BONES to the rescue! Also, celebrations to be had! We're officially half way through (not including any last minute changes). Thank you all so much for sticking with me this far, even if you want to poke Sam in the eye and hate me for killing Sato.
McCoy had been hovering close to the edge of a fullblown nervous breakdown for several hours. The cold, heatless words that were suddenly whispered into the comm. made his heart freeze in terror.
He'd never felt anything like it in his life.
He was a surgeon – life and death were two things he held in his hands on a daily basis. He could handle stress, he could handle being stuck in the middle of a combat situation with people bleeding out everywhere he looked, he could even handle Jim Kirk and how many times he'd needed to be wrist deep in the kids guts just to keep him alive.
What he couldn't handle, even a little, was the helplessness of being stuck on the other side of a damn wall while his best friend was dying. And he really couldn't handle the concept of Sam Kirk actually going through with his threats.
So in the space of that terrified heartbeat he was simultaneously screaming at Spock to get the goddamn Admiral on the line, and Scotty to blow a hole in the goddamn wall. His vocabulary was shot, his nerves fried, and if someone didn't do something now he'd probably tear the wall down with his bare hands, exposing everyone inside to the toxic atmosphere and killing them all.
Apparently Jim was capable of robing him of rational thought as well as driving him completely crazy.
"Ach, just give me a wee minute will ya?" Even through the filter of the mask, Scott's irritated brogue was clear. "This is nee rocket science!"
"They don't have a minute!"
Riley and Cupcake were holding the perimeter of the building, their features masked by the suits that allowed them to walk on the surface and breath the atmosphere without any adverse effects. McCoy felt like a monkey in a suit.
They'd landed half a click away and walked closer, counting on the fact that what they were doing was tantamount to suicide if they didn't break through the wall in ten minutes or less. The building had been designed to keep everything out, them included. The irony of it all was that the designs had been implemented in an attempt to discourage terrorist attack. Back when constructed, they'd been having serious problems with Terra Prime and after years of peace, fear was slowly starting to creep back into the human psyche.
"What's happening?" Leighton asked. He was a serious man about Jim's age. MCoy had never seen him smile, though he looked almost relaxed sometimes when Jim convinced him to play a game of pool in the rec center. He'd lost an eye on Tarsus IV around the same time Jim's aunt and uncle had been executed by Kodos. The two men had bonded over shared loss and Leighton had been fitted with a state of the art digital device that allowed him to see through most solid surfaces. Jim called it his supersight but he was the only one with the nerve to bring it up in conversation.
McCoy shook his head, listening in on Uhura and Sam through the open channel with Spock. The ear piece felt alien and uncomfortable, but McCoy was glad he had it.
There was a slight sound of static, then Spock was speaking to McCoy directly. "Doctor, it is imperative that you secure the building as swiftly as possible. I will endeavor to keep the hostiles distracted with Admiral Marcus but I fear greatly for the captain's life."
No one needed to tell McCoy that. "Then tell Scott to blow the damn wall already!" McCoy said, just as Scott gave a cry of success and the wall they were facing imploded.
"Everyone in!" Scott hustled them forwards, into a room with a large airlock. As soon as they were through, he used a much larger, much cruder variant of the tool that had been used to patch Jim up to seal the hole they had climbed through. "Alright laddie!"
Riley didn't bother to try break through the security code that locked the door in front of them. He blasted the control panel to the side of it, reached his arm through the wall and hit the internal override switch that allowed easy departure.
The door slid open silently.
McCoy didn't wait.
He ran.
He left the rest of them behind, to hell with formation and standard practice and everything else he'd been taught. Jim was only rooms away from him now and he needed McCoy to be fast.
So he was.
He followed the schematics that showed on his headset and sprinted like the devil was on his heels. Up stairs, down corridors and towards the very heart of the building.
He didn't even wait when reaching the room Jim was in. He tore through the door and skidded over to where Jim was laid out between Uhura and Sam Kirk.
Fortunately for him, the rest of the team were hot on his heels. As he planted his fist in Sam Kirk's face, Riley, Leighton, Scotty and Cupcake were covering him with phaser fire.
Sam stumbled back. McCoy shoved Uhura safely down and threw himself over her and Jim both.
So no entirely to plan, and not exactly SOP, but whatever. Spock could chew him a new one later. Jim could kiss his ass.
Eventually the phaser fire stopped. McCoy didn't check to see which side won. He turned his attention to Jim, his heart loud in his ears as Spock demanded to know what was happening.
