Chapter 10: Meet Ups
Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Star Trek universe and make no money from writing about characters I have loved for a very long time.
"I am Lieutenant Nyota Uhura of the starship Enterprise, and you have committed an act of war against the Federation."
A verbal gauntlet thrown in anger at her captor, her words deliberately clipped and aggressive. A risk to speak this way, but Nyota's beyond caring. To her surprise—and if she is honest, to her relief—her captor jerks visibly backward as if struck.
"Federation!" he spits. "Federation is an act of war!"
Before she can stop herself, she says, "You attacked us!"
She tenses, waiting to dodge a blow. Instead, her captor tilts his head and runs an intense gaze over her. Then his eyes meet hers and something in his expression changes.
"Your captain. Why did you sacrifice yourself for him?"
A hint of admiration in his tone? Nyota prides herself on her aural acuity, but he's hard to read, his voice graveled and smoky, as if he hasn't spoken English in years.
Jutting her chin up, she says, "He would have done the same, and if he made it off that ship, he will come for us!"
Bravado, but born from her belief in Jim Kirk. He will come. She knows it as well as she knows anything about him.
Apparently her captor knows it, too. "I am counting on it."
He turns his back on her then and the other alien, shorter and leaner than his leader, waves a phaser rifle at her. A dismissal? Deciding to accept it as such, she heads down the walkway toward an open compound, halfway expecting to feel the searing pain of a phaser blast in her back.
In the compound, crew members are milling about or shambling in ragged lines, looking like historical videos of war-torn refugees or people in shock after a tragedy.
Which is what we are, she thinks.
Standing with phaser rifles pointed at the crew are the oddly faceless soldiers who attacked the ship. Seeing her, one waves his weapon at her, an indication to join a line. She falls into place behind a young ensign nursing her arm.
"Are you okay?" she says, leaning forward.
The ensign looks up at her with a blank expression. "Where are we?"
Placing her hand on the ensign's shoulder, Nyota helps steady her as they continue into a fenced enclosure. Immediately she starts noting the people she knows. Hannity, Darwin, Anaga Nwoke. Keenser standing beside an engineer whose name she's forgotten, but no Scotty. And Dr. McCoy isn't anywhere in sight.
Her heart is racing and her mouth is dry as she scans the crowd.
She knows the captain isn't here. But there's Sulu, and two more junior officers who are usually part of the bridge crew, covered with dirt and soot.
A flash of dark hair and a blue uniform shirt behind a gathering knot of red-shirted security officers—she rushes forward only to see the dark hair and blue shirt resolve into an entomologist named O'Halloran.
Pivoting slowly in place, she cranes her neck looking for Spock.
"I haven't seen him." Sulu at her shoulder, a look of crucifixion in his eyes.
Nyota nods. He's not here. If he were, she would know.
If he's alive—
Closing her eyes, she tries to hear past the roaring of her heartbeat in her ears.
Nothing at first, and then she feels it, the slender thread that always connects them—a wisp of awareness that never really goes away. Even when they are most at odds, even as she walked away from him on the Yorktown, determined not to look back, she could feel the ghost or shadow or trace or whatever it is that being in Spock's mind and having him in hers has left her with.
She'd felt it first long before they ever admitted to themselves—much less to each other—that they were drawn to each other, Starfleet Academy professor and student aide, tripped up by a mysterious pull, an electric charge that fairly leaped from his fingertip to her palm when they touched. An unlooked for attachment, and then a sought after one.
Still there, tenuous and faint.
"He's alive," she says. Sulu's look is frankly skeptical, but he is too gracious to say anything.
She reaches for his hand and presses it. "What about you? Are you okay?"
"I should never have brought them out here," Sulu says, hardly making eye contact with her. "I was just thinking about what would be easier for me. I wasn't thinking about how we're so far from everything—"
"Ben knew what he was getting into. He wanted to be out here, too. And besides, the Yorktown is on the other side of the nebula. They're safe."
Sulu doesn't answer but Nyota sees him nod slightly, a concession of sorts. He has no reason to beat himself up about trying to balance his career and his family. That she and Spock weren't able to do the same thing—
A lump in her throat, and she tries to reach out again to feel his presence in her mind. This time she feels nothing. If he's alive—
A luxury to wallow in pity right now. She's better trained than that.
