The first clue came that very same day, and he didn't even have to work for it.
"Doctor."
There was no response from him, no indication that he was aware of her presence. The nurse stood in his doorway for a moment, then stepped in and planted herself in front of his desk. She rapped her fingernails against the surface.
"Doctor McCoy."
"Mmph?" His head jerked up from the report he was studying, and he rubbed his eyes.
"Yes, what is it, Chris?"
She reached out, palm closed, and he half-rose to take the data chip she deposited in his hand.
"Weekly pharmaceutical reconciliation."
"Thanks," he responded absently, and turned his attention back to the report. After a moment, he realized his head nurse was still standing in front of him expectantly, arms crossed. He sighed inwardly and gave her his full attention.
"Something I should be aware of, Ms. Chapel?"
She smiled grimly, and he felt his stomach drop. Chapel could be imperious at times with her patients, when they dared to disobey her instructions; and she enjoyed latitude to challenge McCoy on a diagnosis or treatment plan with which she disagreed (and while he would glare and snap at her on those occasions, he was secretly grateful); but her nature was by default compassionate yet poised. A grim smile from Christine Chapel was a harbinger of trouble indeed.
"As a matter of fact, I recommend you review the data sooner rather than later. There are five units of antracil missing from the pharmaceutical inventories."
He stood, chair scratching against the deck and stylus clattering down unnoticed.
"That's impossible."
"I've triple-checked, Doctor. It cannot be accounted for," she responded, unperturbed.
"The stores have redundant biometric authentication access. How the hell can it just disappear?" he demanded.
As was typical in their relationship, McCoy's agitation was inverse to Chapel's composure. She clasped her hands behind her back and followed his pacing back and forth with a tolerant eye.
"I'm sure further investigation will turn up a rational explanation. I'll perform a thorough review of the dispensary access logs myself. In the meantime, I recommend that you personally approve and oversee the dispensing of all Class One medications."
He grimaced but nodded. "I don't like putting everyone under a microscope, but that seems like a reasonable precaution for now. Oh, and—" he said, as Chris turned toward the doorway, "get me an updated list of everyone who has access to the dispensary."
She smiled again, but this one was fond. "Already on the data chip, Doctor," she replied.
He had a sudden foreboding of a disquieting sort of synchronicity, a lack of mere coincidence. "I, uh, don't suppose Lieutenant Solorio is on that list?"
Chapel gave him a shrewd look, then nodded. "Yes, Doctor, she is. I wondered about that, given that she wouldn't ordinarily have access to prescribed or restricted substances, but I thought you had made an exception. For research purposes, perhaps." Her expression was watchful and expectant.
The hell I did. He smiled at her. "Thank you, Nurse. I'll take it from here."
She made no move to leave. "How is she doing?"
He blinked. "Solorio? Uh, Doctor Macy assures me that she'll make a full recovery."
Chapel nodded, not taking her eyes from him. "Chekov was in her quarters earlier."
He had long suspected that Chapel had spies all over the ship, tasked with alerting her to anything out of the ordinary that may merit medical monitoring or intervention, a system whose efficacy he grudgingly conceded; but this bit of intel, and the speed with which he knew it would spread through the crew, alarmed him.
"Drop it, Chris," he said curtly.
Her expression didn't change, but he knew her well enough to interpret the tightening of her shoulders and the new formality in her tone.
"Doctor, I-"
"Is this going to be a problem, Lieutenant?"
She blinked twice, opened her mouth to protest, then thought the better of it. "No sir, no problem."
"Good. For the record, and in case anyone asks, I had Security send him in to retrieve some lab notes she said would be helpful," he added, trying to keep his tone neutral. "Do we need to reassign any of her duties?"
"No, I think Sanchez and Tirloni can handle it between the two of them, at least short-term. She had an experiment going in there-" she gestured with her thumb toward the biochem lab, "that I can't quite figure out, so I would appreciate a look at those notes." She tilted her head at him, her pique not yet faded. He locked eyes with her, willing her to walk away without further meddling, but as usual she read him like a book.
"You're a terrible liar, Doctor," she said, and gave him a pitying smile before turning toward the door.
Rec Room
Stardate 5960
2200 hours
"What do you have for me, Chekov?" McCoy murmured as he slid onto a low-slung chair opposite the small sofa on which the ensign was perched. The Rec Room was hopping tonight, as they used to say, a lighthearted and animated vibe as shore leave experiences were shared, dissected, and processed. In the background someone—it sounded like Uhura—was running through a chord progression on some sort of stringed instrument, while the deep bass rumble of a hologame was undercut by groans and cheers from the players. That shared excitement would ordinarily make McCoy ridiculously pleased with the crew's disposition, but tonight the noise and energy were already grating on his nerves. To top it all off, his acutely sensitive nose clued him in to the wafting scent of a borderline illicit substance coming from somewhere in his near vicinity. He craned his head around and gave a broad-range scowl, zeroing in on the most likely suspect, a brash young newly-assigned engineering maintenance tech two tables away who met his stare, wide-eyed, then blushed and slipped something into his pocket. Kids these days. He squinted at the crewman. I'll catch you at your check-up, Sanders.