The first thing McCoy did was whip out his hypo, load it with the one painkiller that wouldn't stop Jim's heart, and delivered as high a dose as he dared. Then he set about a more thorough examination.
Moments after the first hypo had delivered it's dose, Jim's eyes fluttered open. They struggled to focus on McCoy. "Easy kiddo." He soothed, touching Jim's shoulder gently as he adjusted the hypospray to deliver the next load of drugs. "I'm gonna take care of you."
Jim's bloodied lips opened as if trying to speak. McCoy couldn't hear the words, but he knew Jim was calling his name.
"I know it hurts." McCoy said gently. "I'm going to make it better, just hang in there ok?"
"Bones."
"Shush Jimmy. I got ya." He couldn't recall the last time he'd spoken so gently to Jim. He didn't think he ever had. Jim hated being seen as weak almost as much as McCoy disliked showing the true depths of his feelings for anything. It manifested itself in a gruff, often harsh display of emotion that mostly consisted of McCoy threatening Jim and Jim barely humoring his instructions.
It was different this time. Jim had been shown so little love by the people who should have always stood by him, and he'd just lost one of the few who had in horrifying circumstances. McCoy knew he could put Jim back together again physically, but trying to mend the hurts he'd taken to his heart would be entirely different.
He blocked out the world around them and focused everything on Jim. He was only vaguely aware of Riley and Cupcake rounding up the entirety of Sam's team. Weapons were confiscated and each was separately secured. He hoped Cupcake stepped on a few of them in the process.
Uhura had already bared Jim's chest in order to give McCoy the visual feedback on Jim's condition and it was every bit as bad as she'd described it.
He placed his thumb on Jim's sternum, one side of the sluggishly bleeding wound that had speared him right through the chest. From there, he felt either side of Jim's ribs, counting three at least that were broken badly enough to be disjointed.
Those he could fix easily enough. It was the compromise of Jim's lungs that frightened him.
He could tell just by looking that the wound had penetrated the lung.
It hadn't collapsed yet, which was their one saving grace, but by filling the wound with the synthesized polymer, they had in effect killed off the capacity of one of Jim's lungs by at least sixty percent. His blood oxygen levels were barely readable and that was the true danger. Combined with the shock of both his injuries – the head wound especially – and witnessing Sato's murder, Jim's whole body had decided that it no longer gave a damn and was shutting down far faster than McCoy felt comfortable chasing.
And even then, Jim clung on stubbornly to his consciousness. Foolish brat.
"Scott, we need an emergency transport to Medical right now. I needed him in surgery twenty minutes ago." McCoy barked over his shoulder to where Scott and Leighton were trying to make sense of the computer keeping them locked in and the Enterprise out. Uhura had stumbled over to help them, her whole body shaking and her face streaked with blood, sweat and tears.
"I'm doin'e the best I can!" Scott yelled back in frustration. "But to be honest with ya Doc, we're gonna be better getting him on the shuttle."
"We don't have the time!"McCoy snapped. And he really didn't want to move Jim if he could help it.
"Well if you wanna come over here and make sense o'this nonsense, then be my bloody guest!"
"Here." McCoy almost missed the word that slipped from Jim's bloody mouth. "Bring here."
The part of him that was Jim's doctor wanted to tell him to shut the hell up and rest already.
The part of him that was Jim's best friend won over. "Bring the damn thing over here." He shouted. Across the room, Sam Kirk smiled. "I don't know what you're so damn smug about." McCoy growled at him. "He dies, I can think of about four hundred people who'll happily rip you limb from limb."
And that was just Jim's crew.
Scott nearly tripped over his own feet to bring Jim the PADD.
To McCoy's horror, Jim's eyes filled as they scanned over the strings of code. He blinked several times, trying to focus, and McCoy watched with bitter fascination as tears leaked out of the corner of his eyes.
He'd never seen Jim cry.
"Kiaphet Amman'sor." Jim said faintly. In an instant, the code unraveled and Scott was already tapping away at speed. Jim tried to move towards him and help but McCoy would have none of it.
"No Jim. Just take it easy." He took Jim's hand and squeezed it tightly before following his gaze over to where Sam was under guard.
The two brothers stared at each other in silence while McCoy could only watch.
"Got it!" Scott suddenly yelled, and before McCoy had time to worry about his disassembling atoms, they were being beamed safely back aboard.
