Enterprise High
being a high school AU of ST: XI
with many hijinks
and much angst
x
Chapter Twenty: For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
x
Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!
—James 3:5
There is no pain greater than this; not the cut of a jagged-edged dagger nor the fire of a dragon's breath. Nothing burns in your heart like the emptiness of losing something, someone…
—Robert Salvatore
x
Seventeen years ago
Richard Robau rubbed his forehead tiredly. He was nearly done with his paperwork, but an undoubtedly tedious meeting with the science department awaited him in an hour. For a brief moment, he regretted ever accepting command of a Starfleet vessel, but when he looked out of his window and into the hangar where the Kelvin was moored, took in its clean, sweeping lines, and imagined commanding from the captain's chair in battle, he shook his head at his folly. He could not imagine doing anything but commanding. Robau was made for Starfleet; his spirit was forged in the shipyard and tempered in space. Paperwork was merely an unpleasant detour from the important business of captaining a space ship.
A knock sounded at his door. Robau motioned it open and a nervous ensign tiptoed in, staring at him with wide eyes. "Captain, sir, Base Commander Lin would like to see you, sir," the ensign squeaked.
Happy to leave his paperwork, Robau followed the ensign out of his temporary rooms and down a few corridors to Lin's office. The Starfleet base on Calder II was hewn into a cliffside that overlooked a wide lake. Behind the cliffs, a long valley stretched into a broad, thousand-mile plain. The cliffs and the lake were some of the only significant geological features on the planet; its tectonic processes had been dormant for some time, by virtue of its calm and shapely magnetic field. Ten miles from the base, the Romulans had set up a colonial settlement at the edge of the Plains in an attempt to claim the planet. Calder II did not have significant resources other than its rich soil and young, strong sun, but it was a border planet, and both the Empire and the Federation were interested in making it their own.
It was also fantastically positioned along one of the main space trade routes between the Laurentian System and the Solar System. Starfleet had opened a mechanics shop and a small shore leave station in the cliffs to service the merchant vessels that came through. The Kelvin was currently making use of the mechanics shop. It had recently been in a skirmish with a rather vicious superintelligent species, had received severe damages to its warp drive and other important systems, and had limped in to harbor on impulse engines a few days ago for full repairs.
Commander Chelsea Lin was talking hurriedly with a squat, grease-covered Andorian, and motioned apologetically for Robau to wait. The Andorian fished a PADD out of his pocket, handed it to her, bowed wordlessly to Robau, and left.
"I'm sorry about that, Richard," said Lin, moving behind her desk to set the PADD down. She was a thin Philippine woman with a flat nose and calculating eyes. "Have a seat. We've had a very bad break in at our armory. All of the SAMs are missing, and most of the plasma cannons, and of those, the rest have been disabled." She consulted the PADD on her desk. "A total of forty-seven weapons have gone missing. We're quite sure it was Romulan work, but we can't prove it, and we can't accuse them without proof, since the Romulans are letting their armada wander around right now and it's passing close to here, so they might choose to come teach us a lesson."
"I appreciate the gravity of your situation, Chelsea," said Robau carefully, "but—and not to be rude—what does this have to do with me?"
Lin smiled wryly. "Currently, the only functional heavy weaponry on Calder II is in the Kelvin," she said. "If there is any kind of Romulan incursion, we'll have to use your ship to defend the base." She sighed. "You can't tell anybody this, but we just got a shipment of settlers."
"What?" said Robau sharply. "The Federation is going to try to colonize Calder as well?"
"Yes. They're very concerned about the border planets. They were supposed to send us more heavy weaponry before the settlers arrived, but there was a bureaucratic mix-up, and now we've got five thousand men, women, and children to defend without any defenses but the natural protection of this cliff." Lin paced behind her desk, her sharp shoulders jutting harshly from her back. Her entire frame was tense and worried.
"Five thousand?" exclaimed Robau. But that's insane, he thought. The Federation can't just toss settlers at a planet and expect them to thrive. There are only ninety crew at this outpost, not nearly enough to protect five thousand men, women, and children from truculent Romulans.