Across from him, Chekov cleared his throat politely, both apprehensive and pleased about this semi-covert rendezvous with the doctor, and placed a colorfully-wrapped package on the table between them. McCoy turned his attention back to his companion and eyed the item with interest.
"Christmas paper, Chekov?"
The ensign blushed. "It was all I could find, Doctor. I did not want to be seen walking around with these things, you know."
The doctor made a non-committal sound. "Fair enough."
"The crew. They still do not know she has disappeared?" Chekov had been sworn to secrecy when informed of Solorio's absence this morning. The official word was that she had picked up a minor but virulently-infectious strain of Argelian ocular parasites, and was left behind, under quarantine on the base, her condition requiring more prolonged and specialized treatment than the Enterprise was equipped to provide. The truth was known only by Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and now, Chekov. The doctor had no qualms about including the ensign in this inner circle. Doctor, state secrets were invented in Russia, the kid had intoned in all seriousness.
McCoy stoically tamped down a twinge of regret. "Starfleet Intelligence ordered us to keep this under wraps. If people have questions, they should come to me." And I will tell them absolutely nothing, because those are my orders, and sometimes the needs of the one do outweigh the needs of the many, damnit.
Chekov gave him a long, measured stare that told the doctor the younger man knew exactly what was going on. McCoy fought the urge to fidget, and instead leaned forward and glowered at the young Russian. "Out with it, Pavel," he rasped.
Chekov lurched back, eyes widened slightly, and nodded. "Yes, sir. I was able to gain remote access to her accounts—don't ask me how, sir, please—and reviewed all transactions within the last twelve months. I've also reviewed her computer activity and searched through her quarters, but I think someone saw me go in, so…" McCoy nodded wearily and gestured at him to continue. "Four things I have discovered, Doctor. The first is intangible." He paused.
"Well, don't keep me in suspense, Pavel," the doctor drawled, the ensign dipped his head in apology.
"Yes, sir. There have been no unexpected or suspicious deposits into any of her accounts. But shortly before she beamed down to Deep Space Three, the lieutenant converted almost all of her credits to darknet currency."
McCoy attempted to cover his confusion with a frown. "I've heard about this, but explain the ramifications, please."
Chekov nodded eagerly. "Sir, it's a completely virtual currency that cannot be traced from origin or destination. It is used primarily for illicit or illegal transactions across and beyond the Federation, with tens of thousands of transaction points and conversion values that shift around every microsecond or so."
McCoy thought back to his days as a young boy visiting his grandmother in the still-rural parts of Georgia, and how she would give him pieces of paper with numbers and pictures of quaintly-dressed people, worn to silky-softness from decades of use, and send him down to the corner store to trade them in for an ice cream cone or bait for the local fishing hole, or a cool drink. Soda, he recalled. He was forbidden from trading it for the latest game vid, though, at risk of incurring the fearsome wrath of that Southern matriarch.
Currency, he decided, had come a long way. He rubbed his temples and wished he had brought along that new bottle of bourbon sitting in his quarters.
"Almost all of her credits?"
"Yes, sir. According to base records, she spent the remainder of her funds on clothing and supplies."
That kindled his curiosity. "What, exactly?"
Chekov bent his head, consulting his tablet. "It appears to have been the sort of clothing one would need for a wilderness expedition or survival training, sir. Long trousers, long-sleeved blouses, field jacket, synthetic wool socks, all made of the latest nano tech. A knapsack. Also, a knife, a solar lantern, a personal water filtration unit, first aid supplies, and a case of emergency rations."
At that, he was stumped. Are you on safari, Solorio? he thought at her.
"Next?" he prompted.
The ensign drew a deep breath. "The lieutenant was spending a great deal of her free time in stellar cartography."
"Doing what?" he asked, perplexed. As far as he was aware, she had never mentioned or indicated a special interest in that field.
Chekov shrugged. "Seemingly random searches, sir. No patterns that I could detect."
"Hmm. Okay. Nothing missing from the armory? I assume we would have heard about that by now."
"No, sir. Probably a good thing," Chekov added. "Her marksmanship skills were apparently not, um, as they would say, optimal."
"Well, that's not generally a skill I recruit for in my labs. What else do you have?" he asked, indicating the package on the table. Chekov looked at it as well and chewed at his lip for a moment before picking it up gingerly and sliding the wrapping off of it. It was a small stack of canvases and transparent paintings, half a dozen of various shapes and sizes, the smallest no larger than his hand, the largest an oblong shape of nearly half a meter on one side. Chekov carefully slid them from his forearm onto the table.
