A/N: Potentially rough content ahead; scroll to the end if you'd like a heads-up about what's to come!
Chapter 14
When the red alert signal went off, Mambaso didn't spare Jim another glance. She darted to the nearest wall console:
"Captain to the bridge, what's happening?"
An unknown voice shouted back: "Klingon bird of prey—it just uncloaked off the port bow—"
Without warning, both of them were on the floor, knocked off their feet as a violent jolt shuddered through the ship. The lights flickered dangerously overhead. Jim shook his head and pushed himself upright, his heart somewhere in the vicinity of his throat.
Chang.
To his left, Mambaso was already making her way back to the wall console. The conference room door hissed open and Jim stumbled through after her. The hallway, nearly empty what felt like mere minutes ago, was now full of red, blue, and gold-uniformed personnel. Jim found himself face-to-face with the curly-haired and huge-eyed security officers from before.
"Report to your stations!" Mambaso barked at them.
The officers cast an uncertain glance at Jim, then at each other.
"Move!" Mambaso shouted, and both saluted and disappeared down the corridor without a second glance. She then turned to Jim. "Make yourself useful or go back to the brig."
She didn't wait for a response. She started running, single-minded, in the direction of the bridge. There wasn't time to think about the decision. Jim only knew he wasn't about to spend a battle sitting around in a prison cell.
Not half a minute later, they rounded a corner and ran straight into Chekov, Scotty, four security officers, and a balding, blue-shirted officer Jim didn't recognize.
"Keptin!" Chekov shouted, at the same time that the blue-shirted officer turned to Mambaso.
"Captain, what the hell's going on?" he demanded. There were double-stripes on his sleeve marking his rank.
"Klingon warbird," Mambaso said. "What are you doing with these two?"
"Getting them back to the brig, they were—"
Another blast juddered through the ship, and the lights flickered again. Just under the blare of the red alert klaxon he could hear the chirp of a communicator. Mambaso flipped hers open to an unknown voice, calm but strained:
"Helm to Captain Mambaso."
"Mambaso here, what's going on?"
"The Beichen has been hit; Captain Holcomb is asking to speak to you."
"Put him through."
A new voice, this time male, shouting over the crackle of static: "Bridgette!"
"What do you need, Al?"
"We've sustained warp core damage; the Beichen doesn't have much longer. I've issued general evacuation orders, but that ship is taking out everything that moves. If we put a shuttle outside, it's gone! We have to get out of here, but there's nowhere to go."
"Start sending people over to us; we'll try to hold her off."
"We—" There was a distant crash, an electric crackle, and the sounds of muffled shouting. "—we've lost beaming capability. We took a hit that cut off power to the transporter."
Scotty shot a glance at Jim, eyes wide.
"Can you reroute power?" Mambaso asked.
"No, there's a—" Another crash, a burst of static. "—hull breach in the adjacent corridor that's preventing repairs—"
Before Captain Holcomb could get another word in, Scotty darted forward, grabbing the communicator with Mambaso's hand still around it. Two of the security officers lunged at him, gripping his upper arms to yank him back, but not before Scotty shouted: "Are the warp coils still intact?"
"Who the hell is that?"
"Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer USS Enterprise. Answer the bloody question!"
"I—" Holcomb broke off. For a few moments there was nothing, then the communicator buzzed to life again: "Yes, they're still intact."
Scotty released his death grip on the communicator, and the security officers pulled him away from Captain Mambaso. He looked directly at Jim, and said, "I can fix that."
Jim stared at him. He'd seen the look on Scotty's face before: wide-eyed, brimming with energy like a racing dog on a leash—yet focused. Channeling all of himself into a single task, and waiting for the green light to get it done.
Jim turned to Captain Mambaso. "Send us."
When Mambaso didn't answer right away, the blue-shirted officer gaped. "Captain!"
"You have nothing to lose," Jim said.
A beat more, then Mambaso nodded. "Go."
Pavel Chekov was running.
Just ahead of him was the captain, behind him Mr. Scott. Ahead of all of them, weaving a path through the corridors and leading them to the flight deck, was a lone security officer, one of the four who had escorted them to the meeting room to speak with First Officer DiElsi.
All around them, crewmembers were rushing back and forth to their posts, and more than once Chekov had to dart to one side or another to avoid crashing into someone—the kind of chaos of battle he rarely saw from his seat at the navigator's console on the Enterprise bridge. Every so often another blast from the Klingons would judder through the ship, absorbed and distributed by the shields. He was used to being able to see the enemy through the forward viewport; he wasn't used to not knowing when the blasts would come. He became acutely aware of his heart pounding in his chest, the rhythm of his breath as he ran.
