Secret Service

Summary: An excerpt from the adventures of Agent Senek and Agent-Trainee T'Pol of the Vulcan Security Directorate.

Author's Note: Aquarius said:

"The thing that has been on my mind the most the last several weeks is Cool Vulcan Mojo. Nerve pinches, mind melds, pon farr, katras, fal-tor-pan, you name it--anything uniquely and awesomely Vulcan.

And then there's my biggest gripe about Enterprise--they hand us a badass female Vulcan character, but majorly shortchange us on the Cool Vulcan Mojo.

So, Distracted, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a T'Pol fic prominently featuring some aspect of Cool Vulcan Mojo--with the following twist: you either need to invent a completely new bit of Cool Vulcan Mojo, or if you show us something we've already seen, you need to show it in a way that it hasn't been seen before.

Also, T'Pol should just look super-cool while doing it.

Extra credit for Smutty Mojo, but it's not required."

Senek winced as the security recording played again. The aircar's violent explosion dismayed him even more each time he viewed it. Although it was physically impossible, it seemed to Senek that he could feel the heat from the resultant fireball in the confines of the small rocky chamber that served as Outpost Two's communications room.

"It is certain that there were no survivors?" he asked the sensor technician who'd called him from Outpost One with the news. The young man's expression was rigid on-screen.

"Yes, Subcommander. We are certain."

The "we" to whom the tech referred included the four forensic scientists and three other technicians who'd been monitoring all transmissions and traffic in and out of the smugglers' mountain stronghold for the past three weeks. These eight individuals collectively possessed enough sensory equipment and forensic experience to be certain of the chemical composition and average decibel level of the flatus expelled by said smugglers, and so Senek didn't question the statement. Unfortunately, the "accidental" destruction of the aircar had just for all practical purposes ended their mission.

Priestess T'Met had been their last chance to enter and successfully exit the smugglers' fortress undetected. An ex-Directorate agent who was an actual priestess of Gol, she'd been the obvious choice to infiltrate the smugglers' impenetrable security. No other fully trained priestess would be willing to participate in such subterfuge, he was certain. It would have been impossible to convince even T'Met without the leverage provided by the Directorate's sealed records on the woman. And now she was dead.

"How long has it been since our people acknowledged their request for temple services?"

"Five days, Subcommander. The priestess was scheduled to deliver services this evening." When the transmission had been intercepted and answered, not by the temple at Gol but by Outpost One, there had initially been plenty of time to fulfill the request. The delay had been T'Met's fault. She'd been very resistant. Delivering services under false pretenses was apparently against the code of her order.

"Has the analysis of the wreckage yielded a probable cause for the explosion?" Senek asked. It was perhaps an unrealistic expectation. There wasn't much left of the aircar.

"Not as yet, sir, but no chemical explosive residue has been detected," admitted the technician.

So, it was not a planted incendiary. It seemed equally unrealistic to assume that the aircar's destruction had been accidental, however. Senek sighed. "Have your communications technician set up a relay through the Temple at Gol again and inform me when it is ready. I will notify our target of the delay," he said.

"I don't think they will want to wait, sir," replied the technician. "They were very insistent on immediate service the first time. They threatened to send an armed ship to take a priestess by force if one was not immediately provided."

Senek lifted a brow. "It seems illogical for the smugglers to follow our traditions so closely with regard to the use of temple services and yet be willing to threaten the temple with force." The young man shrugged.

"Perhaps they have no other options," he replied. "Smuggling forbidden technology to off-world markets is a high risk profession. It is possible that the smugglers cannot find any women willing to join them." Senek's other brow went up.

"Perhaps their women are just more intelligent than they are," he commented.

Behind him, the new trainee that the Directorate had imposed upon him for this mission entered the communications room and handed him a steaming cup of plomeek broth. The girl made decent plomeek. She was also an esthetic addition to the otherwise all-male mission. It was unfortunate that her first field experience was going to be unsuccessful.

