Part VI:

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Archer snapped after the two passed out of earshot of the cabin. Daniels stomped several steps ahead of him, angrily trying to keep pace on the uneven gravel.

"This!" he turned, shoving a scanner in Archer's face. Several glowing green dots appeared on the screen, what appeared to be about 10 kilometers from their position.

"What is it?" Archer asked.

"Lifesigns. Vulcan lifesigns!" Daniels told him. "There's an entire town of half- and quarter-Vulcan descendents down there that aren't supposed to exist, Captain!" Daniels turned away and resumed marching off down the road. Archer double-timed to catch up with him.

"How did they populate an entire town?" Archer wondered aloud. "Christ, how did they populate at all?" he muttered. Archer suddenly looked up and furrowed his brow.

"Vulcans and humans can't interbreed, how is that possible?"

"They can't interbreed yet, Captain. In the future, it is a very routine medical procedure," Daniels told him calmly.

"Yes, but this isn't the future. Daniels!" Archer shouted, prompting Daniels to stop marching away from him. He turned.

"How is this possible?" he demanded to know.

"Vulcans eventually learn to control their physiology consciously," Daniels answered hurriedly. "T'Pol must have discovered something of that nature," he trailed off, not eager to divulge details of the future.

"How could she hide something like that for so long? Wouldn't someone notice at a— at a hospital or something?" Archer wondered aloud. "They wouldn't even be able to treat her. They'd notice right away her blood was green!" Archer said angrily.

"T'Pol's very resourceful. If she wanted to, I'm sure she could find a way to have a baby without requiring the services of a hospital."

"That's crazy. That doesn't sound like T'Pol," Archer muttered, walking up the hill. They returned to the position atop the hill and around a bend from view of the cabin, where they had beamed in. A bemused Daniels turned and looked at Archer for several moments.

"What?" Jonathan asked defensively. Daniels laughed, then turned to punch a key pad.

"You're jealous," he said, smirking.

"I am not jealo---"

A moment later, they were aboard Daniels' ship.

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Blue Lake Trail
5 KM South of Teakettle Mountain, Colorado
October 2nd, 1979

"T'Pol?"

Her eyes struggled against the groggy after effects of time travel.

"T'Pol, are you alright?"

A hand was on her arm, helping her to her feet before she looked up and recognized the Captain. His voice broke through her scattered senses and she attempted to regain her composure, standing of her own free will. She faltered and Archer reached for her.

"It is alright, Captain. I can stand," she asserted. Suddenly, she recognized Daniels standing next to Archer in his undeserved Enterprise uniform.

"Daniels," she said in a flat, disapproving tone. "Have I you to thank for this… excursion?" T'Pol asked, looking around for the first time. Tall, rigidly stiff pines and evergreens swayed in a brisk wind. T'Pol cringed at the cold. Her eyes paused and went still as the sensations around her struck a chord within her. She knew this place…

"Subcommander, I apologize. We came as quickly as we could—"

"Have you been here long?" Archer interjected.

"No," T'Pol replied. "The last thing I remember is being aboard Enterprise, taken hostage by the alien you called 'Ruda'."

"Yes, well he's nowhere to be found, unfortunately," Daniels said to himself gruffly.

"Where are we?" T'Pol asked, stepping out into the trail from the ditch where she woke up. Suddenly Daniels tensed as if remembering something. T'Pol's acute senses detected his heightened mood.

"Is there danger near?" the Subcommander asked clinically.

"Not exactly, but we need to leave now," he said, waving T'Pol and Archer down the path. They took a handful of steps when a voice called out from several meters up the path.

"Can I help you folks?" he cordially asked. Daniels mentally slapped himself and closed his eyes, turning on the stranger. His eyes flickered between the stranger and T'Pol as she turned to face the rancher.

"No, thank you, we just got a little lost on the trail. But we're heading back now," he hurriedly explained through a nervous smile. Archer smiled weakly back at the tall stranger. A relic from a bygone era, Archer couldn't help but admire the scenery and the typically attired rancher as he took a few steps closer.

T'Pol paused, squinting up the path and furrowing her brow. There was something distinctly familiar about this man. She looked closer – he resembled Commander Tucker very closely. An instant later, T'Pol realized Daniels drew his eye between the stranger and her. She stood taller, clasping her hands at her back.

"It's near twelve miles down ta' Telluride. You sure you're gonna' be a'right?" he asked in a drawl.