"Yes. Don't get me started. I'm going to need you to take your crew off of shore leave. If the Romulans decide to attack because they've intercepted a transmission and know about the settlers, or just because they're belligerent damn Romulans, the Kelvin must be ready to defend the base."
"Absolutely. I will let my crew know. But remember, the Kelvin is mainly a research vessel. We have powerful phasers, but we're no Yorktown."
"You can deal with SAMs and plasma cannons, though, right?"
"Yes, easily, but if the Romulan armada hanging around decides to intervene…"
"We'll just have to hope they won't. I've sent a message to Starfleet, and they're sending the Yokohama and the Jakarta, but they won't be here for two days."
"Wonderful. Warp speed and we still can't get places in a reasonable amount of time."
"You're telling me."
A secretary came to the door. "Lieutenant Commander Rokal to see you, Commander Lin."
"Send him in. Stay, Richard? He's in charge of security here."
"You mean, of Romulan espionage?"
"In so many words."
Rokal was a tall, lean fellow with leaf-green hair and a clever smile. "Captain," he said, saluting Robau. "Commander Lin. There's something strange going on. You know how the Romulans have been digging up the yew orchard, near the Hill? I think they've found something. There was an explosion there last night, and now it's swarming with scientists we didn't even know they had."
"An explosion? Were any killed?"
"We're not sure. The spy-bird has a hard time seeing at night anyway, and the glare from the explosion blew out its optical circuits out for a while. We're also not sure what exactly it is that the Romulans found." He paused. "You are aware of the legends surrounding this planet, are you not?"
"I am, but he isn't," said Lin, nodding to Robau. "Fill him in. I asked him to man the Kelvin in case of an emergency; he should know everything we do."
"Very well." Rokal took a breath and settled into storytelling mode. "For as long as there has been space travel, there have been whispers about the Calder system's decalithium potential."
"Decalithium—the stuff they can theoretically create red matter from?" said Robau, eyes narrowed. "That's extremely hard to locate, and even more difficult to mine?"
"Precisely. It is said that the ancient Calderians were able to successfully manufacture red matter—we have never been able to—and tame their planet's unstable gravitational field by careful application of the final product. The Calderians disappeared a long time ago, as did all of the large mammalian life on this planet, in a cross-species plague, but they were said to have left behind a machine capable of converting decalithium-four isotopes into red matter. This story is merely speculation, but all the same, I would not rule out the possibility that the machine does exist, and the Romulans have found it."
Robau wasted no time in recalling his crew from shore leave. He felt particularly bad about reactivating two of his senior officers: Christopher Pike was trying to deal with his wife's abandonment and Julie Eleen's betrayal, and George Kirk's wife Winona Lawrence was incredibly pregnant (Robau thought she looked like she was at ten months; the woman was literally about to pop). Pike looked fine—he was a solid man, not prone to unsteadiness or distraction, but Robau knew his officers, and he knew that Pike was still broken up inside. A single week could not have healed him.
Robau felt better back on the Kelvin. He would have preferred a more battle-ready cruiser as his first command, but the Kelvin was a good ship, small and fast and with firepower too impressive to scoff at, even if it wasn't up to battleship standard. Robau knew that he and the crew of the Kelvin were doing good work. Most of the crew—seven hundred of the nine hundred on board—were science division, and were spread throughout the Kelvin's cramped labs, working on the secrets of the universe.
Once Robau reached the bridge, the chief engineer read out the ship's status. Repair crews were still swarming over the engines and damaged exterior plates. The warp drives were inoperative, decks 6, 7, and 9 were unusable because the hull had been breached in a few places, their shields were at half power, and the autopilot had been completely disabled. A pilot could not even lock onto a target; the Kelvin had to be manually steered wherever it went. Robau fervently hoped that the Romulans would act later, or (ideally) not at all; if they attacked now, when the Kelvin was held together by string and prayers, he didn't know how much he could do before the ship was reduced to space garbage.
