Disclaimer: I don't own Enterprise, no infringement is intended etc etc.

Author's Note: I can't believe it's finally finished (started writing this in July 2007, I think)! I'd like to thank my betas Gabi and Romanse for their support and encouragement, and most of all for their patience! If not for them, this would still be gathering dust in my WIP folder...

Please let me know what you think! Feedback is like chocolate, and chocolate is a major writing boost, so... J

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1

The deck under him was rocking gently. It was the first thing he noticed as he slowly regained consciousness; a soft rocking, like a boat buoyed on a calm sea. It wasn't a feeling he liked or trusted, and he was awake in an instant. He wasn't in a boat. He was lying on the floor of the shuttlepod, and he should be dead, if odds and probabilities were to be believed.

Malcolm blinked. His head hurt, and he could feel the hard deck plating pressing into his cheek, could smell burned circuitry and hear, well, it sounded like waves gently splashing against the outside hull of the pod. He wasn't dead, that much was clear.

He blinked again and tried to move. There was pain, but not as much as he had expected, and he moved more confidently, pushing himself into a sitting position. Nothing seemed to be broken, which was another small miracle as far as odds and probabilities were concerned. He should be lying crumpled in a corner with his limbs shattered. They had certainly been going down fast enough.

There was a muted sound somewhere behind him, and Malcolm turned his head. He was sitting on the floor in front of the helm, and so all he could see were the pilot chair and the science station to his right. The rocking was beginning to make him slightly nauseated, and for a moment he thought he was going to be sick. Then, he heard the sound again, and tried to get to his feet.

"Trip?"

There was no answer, and Malcolm grabbed the pilot chair to lever himself to his feet. It wasn't easy, with the deck careening under his feet and nausea roiling in his stomach, but he made it. Swaying and holding on to the chair with one hand, he surveyed the shuttle until he spotted a pair of blue-clad legs. The body belonging to the legs was hidden behind one of the benches in the back.

"Trip?" Malcolm asked again, although he knew that he wasn't going to get an answer. The sound he had heard, a very faint moan, almost a sigh, wasn't one a conscious person would make. At least not a person conscious enough to answer his query.

Malcolm began to make his way through the shuttle, slowly, dodging broken pieces of equipment and a sparking panel that was dangling precariously from the ceiling. The going wasn't easy, and he almost stumbled twice before he had reached the place where Trip had fallen.

Trip's upper body was squashed against the side of the bunk, and for one frozen moment, Malcolm believed that the Commander's neck was broken. Then, Trip moved his head; just a little, but enough for Malcolm to know that his cervical bones were probably still intact. It wasn't the spine that was the problem, he realized as he took a closer look at Trip's left leg. Blood was darkening the fabric, and from the odd angle at which his foot was tilted, it was obviously broken.

Malcolm knelt down on the deck next to Trip, grabbing the bench to steady himself against the swaying of the pod.

"Trip? Trip, can you hear me?"

Trip moaned again, which was answer enough for Malcolm.

Leaning over the bunk, he opened a side compartment to his left. The equipment inside was a jumbled mess, but at least none of it seemed to be damaged. Malcolm rummaged around until he found the small gray box that he knew contained emergency medical supplies.

"Just a moment, Trip." His hands shook, and he had to try twice until he managed to undo the seal on the kit. It was probably the adrenaline rush subsiding, or at least that was what he hoped. He couldn't really afford to have a concussion right now.

He took out the bio scanner and switched it on. It whirred faintly as he passed it over the unconscious man, and beeped when it picked up the injury to Trip's leg. The ankle was indeed broken, as were several of the smaller bones in Trip's foot. Something heavy must have collided with it during the crash, maybe even the toolbox that was lying a few feet away on the deck. Malcolm remembered Trip frantically trying to repair the suddenly dead engines, and quickly willed the image away. He didn't really want to remember those last panicky minutes before all hell had broken loose, or the look on Trip's face when he realized that there was nothing they could do.