Seven hours after they'd secured the symposium, McCoy had signed Jim out of surgery and into recovery. The rest of the conferences guests had been briefed by Spock and released to their respective transport. Those who had required treatment had been seen to by M'Benga and Chapel. On the whole, most had been unharmed. There had been several cases of shock, and one heart attack in one of the older guests. A few cuts and bruises had been the norm. Uhura had been given a sedative and released to quarters to sleep, but Jim had come out of it the worst by far and fixing the damage done in the explosion had taken all of McCoy's considerable experience. He'd encountered the polymer they had used on him just once before and the issues he'd flagged with Starfleet Medical had not been addressed at all. While it worked very effectively at prolonging the window in which a patient had to seek treatment for serious injuries, it did so purely so they could complete the mission at hand. The life prolonging properties that made it so attractive in the field also made it a damn nightmare to actually treat in surgery.
But Jim was out of the woods and he'd recover. McCoy kept him induced and planed to do so for the next twenty four hours. Jim's body needed time to heal and his soul needed just a little bit longer before Marcus and the rest of Command dragged him into a damned interrogation. It was all McCoy could really do to protect him.
Actually, that was a lie.
There was something else.
Something else that had been sitting at the forefront of his mind ever since he'd found Jim bleeding in Uhura's arms. It had festered and grown while he'd been in surgery and now, looking down at Jim as he lay unconscious on the biobed, chest wrapped in clear polymer bandages that helped speed up the healing process and looking every inch the kid that he still was, McCoy's mind was made.
The hypo in his pocket was filled with only air.
Injecting air into the blood stream as a method of murder had always been something of a myth. Blood was oxygenated. Small pockets of air did no damage at all. The amount of air you needed to induce a lethal air embolism was considerably larger than a syringe could house.
Until the invention of the hypospray, which, incidentally, didn't even leave behind a pinprick of evidence at all.
There was a safety override on the side of a hypo to stop it accidentally self loading with air. It needed to be overridden manually. Thanks to Jim, McCoy could code his own PADD to a personalized OS. A hypo was child's play.
He signaled to M'Benga. "Keep him under watch at all times. No one but you or me goes anywhere near him."
"And Commander Spock?" M'Benga raised an eyebrow, as if to question McCoy's sanity.
He huffed. "Fine. You, me and the Hobgoblin."
"And Pike." The Admiral had arrived only moments after they had beamed aboard. McCoy had caught a glimpse of his face as he'd looked in through the observation window in Surgical Bay C but he'd yet to speak with the man and he had no real desire to do so.
"No." McCoy shook his head. "I don't want Pike anywhere near him right now." He knew he was being irrational and unfair to Pike, but McCoy didn't trust anyone who had played apart in Jim's past. Not right now. He trusted M'Benga as the only man who had ever operated on him, and he trusted Spock as a Vulcan who would do his duty unto death. That was it.
To his surprise, M'Benga only nodded. McCoy turned, but found his arm caught in M'Benga's grasp. "Leonard," he stressed softly, using McCoy's first name in a way he never had. No one called him Leonard any more. "I understand the urge to protect you friend, I understand the urge for revenge, but I beg you: do not do anything that he would regret." M;Benga tilted his head down at Jim.
McCoy shook off the hold on his arm. "I don't know what you're talking about." He didn't even try make it convincing, he just wanted to give his friend deniability if everything went to hell.
M'Benga sighed but let him leave and McCoy refused to glance back as he exited medical and entered the lift. "Brig." He ordered the computer. The lift moved smoothly to take him to his destination.
M'Benga had it wrong. He wasn't going to do this for revenge. He wasn't even going to do it out of hate.
That Jim had been the only serious casualty of the day's events didn't sit with him at all. Yes, Jim was unlucky, but even he wasn't that unlucky.
And why kill Sato? The woman was one hundred and thirty years old. Hardly a threat to anyone.
Sam was smart, he was ruthless, and he was after something. Something he wasn't going to find in a xenolinguistics conference.
They had captured him too easily, had won without much of a fight at all. Something wasn't right. McCoy didn't believe there was a jail in the universe that could contain Jim if he didn't want it to and he imagined Sam was no different.
Jim was at the center of this. Sam had attacked that conference at that time for a reason. He'd executed those woman for a reason. And he'd surrendered for a reason as well.
And in twenty four hours, Jim was going to wake up. In twenty four hours, no matter what McCoy said, Marcus would do what Marcus would always do, and put his best asset up against their biggest threat.
So yes, McCoy was going to kill Sam Kirk.
He was going to do it so Jim didn't have to.