Robau would never find out just how stubborn his ship was.
The next day, no more word had come concerning suspicious Romulan activities. Robau and his entire crew had remained on the Kelvin, which was still in the hangar, helping with repairs and continuing research and doing all of the necessary starship maintenance and upkeep. They had also been constantly scanning the Romulan dig site miles away, but their weakened instruments could not penetrate the tightly packed metamorphic rock between their location and the supposed machine, and they could obtain no useable data. By midafternoon, deck 6 and half of deck 9 were usable again, and major progress was being made on the warp drive, but nothing else had changed. In the late afternoon, Commander Lin reported that the fire station at the lakeshore had caught on fire. Suspicious, Robau ordered a local weapons scan but found no trace of nearby hostiles.
Instead, the Romulans attacked that night. In the middle of calm and silence, the science officer shouted that explosives were coming in low, aiming for the base's generator, and the bridge crew burst into action. The communications officer contacted Lin and Starfleet rapidly. Kirk, helmsman and first officer, ordered battle stations and red alert.
"Take her out of the hangar," Robau snapped at the pilot. "Fly low, full shields. Phaser banks, target the SAMs; they're doing more damage than the plasma cannons." The cliff face that held the base was crumbling under constant missile fire.
Lin checked in, her voice almost obscured by the crashings and rumblings in the background. "We've got seventy of our men out," she yelled over the noise of the fortress falling. "Only twenty more to go. The packages are out of the cliff." That was their code for the settlers, whom the base personnel had successfully moved to an underground bunker a few miles away. "We've contacted a passing Vulcan vessel, but they won't arrive for a few more hours, and it's a diplomatic craft. Keep covering our backs, and good luck, Richard."
"To you also, Chelsea," said Robau before closing the link. The Kelvin rose magnificently above the cliffs, an impressive sight in the bright moonlight despite its pockmarked hull and blackened nacelles. Hundreds of Romulans were gathered in the middle of the valley down below, dashing between hastily-erected weapons. The dig site, machine updug, was a mile from the weaponry. The Kelvin's phasers fired on the distinctively-shaped SAMs, ignoring the other Romulan armaments. The Kelvin moved forward to fully engage, impulse engines puttering threateningly.
"Captain," said the science officer quickly, a tinge of panic in her voice. "Three harpoons, shielded, aiming right at us."
"Evasive!" screamed Robau, but it was too late. The harpoons, illegal and expensive heavy gauge artillery with massive power, exploded towards the Kelvin and impacted solidly. The whole ship rocked, the hull once more breached in multiple places. Pike, loading torpedoes in the weapons deck, was struck squarely by a piece of flying paneling that pinned him to a far wall like an insect.
"Shields at zero," said Kirk dully, staring at his readouts. There was a disquieting calm; the Romulan bombardment had ceased. Reports from around the ship flowed in. Casualties were massive. Four phaser banks were out and five decks were destroyed. And then the communications officer said, "Sir, we're receiving a transmission from the Romulans."
The bridge went silent. Robau sat up straighter in his chair. "On screen," he said coolly.
The image flickered, then steadied. Two Romulans, a man and a woman, both heavily tattooed and dressed in formal leathers, stared off of the screen at Robau. The bridge crew glared at them hatefully. The Romulans seemed to draw themselves up, taking on self-satisfied expressions as they noticed the resentment and antipathy in their opponents' demeanors.
"Captain," said the woman lightly, a cruel smile playing around her thin lips. "My name is Aemilia, and this is my husband Naeus. We are the governors of this Romulan colony. We require your presence at our residence. If you refuse to come to us, we will fire on your ship with all of our available weapons."
The science officer's eyes widened painfully as the Romulan finished speaking. Wordlessly, she sent the data she had just received to Robau's personal screen, which he glanced over at. The Romulans had just removed cloaking devices from five more harpoons and were aiming them at the Kelvin.
"I will come to you," said Robau steadily. "Hold your fire."