That voice, she thought. It was not like Commander Tucker's, but still familiar. The thought plagued her and she felt an uncharacteristically warm gust of air toss through her hair. She looked up, finding that pines were still. Looking down, she was a handful of small steps up the path.

"Do I—" the stranger began to mutter, drawing his brows together in thought. T'Pol opened her mouth to speak but the air evaporated from her lungs. She found her lips flexing inexorably for words, words as incapturable as the wind through her fingers.

He was equally speechless. Raising the brim of his Stetson, he revealed more of his face to T'Pol's searching gaze. The intuition was inescapable, and irrevocably irrational. She was on some unknown planet, with no memory of this place nor this man, yet a certainty to the contrary gripped her like the fangs of a wild Sehlat.

"T'Pol, we have to go," she finally heard Archer say. She wasn't sure how many times she had called after her. The air was still but oppressively heavy and difficult to hear through. Still, she clearly heard the stranger utter, "You be careful, miss. I wouldn't want nothin' to happy to you."

Finally, she turned to follow Archer. Pausing, she turned back to find the stranger marching back up the path towards the mountain.

"I will," she assured him. He stopped and looked back at her, but she was already walking away, several yards down the path.

"How did she…?" Jack muttered to himself. T'Pol looked back one final time before walking with Archer and Daniels around the bend of the trail as it led down the mountain and toward the small town of Telluride. As soon as they rounded the bend, Daniels dialed a command into his scanner, and they vanished.

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There was no moon. The sky, black as pitch, loitered overhead. The stars looked like they did from space, immaculately clean dots of light, patiently carrying their rays across depths of emptiness to this single planet. She wondered if humans ever believed they shined for this planet alone. The ignorance was understandable, from a place like this.

"T'Pol?" Jack called from behind her. The cliff was nearly just as she remembered it that first night he kissed her. Very little of the landscape had physically changed besides the passing of seasons, but something was different. It was like arriving somewhere you had never been, in the dark, then awaking to find the sun high, and recognizing the place as wholly new.

A cool, hard surface beneath her reminded T'Pol of his labor to make her comfortable. When the broom disappeared for a week, she knew he was up to something. He had swept the cliff just to make her more comfortable. She would have to restrict future complaints of minor discomforts.

"Yes," she replied into the sky. He smiled behind her, sliding his legs around her as he sat behind her. Her head fell and her eyelids slid contently shut as he kissed her neck.

"Do you miss it?" he asked.

"It is illogical to miss what will never return," she replied.

"There's no logic in a lotta' things, sweetheart," he whispered into her hair, kissing her lightly. She exhaled heavily, all her reserve disappearing into the mountain air with that hot breath.

"Perhaps, I will always miss it," she said. "However, it would also be illogical to dwell on such unpleasant emotions," she said, twisting her neck to look at him. "Particularly when more pleasant ones confront us," she said. She accepted his lips into a long, slow-moving kiss. Their lips hardly moved, patiently enjoying the simple contact. She broke away, looking at him. Commander Tucker looked back at her.

"Marry me, T'Pol," his eyes begged.

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T'Pol rose from her bunk aboard Enterprise with a light start. Her brow beaded with sweat, she took a slow and heavy breath to calm herself. She attempted to recall the dream that had awakened her so abruptly, but failed to do so. It was often a sign of insufficient meditation among healthy Vulcans to experience such disturbing dreams.

"T'Pol, I don't mean to intrude," she heard Daniels say from the corner of her room.

"Daniels!" she heard herself exclaim. She furrowed her brow, rising from bed, clothed in a blue set of silk night clothes. T'Pol could not help but frown at him.

"I'm sorry, but I wanted to speak with you privately, I had no idea you would be sleeping. Time of day on starships is exceedingly difficult to predict from our perspective," he replied wryly.

T'Pol stepped into a robe, pulling it over her body. She moved to turn on the desk lamp of her quarters, spilling enough light into the room to reveal Daniels in the corner. She sat on the edge of her bed.

"What do you want?" she asked simply. Daniels paced away from the shadows and came into the light.

"Did the Captain brief you on our experiences while looking for you?" Daniels asked with a hint of curiosity.

"No," T'Pol answered sharply. She had been made aware that Archer experienced something which involved her in the past, but had insisted he could not divulge details at Daniels' request.

