11. Hypothermia

Summary: Bones hated the cold.

Warning: May contain mild profanity

Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek or its characters. This is purely for personal enjoyment, not profit.

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After several weeks of nothing but system surveys, Jim had jumped at the chance to go get off the ship. McCoy had tried to talk him out of it but his arguments, as well as Spocks, had fallen on deaf ears. Several weeks of boredom had left Jim climbing the walls for a change of scenery.

The distress call had been a trap from the start. They'd arrived at the outpost expecting an epidemic and instead been met with phasers. The distress call had been a set up from Orion slave traders; there had never been an outbreak.

For two days, Kirk and McCoy had been forced to work in the mines deep beneath the outpost. They hadn't seen any other members of the away team though. McCoy didn't even know if they were even still alive.

On the third say, Jim had pick pocketed the detonator and deliberately set off a cave in. In all the chaos, they'd taken out two of the guards and quietly slipped away to the surface. They'd been running ever since.

McCoy hung his head over his knees; He couldn't keep this up. His breath came in breathless pants, 'Dammit, Jim, stop.'

Jim anxiously looked over his shoulder in the direction that they had just come from. 'Bones, We've got to keep moving.'

Outside the mines it was sub-zero. Bitter winds stung every scrap of exposed skin and seeped their way through his clothes and sank all the way to his core. Their thin uniforms offered little protection against the raw cold.

The constant shivering wrecking his body were achingly painful but shivering was good. The rapid muscle contractions were his body's attempt to generate heat to keep him warm, to keep him alive. It was when the spasms stopped he needed to worry.

McCoy looked at the desolate landscape. There was nothing but ice and snow as far as the eye could see.

'Are you out of your corn-fed mind? We've got no food, no way to contact the Enterprise and most importantly no warm clothes.' Even if they could find something out here to burn, they couldn't start a fire because they had nothing to light the damn thing with. Escaping was looking like an increasingly bad idea; survival training could only get you so far with limited resources. He was a doctor, not a damn polar bear. They were going to freeze to death before the ship found them.

Jim held something small and metallic up. It took McCoy a minute to register what it was. 'Where the hell did you hide that?'

The Orions had been thorough when they'd searched McCoy. They'd found and taken everything. Tricorder, medkit, communicator, they'd taken the lot.

'You don't want to know.'Jim was deliberately avoiding McCoy's eyes. A few places sprung to mind and Leonard came to the realisation that his best friend was probably right. He'd learnt that lesson with Jim, more than once, the hard way.

'Well then why haven't you contacted the damn ship already?'

'Can't, I tried.' The Orions have activated some kind of localised blocking device that's jamming our communications. We've got to get further away.'

They walked for over an hour. Every now and then, Jim had tried to raise the enterprise to no avail. All they kept getting was static. Aside from that, they walked in silence; There was no point in wasting energy they needed to survive. It wasn't like there was anything to say anyway.

The more they walked the harder it was to keep going. By they time they reached the ridge, McCoy was stumbling more often than not. He stood and looked up at the steep incline. The face was a wall of ice was almost sheer apart from the occasional ledge jutting out every now and then.

Jim reached up and pulled himself up by the first ledge. 'Come on, we need to climb.'

McCoy had lost feeling in his hands and feet long ago. They didn't even hurt anymore. When he'd woken up three days ago, turning into a human popsicle had not been on his list of things to do. After several meters, his numb fingers failed to find purchase onto the ridge. Leonard scrabbled to regain his grip, only to find himself falling.

After hitting ever rock sticking out on his way down, he found himself come to a still at the bottom of the slope. McCoy lay there, unable to find the energy to move. The tumble had left his clothes soaked through. He hadn't known the point at which he'd stopped shivering but there was no point in worrying about something he could do nothing about.

Why not just go to sleep here...

'Come on Bones, we've got to keep moving.' He knew that Jim was right, that he should get up. He was done though; This was it, he couldn't go any further.

'Can't' McCoy slurred. Dammit man, he was so tired.

'Kirk to Enterprise, come in.' The bleep announced that Jim had opened the communicator. 'Enterprise, do you read me.' All the captain got for his efforts was more static, just like last time and the time before that.

They can't hear you...

Jim slammed the communicator down in frustration. It bounced against the ice, before coming to a rest near where Leonard had fallen. Jim slid to the ground at the bottom of the cliff, head sinking into his hands.

McCoy didn't know how long he'd lay there in the snow. The Captain had gone quiet a while ago. Leonard couldn't even tell if he was still breathing.

'Enterprise to Kirk, come in kirk.'

It took all of McCoy's effort to open his eyes again.

'Captain do you read? Please respond.'

The tiny piece of metal lay a foot away from him, where Jim had thrown it earlier. It took several attempts to reach it and several more to hit the respond button.

'McCoy...here.' Distantly he could hear Uhura talking to him, but the Communicator had fallen through his frozen fingers. He was so cold.

The scene McCoy woke to had become way too familiar for comfort over the last two years. It wasn't much that different from when he'd fallen into the river the previous month, only this time he wasn't alone. He turned his head to see Jim on the biobed next to him, his spiky hair the only identifiable feature visible beneath the mountain of blankets. Across the room and on his other side, he was relieved to see the missing members of the away team still alive.

The sickbay was pretty empty and the lights turned down low suggesting it was gamma shift, when most of the ship was asleep. There would be no doctor on duty, just a handful of nurses. With only two doctors onboard and three shifts to fill, they just didn't have the staff. Gamma was always the quietest shift so he and Geoff took it in turns to be on call, the nurses only calling them in if an emergency came in that they couldn't handle.

Satisfied that everyone was alive, and safe, McCoy went back to sleep. This was the Enterprise. They lived by warping from one crisis to another. Who knew how long the peace and quiet was going to last?