The bandages abruptly fell away from Trip’s eyes and he suddenly found himself blinking against a swirl of harsh light. Although the light fixture in the sleeping area seemed a little too bright to his dilated pupils, his eyes seemed to adjust very quickly to the abrupt disappearance of the darkness into which he’d awakened.
“Looks like the Adigeons do pretty good inner‑eyelid work,” Trip said, his gaze lighting on the face from which Phuong’s voice had evidently come.
While the face in question was still clearly humanoid in appearance, it was one that Trip almost didn’t recognize–but for certain unexpectedly familiar features. One of these was Phuong’s thick black hair, which had been severely shorn down to a stark bowl cut. Another was his dark eyebrows, which swept sharply upward at their outer edges.
But the most striking change visited upon Phuong was to the tips of his ears, which now tapered gracefully upward into points. Except for the presence of a subtle but clearly noticeable brow ridge, Trip could have sworn he was staring into the face of a Vulcan.
Trip rose to his feet, and his words came out in a hoarse whisper. “Tinh, are you sure the Adigeons got your order right?”
Phuong’s right eyebrow rose and he grinned in a decidedly un‑Vulcan way. “We’d both better hope so, Commander.” He placed a hand on Trip’s shoulder and steered him toward the head at the rear of the cabin.
Trip saw his reflection in the mirror over the gun‑metal gray washbasin and came to an abrupt stop. He raised his hands to a face that he doubted his own mother would have recognized.
He couldn’t tear his gaze away from his own set of distinctly Vulcanoid ears, which were accented by a prominent brow ridge, a thick mane of dark brown hair, and nearly black eyebrows canted at a steep angle that reminded Trip of the windshield‑wipers on some of the old gasoline‑powered ground vehicles his grandfather used to spend his summers restoring and repairing.
If only T’Pol could see menow, he thought, approaching the mirror more closely in order to study his new face in greater detail. After concluding that he looked like a Vulcan with a forehead concussion, he examined the rest of his face with an intensity he usually reserved for complex technical diagrams. His eye color had been darkened almost to black, the width of his nose and mouth had increased slightly, and even his skin color had subtly changed, taking on an almost pale green cast.
“So the Romulans must be kissing cousins of the Vulcans,” Trip said at length, his eyes still riveted to the face in the mirror. “Wonder if the Vulcans have known it all along, but decided to keep it to themselves.” After all, that’s the way they handled “sharing” their warp technology with us for years.
“Can’t say I’d blame them for not being eager to put all their dirty laundry on display,” Phuong said.
Trip nodded, still watching the dour‑faced alien who was staring back at him from the mirror. “I suppose that’d be especially true on the eve of the signing of the Coalition Compact.”
Does T’Pol know anything about this?Trip thought, feeling adrift.
“Exactly,” Phuong said. “Regardless, the Adigeons have surgically altered you not just to make you look generically Romulan, as I do. You have, in fact, been made to resemble a particularRomulan, right down to your voice prints–specifically, you are now a junior warp scientist named Cunaehr, who was Doctor Ehrehin’s most trusted assistant.”
“Was?” Trip asked, turning to face Phuong. “Past tense?”
“He’s dead,” Phuong said, nodding. “Killed in a recent warp‑test accident.”
A worm of suspicion was beginning to turn deep in Trip’s gut. “You knew beforehand what they were going to make us look like?”
Phuong held up a placating hand. “I knew about Cunaehr and his relationship to Ehrehin, thanks to our intelligence dossiers. But as far as what Romulans look like in general, I’m as surprised as you are. The Adigeon surgeons seem to have their own sources regarding the exact likenesses of prominent Romulans.”
Trip stroked his own now very alien‑looking cheek. “Well, let’s hope they did a good enough likeness to fool this Doctor Ehrehin.”
“Ehrehin might not be all that hard to fool, if our dossier on him is correct,” said Phuong.
Trip’s enlarged brow crumpled inquisitively. “What do you mean?”
“Doctor Ehrehin is an elderly man, Commander. And he’s reportedly been only intermittently lucid during recent weeks. As far as I know, this hasn’t affected his theoretical and mathematical work, and it may even make him tractable enough to allow Earth and the other Coalition worlds to benefit from his expertise–provided he’s comforted by the presence of one of his most trusted assistants.”
Comforted by a dead man,Trip thought. He was beginning to feel that he was about to participate in something exceedingly ugly. “All I have to do is pretend to be Ehrehin’s beloved apprentice. Then take advantage of a feeble old man’s vulnerabilities.”
Phuong scowled and folded his arms across his chest. “This is war, Commander.”
“Sure it is, Tinh. Never said I had to like it, though.” Trip turned back toward the mirror and looked once again into the face of Cunaehr. As important as he knew this mission was, he now felt determined not to allow it to completely swallow his real identity–at least, not forever. He couldn’t let the role of Cunaehr, or for that matter Phuong’s apparent tendency to allow the ends to justify the means, to engulf the man he still was at his core.
After all,Trip thought, I’m going to have to go home sometime and be able to put all this behind me.
Running his index finger along the side of one of his oddly natural‑feeling pointed ears, Trip asked, “What did the Adigeons do to us exactly?”
“The details?” Phuong said. “Well, the bureau spared no expense, Commander. The Adigeons not only performed all the necessary cosmetic alterations, they made quite a few temporary internal changes, all of them reversible. They even resequenced our genes.”
Trip turned back toward Phuong, his fists clenching involuntarily. “That’s illegal.”
Phuong shrugged. “It’s illegal on Earth,Commander. But the Adigeons weren’t a party to either the Augment tyrannies of the twentieth century, or to the Eugenics Wars. So they’re a little less squeamish about such stuff than we are.”
“But why change our DNA?”
“Because it’s our best chance of fooling suspicious Romulans–particularly those equipped with medical scanners. Cut yourself shaving and you’ll even bleed green. Only an extremely deep tissue scan will reveal the truth.”
Or an autopsy,Trip thought, though he tried very hard to push that unpleasant notion aside.
“Besides, the Adigeons say we may even receive some ancillary long‑term health benefits as a result of these alterations,” Phuong continued. “An extended life‑span, for instance.”
Trip shook his head incredulously, then moved even closer to the mirror until he was almost nose‑to‑nose with the reflected image of Cunaehr.
“Tinh, if we foul up on this mission, figuring out how to spend a few extra years of retirement pay won’t be at the top of our list of problems.”
Twenty‑One
Thursday, February 20, 2155
Enterprise NX‑01
THE SWIRLING,BLUE‑GREEN CLOUD bands of Adigeon Prime displayed on Enterprise’s central bridge viewer abruptly gave way to the image of a vaguely humanoid creature. The being’s long brown wings, feather‑covered epidermis, and outsize, apparently lidless eyes gave it a more than passing resemblance to a gigantic barn owl.
“Universal translator engaged, Captain,” said Hoshi from the communications console located at the periphery of the bridge’s forward portside section. T’Pol stood at the station to Hoshi’s immediate left, attentively watching the readings on her science console.