"We expect no foul play," Naeus warned, his voice more solid and cold than Aemilia's. "We do not react well to surprises." With that, the Romulans canceled the link.
Robau rubbed his forehead once more, this time in frustration. "Walk with me," he said to Kirk, pushing himself off of the captain's chair and stalking off of the bridge, trying not to think that this could be the last time he ever saw it. "If you discover that that machine is what we think it is, do your best to destroy it. I should tell you, there are settlers huddling in an underground bunker near the lakeshore along with the rest of the base crew. More than the ninety base crew lives are at risk. The settlers are five thousand strong. You need to make sure they are safe."
"When you get back—" Kirk started to say, but Robau cut him off with a gesture. They were walking through devastated areas of the ship, ducking under fallen wires and stepping around fallen debris. The medical staff were hard at work tending to the injured. Robau's heart was cold at the thought of the dead, and he was silent as he passed cloth-covered bodies. They both saw Pike, being tended to by the CMO herself, but could not stop to inquire about his status. They reached the shuttle bay and Robau turned to Kirk at the elevator doors.
"You're captain now, Mr. Kirk," was all he said.
The doors closed. Kirk paused for a moment, utterly still. He felt the heaviness of responsibility settle on him like a mantle. Trying not to think about Winona, or Pike, he returned to the bridge to take the conn.
x
Sulu drove at breakneck speed up and down the thin, hilly residential roads. Spock rode shotgun, paler than usual and utterly silent. Kirk, Bones, and Chekov had stuffed themselves into the backseat of the van. Kirk was on his PADD, reading news reports and trying to think of a way to prove definitively that Nero was behind this.
Spock had tried to insist that nobody need accompany him, but Kirk had just ignored him and gone to Sulu's van, and Bones had followed Kirk with a you-know-I've-got-to-follow-him shrug in Spock's direction. Chekov thought he might be able to help and was also trying to escape Sylvia, who had gotten a little too drunk. None of them had had any alcohol yet, but Sulu was still high, although he seemed to have shrugged the worst of it off.
A slight orange glow became evident in the night sky as they approached the house. Spock sat up straighter, and Kirk turned off his PADD. Sulu glanced carefully over at Spock as he barreled around a corner. Spock's hands were trembling, but his face was still.
They turned onto Spock's street. Chekov gasped involuntarily. The house at the end of the cul-de-sac was in flames that licked high into the stars.
Sulu had barely stopped the van in front of the house before Spock was out of the car, throwing himself at a dead run towards the front door. Kirk called 911, speaking quickly to an emergency dispatcher. An older Vulcan woman stumbled out of the open front door, coughing heavily, and Bones ran to her, dragging her away from the house with Chekov's help. Spock was long gone inside the house.
Kirk steeled himself to dash inside, but Bones caught him before he could make a run for the front door. "You can't go in there," Bones hissed, clutching Kirk's arm tightly. "It's much too dangerous. The smoke—"
Two more Vulcans emerged from the house, one old man and one younger man, the younger man supporting the old one, who was coughing heavily. Bones turned to tend to them, giving one Kirk one last warning look. Chekov went to help Bones, and Kirk focused on Sulu, who cocked his head questioningly at Kirk. Kirk nodded. Sulu nodded too, a suddenly decisive look on his sharp face. Without hesitation, they took off for the house.
Kirk ignored Bones's frantic yells behind him. He took a deep breath before crossing the threshold of the house, feeling Sulu's footsteps pounding the ground behind him. Entering the house felt like passing through a warm curtain; inside, the heat beat at him. He paused a few feet into the house, unsure of where to go.
"We need wet cloths, to keep the smoke out of our lungs," Sulu said, passing Kirk. "The kitchen's this way." Sulu had been to Spock's house a few times before. They jogged through the living room and into the kitchen. This part of the house was safe; no fire was visible, although they could hear the sharp crackle of burning wood and building materiel from other rooms.