As they wound their way past the cargo bay Jeffries tubes, past the auxiliary control room and down into the catwalks of Engineering, Chekov realized what he was seeing was a controlled kind of chaos: engineers making repairs to fried equipment, white-uniformed medics ferrying the injured to Medbay, logistics personnel monitoring shield capacity, weapons banks, life support.
Chekov focused ahead of him and put another burst of speed into his steps.
What felt like far too long after they'd first started running, the security officer turned a corner, and a pair of large, gray doors loomed into view, then parted before them to reveal the expanse of the aft flight deck. Beyond the rows of shuttles was the airlock seal, and beyond that, the transparent dome of the hangar doors.
"This way!" shouted the security officer, directing them to the nearest shuttle. "Take that one. Don't go yet." He darted away, out of sight.
"We're going in that?" gasped a voice.
Chekov turned to where Mr. Scott was bent over his knees, wheezing.
The captain looked at Mr. Scott and then Chekov in turn. "I'll get us over there," he answered. "Scotty, what's the plan once we do?"
The engineer sucked in a breath and straightened up. "Ok. We're gonna borrow reserve energy from the warp coils to power a patch for the hull breach, which will then allow us to reroute power from the from the auxiliary grid to the transporter."
Kirk frowned at him. "Will that work if the warp core is damaged?"
"Temporarily," Chekov spoke up, nodding. "The coils themselves are likely to still be operational."
"So we'll have as much time as the core will give us," Mr. Scott said.
Kirk nodded. "What do you need when we're over there?"
The engineer jerked a thumb over at Chekov: "I could use the wee man here, but otherwise we've gotta get people over to the transporter room in the first place."
"Ok. That'll be me, then."
"Right. There's just one wee thing though, Captain." Mr. Scott pinched his thumb and forefinger together.
Kirk looked warily at him. "What?"
"Once we start an energy drain on the warp core, some of the systems that keep the core functional, and, you know, not imploding from lack of maintenance, are going to—well—stop working."
"…The core's gonna fail faster," the captain concluded.
"Aye, that's it."
"Fantastic."
At that moment the security officer returned, holding out three standard-issue communicators. "The Helena will cover you on the way over. If you need help when you're over there, hail the bridge; it's coded as the emergency frequency."
The captain nodded to him. "Tell the transporter room to be ready for us."
In the shuttle, Mr. Scott strapped himself into a seat in the passenger cabin, the captain assumed the helm seat, and Chekov his usual place at navigation.
Hangar control over the comms: "Shuttlecraft Hopper, you are cleared for takeoff. Good luck."
Kirk was already disengaging the inertial dampeners. "Roger that."
Chekov stared ahead at the yawning airlock ahead, and tried not to think of how this felt just like before—Mr. Scott, the captain, and him, sprinting across catwalks as artificial gravity failed and the Enterprise Engineering Bay crumbled around them. Slipping as the ship tilted up at a fifty-degree angle, and sliding past the manual override switch. Only flipping it to reroute power to the warp core minutes later than he'd meant to. Discovering not long after what Mr. Scott had witnessed, and what had become of the captain.
"Chekov, you all right?"
Chekov started, and turned to see Kirk staring at him. The ensign swallowed and pushed down on the churning in his stomach. "Aye, sir."
"Hold on." Kirk fired the engines, and the shuttle lifted into the air.
Without the blare of the red alert klaxons, the expanse of void and stars outside the Helena was a bright, nightmarish vacuum. The Beichen floated only a few kilometers off the Helena's starboard bow. Even from a distance, inside the shuttle, Jim, Scotty, and Chekov could see multiple hull breaches scattered from bow to stern, venting oxygen into the black. Part of the NCC-729 had been scraped off the port hull.
They sailed under the Helena's starboard nacelle into the space between the ships and the bird of prey loomed into view: a smaller vessel than the Helena, but alien, winged, menacing. The warbird was trading fire with the Helena: silent streaks of red and green, the white-yellow explosions of photon torpedoes against reinforced plasma shields. Beyond the Klingon ship, the asteroid field, rock and dust displaced by the Helena's fire.
As the shuttle weaved across the starscape, barely noticed among the rubble from the Beichen, Captain Mambaso made good on her word. When a stray torpedo from the warbird came within meters of the shuttle, a streak of red phaser fire reached it first, rocking the shuttle from the force of the proximity detonation. It flew on.
As a small-crew research vessel, the Beichen had no independent shuttlecraft, and no hangar deck. The shuttlecraft Hopper disappeared beneath the ship, emerging on the starboard side, just outside a maintenance airlock as close as they could get to Engineering.