"I would agree with your assessment, sir. Females are often more conservative than males when it comes to judging risk," said T'Pol, sipping her own plomeek. She eyed the footage of the explosion as it played on repeat, reached over his shoulder, and paused the recording just at the moment of initial disruption of the aircar's fuselage. In the frame she'd chosen, Senek could clearly see a structural defect in the metallic skin of the airfoil closest to the surveillance camera.

"This looks like sabotage. Has the maintenance crew who prepped the vehicle for departure been questioned?" she asked casually. The young man blinked in obvious surprise.

"The mechanics' logs are in order," he replied.

"Make certain that someone actually interviews them," Senek put in. "Do not rely on the logs. The people that we are dealing with cannot be trusted to be truthful in their documentation."

"Yes, sir. I am aware of that, sir," replied the technician tartly. "Outpost One out." And he cut the connection abruptly, leaving Senek taken aback. The young man's isolation during the mission was obviously affecting his social skills.

Senek glanced at T'Pol. She was still studying the surveillance footage frame by frame and seemed unaware of the fact that no one else had seen evidence of sabotage, a detail that she'd discovered in the first seconds of a cursory inspection of the evidence. It was an impressive beginning.

He'd initially thought that a field agent with degrees in both astrophysics and aerospace engineering was a misuse of resources. He still thought so, to some extent. Field agents with a tendency to think too much before acting usually had very short careers. Success in the field required prompt action. She was young yet, though, and lacking in experience. There would be time to train her properly.

"How will we complete the mission now that T'Met is dead?" inquired T'Pol. "What is your plan now, sir?" Her complete trust in his ability to find an alternative plan shamed him. Instead of stating the obvious truth, that there was now no means of achieving success, he found himself skirting the question.

"Obviously, we cannot follow the original plan," he admitted. "There is no one to replace T'Met."

"I have completed Directorate melding training, Subcommander, and I am unbonded," the girl reminded him. "I could pose as a priestess." Senek studied her face. It was solemn and determined. There was some merit to her statement. She might even be a better candidate than T'Met in some ways, for upon her retirement from the service T'Met's memories of the advanced melding training given to all field agents had been completely eradicated, a precaution dictated by safety protocols which had been in place within the Security Directorate and its predecessors since before the time of Surak. Unlike the memory suppression of the Fullara, no amount of mental stress or manipulation was capable of restoring the memories thus removed. It would hardly be practical to allow agents to leave the service capable of doing the sorts of things that Security Directorate field agents were capable of doing to the minds of sentient beings. T'Met's melding skills at the time of her premature demise had thus been limited to those skills taught in the temple, substandard compared to those of an active field agent like T'Pol. But T'Pol was very inexperienced. Did she realize what she was saying? He cleared his throat.

"This is an intelligence mission, T'Pol. T'Met was to meld with the man who requested temple assistance and acquire information from him while she provided the contracted services of her order. The informant was not to know of his role in this, and T'Met was to have left the smugglers' stronghold without any suspicion being drawn to her in order to bring her information to us. To follow this plan, the one who replaces her must behave as a priestess of Gol would behave..." Senek paused for emphasis and watched T'Pol's eyes widen as she realized the meaning of his words. "...in every way." Silence followed. T'Pol cleared her throat; her face flushed a dull green.

"You could always just kill him and hide the body," Senek suggested lightly.

The plak-tau blazed within him as if acid flowed through his veins rather than blood. A platter of choice fruits and vegetables lay on the folding table before him, the last of the fresh produce to tempt his waning appetite, and still he had no desire to eat. But his appetite for more carnal refreshment was becoming more difficult to resist at every moment.