Sulu whipped open a drawer and withdrew two large dish towels. He ran them under the sink, flinching at the burn of the hot metal handle—the ambient heat alone was affecting the part of the house not on fire—wrung them out, and handed one to Kirk. They wrapped the wet cloths around their heads like bandanas and tied them tightly at the backs of their heads. Kirk pointed into the other room, at the stairs, asking Sulu with his eyes if that was the correct direction to go. Sulu didn't know much about the house, but he did know that the formal sitting room was upstairs, and that was where everyone would be—he had heard Spock talking about the gathering earlier in the night.
Sulu took a moment to be thankful that he had successfully thrown off his high. He could still feel the effects of the marijuana lingering in his brain, the warmth of the drug continuing to exert a slight, pleasant pressure on his lungs. But since he had to give himself over to the drug, which generally didn't affect him unless he let it, he was able to snap out his high. He pushed back a spike of searing guilt at the thought that, with less willpower or a more potent dose, he might not have been able to function, and resolved not to smoke for the next month. Plus, he wasn't too fond of fire at the moment.
The south and west sides of the house were relatively clear of fire, making the area they were in comparatively safe, although the ceiling was starting to dip redly in some places, and the further they got into the house, the more pieces of it were flaking off entirely. The heat was incredible, even away from the main fire; they both felt tempted to continue naked, since the warmth seemed to trap itself in their clothes. But their clothing was their first defense against fire; if it started to burn, it could be shucked of like skin could not.
As they moved towards the stairs, Kirk glanced down a hallway into a long room that looked like an open living area. He could see in the decorative mirrors at either end of the room that the opposite walls were on fire, but not the middle of the room. His stomach twisted; that was clear proof of arson, because fires didn't leisurely gobble up one wall and then sneak around to the opposite one without going through the center.
Kirk and Sulu climbed the stairs carefully. The heat was increasing exponentially. Kirk felt as if his bones were fusing slowly into one mass; the heat made his very joints ache and he could no longer even feel his sweat. The landing at the top was a largish hallway, and the wall at the top of the stairs was in flames. Large parts of the ceiling overhead were on the floor. The hallway stretched on either side of them. Sulu motioned Kirk to the right and they walked a few feet straight through a flame-shrouded doorway.
Kirk entered first, saw immediately that this was not the right room (it was a large, elegant bedroom, nothing like a sitting room), and tried to back out, but Sulu had entered behind him, and before they could return to the entrance, half of the room's ceiling fell in with a massive groan.
Kirk shrieked as a foot-thick chunk of siding struck his chest, knocking him down and burning straight through his shirt to sizzle his flesh. He moved quickly, flexing like a cat, and tipped the siding off of him and onto the floor. Sulu had been peppered with smaller pieces of debris and was still standing, but his shirtsleeve was thoroughly on fire. He dropped and rolled hurriedly, flinching as the flame covering his arm turned upwards to eat at his flesh in its need for oxygen. When it was out, Kirk helped him to his feet, grimacing as he bent over his burned torso. They left the bedroom at a run, without looking back, though Sulu put a cool hand over his crisping skin.
Outside, they retied their wet bandanas and moved down the hall, into the heart of the fire. The floor creaked horribly as they tiptoed across it, and pieces of the sky were visible through the flames above them. They could feel the house shudder around them. Sulu shuddered too, afraid of dying here without rescuing anyone and being just another casualty listed on a form somewhere. Kirk was afraid of nothing and pulled Sulu on.
As they came to the end of the long hallway, they heard a shriek. Sulu, who had moved ahead of Kirk because he was lighter and less likely to damage the floor, hurried towards the door, but pulled up short abruptly, his shoes scrabbling on the creaking hardwood. He had seen the floor sloping sharply downwards, into a five-foot hole that revealed another fiery room beneath.
"Watch out!" shouted Kirk, but Sulu had already stopped himself and was backing away.
"Spock!" called Sulu across the gap. "Are you in there?"
