The Tiger
by
Pat Foley
Chapter 1
apologies to Rudyard Kipling*
A busy Starbase can function almost as a kind of mini-reunion site, as Starfleet officers who haven't crossed paths since their Academy days meet up and share a drink and some reminiscences.
With two starships and several smaller craft in orbit, the main mezzanine of StarBase Six was especially crowded, situated as it was between shops and food services below and Starfleet and Federation offices above. Even deep out in space as it was, the humans in charge strove to make it homey, hanging the echoing area with exotic plants and a few struggling trees. A flock of tiny hummingbirds substituted for birds and insects, and a minute waterfall-filled pool struggled to lend the confined space a larger planetary feel, or at least to guise it as an atrium. But rather like the Enterprise's bare attempt at a conservatory, the metal seams and regulation paint showed through around the edges. Still, Captain Kirk paused on his walk from the transporter platform to his meeting with the Quadrant Administrator, to admire the waterfall filling the artificial grotto and the tiny birds flying through its vine laced flowers. They were a few minutes early.
"Pretty," he said to his Vulcan First Officer, who was station-keeping as usual half a pace behind and to his Captain's side.
"Yes, sir," Spock agreed blandly, his unchanging expression belying his true opinion.
"We haven't had a planetfall even on a barren rock, much less a class M one, in four months," Kirk countered. "You're a hard man to impress, Mr. Spock."
"Yes, sir," Spock repeated deadpan.
"Spock? Commander Spock?" a pair of voices called.
Spock turned to see two officers, clad in Command gold, waving from a nearly table.
"Friends of yours?" Kirk asked, his eyes narrowed in an attempt to place the faces.
"Commander Jose Tyler," Spock elucidated, with no expression of welcome or surprise. "And Lt. Commander Garrison. They served with me on the Enterprise with Captain Pike.1 Transferred with him before you took command."
Kirk gave his friend a swift double take on that uninflected information. Spock's history with Chris Pike was too prickly and sensitive to be raised between them, even years after Kirk had assumed command of Pike's ship and his former Science Officer. "Well, old shipmates don't cross paths that often," Kirk ventured. "You can't rush past without so much as saying hello."
Spock flicked a brow, but crossed to their table.
"Mr. Spock tells me that you were shipmates on the Enterprise," Kirk said after the obligatory introductions, and when Spock didn't proceed. He gave Spock a quizzical glance. Spock's reticence was not unusual, but it generally stemmed from indifference over the minutiae of human social customs. Very rarely, from reserve born of dislike based on previous interactions. This seemed to be neither. Instead, Spock was giving his old shipmates a stolid, heavily repressive gaze.
"And before that, we were cadets together, at Starfleet Academy," Tyler said.
"Really?" A gleam of interest flared in Kirk's hazel eyes. If Spock spoke little of Pike, he spoke even less of his Academy days. "I don't think we've ever met before. Odd given we overlapped at the Academy for a bit. Still, I didn't manage to cross paths with Spock there, either."
"You were two years behind us, sir," Spock said, still giving his former shipmates the Vulcan version of a stink-eye.
"But not for long, given your promotion," Garrison said, appearing undrawn, if not unmindful of Spock's reserve. "Belated congratulations on the Enterprise, Captain."
"Thanks," Kirk said, shrugging it off. "A bit of luck, a successful engagement. I was fortunate to get the step."
"We just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Commander Spock. For what he did for Captain Pike," Tyler said, for the first time showing embarrassment, speaking of such events before the Captain whose ship Spock had hijacked.
"Yes. A good cause, if a dangerous one. Probably the less said about that the better," Kirk said. Spock as usual, said nothing.
"You served together long on the Enterprise?" Kirk asked, looking from them to Spock, who was still regarding his former shipmates with a look of absolute Vulcan repression.
"Eleven years, sir," Tyler said, giving Spock a piercing look. Whatever he wanted to say, he hadn't said yet, Kirk gathered. Nor, Kirk surmised, would he with himself present.
"Eight, for me," Garrison added."
"We have that meeting, Captain," Spock prodded.
