Chapter Two: Guilt
A/N: Based on the TOS episode "Obsession," which refers to Jim's disastrous experiences as a young lieutenant on the Farragut on his first deep-space assignment. I've changed the details a little to make it work on the Reboot timeline.
This is his first long-range training mission. He's been on gamma shift for most of it, doing mostly menial tasks in armaments and engineering with two other third-year cadets. They've been supervised by a grumpy weapons specialist named Simmons, who is obviously less than thrilled to be their mentor. Jim's been determined to make a good impression anyway. The Farragut's not the flagship, but it's a taste of what Jim's life could be, in another two years. And Garrovick's a good captain. He wouldn't mind serving under him, at least for a few years.
Simmons has made no secret of the fact that he thinks training cadets is not part of his job description. He's hated Jim in particular, ever since he made the mistake of suggesting an improved method of assigning torpedo targets using Kay's sorting algorithm. Simmons promptly informed Jim that since he seemed to have so many good ideas, he can spend the rest of his training cruise in the lab, running weapons sims to his heart's content.
Jim tries to make the best of it, but the truth is that he feels that he's missing out. Instead of gaining valuable hands-on experience, he's been spending most of his shifts alone, doing the same kind of work he could be doing in an Academy sim lab. He spends each day programming the simulator, manipulating the variables, and writing reports. The other two cadets, who had the sense to keep their mouth shut and not suggest any clever improvements, have also been given boring, repetitive assignments, but at least they're in the main bay with the other crewmen.
****
Jim's alone in the weapons sim lab, as usual, when the ship is placed on yellow alert.
Jim tenses and stops what he's doing when the strip of amber lights begins blinking above his console. Cadet runs are supposed to be uneventful, and the last three weeks aboard the Farragut have been no exception. They've been surveying and mapping an uninhabited system. They're not supposed to run into any trouble.
Garrovick's deep voice resonates reassuringly over the intercom, even as he explains that the away team on the planet below has been killed. "The landing party reported a gaseous, translucent cloud that changes in shape and size," Garrovick tells them succinctly. "It seems to feed on human blood. Highly dangerous. We are maintaining orbit around the planet in an attempt to identify and destroy it."
Jim quickly exits the lab and locates Simmons in the main weapons bay. Watching the flurry of activity as the regular weapons crew organizes drills and practices emergency response protocols, Jim can feel the adrenaline humming through his bloodstream. He can barely contain his disappointment when Simmons assigns him the non-essential task of calculating ion dispersal and refraction in phaser sims. Alone, of course.
"But the other cadets are working with the tactical response teams," he tells Simmons. "Let me do something more useful. I'm quick and I'm good with my hands. I can—"
"You can stay out of the way, Kirk," Simmons responds tersely. "I don't have time to hold the hand of any green cadet. This is no drill."
"Yes, sir," Jim says, keeping the resentment out of his voice, although a muscle in his jaw twitches. Passive-aggressive asshole.
"Take a phaser, Kirk," Simmons reminds him, pointing to the weapons dispensary. "Standard procedure during alerts. All crewmen must be armed." He smirks. "Even in the sim lab."
Trying to reign in his frustration, Jim nods and grabs a hand phaser, then goes back to the lab. He works methodically, running the phaser sim using varying concentrations of dikironium, an atmospheric anomaly which was detected on the planet in the area where the landing party was killed, and recording the results. The results are mostly inconclusive, although some trials suggest that wide phaser dispersion causes an unexpected chemical reaction, rendering a certain percentage of dikironium molecules inert. Jim is intrigued, and despite his animosity toward Simmons, he delves into the problem, varying atmospheric pressure, humidity, and levels of various gaseous elements.
He wonders briefly what Bones would say if he could see him. Nobody likes to be made a fool of, Jim, he'd probably say. Serves you right for showing off.
He sighs. He can always count on McCoy to tell him the truth.
Jim continues his calculations. It's an intellectual exercise, probably less than useless in the field, but he can't give Simmons another reason to fault him. He needs an exemplary rating for this assignment if he wants to convince Pike to let him continue in the accelerated command track, especially after last month's Kobayashi Maru fiasco.
