"Damn technology," he grumbled, reading the alert that flashed across his screen.
In twenty minutes, Yorktown's databases would go offline for a routine diagnostic. He glanced at the clock – 1745.
So much for finishing his evaluation reports for the outgoing personnel by the end of the day.
He rubbed his eyes, rose to his feet, and stretched. His yawn turned into a low, bellowing moan as he felt his ligaments stretch and muscles elongate. Almost better than sex.
No, not really. It had just been so long since he'd even talked with a woman outside of work that he could barely remember what sex was like. No one told him Starfleet would be so damn lonely.
He drummed his fingers on the desk and looked around. His shift wasn't complete until 1800, but he decided to leave early. Being the chief medical officer of a ship that no longer existed was pretty boring work.
Sure, it had been nice at first. He and the rest of his staff started working shifts in Yorktown's medical facilities, taking advantage of the downtime to focus on continuing medical education and independent research. It was great in theory, but most people were too busy fighting to pick up the pieces of their lives.
They'd lost 109 members of their crew during the Swarm's boarding of the Enterprise and their subsequent marooning on Altamid. Everyone had lost someone. Whole departments had been decimated. He counted himself fortunate that he'd only lost three of his forty-eight assigned medical personnel. Engineering hadn't been so lucky.
He'd seen a noticeable uptick in the crew's psychological issues, mostly things like post traumatic stress and survivor's guilt. Medical technology had come a long way in healing every physical injury imaginable, but emotional injuries, those were a different beast. Everyone walked away with scars from Altamid; many just carried them on the inside.
More than two dozen of the crew were quitting, either requesting a transfer or resigning their commissions altogether. The Enterprise-A was getting 137 new crewmembers and officers, but more than half of the positions remained unfilled. He was still short an assistant physician, a head nurse, and two lab techs and he knew Scotty was losing his mind with no warp field engineers.
Damn Starfleet personnel resources taking their sweet time.
It was like they didn't realize he had to personally review the medical files of all incoming personnel. They would probably get assigned at the eleventh hour, leaving everyone to scramble. It was just the Starfleet way – hurry up, wait, and then panic at the last minute.
If he were being honest with himself, he wouldn't mind just a little bit of stress right now, and ready or not, he wouldn't be a CMO without an active assignment for much longer. The Enterprise-A was less than seventy-two hours from getting underway, and though space was nothing but a dark hole waiting to suckle on the souls of innocents, he was itching to do something different.
He reached for his communicator and was in the process of tucking his chair under his desk when a familiar face popped around the corner of his semi-private office.
"How you doing, Bones?" Jim asked, stopping to brace himself in the doorway.
"Oh, another day for the record books," he sighed.
"Anything interesting?" Jim asked, his tone suspiciously casual.
"I spent an hour this morning trimmin' the bunions off the feet of a little old lady at the walk-in clinic," he smirked. "Most interesting thing I've done all week."
"Sure, I can see that," Jim chuckled, giving a sage nod.
His computer dinged, alerting him to a new message. It could wait until tomorrow.
"You should check your messages," Jim mused, glancing at the terminal behind him. "Could be important."
He scowled and traced his finger across the screen to his inbox.
One new message – an invitation to something called "Eight Minute Date."
"Speed dating?" he growled, glaring at his friend.
"We're heading back into space in two days and I thought maybe you'd like the chance to-"
"Throttle you?" Bones howled.
"Have an open mind!" Jim insisted.
"The only thing I need to have is a drink."
"It's an open bar," Jim added, a crooked smile streaking across his face.
"Yeah, it would have to be."
"I'm going to level with you, Bones – all you do is hide in this office and when you're not here, you're in your quarters. I'm worried about you."
This confession stunned him. So maybe he'd kept to himself lately, so what? Everyone had highs and lows.
"Then come have a drink with me," he offered. "We'll go down to that pool hall on the lower plaza and-"
"I'm on my way to a meeting with Commodore Paris," he shrugged. "And she does like to talk."
"Well, good luck with that," Bones said, powering down his computer terminal.
"Well, this eight minute date thing-"
"Maybe some other time, Jim," he said, slapping the captain on the shoulder as he walked past him. "And by some other time, I mean never."
"What's it gonna take, Bones?"
They strolled together, walking in step down the long arm toward the plaza. Jim was nearly trotting to match his pace, shooting a series of probing looks at him as they marched.
"We're leaving in less than three days," he argued. "What's the point of meeting someone I'm never going to see again?"
"It's called speed dating," Jim sneered. "I don't think anyone imagines you're going to meet the love of your life. You just need to get out of your quarters for a night. Once we're back on Enterprise, it's going to be work work work all the time."
"Haven't you ever heard the expression you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink?"
"More Georgia wisdom," Jim groaned.
"Look, I appreciate what you're tryin' to do, and maybe you're right: I should put myself out there more. But no speed dating."
"Yeah, ok then," Jim agreed, stopping in front of the headquarters building. "I'll catch up with you tomorrow."
When he rolled into his quarters several minutes later, he was greeted by random piles of dirty clothes and a handful of empty liquor bottles lining the small counter like sentries. His sickbay was never anything short of immaculate, but he was less particular when it came to the nest of Leonard McCoy.
