Christine Chapel felt like she hadn't slept properly since they had beamed down to this planet. It was hard to grasp how they had fallen into such a terrible situation. They had expected a certain amount of danger, of course. They had been beaming into a war zone to help those in need. There was always risk in that. But they had expected to be here for a week, at most. They had expected constant contact and backup from the Enterprise, and for relief if needed. They hadn't expected to end up little more than refugees in a city of refugees, caring for their own and for injured natives beyond the limits of their resources and endurance.
She rested her head back on the floor, and tried to relax. She wished she had a pillow, but everything roughly fitting that description had been given over to the patients, and she was glad of that. She would have paid money for a comfortable bed, although she knew that if one were to materialise she would have handed it over to one of the most severely injured patients. Not the captain, who was deep in coma, or even Ensign Gaston, who most of the time was so heavily drugged he was barely aware of his name, but one of the ones who were conscious and hurting. Everyone who had beamed down from the Enterprise had been fully aware of the dangers of war, but most of their patients were natives; not soldiers or fighters, but just innocent civilians who had found war wiping out their homes and their loved ones.
She looked across at the captain, who was still pale and unconscious. They had brought out the intravenous drip and managed to convert enough sustenance into the fluid to fill the bag, but she worried about tomorrow and the next day, and the next. And then there was Spock. Spock had made his bed close to the captain again. He was lying with his eyes closed and his hands clasped loosely over his stomach, but she didn't believe he was asleep. His stance was too rigid. His face was turned slightly towards the captain and she wondered if he were reaching out to the human's mind again. They had almost lost him in the truck, he had been embedded so deeply in the captain's mind.
After a while she made up her mind to speak.
'Mr Spock,' she said in a low voice.
He blinked, and turned his head towards her. 'Miss Chapel,' he replied.
She was not sure what to say. 'Mr Spock, the captain...' she began.
Spock exhaled so slightly that it was hard to tell if he were sighing, but she thought he was.
'I have very little that I can tell you,' he replied.
'I don't want to probe,' she said awkwardly.
Spock shook his head. 'I understand,' he said. 'You are a nurse. You wish to know about your patient – and your captain. But what can I say? Your instruments will tell you as much as I know.'
'But he's – he's still there, isn't it?' she asked tentatively, desperate to be reassured of that one fact.
Spock was silent. He stared up at the ceiling that was almost lost in the dim night time lighting. She watched him, seeing his clasped fingers tighten and then relax.
'I – believe that the man we know as James Kirk is still there, deep within,' he said in his low, resonant voice.
She nodded, resolving to press him no further. It was obviously difficult for him to talk about such a thing, and she had no desire to push him away with her probing.
'You should try to sleep, Mr Spock,' she said.
Spock fixed her with a look, and she read his unspoken words. She, also, should sleep.
((O))
In the morning the rain was gone, but the sky was still veiled with thick white cloud, occasionally torn by various aircraft that flew too high to be easily recognised against the bright nimbostratus. Every time one crossed over, Christine looked up with apprehension. Was it a fighter or a bomber? Was it a missile lower down than she thought, perhaps aiming towards their small encampment? What was it about the last place that had suddenly made them a target for attack? She could only assume that word had got out that they were helping people, and that the W.C.G. had taken offence at that, and that was why the bombardment had started. Because of it Tomlinson had died, and the captain was in a coma. It was merciful, she supposed, that they had got away so lightly.
After the morning rounds there was the usual search for anything that might qualify as food. They had started off mostly sending the security personnel out for this task, but one by one they had been picked off. After the first few forays had returned with injuries Spock had ordered that where possible the security men wear local clothes so as to blend in better and be less conspicuous, but still they seemed to find themselves in situations where they were exposed to danger. Perhaps it was simply the character set of those who chose security as a career. Perhaps they took more risks than the nurses, who were well used to seeing the unpleasant consequences of those more gung ho missions. However it happened, now Gaston and Mabbott were wounded and off duty, Gomez was recovering from a head wound, Tomlinson was dead. They had lost Leeson, their amiable social scientist, and before that two other security men. On a practical front, there were less mouths to feed amongst their people now, but injured people required calories to heal, and they had acquired so many patients that it was becoming impossible to feed everyone.
If only they could contact someone, anyone, outside this hateful place, perhaps someone could send them help. But the governments of neighbouring regions cared little for this war outside of their borders, and they hadn't been able to penetrate far enough into space to reach anyone outside the planet who could help. They were truly on their own.
She returned from the search for food wearied and dispirited, but she had a small amount of plants and sad corpses of creatures caught up in the fighting, all carefully scanned for pathogens that could not be eradicated by processing or cooking. It looked grim, but it was all calories and vitamins and minerals and it could all be used. But then there was Spock, of course. Even in a situation such as this Spock could not put aside his strict principles of vegetarianism, and it was tough trying to find sufficient non-animal-based protein for him.
She took the food into the kitchen of the house, which was intact enough to be easily taken over for their use, and slumped the bag onto the counter. Nurse Davies was there already sorting through various piles of dubious looking edibles.
'What I'd give for a decent cache of tinned food,' he said with a sigh, looking at what Nurse Chapel had brought. 'Thanks, Christine.'