It wasn't just failing to find a way out of the situation. From what he could discover, that seemed to be the standard outcome for all cadets. Everybody failed the Maru, though Jim had arrogantly believed that he'd be able to find a way to beat it. He prided himself on his intelligence and his ability to think outside the box. But when he began to realize that nothing he tried was going to work, and the ship that he commanded was going to fail in its rescue mission and be destroyed itself, he lost his composure. He shouted at the hapless helmsman whose evasive maneuvers weren't effective, and used a withering sarcasm to express his displeasure at the communications officer, who couldn't seem to keep a channel open for negotiations. He'd been overcome by a fury that he couldn't control, and had barely been able to thank the other cadets for their participation at the end of the simulation.
His performance evaluation praised his tactical maneuvering but concluded, "Cadet Kirk failed to adequately control his frustration with the challenges of the Maru simulation, and his interactions with his bridge crew indicated poor impulse control and immaturity. His actions ultimately compromised his crew's morale during the height of the crisis."
"You let them down," Pike tells him afterward in his debriefing. His words are stern, but his voice is surprisingly gentle. "You have to put your own issues aside, especially when you're in command in a crisis situation." Pike doesn't discuss which issues he thinks Jim has, but he looks at him meaningfully, and Jim flushes. Pike assigns him extra reading on leadership and crisis management, and makes him write a performance analysis of his decision-making process.
Jim needs to prove, both to Pike and to himself, that he hasn't lost his edge.
****
He is startled out of his concentration by the wail of the red alert siren.
"Attention, crew," Garrovick's voice booms out over the intercom, no longer as calm as before. "Be on high alert. We have detected variations in dikironium levels on Decks 7 and 8. It is possible the cloud creature has somehow infiltrated the ship…"
Jim whirls out of his seat and, taking his phaser in hand, moves warily out of the sim lab into the main weapons bay. As the door opens, he freezes. There's no one there, even though when he began his shift, there were more than a dozen men and women working at various stations in the large weapons bay on Deck 8. Except for the humming of the machinery and the wailing of the red alert siren, there are no sounds at all. The scuffle of booted feet on the floor and the ever-present buzz of communication between his crewmates is gone.
He feels a momentary panic at the idea that he's been forgotten, left behind at his post in the simulations lab, buried in complex calculations, while everyone else evacuates the area. He's only a cadet, not part of the regular crew, and only the watch officer knows where he was working. It's possible that no one even remembers he's there.
The weapons bay is eerily quiet, and Jim's gut is screaming danger. He takes two quick steps forward and then huddles quietly behind the main weapons board, trying to come up with a rational explanation for why every crewman has suddenly deserted his post in the midst of an emergency. He can think of only a few possibilities, and none of them bode well for him.
He weighs his options. He can stay where he is, hail the bridge, and ask for his orders. This option has the advantage of being potentially heroic. Captain Garrovick will surely appreciate the one cadet who has remained in the face of danger to singlehandedly maintain the weapons bay. On the other hand, who is he kidding; the only thing he knows how to do competently, thanks to Simmons, is run computerized simulations under lab conditions, not operate the main weapons console. And that aside, Jim knows that something made everyone else abandon the area, and he doesn't really want to stick around to find out what it is.
Alternatively, he can made a quick dash for the nearest exit and try to make his way to the bridge, or at least somewhere populated. He's got his phaser, and he's blessed with quick reflexes. He figures he has a good chance of escaping a hovering cloud.
He's five meters from the exit when he sees them.
There are fourteen people—no, bodies, he can see immediately that they're dead—scattered on the floor, between the torpedo chambers and exit. The exposed skin of their hands and faces is ghostly white, as if all of their blood has been sucked out of their bodies. Their faces are contorted in agony; they look like they died in horrible pain. Jim can see Simmons among them, hunched over a female engineer in a post that suggests he was trying to protect her. He's dead too. All of the bodies are clustered around the exit, some with phasers still clasped in their fists, as though they were trying to escape, or trying to stop something from escaping through the door.
It's looking for more victims, he thinks, his heart thumping wildly in his chest. God, it's hunting us in our own ship…
He steps cautiously around the bodies and out the door, and moves into the corridor. Here, again, he finds only dead bodies bearing expressions of anguish. He steps past dozens of them, and finds himself filled with a sense of visceral horror. Is there anyone else left alive on the ship?
It's not the first time he's been hunted.
