Charles “Trip” Tucker paced back and forth behind T’Pol as she took a look at a set of sensor readings from the Delphic Expanse. According to T’Pol, their mission to disable the Sphere Network was an unmitigated success. By disabling the one Sphere the Enterprise had targeted, the entire network was disabled. And in doing so, they had dissipated the thermobaric cloud that network was generating. “The Delphic Expanse is returning to normal space,” as she put it.

None of that mattered to Trip as long as they had not heard from Captain Archer’s team. The captain’s was team expected to intercept the Xindi superweapon dispatched to destroy Earth at about the same the ship arrived at Sphere Forty One. Therefore, the ship Archer’s team used to should already be on its way to rendezvous with the Enterprise. Even so, they had received no messages from Archer, Lieutenant Reed, or Ensign Sato. Trip considered a number of different scenarios. Maybe they were on their way, and communications were down. Maybe that was it. Or maybe the away team had destroyed the weapon, and they all perished. He kept trying to ignore the third possibility--that the whole team had perished and they had failed. He couldn’t afford to think like that, he kept telling himself. It was beyond his control. But he couldn’t. He already lost his sister Elizabeth after the attack from the test weapon. And now his whole family could be dead, along with every person on Earth.

“We should have heard something by now,” Trip reminded T’Pol. “What if they failed? Earth could be…”

“Be patient,” T’Pol assured him.

A hail from the bridge, and T’Pol and Trip were informed of the arrival of the away team’s transport ship.

“Captain, did you stop the weapon?” Trip impatiently asked after answering a hail from that ship. “Captain?”

For a few more minutes, he was kept guessing as whether the mission was a success until he and T’Pol arrived at the airlock. Seemingly, only Malcolm and Hoshii survived. But the one big question was still gnawing at him. “It’s done,” Malcom Reed said somberly. “Captain Archer destroyed the weapon.”

Trip was not yet prepared to admit that his longtime friend had been lost in the line of duty along with twenty-seven other shipmates in the last year. “Where is he?” he asked insistently.

“The Captain didn’t make it, Trip,” Malcolm Reed candidly replied.

But he saved Earth, Trip tried to remind himself. Now that he had known that their year-long mission had ultimately succeeded, he could mourn the loss of his friend who made that mission a success.