"You're going to be all right," Malcolm told the man on the floor and even found a shaky smile. "Your foot's going to need to be treated, but other than that you're okay."

Except for a collection of bumps and bruises and a possibly contused rib, Malcolm added in his mind. He helped Trip to get more comfortable on the floor, then took a hypospray out of the medkit and adjusted it to two units of analgesic. He was about to inject it into Trip's neck when he hesitated. There were three hyposprays in the kit, each containing ten units of painkiller. It seemed unlikely that he would need to ration them; any minute now, Enterprise would try to contact them and arrange for a rescue party to take them back to the ship. All he needed to do was make sure Trip wasn't in any pain and his leg was stable until he could be taken to sickbay. Surely Malcolm could afford to use some of the analgesic as a measure of prevention.

Nodding as if to encourage himself, he pressed the button that would release the hypospray's contents into Trip's bloodstream. Trip sighed, and his breathing seemed to ease a little.

"There you go," Malcolm said as he laid the hypo aside. The bloodstain on Trip's uniform leg had spread during the last few minutes, and Malcolm decided that he needed to take care of the injury before anything else. His brain seemed to have been rattled quite a bit during the crash, and would only reluctantly adapt to the tactical thinking the situation called for. He had to try and contact Enterprise, and – as his instructor at the Academy would have been yelling in his face by now – he needed to secure the parameter, make sure that the shuttlepod was safe. Most importantly, he needed to straighten out the muddle in his mind and concentrate. Maybe smacking himself on the side of the head would help, if his hands weren't trembling so much.

Trip's leg. An injured member of the party always took precedence, he remembered that much. Willing his hands not to shake, he began to undo the laces of Trip's boot. Trip seemed to have a habit of not simply tying a loop, but knotting the laces several times as if he were afraid they would come undone and make him trip.

A sudden and quite unexpected giggle escaped Malcolm. Make Trip trip. That was actually quite funny.

Somehow, the giggle turned into something else and suddenly Malcolm found himself on all fours, retching violently. His stomach was mostly empty; he wasn't in the habit of eating much before an away mission. Hunger kept you alert, or so they said.

Malcolm spat, and when he was sure that the vomiting was over, turned back to the task of pulling off Trip's boot. The rocking deck didn't help his queasy stomach at all, and he became aware of a dull pain at the back of his head. So maybe he had a concussion, after all, but he could always pretend that he didn't. That usually worked quite well, at least for a while.

"I'm fine," Malcolm told Trip, who of course had no way of contradicting him. The boot came off after a bit of pulling and tugging, and Malcolm winced at the sight. There was a lot of blood, so much that some of it dripped out of the boot as he set it aside. Usually, a fractured bone wouldn't cause any bleeding, would it? At least no external bleeding.

Carefully, Malcolm began to roll the blood-soaked sock down over the broken ankle, which was swollen and purple, but didn't seem to be the source of the blood loss. He would have to stabilize it, Malcolm thought, and this time he did smack himself upside the head. This was not the time to be squeamish about an injury, especially not when he had seen far worse. The nausea sitting at the bottom of his throat would just have to wait.

Slapping himself seemed to help, and he managed to remove the sock from Trip's foot without any further incident. As he laid it aside, he saw that the ankle was indeed not the source of the bleeding. Trip's toes were... or what was left of them. The great toe looked as if someone had brought a sledgehammer down on it, leaving it crooked at an angle of almost ninety degrees. A piece of bone was protruding from the skin, looking strangely white and clean amongst all the blood. With the second and the third toes, the sledgehammer had been replaced with a blunt axe, and Malcolm had to gather all his willpower not to be sick again at the sight. The two toes weren't really there anymore, and in their place was a bloody pulp that didn't look as if it had once been a healthy part of a human body.

"Oh fucking hell," Malcolm whispered and it helped to hold the nausea at bay, at least for the moment. "Fucking, fucking hell."