"Good, good," Daniels tapped his hands together as he moved closer. "How much do you remember?" he asked her, suddenly.

Taken aback, T'Pol furrowed her brow at him. "I recall only being taken hostage by the alien you call Ruda and then finding myself on Earth where you and the Captain found me," T'Pol replied evenly. Daniels nodded.

"Yes, but you remember more, don't you?" he asked diligently. T'Pol avoided his eyes.

"I do not know what you are talking about," she insisted.

"T'Pol, I know this is a private matter, but it's important that I know how much I remember. Please," he pleaded with her. There was a long beat.

"Why?" she asked. Daniels was silent. "Why do you need to know, what does this have to do with you?" T'Pol demanded to know. There was a pause while Daniels paced the room.

"May I?" he asked, gesturing for the opposite corner of the bed. T'Pol begrudgingly nodded, ignoring her rising impatience. She must meditate soon.

"My people have been moving through time about as long as your people have been using the transporter. And there are still things we don't understand," he confessed.

"Would it not be more logical to abstain from using this technology until you comprehend it fully?" T'Pol countered.

"Perhaps. However, these effects were not known until very recently, and they are the subject of intense study and debate. You see, it seems that some beings of particularly acute telepathic ability are… somewhat immune to the effects of causally-induced memory loss," he explained. "When we go back in time and fix something, say your presence on Earth in 1979, and reverse all of the effects on the timeline your life would have had by retrieving you before those effects took place, your memory should be completely wiped of those events. However, some races, such as Vulcans, are sometimes immune, or partially immune to this effect. We do not fully understand… why this happens, but we have traced it to powerfully telepathic capability."

"Most Vulcans are merely empathic, and my abilities are hardly exceptional among my people," T'Pol reminded him

"Yes," Daniels nodded. "But often the level of ability in the individual is latent, lying dormant. This is usually the case with Vulcans."

Assuming for the moment that he was telling the truth, T'Pol ventured a question.

"Are Vulcans not present in the future? Why was this 'anomaly', not initially detected during the early development of the technology?" she asked.

"It's very rare, few Vulcans experience the effects. Only recently as we have made contact with much more powerful telepaths from outside our galaxy have we discovered the effects. Also," he said quieter. "Vulcans are rarely involved in temporal incursions," he confessed.

"Indeed," T'Pol replied, raising an eyebrow.

"The problem is that the effects can result in temporal psychosis. The condition causes a complete breakdown of the person's ability to tell the real world from the recollected memory," he told her.

"And I may suffer this?" she asked pensively.

"It depends on how powerful the memory is. What do you remember?" he asked her again.

"Very little," she replied, staring at the floor in concentration. "I remember the name… 'Jack'. That is all. While on the planet I had brief flashes of recollection but I was not able to identify them. They were mostly urges and… emotions," she confessed quietly.

Daniels sighed. "Well, I'm very sorry that this happened to you. But, I can safely say that given the very limited nature of your recollection, you should not be at risk of temporal psychosis."

T'Pol nodded. "If there is nothing else, I would like to meditate."

Daniels rose, preparing to leave. At the door, he turned back.

"There is one other thing. I told the Captain that Ruda had taken my jump key and used my temporal database to select a location to send you."

"Yes, he told me," T'Pol replied.

Daniels hesitated. "Well, I was able to catch up with Ruda and capture him again. In doing so I retrieved the jump key."

T'Pol blinked, curiously raising an eyebrow.

"I thought that Ruda used the jump key to move to one of my prior destinations, and I did find him at one of the locations in the database. But when I checked again, I realized that I have never been to Colorado in 1979. I know that Ruda incorrectly executed the command, using a mode on the device which allows someone to send two people to two different spacetimes. But the logs show a malfunction in the subroutine that executes the second jump," he went on. "I saw absolutely no pattern," he shook his head. "You could have materialized in empty space… practically, anywhere in the Universe."

"Planets represent an infinitesimally small fraction of the Universe," T'Pol said to herself.

Daniels smiled dryly. "I knew another Vulcan, once, with a habit for understatement," he said. "You would have liked him." He turned and faced the wall, then vanished in a haze of light.

T'Pol sat in silent meditation for the rest of the night. She remembered something from the dream she had kept from Daniels. Something out of context, a single word, plucked from her own private Universe, playing out in secret behind a pitch curtain within her own subconscious.

Yes.

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