"We're still early," Kirk demurred. "But I'll leave you to catch up, and meet you there. I did promise Uhura to reconnoiter the base for her, as a possible shore leave destination. I'll meet up with you in a few minutes. Gentlemen," he nodded to the others and left.
Their eyes followed the Captain until he disappeared into the crowd.
"He doesn't know, does he?" Garrison asked. "What you did for him back then?"
Spock glanced around, doubly confirming no one as in earshot, of either human or Vulcan hearing. "We swore a mutual promise never to speak of those events with another," Spock reminded them in a low, prison-yard tone.
"I never have," Garrison said.
"Nor I." Tyler added. "But if you ever did, to anyone, I thought it might have been to Kirk. Especially now. He's your Captain. And he owes you. Why, who knows if he ever would have made post rank -"
"He would have," Spock said, coming down on that heavily.
"He doesn't remember anything?" Tyler asked.
"After all, you were the one who found him," Garrison added.
Spock tilted his head in a Vulcan shrug, relaxing a trifle. "He'd suffered a concussion. He only was conscious for a brief moment, if even that, upon that event. It's my understanding that memory loss is not an uncommon side-effect of such an injury." He shifted. "All that is long past and best left unremarked. I should go."
"But you're okay, Spock?" Tyler asked. "Happy enough, serving under Kirk now? I know you weren't exactly keen being left-"
"Captain Pike was correct. I perhaps required a change in command styles." Spock's eyes shadowed at that memory. "And at any rate, the point is moot. Captain Pike no longer holds a command to which I could transfer."
"There was some talk after you kidnapped the Captain," Tyler said. "But those of us who served with you knew, that whatever you were up to, you'd act for the best."
"Those events were sealed," Spock challenged.
"Word gets around. Among Pike's old crew, at least."
"Then it is around the entire Fleet," Spock said resignedly and shook his head slightly in exasperation, a human contamination. "Given the human propensity for gossip." He fixed the others with a gimlet glance. "But the former events, regarding Kirk and Finnegan, and Pike, must not. Ever."
"Hey, I've no wish to end up in the brig for assault," Tyler said. "And regardless of how things were back at the Academy then, times have changed. Who knows how a court martial board would look at it now?"
"Finnegan's dead anyway," Garrison added. "Died in a shore leave brawl on Umbtanga."
"You never told me," Tyler turned to his shipmate, visibly startled.
Garrison shrugged. "We have never talked about him, since that night," he pointed out to Spock. "I wasn't surprised his ways would catch up with him. And I confess, I was a bit relieved."
"Yes, well, there is even less reason now to ever speak of it again," Spock said.
"Except Kirk owes you. All the cadets that came in the year with or after you owe-"
"No-" Spock interrupted.
"But Kirk-"
"I owe him," Spock said, leaning in close to his former shipmates in emphasis. "For much more."
They were silenced for a moment. Then - "If you say so, Spock," Garrison said reluctantly.
Spock turned his head to look after his Captain. "I must leave."
"Well, we don't want to keep you," they said, shifting their feet, uncomfortable now. "We just wanted to catch you up - and say thanks."
"Gratitude is unnecessary," Spock said severely. "I did what seemed necessary at the time. Only that. And with some reluctance."
"Good luck, Spock. Take care. And don't worry," Tyler added. "We know what we owe to you, too."
Spock shook his head fractionally in dismissal of that. But his eyes, as he traced Kirk's steps to rejoin his Captain, were shadowed with his own reminiscences.
x x x
Even in temperate San Francisco, the autumn airs could be nippy and damp, but the young Vulcan crossing the quadrangle at Starfleet Academy wasn't cold. An unusual attire protected him - he wore two hulking, snorting upperclassman, one over each shoulder. In spite of that, he trod lightly over the paving stones inset with the old Terran League emblem, past the central statue with the new United Federation of Planet's crest done up in bronze against blue marble. Until the upperclassman tasked with patrolling this section of the quad spotted him.
"Cadet! Halt!"
Spock obligingly paused, bracing to attention as best he could while his interlocutor crossed to him and looked him and his load over with skeptical suspicion.
"What's going on here, Cadet?"