The thought steadies him. He didn't give in to panic when he was a kid, and he won't do it now. But back then he was being tracked by Kodos' security forces, and as young as he was, he knew instinctively how to fight them. How can he fight a cloud? A wisp of gas?
He tightens his fingers on the phaser grip, then looks down at it, frowning. It's set to kill on tight beam, which is the standard setting on red alert. Just like Simmons' phaser was. Just like every other phaser on the ship…
It's a mistake, he realizes suddenly, thinking of the phaser sims. Tight beam is useless on a gas.
Dispersion beams turn dikironium inert under certain conditions… Dispersion beams.
Shit.
He has to get to Captain Garrovick, and tell the rest of the crew. This is vital information. He's got to get to a lift and make his way to the bridge.
He changes his phaser setting to wide scatter and adjusts the burst pattern, then breaks into a run.
****
It's the odor that does him in.
A whiff of a long-forgotten scent reaches him from out of nowhere, startling him into a momentary standstill. Jim skids to a lurching stop, mere steps away from the lift, chest heaving, confused.
It's impossible. There's nothing but filtered, recycled air on a starship. But the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle is in the air, nevertheless.
The smell is automatically connected to a memory, one that he's forgotten he had. It instantly recalls him to a place and a time that he's spent years shoving away from his conscious awareness. Jim has trained himself to stay away from thoughts of his childhood; don't go there is his motto and it has served him well enough. The few memories he retains seem to surface, uninvited, when he's had a little too much to drink; or hover, ephemeral and fleeting, just after he wakes.
He's developed a few workable "coping mechanisms," in the words of that useless counselor on the Hercules. If the memories bubble up when he's had one too many, he finds an outlet in a good punch (giving or getting, it doesn't much matter) or, if he's lucky, in a more pleasurable form of flesh-on-flesh contact. He's cultivated a blatant lack of curiosity about his dreams. He doesn't attend Remembrance Day services, and if Pike doesn't like it, he can just shove it. And he never talks about what happened when he was fourteen.
But this memory isn't bad; it's serene and pleasant. The unmistakable scent of honeysuckle (which can't be, what the fuck is wrong with him) brings him back with startling clarity to a long-lost scene from his childhood. He must have been very small, no more than three or four. It was a picnic in a public park of some sort; he can't recognize exactly where, but he can hear the sounds of cutlery clinking and adults chattering. Jim is tired, and lays drowsily in his mother's arms, lulled by the warm late-afternoon sunshine and enjoying the delicious honey-like smell in the air. Even now, light-years away and in the midst of crisis, Jim remembers the contentment of that moment, as he folded his body into the comfort of her lap.
For a second, maybe two, he is distracted by the intensity of the recollection.
It takes Jim much too long to realize that he is being attacked.
He sees the thin, gaseous mist seeping into the corridor of the Farragut through the air vent next to the lift, but he's still disoriented by the memory. It's as if the relaxed, drowsy feeling of the memory is acting like a very mild sedative, dulling his thinking and slowing his responses slightly.
It reaches for him. As the first, wispy tendrils connect with his skin, he comes to his senses and fires.
It's too late. Oh God, he thinks, we're all going to die, and I could have stopped this.
Pain flares along his nerves, everywhere at once, and he gasps. He fires again, holding the trigger as long as his fingers will allow, but he can't keep his grip on the weapon. His fingers feel like they're burning, as if the nerve endings have suddenly been exposed all at once. Jim cries out helplessly, dropping the weapon, and it falls with a clatter to the floor. His knees crumple and he can feel himself falling, moaning in pain.
(Triumph. Fullness. Satisfaction.)
At the edge of his awareness he senses a malevolent intelligence in the corridor with him. It is a sensate presence that connects with him, absorbing his panic and pain and, God help him, his blood.
(Eagerness. More. Attack.)
Jim knows that he is about to die, and that the creature is still on the hunt. It's not a cloud, it's alive, he thinks, but he can't hold a coherent train of thought.
****
He's so cold.
There are voices around him, shouting, but he's frozen, shivering naked on an exposed mountain. He hears the clink of metal instruments, the hiss of a spray.
It's all so very far away.
****
"Jim," a voice says, penetrating his awareness. "Come on, Jim, I know you can hear me now. Wake up, kiddo."
