Plot

While Trip is repairing a stasis pod at a Retellian cargo ship and the woman inside, heir apparent to the throne of Krios, wakes up, the ship makes a hasty departure. Trip must make a plan to escape.

Enterprise answers a distress call of a Retellian cargo ship. The crew, Goff and Plinn, tell they have a problem with a stasis pod that apparently carries a passenger. While both Retellians enjoy Enterprise' facilities, Trip tries to repair the pod which contains a beautiful woman. Then suddenly the woman wakes up. She seems to choke and Trip opens the pod, only to be knocked out by the quickly returned Goff. He escapes with his ship from Enterprise, leaving Plinn behind. The woman introduces herself as Kaitaama, heir apparent to the throne of Krios, and she suspects she's being held for ransom. Trip thinks of a plan to escape.—Arnoud Tiele (imdb@tiele.nl)

Firek Goff (Scott Klace), the captain of a Retellian cargo vessel, docks and asks Captain Archer for help; a passenger-carrying stasis pod is malfunctioning. Archer then offers Trip's services, while also extending an offer of Enterprise hospitality to both the captain and his brother, Plinn (Leland Crooke). Goff and Plinn were hired to transport a young woman to her home-world. When Tucker enters the cargo hold inside Goff's ship, he notices a beautiful female alien beneath the stasis canopy. Goff tells him that she is a passenger traveling home from a planet where she was studying medicine. He explains that because his ship can't travel over warp 2.2 (on what is a considerably long journey: 5 months of travel still left), she has to be kept in stasis because there is not enough food to support them all. Archer offers that at Warp 4.5, Enterprise can drop off Goff, Plinn and their cargo to their destination in 4 days, but Goff refuses.

As Tucker starts working on the stasis pod (He gets Sato to program a translator for him to ease his understanding of the signs), it begins to fail, and fearing that the occupant will suffocate, he releases her. Tucker is then knocked unconscious by Goff, who then flees from the faster Enterprise by disabling her engines and ionizing its warp trail, but Plinn is left behind on the Enterprise. The female passenger, Kaitaama (Padma Lakshmi), is initially hostile. Tucker uses the translator Ensign Sato left with him, and he learns she is a high-ranking soon-to-be First Monarch (of Krios Prime) being held for ransom. She was abducted while returning from a diplomatic mission. Tucker has a plan for escape (Kaitaama is opposed to the idea as she thinks this will provoke her abductors), and though she believes that her status will keep her safe, she joins Tucker in an escape pod. Tucker then finds a nearby planet where they can hide from Goff's sensors. Kaitaama again thinks this is a bad idea, as there could be hostile life forms and they have no food or water. The escape pod is designed for 1 person and Kaitaama and Tucker has to jostle for space in the cramped confines.

Meanwhile, Archer and Sub-Commander T'Pol use a ruse similar to "good cop/bad cop" to persuade Plinn to tell them how to locate Goff's ship. They hold a fake tribunal for Plinn with promise of dire consequences, if found guilty. The plan works and Plinn reveals the warp core's signature frequency. After finding an island on the planet, Tucker and Kaitaama soon set up camp in a swamp, and their mutual antipathy eventually gives way to burgeoning sexual tension. Goff soon locates them using the homing beacon on the escape pod. Tucker and Goff fight until the latter is subdued by Kaitaama, just as an Enterprise rescue team also arrives. Kaitaama is later collected by a battle cruiser from her home world of Krios Prime, and suggests she will invite Tucker to visit her in the future when she is in power.