"I'm rendering assistance, Sir." Spock shifted his eyes without changing his brace, just enough to identify the patrol officer with whom he was speaking. "Mr. April."
"What happened?"
"Seniors Wesley and Decker were apparently visiting the corridor on my residential dormitory when they became," Spock paused to consider the somewhat delicate matter and choose his words wisely, "suddenly indisposed. I am merely returning them to their quarters so that they may recover."
"Indisposed?" April roared. "How the hell did they become indisposed?"
"I believe they were attempting to assist cadets with survival techniques," Spock said, putting the best light on their activities. "The effort became too much for them." Spock shifted slightly as Wesley snorted in his unconscious stupor.
"Both of them? At the same time?"
"Perhaps the rigors demanded of fourth year can be too exhausting. If pursued to excess," Spock added, with grave precision. He eyed the senior meaningfully, without guile. He knew April was one of the good ones.
"Uh-huh. Excess." Robert April said disgustedly, looking over Spock's unattractive burden. "Well, I don't see any obvious wounds or blood. They just collapsed, Cadet Spock?"
"Indeed, sir." Spock said.
"I've heard certain seniors have developed an unfortunate tendency toward dropsy when they visit your dorm in the middle of the night," April queried, curious in spite of himself.
"That is quite unfortunate, sir," Spock agreed blandly.
Disgusted, April dropped the ungiving cadet much as a cat would drop a dead mouse, uninterested in games it could no longer provide. "You don't believe these two require medical attention?"
"No, sir."
"Very well, Cadet. Carry on."
"Thank you, sir." Spock shifted his double load fractionally and went on.
Once at the perpetrators' quarters, Spock set his burdens down, used their own palms to key to their door locks and tipped them into their bunks. Then he settled his tunic, breathed out one betraying emotional sigh of weariness at the necessities he was put to. And then went out into the cool but clean night air.
x x x
Hazing might be anachronistic, but it was still a fact of existence at Starfleet Academy for new cadets when Spock had arrived. At least for some cadets. Having familiarity with Vulcan bullies, Spock wasn't terribly surprised at seeing the behavior manifest in humans, even allegedly long past childhood.
With his superior hearing, vastly greater strength, ability to dispatch adversaries even as large as a lematya with a nerve pinch, and comparably lesser need for sleep, he was never surprised in the wee hours of the morning, as his fellow cadets were. He was puzzled at the activity, but he could handle any attempt. And did.
But he found it tedious to wait for the personal attacks. And logistically speaking, he didn't care for doing so in his own dorm room, where he did risk becoming a mouse in a trap. So he set himself to listen for the footsteps of the arriving bullies. Cadets were all required to be asleep in their dorm rooms at a specified hour. Anyone arriving after that was therefore justifiably suspect. Spock simply set himself to listen, and then dispatched the hazers as soon as they arrived in the outside corridor of his floor. But then, wearying of the tedium of waiting for them to arrive to his corridor, as soon as he heard the parties approach the building, he positioned himself at the entrance to dispatch them as they entered his dorm. It was more efficient, and expeditious. Though he didn't think it through in so many words, to him it was rather like removing a lematya before it could enter the garden. Even in Starfleet, his mind tended to regard threats in Vulcan terms.
The squads of hazers retaliated at first with greater numbers, but after Spock was hard pressed one night, to take down half a dozen of them, the commotion roused even his fellow tired cadets. Tyler and Garrison, two first year cadets like himself, came roiling out of their dorm room, one armed with a pugel stick, the other with a baseball bat. Blinking sleep out of their eyes, they saw why their dorm, after a few initial assaults, had been spared the bullying that was plaguing other dorms. After watching briefly in shock as Spock disarmed his attackers with nothing more than a hand on their shoulder, leaving no tell-tale wounds, they lunged into the fray, dragging down the attackers and hauling them into Spock's waiting nerve pinch.
"Thanks," they said to him, when the last had been dispatched, panting and sweating from the adrenaline rush, the heap of upperclassmen piled ankle-deep among their feet.
"Thanks are illogical," Spock told them. "But I could use assistance in removing them. There are too many for me to take back to their dorms without at least three trips."
"You usually take them-?" His fellow cadets were even more astonished.
