Title: An Endless Spit of Sand
Author: Josephine
Email: PG-13
Category: Action
Codes: Tu/S, others
Summary: Man … is a creature trapped between two voids, prenatal and posthumous, on a shrinking spit of sand he calls time.
A/N: Occurs before the Xindi arc
"The next step is to place the modulating restrictor into the hoofalte."
Trip paused, then glanced under his outstretched arm to look at Hoshi, contorting himself into something not at all like a pretzel. His arm, which held the said (heavy) restrictor, quivered slightly under the strain. He was covered in sweat, and had stripped the top half of his jumpsuit off, tying the arms around his waist. The de rigueur black Henley had been tossed in a corner long ago, and Trip was seriously considering forgoing the drenched undershirt he was left in. At least it was sleeveless and kept his arms free.
Hoshi herself was primly seated nearby on a cargo container, the small blue type that often time comes in very handy, seemingly unfazed by either Engineering's stifling heat or the sight of Trip in a thin, semi-transparent cotton tank that give the impression of being painted on. The only concession she had made to the high temperature was a slight unzipping of her uniform and a delicate sheen of perspiration on her forehead. And the tendency to let her gaze roam over Trip when his back was turned, which she thought he didn't know about but was wrong. There isn't anything a man who is interested in a woman will feel more than her eyes on him.
"Yer kidding me, right? Hoofalte? What the hell is a hooflate?"
Raising her eyebrow at Trip's snappish tone earned Hoshi a twist of his mouth and a sincere, if muttered, 'Sorry'. She went back to the alien instruction manual, flipping through the pages for show.
"I don't know, the other terms were translatable, but I can't make 'hooflate' out." She looked back up at Trip and gave her own apology with a half shrug. "I'm sorry, Commander."
Turning back to the regulator he had picked up in an alien parts shop (which actually had more in common with a junkyard) that he hoped would be the one that would get the warp drive back up and running (finally), Trip grunted as he repositioned himself and stared at the restrictor in his hand, then over at what he hoped was the hooflate. "No diagrams?" he asked again.
"No diagrams," Hoshi answered again, her arms crossed over her knees, not bothering to search. Forty-two times through the manual and she could recite it in her sleep.
Trip wiggled himself further in the wall of Engineering, giving an interesting little shimmy that brought all sorts of licentious thoughts to Hoshi's mind.
Sighing, she looked down at the too familiar manual, occupying herself by translating the alien script into Denobulan, then from Denobulan to Andorran, which got her thinking about Shran, and really, what a lovely color he was, and how perfect it would look in her house, when she eventually got one —
Another grunt from Trip brought her back from a nice daydream of a blue kitchen where the pots and pans hung on the walls from wriggly antennae to hear him say "Ok, it's in. I think."
"Attach the modulator leads to the regulator," Hoshi recited from memory, "then restore power to the grid."
A few more grunts and wiggles and an interesting snapping sound, and Trip scootched his way backward out of the hole in the wall, sitting down with a thud and a relieved sigh. He reached up toward the closest intercom, toggling it open.
"Ready to turn this thing on, Cap'n." Trip grinned over at Hoshi, and she smiled back, trying hard not to laugh. A wide smudge crossed Trip's cheek, and his brown hair stood up in damp spikes.
'Very cute,' she thought, then as the Captain distracted Trip's attention, Hoshi let herself admire parts of the engineer that needed other, more serious adjectives than cute. Like cut, buff, hard, bitable…
"Will do. Tucker out."
Once more Hoshi came out of a heat-induced daydream, gathering her wayward thoughts and following Trip over to a nearby workstation.
"I've isolated it from most of the systems; this thing may have worked fine and dandy in simulations, but…"
Hoshi nodded absent mindedly, peeking over at the alien hardware not five feet away. "Do you think something will happen?" she asked as she casually took a few steps to the left, putting Trip between her and the regulator.
"I hope it'll work." With a flourish, Trip typed in the code to restore power.
"No, I mean- " A loud thrum cut Hoshi off as a rippling wave expanded from the alien mechanism, fading well before it reached the walls of Engineering. "What was that?"
"Hell if I know," Trip said under his breath. He stared intently at the screen, a frown creasing his brow.
Sidling over to her previous position, Hoshi risked another peek at the device. "Umm, Trip?"
"Just a minute, Hosh." A few key clacks punctuated his words.
"I really think you should take a look at this." Her voice trailing off nervously, Hoshi made room for Trip as he joined her.
"What on Earth?"
Nodules had begun to emerge on the regulator, swellings that didn't seem to grown unless you glanced away for a bit, then another look showed you they had.
More anxious by the second, Hoshi watched Trip quickly try and shut down power to that grid again, and the lights did go off in that section, but the regulator kept glowing.
"It's tapped into another power source." Sticking his head back in the wall, Trip looked at the device again. "How the devil did it do that?"
Trip stood up, hands on hips. "I don't want to just unplug it, but we can't leave it there," he mumbled, talking more to himself than Hoshi. "Although it doesn't look like it's doing much of anything right now."
"It's growing," Hoshi pointed out. Indeed, the bumps were half an inch long now, more like knobs than nodules.
"Yeah, but it's slow. I want to tell the Cap'n about this, and see exactly what's going on before I try anything." A call to the bridge got no answer though, and Trip gave up trying after the Armory and Sickbay were silent too.
"What the hell did this thing do?" Walking across Engineering, Trip picked up one of the newer, larger PADDs. He returned to the original workstation where Hoshi waited, and typed a few more instructions with one hand, peering intently at the PADD.
"That's funny," he said, not laughing.
Hoshi looked around his shoulder to see nothing but static filling the small screen. "What's wrong?"
"Dunno." Nothing Trip did would bring the sensor data up, not even rebooting the PADD, or the tried and true method of giving it a good sharp whack. "I'll take a look at it later."
Tossing the PADD down, Trip picked up one of the original PADDs that had been lying by the keyboard. "This'll be slower, but if anything changes the computer'll let me know."
Uneasily staring at the glowing alien device, Hoshi was caught by surprise as Trip strode off to the door, his long steps eating up the plating and causing her to hurry after him. She quickly caught up, however, as he repeatedly pushed the control button, trying to get the door open.
"Does nothing work anymore?" Griping under his breath, wrestling with an access panel under the control pad, Trip exposed the piston with its lever that would manually open the door. A heave and a ho, and the door opened with a soft whoosh.
Trip's concentration was locked on the PADD in his hand as the pair walked down the corridor toward the lift that would take them to the bridge. "Malcolm said he didn't trust that trader, but his was the only place that had anything that could get us moving again. Looks like Mal was right this time…"
Hoshi's sharply indrawn breath and the clutch of her fingers on his arm stopped him short, and he glanced down to see wide, scared eyes in her pale face.