"Yes," came a faint reply through the crackle of burning wood. "There are seven of us, and the hole in the floor—we cannot get out! This room has no windows, and I cannot go through the walls; the ones around us are load-bearing—"
"We'll get you out," Kirk yelled to him. "Hikaru, help me—" He ran back a little ways down the hallway, dodging a piece of rafter beam that fell heavily in his path.
"What are we doing?" Sulu called, trailing after him.
"To get something big enough to go cross that gap," Kirk replied. "A door—but I don't see any that aren't damaged—shit!" His foot had sunk through the smoldering floor and he fell heavily, ankle catching on exposed, burning planking. Sulu skipped around the sunken spot and heaved him up.
"Not a great weekend for ankles," Sulu commented lightly, but Kirk could see the fear in his eyes.
The upstairs floor plan consisted of one large hallway shaped like a U, with the stairway leading off from the base. The fire had been started at the back corners of the house, at the tips of the U, and had spread mainly at the back and around the right side. The sitting room was located in the northeast corner of the house, the part that was burning the worst. Kirk and Sulu had been in the right hallway, and the left one that they now entered was more intact. Kirk pointed to a sturdy bedroom door and Sulu immediately started attacking the top hinges while Kirk got the bottom ones.
They got the door down and carried it back to the room, hugging the edges of the walls to avoid sinking through the floor. More of the roof was falling in, and the centers of the floors drooped into the flame eating them from below. They placed the door carefully over the gap. Kirk saw Spock's head peek around the corner of the doorframe and watch as Sulu gingerly crossed the horizontal door to check its ability to hold weight.
"It's ready!" Kirk shouted when Sulu had come back across.
Five Vulcans, including Sarek, who was helping one of them, stumbled across, choking on the thick smoke. They all had cloths covering their mouths, but looked the worse for wear—two of them were badly burned, and since they had nothing to douse their cloths in, the smoke had gotten into their lungs anyway. Spock, supporting Amanda, who had severe burns on her left arm and side, came out last. Amanda clutched her son, eyes heavily lidded, clearly in a great deal of pain. Spock's expression was like nothing Kirk had ever seen—he was all intensity and concern and determination.
Sulu was motioning everybody down the hallway towards the stairs when there was a huge, horrible noise and a wall further down the corridor collapsed, taking twenty feet of floor with it as it fell.
Sulu lurched backwards, colliding with everybody behind him. The floor crumpled around his toes. Sarek, directly behind Sulu, grabbed the boy back from the edge of the hole and dragged him into a room a few feet back down the hall, another bedroom. The other Vulcans, Kirk, Spock, and Amanda followed him hurriedly inside. There was no leaving in that direction.
This bedroom had a sturdier floor than the hallway or the old room the Vulcans had been trapped in, but the roof was beginning to sag. Spock and Sulu moved everyone to the edges of the room, away from the lowest part of the ceiling. The flames covered only one wall, and while the smoke was just as thick, the atmosphere was not as dangerous. Everybody seemed to relax slightly; they had found a safe haven.
"Good, a window," said Kirk briskly, crossing to it and wrenching it open. He looked down on bare ground fifteen feet away. "We'll jump if we have to, but I'd rather not." He flipped open his communicator. "Bones? Pavel? Jim here, come in—"
"Pavel here," said Chekov's voice over the communicator.
"You don't happen to see a ladder, do you? We're on the right side of the house, second story, and we're trapped—"
"I have seen one in the garage earlier!" cried Chekov.
"Grab it for me, will you?" said Kirk, leaning out the window and staring towards the front of the house.
"I can do zat!" Kirk could picture Chekov running off to grab it. The thought made him chuckle.
"I fail to see what amuses you, James," Spock snapped directly behind Kirk. Kirk jumped; he hadn't realized that Spock was so close to him.
"'Life does not cease to be funny when people are hurt any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh,'" Kirk quoted, watching at Spock. "There is nothing we can do for the moment but wait for Chekov to bring the ladder around. Why not laugh?"
Spock looked like he wanted to pace out his frustration, but also spare the delicate floor the angry pressure of his feet. He returned to his mother, who smiled slightly at him (thinking what a wonderful pair the two would make someday), and coughed heavily.