No stabilizing to be done here; what he had to do was somehow stop the bleeding and then call Enterprise to arrange an emergency transport right away. He wasn't sure if a person could actually bleed to death from an injury to his foot, but from the amount of blood Trip was losing, it didn't seem all that unlikely. His hands trembling worse than before, Malcolm grabbed a roll of bandage from the emergency kit and tried to wrap it around the mashed toes. The result looked more like a child's attempt at bandaging a life-size doll than anything else, but at least it seemed to slow down the flow of blood. God, why couldn't he think clearly? Why hadn't he contacted Enterprise right after he had woken up? Because he had needed to look after Trip first, that was why, his own mind answered angrily. But he had to call them now.

Biting down hard on his lip to keep from retching, Malcolm stumbled to his feet and over to the communications console. Most of the displays were still lit, so chances were that it wasn't broken. Keeping his eyes lowered so all he would see was the console, he tried to enter the sequence that would hail Enterprise, and found that he had to aim for each key with his index finger instead of touch typing as he usually did. Malcolm rested his forehead on his hands as he waited for the crackling that usually preceded the answering channel being opened.

It didn't come. Malcolm hit the call button again; maybe he hadn't caught it right in his first attempt. There was no change. He frowned. Maybe the console was broken after all, even though the displays still seemed to work.

They would've tried to call us long ago, he thought, and it took his bleary mind a moment to understand the implications of this. Enterprise hadn't tried to hail them, not after they had exchanged that last, panicky call shortly before the shuttle went down on a rapid descent. Archer's voice had barked something unintelligible before it was cut off, and after that, nothing. Which meant that communication must be permanently damaged. It was just his luck that they had no communicators; their mission had been to perform a close-up sweep of the planet's stratosphere, and there was no need to take communicators if no one was going to leave the shuttlepod.

Well, but Enterprise had seen them go down, so the rescue team should be arriving soon. Until then, Malcolm could do little but sit tight and hope for the best.

His eyes had been traveling aimlessly across the shuttle's damaged interior, and for the first time he happened to glance at one of the hatch windows.

Water. A clear, blue vastness that stretched to the horizon where it merged into a rose-tinted sky. And, about four hundred meters away, the silver streak that was the coast.

Malcolm swallowed. He had known, of course, that they were floating on the sea; he had felt the rocking and had heard the sound of the waves, but until now something had prevented him from looking, especially out the front window. Maybe his subconscious had sensed that whatever was out there would not help him concentrate on the tasks at hand.

He turned away from the console and on unsteady legs began to make his way back to Trip. The engines were dead, communication was too, so there wasn't much use in hovering next to the lifeless helm station. He might as well stay with Trip until Shuttlepod II came to get them.

He sat down on the floor next to the unconscious man, careful to avoid the puddle of vomit, and checked the bandages he had applied to Trip's injured foot. They were soaked with blood. Malcolm closed his eyes, willing the infuriating slowness of his thoughts to go away long enough for him to think. There had to be something else he could do.

Lift the foot. Of course. He was an idiot not to have thought of it before. Elevate the injured limb above heart level to decrease the pressure and slow down the bleeding. For lack of anything else within reach, Malcolm grabbed the toolbox and dragged it closer. As he gently lifted the leg off the deck, Trip's head moved and he moaned again.

"It's okay," Malcolm said. "It's okay, Trip. They'll be here soon."

He slid the toolbox under Trip's leg, careful so he didn't inadvertently bump against the foot. Small drops of blood fell to the floor, mingling with the water.

Water.

Malcolm stared at it. Why would there be water on the floor? But there it was, trickling across the floor in thin rivulets. His eyes followed it, retracing its trail until he found himself looking at the hatch. There, at the very bottom, the water seemed to appear out of nowhere, but for all his confusion, Malcolm knew very well just what was happening. The hatch was leaking, and water was seeping in. Water that would soon cover the entire floor.