Some of the ship's sensors must have still been working, because when Jim, Chekov, and Scotty leapt off the maintenance airlock platform and into the adjacent corridor, they were met by a figure in blue, with three stripes on his sleeve.
At first glance Captain Holcomb looked to be Captain Mambaso's peer. A moment later, Jim realized that what he'd mistaken for gray streaking the man's dark hair and beard was really ash. Something dark and liquid had trickled down in front of his ear from a cut just under his temple, black in the low emergency lighting. A deafening, mechanical grinding noise made it impossible to hear. Holcomb shouted over it: "Are you Kirk?"
Jim nodded and shouted back: "Yes."
"Holcomb," the captain answered, looking behind Jim at Scotty and Chekov. "What's the plan here?"
A jolt ran through the ship, and the floor tipped toward starboard, sending the four of them crashing into the wall. A plume of dust and smoke exploded from an open door up the hall, engulfing them as quickly as it had emerged.
"Captain, she hasn't got long—point us to Engineering and we'll get your transport up and running right quick!" Scotty managed, his sleeve over his mouth, and Holcomb nodded, pointing down an adjacent hallway. "First left," he coughed.
Scotty started running without a backward glance, Chekov on his heels.
Jim grabbed Holcomb by the shoulder. "We have to get everyone to the transporter room, or as close as they can get 'till Scotty can fix the hull breach. How many do you have on board?"
"After this? God only knows. We have a crew of fifty-five counting me."
"Where are they?"
Holcomb was wild-eyed, "Trying to keep her from falling apart! They're scattershot all over the damn ship; I wasn't even on the bridge when this happened—"
"Engineering, Medical, where?" Jim shouted.
Holcomb seemed to snap out of it. "Medical," he said, "the labs." He pointed up the corridor toward the bow of the ship.
"Let's go."
Starfleet Headquarters
Office of the Judge Advocate General
Internal Investigation on Events of 2259.187 – 2259.222 involving USS Enterprise crewmembers Capt. J. Kirk, First Officer S.T. Spock, Lt. Cmdr. L. McCoy, Lt. Cmdr. M. Scott, Lt. N. Uhura, Lt. H. Sulu, and Ens. P. Chekov, first in [redacted] and subsequently in [redacted].
Requisition Files: Batch 2
[Excerpt: Timeline of Events: Evacuation of USS Beichen personnel to USS Helena, 2259.219 [time] – 2259.219 [time], page 9]
[Time]: Cpt. A. Holcomb makes the following ship-wide announcement from USS Beichen Console 15, Deck 4
Attention all hands: repairs are underway on the ship's transporter. Report to your division officer on duty and get to Deck 3 port corridor to prepare for evacuation to the Helena. Holcomb out.
Put bluntly, they had said at the Academy, any ship-wide evacuation was a logistical nightmare. Even in huge-scale starship battles—clashes between birds of prey, Constitution-class Federation ships and the like—ship-wide evacuations were rare, the absolute last resort of any captain worth their salt. No matter how many safety protocols were hammered into the heads of bright-eyed cadets, no matter how many drills were conducted over the course of a long-term assignment, the reality of moving fifty to eight-hundred souls from one location to another in a real-life crisis was, and had always been, messy.
There would be a list of things that stood out to Jim after it was over: the echo of Holcomb's voice over the ship-wide channel as he gave the order to abandon ship. The sight of the Beichen's CMO through the wide window of one of the Medbay operating theaters: a tiny woman with a jet-black bun, barely taller than Keenser, standing on a stepstool and wrist-deep in a patient's stomach. The way she fired back at Holcomb that she could save this man, and that she wasn't leaving the ship until the patient could as well.
The burst of energy that hummed through the ship, heralding Scotty's triumphant shout over the tinny comm speaker, announcing that the patch for the hull breach was secure, and the transporter was operational. Making their way to the Deck 3 corridor to count off groups of seven, the maximum capacity of the transporter.
As personnel arrived with them, they counted off groups of seven, the max capacity of the transporter, sending them across the patched hull breach. They made their way tentatively: it looked like a soap bubble, shining and oily, thin streaks of refracted rainbow that distorted the stars behind it. Just around the corner, the sound of Chekov's voice and transporter chimes: Six, seven—go! A lone straggler: an ensign who looked on the verge of tears, who they had to near-manhandle onto the pad.
As the Beichen shook around them, Jim held fast to the safety railing. The corridor ahead of them was opaque with smoke. He scanned it for signs of movement. "Who's left?" he shouted to Holcomb. There were four: the CMO, her patient, and two other Medbay personnel.