Spock put his arm comfortingly around her. "We will be out soon, mother," he said gently. She kept coughing, but turned her head to rest it against his chest, closing her eyes. He felt a surge of fondness for her, and concern. When he had leapt over the hole in the floor (which had been smaller then) after a mad dash through the house, into the sitting room, the first thing he had seen was Amanda's burned arm, and the first thing he had felt was a protective dragon roaring in his chest. Sarek, tending to another burn victim, watched them; for a second, a smile teased the corners of his lips, but he suppressed it and shifted his attention to his charge.
Kirk and Sulu were staring at the ceiling, which was hanging lower than ever in the room. Flaming bits of it were dripping off. They were going to have to risk jumping out of the window if Chekov didn't show up with the ladder soon.
As if he were responding to their brain waves, Chekov rounded the corner at a run, carrying an absurdly large ladder on his back. It was a wide, incredibly practical work ladder, extendable to thirty feet and made out of reinforced lightweight titanium. Chekov set it up directly under the window, punching the lock button on its computer so that the ladder's legs shot anchors a foot into the ground, steadying the contraption. Chekov climbed up it quickly; there was just enough room for two people to pass each other on the ladder, and he was needed to help the injured out of the window.
Carefully, Sarek and Sulu helped the two other burn victims onto the ladder while Kirk watched the ceiling like a hawk, chivvying people away from the lowest parts. The room emptied quickly until only Kirk, Spock, Amanda, and Sarek remained. Spock and Amanda were about to leave when Amanda tripped over a chair and fell heavily. Sarek impatiently motioned for Kirk to go ahead, following Sulu, who was already halfway down the ladder. Kirk hesitated, but Amanda stood with Spock's help and they started towards the window, so Kirk ducked his head and climbed down, nodding gratefully to Chekov as he passed him on the ladder.
Sarek followed Kirk, and Spock swung his feet out of the window to settle them on the hard ladder. Spock didn't like going first and leaving his mother in the room, but since he was trying to get her onto the ladder, Chekov couldn't help him, and he had to have room for both of them. She reached forwards to take his hand, her eyes sparkling as she took a short breath of fresh air from the open window.
It had held for so long, but the pressure had become too much for its thin beams. With an earth-shattering moan, the roof collapsed.
Spock lunged, his hand closing around her wrist, but it was too late. The room's entire ceiling dropped, and he forced back his instinct, moving forwards to try and grab her, but her hand was ripped away from his fingers as the heavy ceiling struck her and fell towards the floor. In the last moment, he saw her eyes widen in shock, and her mouth form a word, but before she could finish it, she was gone. There was another horrible noise as the bulk of the ceiling crashed through the floor and the whole mass landed with a heavy thud on the first story.
She was gone.
Chekov's hand yanked Spock backwards roughly, with more strength than Spock had imagined Chekov had. Spock lowered his outstretched arm, turning his head and raising one arm to shield himself from the sparking debris, feeling Chekov (who had climbed beside him to tug him down) also hiding his face. They descended the ladder together, quickly and smoothly, Chekov trembling like a leaf next him. Spock felt his feet hit the ground. He turned to his father, who was seeing to one of the elder Vulcans, coughing smoke.
Spock realized that Sarek had not seen what had happened. Kirk and Sulu were watching Spock, wide-eyed, and Chekov was taking down the ladder slowly, eyes fixed on the side of Spock's mask of a face.
I have to tell him, thought Spock numbly, staring at his father's back. I have to tell him.
"Your health will be restored momentarily," said Sarek comfortingly to the injured Vulcan. He turned, eyes roving over Spock. "Amanda? Where—"
And he paused, his face suddenly going still when he looked up and saw the hole in the roof.
"The ceiling," said Spock, in a stronger voice than he knew he had. "The ceiling gave way. I could do nothing."
Sarek stared at him, completely blank. Spock knew his own expression was identical.