He paced the room like a sehlat in heat. The walls were unadorned stone, the floor covered with rough woven fiber matting over sand, his bed a camp cot. This is no place to receive a woman, he thought. There had been a time when his pride would not have allowed him to give any female such a poor reception, not even a priestess with no expectations of a lasting relationship. That time was at an end. V'Len was gone. She'd even taken the trouble to formally sever their bond so that she would not be endangered by her own stubbornness, leaving him without recourse-forcing him to make a choice between the security of his operation and death. She'd been wise to hide her destination from him. His gaze went to the paring knife on the table beside the plate of fruit. It was small, but very, very sharp. His lip curled, baring his teeth as he imagined burying himself-and then, after he was finally satisfied, the knife hilt deep-between V'Len's traitorous thighs.

A pity. The priestess would have to do instead.

"The priestess is here, Master Skelk," came a hesitant voice from the passageway. "Should I search her? She refused to enter the compound without her..."

"Touch her, and you will answer to me, boy," Skelk growled in a voice he didn't recognize as his own. "Send her in. Now." He gripped the edges of the small camp table, forcefully resisting the urge to charge through the dividing curtain and take the female right there in the passageway against the rocky wall. A moment later, a cloaked and hooded figure entered the chamber. She was shorter than he by several centimeters. Her face was in shadow, her slim body obscured by the flowing lines of her sand-colored cloak, but her appearance was entirely irrelevant. Skelk released the table and stood erect, struggling to maintain control until the formalities were complete.

"My name is Skelk. I burn, yet I am unbonded," he managed in High Vulcan between clenched teeth. "I beg a boon of thee, Priestess."

The priestess inclined her head. "I am T'Met, a priestess of Gol," she said in a husky voice that sent delicious shivers down his belly and directly to his groin. He groaned, biting his tongue while waiting for the rest of her ritual offer of assistance. Instead, a man in a metal helm with a facial cross-piece partially obscuring his features stepped into the room behind her. He was wearing archaic looking ceremonial armor and carrying what appeared to be two pre-Sundering style lirpas in his arms. Skelk's vision went green. He fought down the madness, turning away from the man to confront the woman. Pressing both hands together to keep them from trembling, he stared at her face beneath the hood of her robe. Surprisingly, she was young and very beautiful. He licked his rapidly drying lips.

"Explain," was all he could articulate.

"The violence of your demand for services caught the attention of my superiors, Master Skelk," said T'Met in a calm and reasonable tone, reverting to modern Vulcan. "In consideration of your combative nature, they recommended that I bring along a member of the temple guard, both for my own safety and also to offer you an alternative means of purging the plak-tau."

"Alternate means?" Skelk repeated, his thought processes slowed by the blood pounding in his loins as he envisioned what her body had to look like beneath the robes. He would definitely enjoy being the last man to rake that sand.

The priestess just nodded to her companion, as if giving him permission to speak.

"Some men in your condition prefer combat to coitus. They find it simpler and more satisfying," said the guard in a matter-of-fact tone.

"So I can just kill you to purge the plak-tau?" Skelk asked, intrigued, suddenly more articulate as the idea distracted him from his single-minded lust. Avoiding all contact with the devious illogic of females did have its appeal.

"You may certainly try," replied the guard, raising an insultingly skeptical brow at him. Skelk looked him over. He seemed in good physical condition, and was presumably well-trained in fighting with the lirpa, while Skelk's experience with the weapon was limited to Pre-Sundering historical dramatizations, but choosing to fight him first might mean being able to do everything he desired with the priestess. If he chose the priestess Skelk doubted that the guard was going to allow him to use the knife on her when he was done, unless of course he'd already killed the guard. It was a difficult decision.

He turned back to the priestess. "Take off that cloak," he told her, licking his lips, his eyes fixed hungrily on her body.

The priestess pushed back the hood of her cloak and unpinned it at the neck. Her hair was caught up on the crown of her head in a formal temple style, with small ringlets at the crown and a thin gold circlet about her forehead. She dropped the cloak with a serenely disinterested expression on her face. Beneath it she wore a translucent white gauze garment gathered at each shoulder by a gold pin and golden sandals laced up to her knees. A thin gold chain encircled her waist. Beneath the gauzy bodice of her gown he caught a glimpse of full breasts and burnished nipples, below her waist, a small triangle of tempting downy darkness. Skelk felt his blood begin to heat again, his respirations quickening. T'Met extended two fingers toward him.