She patted him on the shoulder. 'You're doing a great job,' she told him.
'Aren't we all?' he replied rather cynically, with a quiet laugh. 'Good news, anyway. Gomez is back on duty, so we've got another pair of hands, and Mabbott is on his way back. He was sitting up joking earlier.'
Christine remembered that Jim Kirk had been – well, not sitting up, but at least alert and in good humour a day ago. Things could change so fast.
She washed her hands and went back out to the living rooms that they had colonised for the patients. They had arranged them again with the more severely injured in one room, the less severe in another. She looked in on the convalescent and lighter cases to see that Davies was right. Ensign Mabbott was sitting propped up against the wall involved in a long conversation with one of the native patients. It made her smile to see. If it was so easy for two aliens to get on, why could the two biologically identical ethnicities on this planet not do the same?
She turned away and went back into the other room, where the seven critically injured patients lay. Jim Kirk was still lying silent and unresponsive. Gaston was awake but disoriented looking, and Nurse Shah was patiently trying to get him to eat what looked like some kind of porridge from a shallow bowl. The amputee Ahshem looked pale and unhappy, but he was conscious. She considered trying to find him a book or something else to entertain him. He needed something to take the focus away from his lost limb. Another native, a woman named Shelar, was sleeping, looking fevered and restless. She stepped quietly across the room to her, kneeling down to check her temperature and give her a dose of painkiller that would hopefully help her to rest more easily. Then she turned to look at the other three patients, all of them natives. There was a female who was recovering from surgery on multiple injuries caused by shrapnel, another female called Timor of about fifteen years old, suffering from internal injuries, concussion, and blindness after being flung against a wall by an explosion, and an elderly man who was not as badly injured, but was frail and unwell due to his age. All three were sleeping, and she saw no need to disturb them.
There was a footstep in the doorway behind her, and she turned to see McCoy.
'I was coming to check on our little ward,' the doctor said. 'But I guess you beat me to it?'
'I guess so,' she smiled in return. 'I found some food, brought it back to the kitchen. Then I decided to check in on our patients.'
'Including the captain,' McCoy said grimly.
Her gaze followed his. 'There's no change,' she said.
The doctor walked across the room anyway and took his own scans of the captain's still form.
'I tried to get something out of Spock about what state he's in,' he said somewhat morosely.
'So did I,' she replied. 'But he said he doesn't know any more than we do.'
'Somehow I find that hard to believe,' McCoy said darkly, and she looked at him, startled.
'What makes you say that, Doctor?'
He smiled then, and shrugged. 'I don't know, really, Chris. I'm not being fair. I just find it hard to deal with the thought that Spock's been there, been inside Jim's mind, and that he can't tell us any more than we already know.'
'Do you think – Well, do you think he could help bring him back?' she asked. 'I've read reports of mind meld being used successfully in coma to bring a patient back. Do you think – ?' She trailed off. It seemed too large a hope.
McCoy shook his head. He put his arm around her shoulders and led her out of the room.
'Come on with me, Chris,' he said. 'There's plenty of evidence that people in comas can sometimes hear what's going on, and I don't want Jim listening to this.'
He took her up a flight of stairs and into a little room that had been left largely untouched. It seemed that scavengers weren't much in need of arm chairs, at any rate. He sank down in one and Christine dropped into another, putting her feet up wearily on a small table nearby.
'I suppose it's too early in the day to have any of that drink you found,' she said with a smile.
He laughed quietly in return. 'Far too early. Besides, I lost that. Didn't seem like the first priority in the evacuation.'
'Maybe this place has got a wine cellar,' Christine suggested idly. 'Do they have anything like grapes on this world, do you know?'
The doctor lolled in his chair. 'You know, we should check that out,' he said. 'What a boon that would be. Maybe there's a cellar full to the gills with Southern Comfort, and we just haven't looked yet. They seem to have paralleled Earth on every other angle so far. At least with the guns and the missiles and the bombs and the planes...'
'That's enough of that,' Christine told him crisply. 'We were talking about the captain. Maudlin about the war won't help. But do you think Mr Spock could help the captain?'
McCoy shook his head. 'Honestly, Chris, I think if he could I'd have to be holding him back from doing it. Melding isn't an easy thing. It poses huge issues for both sides. Blood pressure changes, pressure on the nerves, electrical impulses. And that's not even mentioning the incredible personal toll, the rawness of letting down every barrier and merging your mind with another person. When Spock melded with Jim in the truck I was afraid he'd gone too far. I was afraid we wouldn't be able to pull him back. Coma melds are something for highly skilled Vulcan healers. Hell, Spock hadn't even melded with a human until we had Van Gelder in the sick bay at Tantulus.'
'He's familiar with the captain's mind, isn't he?' she asked tentatively, even as she digested all that the doctor had said. 'It's not like he's a stranger, not like Van Gelder?'
'Yes, he's familiar,' the doctor said tiredly. He suddenly looked old to Christine, and she felt sorry for the stress he was under. 'I just – I don't know, Christine. I can't tell him to try. I don't want to tell him to try. It's too much to ask of anyone.'
'Even for the captain?' she asked softly.
'Even for Jim.'
