the thought of what some of those stains might consist of.
It was hard to escape the conclusion that he and Hoshi were prisoners – the fact that they were guilty of no crime was presumably immaterial. Possibly if and when the guards arrived, these might be reasoned with; but it was a hope that found little anchorage in the shifting sea of cogitation. Prison guards are seldom selected for their powers of reasoning.
A movement further up the corridor caught his attention. Someone was looking out of their own cage. The angle made it hard to see detail; what he had glimpsed had been the hem of a tunic like theirs, whose owner was presumably close enough to the bars for part of their clothing to protrude through it. “There’s someone there,” he said quickly, pointing. “Call them – see if you can establish communication.”
Her wide-eyed look told him the magnitude of what he was asking, and he felt absurdly guilty; what did he think she was, some kind of miracle-worker? “Just try, Ensign,” he added more gently. “Anything at all you can learn may be of value. Obviously if it doesn’t work, that’s nobody’s fault.”
He was aware that making noise was risky. It could attract extremely hostile attention to them. But they had to do something.
She pressed against the bars and called out quietly. There was no response, and she called a little more loudly, while he waited behind her, tensed for trouble.
There were a few responses, most of which were unmistakably curses. But after these had mostly muttered back into silence, one voice replied.
He thought from the timbre of it that it belonged to a woman, but it was so low and hoarse that it was difficult to be sure. The speaker seemed to have difficulty in drawing breath.
It was hardly surprising that it took a while for Hoshi to establish some kind of understanding. Unobtrusively he watched her face, trying to glean some idea of what she was saying and hearing. It was natural that she should wear a frown of intense concentration, but foreboding congealed in his stomach as he saw her slowly going pale.
He wanted to put a steadying hand on her shoulder and reassure her that this was all a stupid trick that was being played on them, and of course nothing was going to happen. But that wasn’t a promise he could make without knowing he could deliver. And touching was a definite no-no.
Besides, she didn’t need that kind of support. She was a strong young Starfleet officer who’d made huge strides in character since coming aboard Enterprise, and what she needed was for him to set her an example. So he braced himself. Whatever she was hearing, it was his job to rationalise the situation and make whatever decisions he deemed appropriate.
The other speaker ended on a short, harsh burst of words and what was presumably a long, hacking cough.
It was plain that the communication was over.