"I see," Sarek said quietly, and turned back to the other Vulcan.
Spock stood there for a moment. He saw Kirk and Sulu's expressions go from concerned to angry and figured distantly that he should do something about it. He went to help Bones tend to the other survivors, figuring that Kirk and Sulu would not ambush his father on their own.
"An ambulance is on its way," Bones told Spock distractedly, his hand behind a Vulcan body to check the woman's heart rate. "Everyone get out?"
"No," said Spock shortly, staring at the woman. She was T'Ridu, a friend of his mother's. She was young—Amanda's age—and she was also badly burned. She had accompanied her father Sedun to the gathering. Sedun lay unmoving on the front lawn; he had died of smoke inhalation.
Bones looked like he was about to ask who hadn't made it, but the faint sound of ambulance sirens reached their ears. Bones looked up eagerly. Of the ten Vulcans there tonight, only one had died so far, although everyone who had been in the house needed heavy doses of oxygen, and badly. The ambulance arrived, lights flashing: paramedics tumbled out and dashed around applying portable oxygen masks to everyone's face. Spock held onto his tightly, closing his eyes as he breathed deeply in, and out, and in, and out, loosing himself in the steady rhythm of his breath.
x
Robau was dead, his diplomatic mission failed (Naeus and Aemilia had lost their temper and killed him in cold blood) and the Romulan bombardment of the Kelvin had restarted. Above the restricting metamorphic rock, the science officer had finally been able to accurately scan the dig site and state with certainty that the machine the Romulans had uncovered was a maker of red matter. It was synthesizing decalithium currently. It had to be destroyed before it was too late.
But there was a problem. The harpoons had knocked out the Kelvin's weapons—all of them. There was nothing Kirk could do to dismantle the machine.
No, that wasn't true. There was something. The warp drives—even when nonoperational—packed a potent punch.
He had ordered a full evac minutes ago, and watched on the main screen as tens of escape pods burst out of their grooves and disappeared as fast as they could into the Calderian atmosphere. Winona, with her usual good timing, had gone into labor at the beginning of the attack, and he was trying not to think about the only option he had left, but he had to think about it, because it was what he was about to do. The escape pods had so far used their meager weapons to great effect against the SAMs (the Romulans were saving the harpoons for the Kelvin), but that wouldn't last—he knew the Romulans would start really trying to shoot them down soon, unless he did something drastic.
He ran a quick reading on the lifeforms on board the Kelvin. A few of the very badly injured remained, bleeding their last on lonely decks. There was nothing he could do for them except end their pain quickly.
He spoke into the communicator—asked her about the child. "A boy," she said, "a beautiful boy—Tiberius, for your father?"
Even now, he laughed (life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh), and insisted on James, her father's name. He closed his eyes as the baby—James Tiberius—gurgled and wailed, imagining what the son he would never see looked like. His hands had already found the helm controls. He was steering, maneuvering downwards despite the tears pouring like waterfalls from his eyes, aiming for the dig site, over which antlike Romulans scurried.
"I love you both," he called into the communicator, watching as the ground and the dig site approached at incredible speed, "I love y—"
Fire consumed him.
The baby shrieked at the harsh, screaming noise that came out of the communicator open on his mother's palm. Winona sobbed into James Tiberius's thin, pale scattering of hair.
On the planet, a crater and debris was all that remained of the Romulans, the machine, and the Kelvin. Smoke uncurled from the aftermath, drifting into the air lazily, twisting into pretty patterns and shapes. Fires burned unchecked on the planet's surface, eating the bodies of the Romulans and licking at the scraps of ship metal that littered the field.
A few hours later, a Vulcan man took a Romulan baby into his arms and promised to bring him home.
x
"Spock," whispered Kirk, touching Spock's shoulder.
Spock looked up at Kirk with glassy eyes. Kirk tried to convey in one expression all of the sympathy and grief and compassion he had, and might have succeeded, because Spock allowed Kirk's hand to remain on his shoulder, and after a while, covered it with his own.
x