"Where else?" Spock asked, clueless that his inherent Vulcan tidiness required him even returning potential attackers to their respective quarters. And added a Vulcan idiom, untranslatable, the equivalent of, "One can't leave a sleeping lematya inside one's garden court."
"I think we can just lug them outside," Tyler suggested.
"They are undamaged," Spock agreed, examining them with all the disinterest of a butcher checking a steer destined for slaughter. "And for them, this climate is temperate. Perhaps a few hours in the night air will revive them even sooner."
"You take the other end, Jose," Garrison said, grabbing the shoulders of a hefty senior.
Spock simply tossed two over his shoulder.
Spock's hearing being exceptional, even during his rest periods, the hazers never did succeed in sneaking up on that particular dorm and inflicting any damage to the occupants. Years of evading lethal desert predators on Vulcan's Forge had trained Spock to be exceedingly cautious as to where he went, and when. The skill was second nature to Spock, an unconscious habit borne of long practice since he was five years old. A marked advantage for him, compared to his fellow cadets who were largely learning such fatal caution for the first time, without Vulcan single-mindedness of thought. So Spock was never shanghaied. Though there were attempts.
But like bullies everywhere, they soon decided that Vulcans, unlike humans, were uninteresting prey, and that his dorm was not worth the trouble. They moved onto other easier targets. Spock, along with his fortunate dorm mates, soon put hazing out of their mind and concentrated on their studies.
But he hadn't really considered the effect much beyond himself. He ensured there was no further bullying in the dorms in which he lived. And that mostly because his own sense of tranquility and logic was violated enough by the subject matter of his classes during the day – war, tactics, firearms and martial arts - without dealing with the illegal but unprosecuted activities of upperclassmen noisily hazing cadets in the night.
More than that - the strange, arcane ways of humans who professed maturity but still engaged in childish conflicts - he didn't bother to consider. It would not even have occurred to him to dwell long on the phenomena. His dorm mates, even if they might have had strong views about aliens in Starfleet, became if not favored of, than neutral toward his presence. But he didn't respond much to overtures of gratitude made in that vein, merely raising a brow and pointedly ignoring any tacit references. His own training had taught him that such lapses in logic best went unremarked, if they could not be corrected.
So the subject went unspoken. If not entirely unnoticed. Including among the faculty. But given Spock refused to acknowledge the events, and the hazers themselves weren't talking, everyone moved on.
By late in Spock's third year of StarFleet Academy, he was often away on maneuvers. When on campus, he was holed away deep in science labs, or high up in the netherworld of Command Tactics' Games and Theory operations. Places where the presence of freshman cadets barely registered. But he had to sleep somewhere. As he was still intolerant of the practice of hazing cadets, the dorms in which he lived were, perforce of his presence, never bothered by gangs of hazers. So cadets, their problems, and their troubles were seldom part of his consideration.
Or would not have been. Except that one day, going off to seek out a mentor of his who was back in HQ to give a few lectures in the Command School, Spock was accidentally brushed by a new cadet, who nearly ran him down, he moved so rapidly and unseeingly, as if a quarry ahead of some predator. Spock looked after the cadet in something of astonishment. Partly because of his presence - cadets rarely were mainlined so soon into Command Training. But also because in the wake of the cadet's passing, the air hung heavy with disturbing scents. The rust and salt of human blood, the acrid odor of human sweat laced with frustration and stress. And the barest trace of tears, dried and desiccated as dew on Vulcan, but recent enough to register on Spock's senses. The scent of very new cadets such as Spock hadn't encountered in some time.
"You haven't noticed him before?" Captain Christopher Pike asked the young Vulcan.
"Should I have?"
"In that case you haven't noticed much," Pike said. "James Kirk. He's going to be a comer, I think."
"If he is already tracked into Command Training as a freshman, presumably so," Spock said politely, but with a grave air suggestive of doubt. "Though he seems ...physically unprepossessing." That was putting it mildly. Kirk was shorter and slighter than many, perhaps most cadets, and behind his heavy stack of netbooks, rail thin.
"He's not long out of Tarsus IV. The starvation there was rampant. He was lucky to survive. He does have quite a few pounds to go before he makes it back to a fighting weight."