Malcolm scrambled to his feet again. He almost tripped on his way back to the helm, but he hardly noticed. His fingers seemed unwilling to cooperate, and this time it took him two attempts until he managed to enter the hailing sequence. Maybe he had missed something before, maybe this time they would answer...

Bloody well likely, of course. The thing was broken, and it seemed that he couldn't rely on the rescue team to come and get them in time. He had no idea what the bloody hell was keeping them, but he knew that he couldn't sit here and watch the water rise while he waited. Even if he managed to lift Trip onto the bench, there was a very real chance that it would rise to waist level and higher before anyone came to get them out. And at some point, of course, the shuttle would start sinking.

Malcolm closed his eyes for a moment. Even the thought – trapped inside an enclosed space that was slowly filling with water – was enough for the all-too-familiar panic to raise its ugly head. Usually, Malcolm could rely on himself to stay calm in a dangerous situation – if anything, the adrenaline boosted his thinking – but there was a world of difference between situations when he was calm, controlled Lieutenant Reed and... this. Hated, feared, loathed water. Water that was now seeking revenge for his refusal to look at it, slowly closing in on him so that he had no choice but to take notice.

If it had been only him, Malcolm had little doubt that he would have remained where he was, silent, frozen, waiting to deal with the water when it came. But there was Trip, and Trip needed him to be calm, controlled Lieutenant Reed, even now. Even when the water on the floor had almost reached Malcolm's feet.

Calm and controlled my arse, Malcolm thought as he stumbled over to where Trip lay. There was no way he could be either, not now. Maybe, though, there was a chance that he could be Lieutenant Reed instead of aquaphobic Malcolm, coward Malcolm. That was what his father had called it, cowardice, and he was right, of course.

But Lieutenant Reed wasn't a coward. He might have a paranoid streak and maybe even a strange liking for explosions, but he would do everything to keep a fellow officer safe. He would even open that hatch and face the water if that was what had to be done.

Coward Malcolm was terrified by the very idea, but that couldn't be helped, could it? The shuttle was going to sink, more sooner than later from the amount of water on the floor; even coward Malcolm could see that. So out the hatch it was, and if he drowned out there, it would at least be quicker than sitting in here and feeling the water engulf his thighs, his waist and finally his neck as it slowly devoured him, savoring each bite.

He opened the side compartment again. Coward Malcolm was urging him to go now before he lost his nerve, but Lieutenant Reed insisted that there were precautions he had to take first. Among the jumble of equipment inside, there was one of the backpacks they used on away missions to gather rock and flora specimens. Malcolm pulled it out and upended it to shake out the sample containers inside. They hit the deck with a wet clatter, and Malcolm spared a quick glance to see that the floor was almost entirely covered by now, including the place where he had left Trip.

"I'll be right there," he told Trip. He began throwing things into the backpack – a phase pistol, a survival kit, ration packs, a bag of water, the medkit and a thermoblanket. There was a very real chance that he wouldn't need any of it, he knew that. The rescue team might fish them out, or they might drown, which coward Malcolm was convinced would happen. Still, Lieutenant Reed insisted that the only way of going about this was following tactical protocol, and protocol dictated that he be prepared for all possibilities.

He closed the zipper on top of the backpack. It was supposed to be waterproof, but Malcolm doubted that it was designed to be used as swimming gear. The water would probably leak in at some point; he could only hope that it didn't reach the phase pistol.

He hoisted the backpack onto his back and tightened the straps, somehow reassured by its firm presence. It wasn't exactly a life-jacket, but it might serve to give him some buoyancy.

Right. Coward Malcolm smiled a thin, contemptuous smile. When you're out there thrashing in panic and drowning Trip in the process, the backpack will certainly make all the difference.

Lieutenant Reed didn't seem willing to listen, maybe because there wasn't much he could say in reply. The water level in the shuttle had risen so that his toes would have been covered, had he been barefoot. He looked at Trip who was still unconscious, his short hair floating in the water like a halo. He knew that he had to be quick.

