A/N: Thank you Lee for the lovely review of the first chapter! Hello all you who signed up for the alerts / just finding this now! I do hope you enjoy this chapter. I invented Samuel Tucker for a website I'm on, z7 . invisionfree . com /infinity_and_beyond where Lee and I are administrators. However, I really like the character and thought I would throw him in here. Now to get down to the angst! Oh, and if any of you know a lot about medicine and stuff … pardon my assumptions / inventions / whatever. I still don't own the Enterprise gang. If I did, I would not be on Earth typing this right now.


Samuel Elias Tucker. He was named after Samuel Houston, which seemed appropriate considering he was definitely Texan born and bred. However, the last name also held weight in Starfleet because it was from his father's side of the family, his father's brother being Charles Tucker of the infamous NX-01 … Enterprise. He was the first Tucker to really go into space, and here was the second. Yes, serving as a generic science officer – alright, not completely generic because he specialized in chemistry and physics, namely optics – aboard the grand old ship had been a rather interesting joy ride. He had not been there during the Nero incident, rather doing a few other things as a young Ensign on another one of the very few ships Starfleet really had left anymore. However, his transfer request finally came through! He had wanted to be on the new flagship ever since his uncle first started telling stories of the original Enterprise. He was fairly certain she was in some sort of junk pile somewhere. Alright, perhaps not necessarily a junk pile, but a museum. He was not sure because he had been too busy keeping his head down and working through school to think to look that random bit of family history up.

Life on the Enterprise had not lasted very long before he was put on this away team. He would have thought he needed to be around a little longer before having that kind of responsibility. Perhaps his previous captain had written him a good recommendation. He hoped for the sake of things it was not because of his uncle's position in Starfleet and his last name basically gaining awe from every engineer he passed. Honestly, Sam knew little to nothing about engineering. He knew how to take care of his console at his station and that was about it. Consoles weren't even all that complicated. He was more of a software man than a hardware man, but when asked to go on a mission with the captain and chief medical officer, he simply jumped at the chance! What he should have realized was that the Tucker luck was really quite inherited. His uncle had gotten into more trouble than he really should talk about during family dinners – and about eighty percent of that trouble happened on away missions. But there was the rub. How could he deny the askance of his commanding officer! The answer was that he simply could not.

He blinked the water away, feeling it quite embarrassing under the circumstances. His hand was sticky with blood as he moved to get a better angle on his wound. Compound fracture of the lower area of his femur and there felt like there might be something else going on. Every time he tried to shift on his hips to get a better position where he was propped up, something was grinding in his hip. That definitely could not be a good sign. He blinked again, trying to stay focused. Sam could hear the captain talking, what was he saying? Sam was not that great with his hands, but he had tried to put up a fight. It felt like a buffalo had trampled him, though. His entire right thigh felt like it was swelling to capacity – or whatever amount of fluid he had in him was being diverted to the area. He licked his lips, wishing the intense pressure and pain would just go away already. With his free, wrapped hand, Sam pushed some hair out of his eyes with a sigh and tried to focus on the interchange across from him. Walters from security had not been lucky enough to survive the encounter. He had come with them down to the surface, but they had killed him. For some reason the rest of them were alive … for now.

What was it with red shirts, anyway? No, that was just a silly tall tale.

The scream was a bit unexpected. Even for him. When Sam had tried shifting again gently, his hand slipped out from under himself and he landed hard on his injured hip. A hip injury was not good under any condition, much less letting most of your weight slam down on a fractured femoral head. Not that anyone realized that was what was going on under the skin yet. Captain Kirk helped him control the bleeding they could see, but they had to wait for Doctor McCoy to wake up to help him out with whatever was going on with Sam's leg. He really wanted to get this over with, have someone hit him upside the head with a big rock. Captain Kirk had insisted that was not a good idea at all, that they should all remain as conscious as possible to help each other if and when they needed to. Even though Kirk seemed relatively unharmed, no one knew what they had really given him. It could just be a delayed reaction or something. Sam was trying to keep himself focused on worrying about other things other than himself. Oh, and that girly scream he had emitted a moment ago. His stupid hip was just killing him!

"Tucker!"

Kirk had darted back to his position as if he was doing one of those field day events where the children would run the dashes, grabbing PADDs and transferring them to the line drawn on the floor opposite of their position. He always had a hard time with that one because his legs were so long, he could not stoop himself low enough to get to what he was aiming for in the first place. Namely, the PADDs, that is. Sam licked his lips and let out a breath, slow and steady. "Captain … I just … shifted on my hip. I did not mean to …" He cautioned a look over towards McCoy, who was sitting up and wincing. Even in this light he could see that McCoy was worried. He was bloodied and bruised, but he was also worried. "Sorry if I woke you, doctor." Sam managed a small smile, attempting to make some kind of light of their desperately dark and dank situation. If the Enterprise was going to save them, now would be a really, really good time because he was certain by now that he really needed to curl up on a medical bed in Sickbay for a really long week or so of solid recovery.

"No … no harm, no … foul."

McCoy sounded more tired than after a six hour operation. The poor man had a concussion, he heard Kirk mumbling to himself earlier while he was looking over his friend. The two guys in blue – or what was left of their blue uniform shirts – had a lot of things other than the obvious going on with them. Sam saw Bones try to make another move towards him to help, cursing under his breath when it hurt too much. Kirk rolled his eyes and went back to his friend, urging him not to move. McCoy, being the stubborn one he is, demanded Kirk move him towards Sam so the captain could at least keep his eye on both of them better. Sam figured it was just an ulterior motive so McCoy could try and look him over. Whatever it was seemed to have worked, though, because Kirk easily moved his friend. The two bickered for a moment, McCoy letting a few cuss words slip as he was situated against the wall near Sam's offending leg. The doctor reached out and gently prodded it, grumbling. The situation was already farther than just a simple 'not good', and he knew that. Not only his leg, but their entire situation. If McCoy was determined on the prodding, though, and the grumbling, Sam knew something was really wrong.

"This is really not good. I'll have to get him to Sickbay immediately if he ever wants to walk again."

That was the annoying McCoy way of not talking to the patient, of instead talking to the nurse – or in their case, Captain Kirk. The good captain waved the pair off, turning to look around their little cave again in hopes of a way out. Sam figured there was no communicator or anything. Hell, they were lucky to have the medical kit. Everything else had been taken – except their clothes they had on. Hopefully, though, McCoy would not have to practice any sort of backwoods twentieth century medicine on him while they were down here. Those patients tended to lose legs rather than keep them. That was really something Sam wanted to be thinking about this afternoon. He hummed to himself, just a steady note as he tried to calm his breathing and not move. If he moved again on his hip, he was going to scream like a little girl again. Screaming like a little girl again would not be good for Doctor McCoy's headache and the man was already a bear without his coffee in the mornings. Who knew what he would really be like with a concussion on top of everything else. Screaming like a girl again was out of the question.

Not to mention it was embarrassing enough the first time.