"Perhaps he should have waited to recover before attending the Academy," Spock commented doubtfully.
"He is catching it a bit more than some others - plus, he's a bit of a serious swot, is our Jim. That doesn't always go over with contemporaries – as you know from experience. And there are also a few persistent rogues among our upperclassman, who'd pounce on either or both traits."
"I was not aware," Spock said dismissively, unwilling to go there, either.
"As I said, you aren't noticing much." This time, Pike's words held the faint lash of criticism.
"Changing the traditions of this institution is hardly my purview," Spock said, drawn in turn.
"Oh, really?" Pike asked easily. "Have you taken a look at yourself in the mirror lately?"
Spock set his mouth in a line of frustration. "As regards the regrettable practice of hazing, surely it is the administration of the Academy who must enforce discipline." He gave Pike a direct, accusatory look. The subject was never spoken of between cadets and faculty, the cadets presuming the faculty, if not instigating the cruelty, were condoning of it. "While I have made sure never to be a particular victim of this practice, I have wondered why the administration of the institution countenances it."
"I have been waiting for you to ask. Curious as you usually are."
Spock said nothing.
"I confess it does somewhat embarrass me," Pike said. "There's some old school types among the brass who consider it a tradition. And even for those of us that would abolish it, it does serve something of a three-fold purpose. It ferrets out weaklings not fit for military service in a more efficacious way than perhaps legitimate means can do - sooner, anyway. They leave. It also reveals the unremitting sadists. Whatever you might think, if they've slipped past the psych tests up through their senior year, it flushes them out before they're shipped to a position of authority far out in space where they might be the only law."
"I see," Spock said doubtfully. "Logical. So far as that goes. But you said three fold."
Pike tilted his head at his Vulcan protégé. "It also highlights the resourceful. Those that think their way past the traps. Though we've never had a student who has successfully circumvented it, not just for himself, but for an entire dorm population, as you have. My congratulations. Well done."
"I don't understand," Spock said, striving for blank innocence.
"Come on, Spock. Everyone knows there's no hazing in your dorms," Pike said. "Since you were a wet-behind-those-pointed-ears freshman. You put something of a crimp in that engine. But deftly enough that no one, administrative or student, cared to circumvent you. Rumors of that first attracted me to you, you know. I admire strength that strives primarily from intelligence, rather than force. In space, we need the former more than the latter. Though don't get me wrong. I consider both necessary. And you can be a little shy of the latter."
Spock refused to rise to the bait. "But if, as you say, this behavior is condoned, even if not sanctioned, I don't see what you expect of me. Kirk is not in my dorm. And given the justification you have given for this behavior, is it not for Kirk to deal with this in his own way?"
"Usually, I'd agree. But this assailant has gone too far. Hazing is tolerated, just barely, when it is mindless, and impersonal. Targeting a single cadet, bullying repeatedly, changes the activity from hazing to assault. Kirk's a smart one, if a little younger than we tend to get them here," Pike said. "But grimmer than I remember. He's regarding this as an endurance contest, when it's not meant to be anything of the sort."
"Really, sir," Spock drawled, in his most smart-ass Vulcan tone.
"The attitude is unnecessary, Spock," Pike warned him. "Anyway, I knew his father," Pike continued. "I met Kirk himself once, in younger, sunnier days. I want him to get the chance to succeed. In fact, I'd planned to have him intern on the Enterprise when his fieldwork comes around, as I did with you." Pike's face darkened. "If Finnegan doesn't knock his head off first. That's where you come in."
"But what do you expect me to do?" Spock persisted, flummoxed by this.
"You'll think of something," Pike said. "You're one of my special students. To incoming cadets, you've become something of a legend. They fight to get assigned to your dorm. Particularly the smart ones, who don't want to deal with the apes who haze. It's the tough ones, or the ones who think they need to be tough, like Kirk, or the unlucky ones, who get hazed now. And in that regard, I think of you as something of my Tenth Legion. I expect things of you, Spock." Pike said. "So, satisfy my expectations. Find a way to dissuade the perpetrator."
"I can't stop all of them," Spock said.