His foot, Lieutenant Reed reminded him. You can't leave it like this.

Coward Malcolm argued that there was no time, but he ignored him. If Trip bled into the alien sea, who knew what predators might catch the scent of his blood, never mind the infection that was sure to set in.

Malcolm knelt down in the water next to Trip and picked up the sock he had discarded earlier. He was sure that it would aggravate the injury if he wrestled the wet sock and the boot back over the foot, but it couldn't be helped. Trying not to jostle the broken, bloodied toes any more than he had to, Malcolm pulled the sock back over Trip's foot and rolled it over the swollen ankle.

There was a small moan, and Malcolm glanced up. Damn.

Trip's eyes were wide open and glassy with shock. They searched aimlessly for a moment before they came to rest on Malcolm, then on the elevated foot.

"Wh-what..."

"You're going to be all right, Trip." It was Lieutenant Reed speaking, no doubt. Coward Malcolm wouldn't have found it within himself to try for a soothing tone of voice, not when his own throat was tight with fear. "We'll have to leave the shuttle, though. The hatch's leaking."

"Can't..."

Lieutenant Reed decided that there was not time to argue with Trip, who was still only half-conscious. "I have to put your boot back on your foot," he told him. "I'm afraid it's going to hurt a bit."

It hurt more than a bit, and when Malcolm was tying the laces Trip had almost passed out again from the pain. In a cruel way, Malcolm was relieved; the injured man would be much easier to handle if he wasn't aware of what was going on.

Getting to his feet, he grabbed Trip under the arms and began to drag him over to the hatch. Trip wasn't exactly a featherweight but the water on the floor, now almost up to Malcolm's ankles, made the job easier than it would have been without it.

That's right, always look on the bright side, coward Malcolm commented, and it was comforting to know that even now, when he was gritting his teeth not to be sick with fear, he was still able to form a coherent thought.

"Always look on the bright side," he repeated aloud and Trip moaned, although Malcolm wasn't sure if the other man had even heard him. Trip's eyes were closed but moving under the eyelids, his wet face almost white.

Malcolm sat down, his back facing the hatch, and moved Trip until he was sitting between Malcolm's spread legs, his back leaning against Malcolm's chest.

The current. Lieutenant Reed had returned, pushing aside coward Malcolm who was little more than a trembling wreck by now. Do you really think you can hold on to him if there's a strong current? He'll drown a minute after you've opened that hatch. And yes, you are going to open it, he added to coward Malcolm, who winced.

He thought hard for a moment, mentally going through the shuttle's standard equipment if there was anything he could use to tie Trip and himself together. The only thing he came up with was ripping one of the blankets into strips, and that would take too much time. Sitting down, the water was already at their waist level, and he could feel its cold seeping through the layers of his uniform. He couldn't waste any more time.

Malcolm had almost decided to go ahead in spite of the current when the obvious solution came to him... or rather, to Lieutenant Reed. Reed seemed to have taken over control, and it was he who reached around Trip to pull down the zipper of his uniform, and whose hands were steady enough to work Trip's arms out of the sleeves of his jumpsuit. Trip struggled weakly, but he didn't return to full consciousness and Malcolm was glad he didn't. He quickly worked Trip's uniform down and finally pulled the sleeves back so that he could tie them behind his back. It took him some time to knot the wet fabric without being able to see what he was doing, but eventually he managed. He tested the knot by tugging at it. It wasn't as tight as he would have liked it to be, but it would have to do. The water had almost reached Trip's chest by now.

"Go," he muttered, and it was an order more than anything else. Lieutenant Reed would obey an order, even if coward Malcolm might consider refusing, under the circumstances. It was Lieutenant Reed who reached for the button that would unseal the hatch, Reed who actually pushed down on it.

Malcolm wrapped an arm around Trip and closed his eyes as he waited for the water.

TBC...

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