An agonizing minute spent trying to hail Medbay over the comms—then Holcomb's shout, as three figures emerged from the smoke, barreling past: the patient, strapped to a wheelchair with a bloodied bandage wrapped around his head, pushed by a scrub-clad surgeon. Holcomb's tiny CMO was sprinting alongside them, a whirring tricorder gripped in her hand. A last figure—a white-uniformed medic—limped along behind the others, pressing against the wall for support; Holcomb ran to her. A bubble of relief grew in Jim's stomach with the realization that these were the last: they had everyone.
They had everyone.
A blast rocked the ship, and Jim felt himself stagger, felt his head connect with the edge of the wall.
A flash of fire in the distance, a low rumble underfoot. It felt suddenly like there was something flitting at the edges of his vision, making it hard to focus on the passage ahead. He could feel his breath growing shallow—was it the smoke?—and his lungs starting to constrict. He took another step and stumbled when a wave of dizziness crashed over him, catching himself on the wall. It was hot to the touch—something was burning on the other side.
Then a flash of something above him: a glare of bright light on glass, a face looming over him, dark eyes spilling over with tears—
A rush of hot, dark fear flooded at the back of his head and flowed down Jim's spine.
No—not now, not—
"Kirk!"
Jim looked up. A figure was silhouetted in the corridor before him: it stepped closer and his vision focused in on Captain Holcomb, his mouth tight with concern, the medic leaning on him for support.
"You all right?" Holcomb asked.
Jim nodded.
He blinked, clearing his head: he was—as much as was possible under the circumstances. He was in his right mind. He was fine. He was not under the warp containment glass on the Enterprise, he was aboard the USS Beichen, under fire from a Klingon bird of prey, assisting in a rescue mission. He was face-to-face with Captain Alan Holcomb and an unknown member of Starfleet medical: the last two crewmembers to be beamed to safety aboard the Helena. He was about to finish the job.
He took a step forward—
—and the corridor exploded around him.
For a few seconds, his vision was black. Then he opened his eyes, and found his ears were ringing. There was a weight on top of his legs. For a moment he was pinned, but then suddenly the weight was gone, as if someone had lifted it away. He pushed himself upright and saw the medic scrambling on her knees, moving away from him—no, moving towards...
The medic's mouth was moving. Jim couldn't hear, but he could see what she was saying, over and over: Captain, Captain.
He stumbled to his feet and saw what she was looking at. In the middle of the hallway was a dented pneumatic door, likely ripped off its track in the explosion. Beneath it, a motionless figure.
Holcomb's eyes were wide and open. There was a pool of blood under his head. The medic was taking his pulse, switching between his wrist and his neck, finding nothing.
"Come on."
Jim didn't hear himself speak, but he felt himself form the words as he pulled the medic to her feet. "Come on! You have to get out of here!"
A moment's hesitation, and then she seemed to snap out of it: she turned, following Jim into the transporter room.
The door slid—slammed—shut behind them just as they ran through, sealing off the corridor. Across the room, Chekov looked up from the transport console. Scotty was wedged underneath it, legs askew, his face obscured by the edge of the table. He was shouting over a growing electric hum:
"That'll hold her a few more minutes!"
The medic's eyes flashed wide at this. Jim pushed her toward the transport pad, as Scotty reemerged, his thinning hairline bristly with soot. He turned to Chekov, all urgency: "Let's go, lad—"
He didn't get to finish his sentence.
Without warning, a jolt shuddered through the ship; the room tilted heavily to starboard. From overhead, a sickening creak of metal, a shower of sparks and plastic dust. All three of them looked up; Chekov was the quickest to see the jagged-edged ceiling panel above them, tearing away from the ceiling. The ensign stepped forward and shoved hard; Jim and Scotty stumbled back and the panel crashed in the center of the room, dividing it in two.
In the seconds that followed, Jim understood his mistake.
Chekov was staring directly at him. He swallowed, his eyes wide with fear—and then regret.
"Chekov—"
Jim never got the words out.
The ensign had a phaser strapped to his hip. God only knew where he'd gotten it, and it didn't matter. The blast knocked Jim backwards off his feet, and he landed hard on the transport pad. The wind rushed out of his lungs, his head cracked against the floor, and—
And Spock was staring down at him, his fingers splayed over the glass, his eyes running over.
I want you to know why I couldn't let you die. Why I went back for you.
There was smoke and fire, and white-gold rings were encircling his body. The last thing he saw was a blinding explosion, and against it, a skinny, curly-haired silhouette.
A/N: Chapter contains an attack on the USS Helena and Beichen by another ship, and subsequent descriptions of blood and injuries, and ends with a main character in...well...serious mortal peril. *hides*