He kicked off his shoes as he walked to the kitchen.
"Damn."
There wasn't enough bourbon left in the bottom of the square glass bottle to get a fly buzzed, and of course he'd run out of Scotch two days ago.
It hadn't occurred to him just how much he'd been drinking lately. Drinking alone was for assholes and the broken-hearted.
He sat down on his couch and ran his hands through his hair, gently massaging his temples. No one had told him Starfleet would be so lonely, but it was just as lonely on the other side.
Joanna would turn fourteen in a couple of weeks. He'd invited her to visit him at Yorktown, but the ex-wife had refused, citing a trip to the frontier of space as "too dangerous." Life was dangerous. His daughter hadn't really seemed excited about coming anyway – she had her own life, her school, and her friends. They were fast becoming strangers, and that killed him.
He slumped back against the couch and stared at the ceiling. He was alone, out of booze, and not the least bit tired.
"I could go just to check it out," he said, scratching his chin. "I wouldn't have to stay or anything."
Great, now he was talking to himself.
That settled it. He stripped off his uniform and hopped in the sonic shower, enjoying the sensation of the pulse vibrations on his muscles. He paused to examine his naked body in the floor length mirror on the back of the lavatory door. He pinched his midsection and grimaced – he'd put on a kilo or three in his sedentary lifestyle aboard the starbase.
He traced his fingertips along his jaw to measure the length of the stubble. He always thought he looked better with a few days' growth, but he'd shaved that morning and the five o'clock shadow that had grown in just made his face look dirty.
He shaved and brushed his teeth, donned a set of gray slacks and a light blue dress shirt, and returned to the bathroom to judge the result. He untucked the shirt and undid the top button: casual but still nice. He combed his hair back, then forward, made an attempt to part it, and then just decided to let it do its thing.
As he set down the comb, he spied a gray hair at his hairline and viciously yanked. Damn things.
At thirty-six years old, he was closer to forty than thirty. If he had asked himself ten years ago where he thought he would be today, he would have said something like "living in the country with my wife and a few kids, playing basketball on the weekends and running a thriving medical practice." That had always been the plan. Yet here he was, huddled over a sink in a tiny bathroom at the fringes of explored space, alone, preening for speed dating, the most desperate mating ritual ever devised by humanity.
He started to browse for more gray hairs and then abandoned the search. So what if he had a few grays? At least his hair was all there.
When he walked into the ballroom on the upper plaza, he found a diverse group of people milling around and a cheerful woman with blue hair and a bowtie waving at him.
"Over here to register," she called.
He slouched in front of her table and took a questionnaire. As he began to provide data about what he was looking for in a prospective partner, he suspected he'd bitten off more than he could chew.
The questions got more embarrassing and painful, and by the time he arrived at, "Would you be open to dating someone who engages in violent mating rituals?" he asked the woman, "What exactly do you plan to do with this information?"
"Oh, just fill out as much as you feel comfortable," she grinned.
He scowled and handed the PADD back to her, and she gave him a small device. As she input his data into the computer, he received a table assignment.
"Ok, so you're going to start at table 13, and when you hear the timer go off, you'll move to your right, to table 14," she cooed. "Now here's a PADD with a list of rules and a place to write some notes, and I wish you the best of luck. We're going to get started here in a few minutes, so when you hear the timer-"
"I think I've got it," he sighed, forging the most polite smile he could muster.
He made his way to the bar to collect a whiskey neat and enjoyed a long, slow sip of the burning liquid. He looked around, noting that more than half the people in the room were human, but there were several species he couldn't even identify. He had a pretty open mind, but he thought back to the questionnaire and hoped none of the alien women in the room killed after mating.
The buzzer sounded sooner than he anticipated, and he trudged to table thirteen. The woman was facing away from him, but he could already tell she was about ten years his senior.
"Have an open mind," he muttered through clenched teeth.
He sat down and she introduced herself as Amelia. She had a kind face and wry smile, but the slight odor of metabolizers suggested she was actually much older than he'd supposed. Modern medicine had come a long way in helping people age more gracefully, and in his professional, medical opinion, Amelia was slurping from the fountain of youth like a camel at an oasis.
Best guess, she was about seventy.
But so what? He wasn't here to meet the love of his life or have a careless fling. He could sit and have some polite conversation.
"So what do you do, Leonard?" she clucked.
"I'm a physician."
"Ooooooohhhhh, a doctor!" she sighed, a dreamy look spreading over her face. "Maybe you could take a look at this mole."
She shrugged her shirt off her left shoulder and tried turning around for him to examine a spot on her back.
"I really- um- hasn't your own doctor looked at it?"
"He's an idiot," she barked.
Leonard actually thought the man must be a genius if he had Amelia looking closer to fifty than seventy. He took a long draught of his whiskey and shrugged.
"I have another mole you might be interesting in… checking out," she grinned, leaning over the table.
He threw back the last of the liquor and set the tumbler glass on the hard table with an audible clink. He waved his hand at the server at the other end of the room.
Not that it mattered much. There wasn't enough alcohol in the quadrant.