"Make thy choice, One-Who-Burns, and may it bind thee," she said, completing the ritual offer in High Vulcan. Skelk felt the plak-tau burn through him again, and his decision was made. He ignored the woman's proffered fingertips and grabbed her by the wrist.

In the moments between when she entered the room and when she first made skin contact with the smuggler, the man's pitiable condition invoked a marginal amount of sympathy within T'Pol, a sympathy which vanished immediately upon contact with the filth that served him for a consciousness. The trace of guilt she had been harboring over not actually intending to provide the services of a priestess of Gol vanished with that sympathy. She reached out with her other hand as he pulled her roughly toward him by one wrist and tried to make contact with the meld points on the side of his stubbled face. To her dismay, he intercepted her before she made contact and twisted both of her wrists together behind her back in one of his calloused hands, his strength augmented by the plak-tau into something unnatural. A second later she found herself caught up with her back against his rank-smelling chest, a knife to her throat and the blade of a lirpa in her face-or more specifically, with the blade of a lirpa pointing at the center of her captor's forehead. Senek was on the other end of the lirpa, looking formidably primitive in armor and helm with his weapon extended in an arm's length lunge. He raised an expectant brow, saying nothing.

Ah, yes. Of course. I am the priestess.

"Master Skelk, you will show me proper respect or face purging the plak-tau with him," said T'Pol as firmly as she was able with a knife under her chin.

"Tell your man to get his lirpa out of my face and leave the room," growled Skelk, who was surprisingly articulate for someone so far into pon-far,"... or I will kill you to purge the fever." T'Pol closed her eyes and focused on suppressing her annoyance, half-hoping that Senek would solve her problem with one thrust. Unfortunately, removing Skelk's frontal lobe with a lirpa would probably preclude a successful mind meld.

"Master Skelk," began T'Pol, her patience straining to the utmost, "killing a defenseless victim will not purge the fever. Only combat will do that, and I am incapable of offering resistance in this position."

The smuggler's only response was a huff of fetid breath on the back of her neck. Senek still had his lirpa up, demonstrating an impressive amount of upper body strength.

"If you kill me you will still be faced with the need to confront my companion in combat to avoid death by plak-tau, assuming that you believe yourself capable of defeating him," T'Pol continued in a level voice. "Or you can drop the knife and allow me to ease your discomfort."

Skelk's hand gripping her wrists gave enough skin contact to allow her to sense his conflict. The expression on Senek's face told her the rest. She was thus prepared for the slight relaxation of the smuggler's grip that preceded his removal of the knife blade from her neck. T'Pol ducked straight down out of the circle of his arms, pulling her wrists free, and extended one leg behind her in a sweep, knocking him to the ground on his back, stunned. Spinning, she threw herself across his chest, blocked and gripped his flailing knife-wielding arm with one hand, and delivered a satisfyingly forceful nerve pinch to the juncture of his neck and shoulder with the other. The small but wickedly sharp knife dropped out of his limp fingers onto the fiber matting covering the sand floor.

T'Pol breathed a sigh of relief, collected her wits, and then pushed herself off of her now unconscious would-be killer. She gave Senek a raised brow.

"Were you contemplating assisting me at any point?" she asked. Senek rested the lirpa butt-first upon the ground and gave her an innocent look.

"When you require assistance I will give it," he said.

She suppressed another sigh and tipped her head to acknowledge his statement before gathering up her cloak from the floor. Senek leaned his lirpa against the wall next to its mate and stepped in to lift the smuggler beneath the arms. T'Pol, having secured her self-respect with her cloak, took up his heels, and between them they carried him to the cot. Then Senek stepped through the makeshift curtained doorway of the chamber to stand guard. Standing looking down upon their unhygienic informant, T'Pol contemplated asking Senek to do the meld himself. He was, after all, much more experienced with melding. But as the plan called for Skelk's men to believe that their leader was receiving the services of Gol and his predilection for females was well-known, reversal of roles was not an option-not if both she and Senek planned to get out of the smugglers' stronghold alive.