"Let's get a count of everyone here," she tells Sulu. "And then let's figure out how we're going to get out."
A rustle at her side—Ensign Syl, her hands visibly shaking, her eyes darting around at the guards on the perimeter of the compound.
"I need to talk to you," she says, looking from Nyota to Sulu. "There's something you need to know. The captain gave me the artifact the aliens were looking for on the ship."
Stunned, Nyota said, "You still have it?"
"Yes, but it's hidden. I'm not sure, but I think it's a weapon of some sort."
She's clearly asking for direction. Nyota exchanges a look with Sulu and then makes a decision. "Captain Kirk will get it from you when he's ready," she says with more confidence than she feels. "He'll be here soon."
The last time Pavel sees the Enterprise, the saucer is a fiery half moon, the alien Kalara a dark silhouette in the foreground. As the saucer flips forward, something in Kalara's stance suggests resignation. No movement, her hands at her side, passively waiting for the tidal wave.
By contrast, he and the captain make a hasty retreat, flying first through the air and landing hard on scrub and tall grass.
"Move!" the captain yells. Hoping he hasn't broken anything, Pavel scrambles to his feet and runs.
He trips twice as small explosions from the dying ship continue to reverberate through the air.
"You still with me?" Captain Kirk calls.
They run until they reach a clearing where the trees have thinned out. While they pause to catch their breath, he pulls out his scanner and marks their coordinates. Running in the heavy survival jumpsuits the escape pods were equipped with has made him hot and sweaty and he considers stripping down to his uniform, but the jumpsuits are outfitted with sensors to help rescue ships pick up their bio-signs.
"Anything?" the captain asks when he stops again to check for signals. Pavel looks up and frowns. "They have to be here somewhere," the captain says. "Why bother to intercept the escape pods unless they were going to take them somewhere."
It's not a question as much as a declaration, as if saying it out loud makes it true. The crew is alive. Now he and the captain have to find them.
The sky is growing brighter and even without using the scanner he sees that the terrain is increasingly rocky ahead. Two kilometers in the distance is a flat-topped escarpment. A good place for a lookout?
As if he can read his navigator's mind, Captain Kirk says, "Let's head up into those mountains and see what we can see."
"Captain, we should have been able to pick up a signal by now. What if—"
"If Spock were here, he'd point out those magnetic outcrops that make communications tricky. And see all these hills and mountains? Hard to bounce a signal through. It's too early to say—"
The captain stops short of voicing anything dire. Not saying it means it isn't true. Yet.
"Aye, Captain." Pavel's tone is low and mournful. The captain seems determined to buoy his mood.
"We'll find the crew. They're the most resourceful people I know. Don't give up, okay?"
Pavel nods silently, not willing to be humored. As they stumble their way through fields of boulders and thick vegetation, he pauses regularly to adjust his scanner.
Several weeks ago Commander Spock showed him a way to use a handheld scanner to distinguish the pulse amplitude of Starfleet communicators from background radiation noise. They had both been off duty, a 3D chessboard set up in the forward lounge, the two of them discussing the new scanner designs and playing a leisurely game, something they did several times a month. Glancing up from moving his knight to level three—and hearing Spock's dry pronouncement that the move was ill-advised—Pavel noticed a couple of ensigns from the astrophysics lab eyeing him with sympathy, as if he were a prisoner forced to do hard labor.
He knew that some of the crew were intimidated by Spock. It was an attitude that irritated him, even as he understood why they felt that way.
"Sure, he's brilliant," Ensign Deela El-Fajorrah, the pretty Orion he'd dated until recently said, "but I wouldn't want to socialize with him. He dressed me down last week for being two minutes late for my shift. Two minutes! And he didn't even ask me why!"
"Because it didn't matter," Pavel said. "You were late. You shouldn't have been."
Deela gave him an icy stare—which, in retrospect, was a hint that things were going to go badly from there. At the time, however, he'd felt compelled to defend the Commander.