"Just deal with this one."
Spock considered what little he knew of human conflicts and the repercussions thereof. "I suppose I could look into having Cadet Kirk's residence shifted to my dorm."
"Heavens no. That's oratio directa. I prefer oratio obliqua. I don't want Kirk to know anyway. He's a proud sort and it wouldn't be good for his self-confidence. Which, if I don't mistake, combined with his intelligence and other skills, is going to make him an exceptional officer."
"But he hasn't managed to handle this issue," Spock pointed out doubtfully.
"Everyone can have a blind spot. He's too stubborn for his own good, trying to handle this alone, to tough it out. But one can't tough out a bully, it only encourages them to greater efforts. And he's outmatched, physically and by rank. That's where you come in."
"I still fail to see how I can be involved," Spock argued, digging in his heels.
"Consider this a little outside command assignment, a mission in tactics."
Spock sighed in pained frustration, but was well aware of his own obligations to Pike. And he was becoming just a little intrigued by the problem. "This ...antagonist is a senior?"
"And you're a class below. Given how you have frustrated some of the upper class with your existing tactics, you'd make a tempting target.
'The bleating of the kid excites the tiger,'2" Spock mused.
"Exactly."
"If I'm to be the kid-" Spock began delicately.
"Only as a lure until you reverse the roles." Pike eyed the doubtful Vulcan. "Come on. Someone who's suppressed even the attempts of bullying as you have in every dorm you've lived in, must know something of the trials of being on the receiving end. Or you wouldn't have stopped it so thoroughly. Here's your license to pay that back a little, to these perpetrators, as you perhaps never could before on Vulcan."
Spock drew back at this, surprised, offended and shocked. "Vulcans don't -" Then paused, well and truly caught.
"I'll wager some Vulcans must have with you," Pike pointed out.
Spock refused to be drawn further.
"Regardless," Pike continued, knowing well that Spock wouldn't talk, "sometimes bullies, whether of the upperclassman variety, or across from you on the field of battle, only recognize strength. And cunning. And a bit of a bloody nose. Much as you've resisted that so far, I think you have that in you if the cause is good enough. A little exercise in aggression could be instructive for you."
"Vulcans pass beyond that level of behavior at a very early age," Spock huffed.
"Well, if you're going to command, you need some of that. And I want to see it."
"I take it I have no choice?" Spock asked.
"Oh, you have a choice, Mr. Spock. But not if you plan to continue your career with me on the Enterprise. Or you can to keep your Vulcan ways and return home."
Spock sighed, given that was the only ship, and Pike the only commanding officer, he had set his sights for. "It is unfair of you."
"So is life. Haven't you noticed? Otherwise we wouldn't need much of the military arm of Starfleet."
"Very well. I will make the attempt you request," Spock said obscurely. "Do you wish a report?"
"Are you kidding?" Pike asked, his brow rising. "We've never had this conversation. I'll know when I see Jim Kirk go two weeks without a shiner."
"Yes, sir."
Pike leaned down close. "Enjoy this," he suggested. "That's an order. But," he cautioned, "not too much. That's an order too."
Spock raised a brow. "Unlikely, Captain, given I am long past such emotional failings. But I will investigate and attempt a resolution, as you wish."
x x x
Spock shadowed James Kirk for a week after that. Not an easy task. The cadet was already wary, and he had his tormentor already after him. An upperclassman named Finnegan. Spock followed them both, using tracking techniques partly learned in Fleet, and part learned on desert sands over a decade ago and light-years away. He did enjoy himself a little in that. But he found himself sickened by the maniac cruelty the senior cadet inflicted.
It was an unfair contest. James Kirk was shorter by half a head, and far slighter than his tormentor. The intense physical exercise of plebe year at the Academy was beginning to put muscle on a frame starved by Tarsus IV's famine. But he had still had quite a ways to go before he would be an equal match for a well-conditioned senior. In spite of that, Spock observed Kirk often escaped his tormentor's traps with a truly resourceful intelligence, occasionally turning them on him. But, bound by the code that meant cadets were subject to the hazing of upperclassmen, a code Spock did not subscribe to, Kirk had far fewer resources. He was, like most cadets, a sitting duck.