T'Pol sat on the edge of the cot beside the unshaven and obviously un-bathed smuggler. His appearance and body odor made her skin crawl. Suppressing her distaste, she reached out and silently completed the meld. The depraved violence of his plans for her gave her pause for a moment, but the parameters of her mission were clear. With his conscious mind out of the picture, the plak-tau was a burning backdrop to the meld rather than an overpowering force. She kept personal shields up anyway to prevent bond formation. Melding during pon-far was a high risk activity if a bond was not the desired outcome of the meld. Going deeper, she began to experience his memories as if they were her own. From there, it was a simple matter to "remember" shipping schedules and the access codes to encoded customer lists. While her left hand maintained the meld, T'Pol reached into the inner pocket of her cloak and extracted a small data padd. Activating its voice recognition function, she began to speak softly into it.

Senek entered the large central cavern of Outpost Two. Workers carried loads of packed crates on rolling hand trucks through the exit to the transports. He caught sight of T'Pol overseeing the transfer of the surveillance gear. Fragile electronics often did not survive changes of location unless precautions were taken to treat them with unusual care. He approached her.

"Central Office called. Our information has resulted in seven high level arrests thus far," he told her. She raised a brow.

"Only seven? Just arresting Skelk and the others in his group would have yielded greater numbers," she replied.

"Only the leaders are included in that number. Most of the others are now willing sources of information and have been spared incarceration," said Senek. The Central Office had strictly forbidden Senek from alerting Skelk and his fellows by taking them into custody until after the higher-level government connections revealed by T'Pol's meld had been arrested. There had therefore been a two week delay between the successful intelligence mission and the arrest of Skelk and his men. "Skelk was taken today along with his cohorts, an outcome which I confess confuses me."

"How so?" T'Pol asked. She turned away from the equipment cases she was supervising to join him. He debated asking the question that had been on the tip of his tongue for days now. He had no desire to shame her by calling attention to unmentionable activities, but she had been so adamant from the first about not portraying a priestess of Gol with complete accuracy that he found the outcome of their mission difficult to fathom. Finally he decided to ask her and be done with it.

"Why is he still alive? The plak-tau should have killed him."

To Senek's surprise, T'Pol seemed not the least uncomfortable at his question. "If he had died while we were attempting to leave, would that not have endangered the mission?" she inquired. Senek looked back at her, frustrated.

"Yes. Of course it would have," he told her. He lowered his voice. "So... is that why you changed your mind? Would you like to see a healer?" Both of T'Pol's brows went up at that and she turned a pronounced shade of olive green. She cleared her throat.

"I am gratified by your concern, sir...but that will not be necessary," she replied.

"So, then... you didn't...?" he began delicately.

"No. I merely searched his memory for a representative sample of... physically satisfying activities," T'Pol answered softly, her gaze cutting toward the technicians nearby. If they could hear the conversation they gave no evidence of it. "I then suppressed every memory subsequent to that moment. He woke believing he had recently engaged in vigorous sexual activity. His body responded to that belief by purging the plak-tau. He now lacks approximately six months of his memory, a gap that any reputable mental healer can restore. When it is restored I would think that he will require the services of a real priestess of Gol while incarcerated, unless of course his wife returns to him." She made a small moue of distaste. "I sincerely hope that she does not. In her position, I would remain as far from him as physically possible."

Senek blinked, contemplating her eminently logical solution to their ethical dilemma.

"An altogether elegant solution. I admire your ingenuity," he said. T'Pol straightened, looking inordinately pleased with herself.

"I am honored, sir," she said.

"Titles are not customarily employed between partners, T'Pol. You may address me as Senek," he replied.

End