"Bones," he breathes. His eyelids are so heavy, but he manages to lift them. "Where—"
"You're in the Fleet hospital." Jim is confused. It doesn't make sense, and he can't remember how he got there. "Do you remember what happened to you, Jim?"
He tries, but can only recall a vague sense of horror and the smell of honeysuckle.
"'m tired," he mumbles. "So cold…"
"It's the blood loss," Bones tells him. "It's okay, Jim. Go back to sleep."
****
The next time he wakes, he's more coherent and doesn't feel so exhausted. He's covered in a thermal blanket. Bones is there again, looking exhausted, pale and unshaven.
"You look like shit," he tells him.
"Right back at you, kid." Bones gives him a small smile, but his eyes are concerned. "You're not quite as white as the sheet anymore, but it was a fucking close call."
Jim shakes his head in disbelief. "I thought I was dying…I thought we all were."
"Well, you don't want to know how many transfusions you've had. You have more luck than any ten people I know, Jim."
Jim snorts. "Right. Lucky me. Just one more in a long string of fortunate events that started the day I was born."
McCoy scowls at him. "Depends how you look at it, asshole. You're alive."
"How many died, Bones?" McCoy doesn't answer, and Jim looks steadily at him. "Don't give me that 'wait until you're recovered' crap. Just tell me. I know it was bad."
Bones sighs. "I'll tell you because it's all over the news vids, and I'd rather you hear it from me. It was nearly half the crew, Jim. Two hundred men and women. Captain Garrovick too."
"And the other two cadets," Jim says tonelessly. "I know."
"And you are lucky, Jim. They told me the cloud left the Farragut about a minute after you collapsed, God knows why."
"I guess it wasn't thirsty anymore," he says in quiet fury. "It drank up enough of our blood."
"Jesus, Jim," Bones says. "You have no idea what it's been like for the past two weeks. Nobody would release any information until two days ago when the ship docked, although it was clear that there'd been a disaster. All Pike would tell me was that you were alive and unconscious."
Jim is silent. It's coming back to him, the horror of finding himself alone. The mad dash down the corridor, stepping over dead bodies. The beguiling smell of honeysuckle and his goddamn hesitation that cost so many lives…
"You're going to be fine, Jim. Another week or so, and you'll be good as new."
Jim grunts. "No, Bones. Not good as new."
"I didn't mean—"
"It was my fault."
McCoy shakes his head at him. "Don't be stupid, kid. The ship was attacked and you happened to be on it. This is survivor's guilt talking."
"No," Jim whispers in self-loathing. "I hesitated. I could have shot it, I knew how to kill it, but I froze. I…I lost concentration. There was a smell—"
"No, Jim!" Bones says sharply, raising his voice. "You are not responsible for the deaths of two hundred people! I talked to Pike, Jim. Almost all of the deaths occurred before you even left the weapons bay. He said it was some kind of poisonous gas. You can't fight that with a phaser."
"That's not what it was. It was a creature and it was alive, Bones. I felt it."
"The mind plays tricks on us when we lose consciousness, Jim," McCoy tells him gently. "You can't trust anything you were thinking just then. Memory's a funny thing."
"I knew what to do," he says, more to himself than to his friend. "I could have stopped it."
"No, Jim. You had a hand-held phaser, same as everyone else. Pike told me he reviewed the security recordings. You went after it alone, even though your entire team had been taken down. It was heroic, kid…but it wouldn't have worked."
"I'm in a slump, Bones," he says, feeling his eyes watering and brushing the tears away angrily. He must be more tired than he thought. He hasn't cried since he was a boy. "First the Maru, now this."
"You'll be back on your feet in no time, Jim. Focus on that," McCoy says, squeezing his shoulder gently. "Come on, Jim, it's over. Be glad you're alive. Wait until you're a little stronger, and then you can get back in the game."
Jim is silent for a minute, then nods as if he's come to some sort of a decision. "That's not a bad idea, Bones."
"What?" McCoy asks warily.
"Get back in the game, you said. The Kobayashi Maru. I'm going to take the test again."
"The hell you are!" Bones tells him angrily. "Once was enough, you idiot. Your liver can't stand another one. What are you, a fucking masochist?"
"I can't let it win."
"Who's 'it,' Jim? The Maru? Or that damn poison cloud?"
Jim shrugs. "Doesn't matter," he says quietly. "I have to beat it."