Spock knew that first year cadets, at least those who were human, found the Academy a hard enough grind without having their rest disturbed, their food adulterated, and their persons subjected to abuse, all in the name of traditional 'hazing'. Even those without the disadvantage of coming out from Tarsus IV.
In some respects, Spock calculated that Finnegan's weakness made his own planned task easier. The senior would fall more easily for an apparently vulnerable lure. But bound by training stricter than Starfleet's, and laws of obligation learned far earlier, Spock still hesitated to act for some time after he'd finished his reconnaissance. And in that delay, something truly dangerous occurred.
Spock had finished his own lab work late one evening, and had picked up the trail of James Kirk, also working overtime in a lab. The human had come to avoid his own dorm room, where he would have been easier pickings, and even the refectory, where he was only minimally likely to get a meal. Spock trailed behind, following the human's scent on the wind. His ears were trained to Kirk's distant footfalls, but his mind still half mused through a problem of multi-dimensional physics he'd abandoned in the lab. Another compartmentalized section of his thoughts worried the one of multi-relational ethics that presented itself in the person of James Kirk and his nemesis, as well as in Pike's questionable order.
Then, ahead of him, where a long staircase led down from the science labs to the quads - Kirk had learned caution of being trapped in lifts - he heard a surprised cry and the thudding sound of a falling body. Spock's sharp ears picked up Kirk's ragged pained panting, and then the manic sound of Finnegan's laughter, before the shock-headed perpetrator sped away. Spock looked after the villainous upperclassman, balefires in his dark eyes, but restrained himself to first things first. Even at this distance, he could smell human blood. He found Kirk at the bottom of the long staircase, only barely conscious.
"Cadet Kirk?" Spock asked. He ran his fingers over the bleeding bruise on high forehead, even while he reassured himself that head wounds always bled copiously in humans. Worried at the lack of response, he prompted with the familiar name that seemed to leach into his fingertips with the human's blood. "Jim?"
Kirk moaned and then his eyes opened. For a moment he stared blankly at the Vulcan. Then he blinked, puzzled at the alien face hovering over him, and said, in an almost ordinary voice, lightly amused in spite of his injuries, "Either you're a Vulcan, or I've died. And where I've ended up isn't heaven."
"I am," Spock began, but then Kirk's eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out.
Spock checked his pulse and called for a medical team.
x x x
The encounter had burned away any reservations Spock had possessed against acting. But he conceived that he could use assistants in the plan he had envisioned. He chose the two cadets who had rendered him aid long ago, Jose Tyler and Frank Garrison, to see if they were willing to help in taking down the hazer of another. They had also served an internship tour of duty together on Pike's ship. Spock trusted Pike's judgment of their characters. That, along with his own history with them, convinced him they were both trustworthy and likely to be amenable. They had no love of Finnegan, or the hazing they had so briefly experienced, thanks to Spock's ready intervention.
When he caught them up, they were surprised, given he was not the type to seek alliances, or ask for help. But with no more than a glance between them, redolent of past debts owed, they quickly agreed.
Spock gave them their first assignment, to query their fellow cadets as to the tortures that had been delivered to them, a conversation Spock could not as easily introduce as the humans.
Later, with that information shared between them, they factored a plan.
"But we'll need a cadet, for bait," Tyler said doubtfully.
"I will be the bait," Spock promised.
"You? How are we supposed to have caught you?" Garrison said.
"That won't matter, when he sees me immobilized," Spock said. "All he will be considering is what he can do to me."
"How do you know that?" Garrison asked.
"I believe I understand the mind of a bully. But we must agree," Spock warned heavily. "Whatever happens, when all this is over, we shall never speak of this again."
Looking at his dark, enigmatic face, radiating a repressed Vulcan fury neither of them had seen in Spock before, not in combat class or even in the white heat of dispatching groups of hazers, the humans didn't choose to argue.
"Agreed," his companions said.
And the deed was set for action.
To be continued...
* see Stalky and Co, "The Moral Reformers", Kipling, Rudyard, 1899
1 Both appeared in The Cage
2 The Art of Travel, Galton, Francis, 1855