McCoy stared at the top one for a moment, then picked it up and leaned over to hold it up to the closest light, a dim lamp built into a side table next to the chair he was sitting on. The painting was on a wedge of what he took to be transparent aluminum, rigid and no more than a millimeter thick. The lamplight shone through in places where thick layers of dark pigment did not obscure it. The subject of the painting was a stylized representation of something ill-defined, appearing organic, animalistic, threatening. Acrylics, he mused as he ran his fingers over the texture of the paint. Versatile, but, according to his daughter, challenging for the contemplative artist who liked to linger over brushstrokes. Joanna had gone through an angsty artistic phase, and he'd indulged her hobby from afar, acquiring and shipping back all manner of art supplies from around the galaxy, and in return, earning a treasure trove of critiques and occasional approval from his brutally honest daughter. No more of those iridescent chalk pens from Centauri, Dad. They're just impossible. His eyes crinkled at the memory, then he tilted the pane of aluminum at an angle and frowned.
"My god, what is that?" he breathed as new shapes, previously invisible, appeared around the edges. Some kind of reflective medium? Light sensitive or gyroscopic paint? It could make for interesting creations, he thought, for the artist who wanted control over the viewer's experience. But this did not feel like a deliberate artistic decision; something about the hidden symbols felt unconscious and urgent, evoking an anxiety exponential to that expressed in the primary painting.
"Looks like some kind of…hieroglyph?" Chekov suggested as he peered through the piece from the other side.
McCoy shook his head slowly. "No, that's not the word. They're more like…" he searched his memory for the term, one he'd heard long ago at a xenomedicine conference…the one where the anthropologist had lectured about native medicine on some obscure planet, the one where the practitioners used symbols to…
"Sigils," he said suddenly. "They look like sigils."
Chekov's forehead crinkled as he continued to study the symbols. "There's a pattern," he said.
"Yes, you're right." McCoy noted the recurrence of the sequence and filed it away for his subconscious to mull over in the background. He placed the painting atop the others and sat back.
"What do you think?" Chekov ventured.
"I'm a doctor, not an art critic," he replied testily. "I'll look at the rest later. But you said four things. Are you saving the best for last, son?"
The ensign gave a small nod and drew from the corner of his sofa an object that resembled some of the books that occupied a prominent space along a shelf in McCoy's quarters, collected from worlds near and far; printing and bookbinding had turned out to be a relatively common invention among humanoid species.
He placed it almost reverently on the table and gave the doctor a satisfied smile. "It appears to be her journal, sir. I did not read it," he hastened to add. "The very first page told me what it was, and I closed it."
McCoy picked it up and weighed it in his hands. It had heft, bound with precise stitching and covered in a synthetic but very convincing leather in a shade that evoked the cattle ranges of West Texas. He flipped the pages, then ran his hand over one at random, impressed that it was real paper, not the composited-from-everything-that-goes-into-the-recycler crap that filled most printed books these days. Occasional smudges in the writing indicated real ink. Expensive private indulgences on a lieutenant's wages, that told him she was an admirer of things both traditional and elegant, but who did not wish to be seen as so. Maybe an artifact of her meager upbringing? he mused. A scent wafted up from the rifled pages, an echo of something vaguely botanical he had on occasion noted on passing Solorio in the lab or corridor. He placed it on top of the stack of paintings and rested his hands on it in a protective manner.
"Thank you, Ensign. Some nice investigative work there."
Chekov sat up straighter and nodded once, briskly. "Thank you, sir. It's nice to work on something a little different sometimes."
McCoy leaned back and stretched out his legs, then laced his hands together over his stomach.
"You two were friends, weren't you?" he asked as he scanned the room again, noting the uptick in noise and the crowding around Uhura, then brought his gaze back to the young man.
He flushed and nodded, and McCoy wondered if the ensign had hoped for something more than the occasional shared meal or stroll around the ship's gardens that he had observed between the two of them.
"Notice anything different about her lately?
Chekov considered for a moment then leaned forward and let his arms dangle between his knees, all awkward angles, and reached up to brush his mop of hair out of his face. McCoy was reminded not for the first time of a puppy that had not yet grown into itself. He thought he heard the faintest of sighs escape the ensign.
"What is it, son? You can tell me," he said gently.
"It's probably nothing, sir. It's just that, well, she asked me a few weeks ago if I would...if I would take care of her plants." He shrugged at the puzzled look McCoy gave him. "You know, if something happened to her."
The doctor felt a sinking in his chest but dredged up a half-smile for the ensign. "Well, I hope you have a green thumb, Chekov."
Chekov snorted. "I'll consult with Sulu, sir." He paused, and a note of worry tinged his voice. "I hope you can figure out what happened and find her, sir."
McCoy nodded distractedly, thoughts already racing down half a dozen pathways. He rose and bent to gather all of the items Chekov had entrusted to him. "Me too, Pavel. I'll let you know if there's anything else you can help with."
"Yes, sir. Have a—" Chekov broke off, his words lingering in the air between him and McCoy's already-retreating figure. "Good evening," he finished to himself.