Archer nodded, then puffed up his chest in a conspicuous show of bluster. “Shran left six hours ago. You’re too late.”

“You’re lying. His shuttle is still in your launch bay,” the leader said. He stepped forward, his weapon trained directly on Archer. “Kill him,” he ordered the subordinate to his right, who responded by raising his rifle.

“Hold on!” Trip said, holding up his hands. “Wait a minute!”

“Trip, I’ll take care of this,” Archer said, putting out an arm to stop him from advancing on the “pirates.”

“The hell you will,” Trip said, pushing at his old friend’s arm. To the lead invader, he said, “ I’llbring you to Shran. I know where he is.”

Archer turned and brought his hand up to Trip’s chest. “I gave you an order,Commander.”

Trip ignored him and continued to address the leader of the intruders. “You heard me. I said I’d bring you to Shran.”

“Trip!” Archer pushed his friend against the bulkhead.

The alien leader muttered something about them turning around, but Trip wasn’t really hearing him. For that moment, his gaze locked with that of his oldest friend, and absorbed a myriad of emotions. Love, regret, anger, fear.

“Hey, this guy’s the captain,” Trip said, shouting to the “pirate” leader, breaking the moment.

“That’s enough,” Archer snarled.

Trip faced the chalk‑skinned alien. “He’s my boss. If I’m gonna disobey his order, I don’t want him coming along.”

“Trip, that’s enough!” Archer repeated, shouting this time, shoving Trip again.

An errant thought flickered across Trip’s mind. Everyone’s playing their parts a bittoo well.But he knew they had to. When the security logs were reviewed, this had to look real. Still, it bothered him that the fingers of these “pirates” really were poised to pull their triggers.

“Listen…I won’t do this if you kill him. But could you pleaseshut him up?”

Trip fully expected one of the boarders to stun Archer with a blast, but instead, on a nod from the leader, one of the other two aliens crashed his rifle’s stock into the back of Archer’s head. The captain immediately crumpled to the deck, unconscious.

Trip winced. Theyreally didn’t need to dothat. Still, he had his part to play, and they were running out of time before Malcolm’s security teams would arrive from the armory on F deck.

He began leading the “pirates” down the corridor, trading barbed words with them as they went, all of it concerning the specific whereabouts of their quarry, and the Orion slavers who had supposedly paid these men to bring Shran and Theras to face “justice” for the deaths of some of those who had participated in the recent raid against the Aenar city. Trip felt as though they were being almost tooarch with these exchanges, but hoped that upon a close investigation of Enterprise’s security logs, no one else would notice just how dunderheaded this entire piracy scenario really was.

“Take me to Shran now,or I’ll send one of my men back to kill your captain,” the lead alien said, making a show of his mounting impatience.

Trip affected a nearly panicked tone, but wasn’t completely sure he was only acting. “Okay, okay! I’ve got a better idea. I’ll bring Shran and Theras to us. We won’t have to go any farther.”

“Be very careful,” snarled the pistol‑wielding alien.

They went on a short distance until they reached a narrow hatchway, which he and Malcolm had already rigged for precisely this sort of situation.

“You can all come see for yourselves,” he said to the men behind him as he pulled the hatch open and began to climb inside a crawlspace filled with a profusion of cables and conduits. “This is just a com station.”

He reached up and began moving a small handle mounted at the top of the cramped chamber. “I’m gonna need to open this so I can bypass the security protocols,” he continued. “Is that okay?”

The “pirate” leader approached closely and inspected the equipment. His weapon remained raised and ready. “As long as you keep your hands where we can see them.”

“No problem,” Trip said as he continued working. The handle turned, opening up an overhead access panel containing still more cabling and circuitry. After carefully bypassing the security protocols, he grasped one end of an open energy conduit inside the panel and pulled it down.

Holding the open conduit out in front of him, he said, “Now, all I need to do is connect this to the relay inside that panel.” He gestured toward a second overhead panel, located not far from the first one.

“Stop,” the head raider said. To one of his men, he said, “Open it for him.” He pointed at the second panel. “If there’s a weapon in there,” he warned Trip, “you’re going to die before your captain does.”

Still holding the conduit, Trip watched as one of the rifle carriers reached up and opened the second panel. No obvious weapons were in evidence.

“Satisfied?” Trip said.

The head alien sniffed. “Proceed.”

Trip reached up into the second open panel and extracted another open conduit line, the virtual twin of the one he still held in his other hand. Then he joined the ends of the cables, twisting them together, and flipped the toggle switch next to his right hand.

At his signal, the aliens all backed away slightly, getting safely out of harm’s way. Trip jumped down and out of the access hatchway, counting the few seconds that remained.

Gotta have some famous last words,he thought. “There’s just one other thing I need to tell you,” he said, making certain that he spoke loudly and clearly, so that the ship’s computer would pick up every word. “You can all go straight to hell.”

Trip felt his skin itch, experienced a bizarre, disjointed feeling, and then he was pulled away. In that nanosecond when he was still corporeal, he hoped that the small plasma explosion he’d set up would go off without a hitch–and without blowing a huge hole in the hull on the starboard side of E deck.

As a slightly disoriented Trip lay on one of sickbay’s biobeds, Phlox quickly applied convincing facsimiles of all the appropriate wounds to the engineer’s face and chest. Only minutes remained now before Archer was due to call and raise the medical alert, and before the med techs arrived. Phlox had let them go off shift early, but since they all bunked on E deck–the same deck where sickbay was located–they would doubtless arrive quickly once called.

“You will need to breathe as though you’re having an extremely difficult time doing so,” Phlox said to Trip, who looked quite gory at the moment. Even though he knew it was his own harmless handiwork, the sight of the apparently mortally wounded man–his friend–made the Denobulan physician shudder inwardly.

“I faked being sick at school a whole bunch of times, Doc,” Trip said, smiling wanly up at Phlox.

“Yes, well, but this is considerably different,” Phlox said, grimacing. He thought the whole plan was outlandish, and felt certain that it would never hold up to close scrutiny. But as long as it was under way, he was determined to do his best; Commander Tucker’s scheme wasn’t going to fall apart because of hisactions.

Archer stood by the doorway, rubbing the side of his head and wincing. He’d apparently actually been injured, however slightly, during the subterfuge, but there was no time to treat him now. Suddenly, the captain’s communicator beeped. “We’re out of time, Doctor.”

The captain flipped the communicator’s grid open. “We need help in sickbay,” he said, his voice now sounding strained. “Trip’s been hurt.”

“Alerting sickbay personnel now,”T’Pol said, her voice issuing from the device. “What has happened?”Phlox could hear the concern in her tone as he moved to a nearby com panel to enter the command that would summon his emergency med tech staff.