Slightly short part as Sulu questions why he enlisted in the first place, Joanna is her daddy's daughter, and everyone wants to kill Jim. Poor Jim.
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Hikaru Sulu was stuck in the difficult position of having to decide whether or not to murder his boss.
On the one hand, his boss was a Starfleet captain and people tended to frown on killing them.
On the other, that captain was Jim Kirk. There wasn't an Admiral alive who would blame him for it. There were one or two who would probably hand out medals for that matter.
But still, there would be consequences, and they would probably be unpleasant.
He could, Sulu supposed, just let Spock and McCoy do the job for him. And they would, oh boy, they would.
Unfortunately for Sulu however, that plan, as well conceived as it might have been, did come with one rather large complication.
Mainly that Spock and McCoy would embrace the age-old concept of shooting the messenger. Sulu did not join Starfleet just so Jim Kirk could get him shot.
But Jim didn't give him a choice. No, he just threw himself into the path of highly armed, no doubt unstable men and then played the rabbit at a race filled with hungry greyhounds.
Sulu's first instinct was to follow: Jim was his captain and his friend, and both demanded that Sulu do something other than sitting there doing nothing.
His training won out. As the last of the men tore after Jim, Joanna McCoy chose that moment to decide that she wasn't about to let her favorite uncle get shot – very much her father's daughter, Sulu supposed – and crawled out of her hiding place.
Sulu could see it play out clearly in his head: she would cry out, they would return, and all kinds of nasty things would follow, not least being Sulu's imminent death – and if there was anything more terrifying than the knowledge that Spock and McCoy were going to kill you, it was the knowledge that Jim Kirk was.
He rushed forward before she could call out, grabbed her around the middle as gently as he could when moving so quickly and sprinted off in the same direction they had come.
Joanna was clearly so startled – and he hoped it was that and not fear – that she didn't make a sound for the best part of half a mile. When she did, it was only a second of warning before she was digging her teeth into his arm hard enough to draw blood.
Sulu yelped in surprise and set the girl down, only to get a solid kick to the shin for his effort.
"Jim's clearly been teaching you a thing or two." Sulu grunted, not sure how to restrain a small child who clearly had been taught exactly where to bite and kick by father's insane best friend.
Jim's name made Joanna stop. She paused and wavered on her feet. Sulu's mild irritation dropped like a stone. She was just a child and she must have been scared out of her mind.
He knelt down so he was at her level. "Do you remember me?" He asked. She'd only met him the once, and very briefly at that, when the Enterprise had first docked after the Battle of Vulcan. Sulu had been as surprised as anyone when Doctor McCoy had been knocked off his feet by a small bundle of energy with ribbons in her hair. Even more surprising was the way she had jumped from McCoy's arms to hang like a monkey from Jim's neck, and that Jim had not only allowed it but encouraged her.
Her dark eyes blinked up at him, bloodshot and weary, but she nodded slowly. "You fly Uncle Jim's ship."
Sulu grinned. "I do. I'm Hikaru."
He waited, expecting her to tell him her name. Instead she stomped her foot and glared. "We have to find Uncle Jim!"
"And we will. But first I'm taking you back to your father. He's worried about you."
He could see her waver, clearly wanting nothing more than for McCoy to fix everything. But then her stubborn side won out. "No," she said. "We have to find Uncle Jim before the bad men hurt him."
Sulu's chest ached. A child as young as Joanna should never have to worry about such things. "We will." Sulu promised her. "But we need help. Your father and our friends can help us find Jim."
Joanna looked at him assessing. "Is my daddy with Spock?"
Sulu nodded. "Yes he is."
"Spock promised me he'd protect Uncle Jim when I went away." She seemed to have reached the conclusion that what Sulu was proposing was sound logic. "We can go get them to help." She allowed.
Sulu took another look at her and held out a hand. "You want a piggyback?"
Joanna took his hand reluctantly and climbed onto his back. "Uncle Jim gives the best piggybacks."
"I bet he does," Sulu chuckled. Military maverick, saviour of the Federation and, apparently, a child whisperer.
Joanna fell asleep against his back as Sulu trekked out of the forest and towards the rendezvous site. He hadn't realized just how far he and Jim had ventured before finding Joanna, and was impressed the little girl had gotten so far on her own. She was still asleep when Sulu spotted the others, but woke at McCoy's loud shout of her name.