Spock might appear austere but that doesn't mean he isn't fair. Or caring.
And Spock is the reason Pavel is in Starfleet. If Spock hadn't sought him out when he was a 16 year-old student at the Federation Worlds Chess Competition in London, Pavel would be stuck in some boring tech job in his hometown, Novgorod, disappointed that his application to Starfleet Academy had been rejected.
"You can sit the exam again next week," Spock told him on the second day of the chess conference where Pavel advanced to the semi-finals. The auditorium filled with competitors and onlookers was crowded and noisy and Pavel's command of Standard English was shaky. Had he heard him correctly?
Not only did Spock offer him a chance to reapply, he arranged for him to be tutored in the language lab that he and Lieutenant Uhura ran at the Academy. Without their help, he wouldn't be here now.
Which at the moment isn't a happy thought.
The sun is directly overhead before he finally picks up a signal.
"Captain!" He holds up his scanner. A definite electronic trace, though too faint to identify the source.
"How far away are we from the coordinates of that call?"
"Still a ways." The signal, weak as it is, is the first hopeful sign he's had since the attack. He decides to ask a question that he's mulled over since he saw the captain aim a phaser at Kalara's head. "Captain, when did you begin to suspect her?"
The captain isn't confused by the apparent non sequitur. He grimaces. "Not soon enough."
"How did you know?"
A wobble as the captain steps on the sloping surface of a boulder. Pavel scrambles behind him.
"Oh, I guess you could say I've got a good nose for danger."
A cloud of acrid black smoke billows up around him.
"Run!" Captain Kirk shouts, but even as Pavel does, he feels the snap and pull of a net slinging him backward onto the rock face. He's pulled so tightly that he can't move his arms or legs.
"Captain!" he calls. From the sound of it, the captain, too, is imprisoned in the trap.
At that moment he hears voices and the unmistakable sound of footfalls on the loose scree. The aliens who destroyed the Enterprise, hunting down survivors! He's instantly both furious and glad. They know where the rest of the crew are. If they don't kill him first, they will take him there.
"Get ready!" Captain Kirk says as the footfalls grow louder. "They aren't taking us without a fight!"
"Captain?"
Twisting his head so that he can look forward, Pavel sees a slender alien woman, so pale that her skin is luminous, the black striations on her face a striking contrast.
"You know these men?" she says to someone behind her.
"Aye, lassie," says a familiar voice. "That wee man there is Pavel Chekov. And that handsome beast is James T. Kirk. They're my mates. It's good to see you, sir."
The pale woman aims a long-barrel particle weapon at them.
The captain sounds alarmed. "What's she doing? Scotty?"
A noise like a blaster and they fall hard to the ground.
"You're free, James T."
Dusting himself off, the captain turns to Scotty. "Who's your new friend here? She sure knows how to throw out a welcome mat."
Scotty catches Pavel up in an exuberant hug before he answers. "This is Jaylah," he says, sounding almost like a proud parent.
"Did you find anyone else?"
Scotty's happy mood dissipates at once.
"No, sir," he says. "You're the only ones."
That's as much a surprise as it is a disappointment. Pavel feels a lump in the back of his throat.
"We must go," Jaylah says. Worry in her voice? Or irritation? Scotty turns and sounds just as alarmed.
"They'll be looking for us," he says. "We have to get inside."
"Inside? Inside where?"
Jaylah starts up the path the way she came. Calling back over her shoulder, she says, "My house. We will be safe there."
Captain Kirk raises his eyebrows and Scotty nods. "Aye, Captain. You have to see this for yourself."
Author's Notes: The little backstory about Chekov at the Federation Worlds Chess Championship is in my story "Crossing the Equator."
Thanks so much for staying onboard with this story! I appreciate all the feedback, including ilex-ferox's pointing out the bad science in the last chapter! Rogue planets like the one I describe for Jaylah's homeworld do exist—you know, those interstellar planets that don't orbit a star—but I completely muffed the description of the planet's moons. Moons orbiting a starless planet would appear dark without any reflected light (like a new moon in our sky), not bright like I described them. Either help me think of a way to retcon explain my goof, or let's just keep this mistake between friends….