He was just about able to hand the sleepy child over to her father before McCoy was wrapping her up in his arms, his thick accent all but undecipherable in his relief as he struggled between hugging her tightly or scanning her with a tricorder.
"Thank god." Uhura breathed softly. "We hopped you'd had more luck." They formed a loose semi-circle around father and daughter, the reunion heart-warming and almost unexpected after so much worry. McCoy fussed as Joanna promptly burst into tears now she was safe.
"Where's Jim?" Kevin was the first to ask the question Sulu didn't want to answer, but the words caused a ripple effect, and suddenly he was pinned under some of the most intimidating stares in the galaxy.
He held his ground and waited for McCoy to stand, Joanna still clinging to him, her face wet with tears. "The bad men got him." Joanna said, sniffling against McCoy's shoulder.
"What?" McCoy barked, looking around as if Jim was going to spring out of the walls unharmed and smirking. "What happened?" He turned angry dark eyes on Sulu. "You were supposed to look out for him!"
Sulu didn't point out that there had been frequent times McCoy should have been looking out for Jim and he'd still been hurt – including the time when he'd been abducted right from McCoy's own sickbay.
He turned instead to Spock and spoke as he would if he were delivering a report to a senior officer. "We encountered a group of armed civilians we believed held malicious intent. They were about to discover our location, and since they vastly out numbered us, the captain created a diversion in order to lead them away and allow me to escort our principle from the scene." He took comfort in the words and the way they were delivered. He was also careful not to word it in a way that Joanna, who was still listening, could assign herself any blame.
Spock's face was blank. Only by knowing him as Sulu did was he able to get a read on the myriad of emotions that were swirling in his gaze. "You should have commed us immediately."
"Yes sir," Sulu agreed. "However my primary objective was to get the child to safety. Those were the captain's orders. And," he hesitated, now second guessing himself and hoping Jim wasn't going to pay the price for any bad choices. "The men we encountered weren't hunters, and they weren't soldiers." He thought of them and the boisterous, careless way they had traipsed through the forest. "I didn't believe they were looking to kill the captain. I think they were looking for sport."
To his surprise, Kevin Riley spoke up. "We managed to get an idea of what's happening in the town." He said, drawing everyone's attention. "It's a mess. There is no central organization, and certainly no one policing the streets. It's mostly rival gangs vying for supplies and territory."
"Did you encounter similar on Tarsus?" Spock queried.
Kevin shook his head. "Kodos kept a tight hold on things. There was a lot of violence, a lot of terror, but only if endorsed by him. He kept his soldiers loyal with rations and the lives of their families. Sometimes they'd get carried away and take things out on civilians." His expression clouded, "That's how my parents were killed. They weren't even on Kodos' list; just a couple of his men going power mad and gunning them down because they could. They'd have killed me too if Jim hadn't stopped them." His expression cleared again. "But it was nothing like this. It's like the people here have given up hope of salvation and are determined to take the world with them when they die."
They paused as Riley's words sunk in. That was something they had all learned from Khan, and Jim too in some ways – there was nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing left to lose.
"Well he's alive." McCoy said grimly. He'd set Joanna down and let her cling to his leg while he balanced a PADD in one hand. Jim's obs ran across the screen, several flashing in red and demanding attention. "He's a mess, but he's alive."
Pavel had his own PADD out and was zeroing in on Kirk's signal. "I have him."
They gathered around the PADD, Jim's communicator was still active. If they were on the Enterprise they could just beam him aboard and be done with it. Of course things were never that easy for Jim Kirk. "They seem to have brought him back to town." Spock observed. He looked at Sulu, "For sport, you said?"
Sulu nodded. "They were laughing and joking when we came across them. Not exactly the attitude of people who are afraid for their lives."
"So they are either dangerous enough to be running the show in town and have enough supplies to keep them going…or they're crazy and don't give a damn that everyone is dying around them." McCoy said in his usual abrupt manor. "And they have Jim." His hand absently reached down to cover Joanna's ear. "I'm going to kill that bastard when I get my hands on him."
"I believe, Doctor," Spock said coolly, "that the phrase is 'get in line'."
Sulu wasn't sure who he felt more pity for: Kirk, or the men holding him.