Chapter 36

He found himself floundering in murky water on one small lungful of air. He kicked up with his legs but almost immediately his head hit a ceiling. Fighting the sudden sense of confinement, he cast about for a gap, a door, a way out of the cage. The cloudy water was layered with currents so saturated with a flaky substance they afforded little visibility. Then he discerned a dark shape, a hole perhaps. His lungs bursting, he released some air and started swimming toward it.

But then he saw. He almost cried out. He thrashed to slow his approach but his momentum brought him too close to the jelly-fishlike creature that floated there. Just inches away from the pale, eyeless rag of a face he managed to reverse his advance by pushing off against the water, but the thing was caught in his wake and pulled towards him. Then his back hit a wall and the bloated thing stormed at him, filling his vision with white, spongy flesh so weakened by the brine it had separated and loosened.

He raised a hand to ward it off but his hand was a knot of bone protruding from a cloud of flesh wafting in the currents.

Screaming, he surfaced.

"You alright?" asked Dax, looming over him.

Kirk concentrated on drawing breath, not succumbing to the pounding in his head. His heart was beating so violently he had to make an effort to calm it down. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he wiped it away with a bandaged hand.

Dax did not budge. His concerned eyes darted between Kirk's face and the heart monitor.

"I'm okay," Kirk said through clenched teeth, if only to get the Doctor to leave him alone for a moment.

"I'll be the judge of that," Dax muttered.

It took a couple of minutes before Kirk was himself satisfied that his heart had handled it, but his relief was tempered by the all-too familiar feeling of hopelessness over his debilitated body. Dax too seemed content, and to Kirk's relief, he didn't ask what had just happened.

"I thought," the Doctor said cautiously instead, "that before you meet the crew, we might work on your right hand."

Kirk shuddered. He looked at his hand as if the bandages were hiding something sinister that had attached itself to his body.

"We're limited here," Dax went on, "but at least I can give you a working thumb, index finger and middle finger. It'll allow you to manipulate things and to rest on a crutch, once you're able to."

Kirk nodded, distracted by his thoughts. He remembered the sight of Grale's foot, that block of black, peeling flesh. He remembered McCoy's dire warnings about frostbite.

And that's what happened, he told himself, hard. It happened to me.

He remembered the slide down the crevasse, losing his mitten, the stinging pain that had dulled incredibly fast to a throbbing. Then the nothingness of numb flesh.

And so I lost it. It's lost.

Up until now his worries had been for his breathing and his heart, and his precarious mental state. The state of his hands had been a real nuisance that required Dax to do everything for him, and as such they had rendered his feelings of helplessness more acute. But somehow his brain had kept the issue in the background. Even when Dax had changed the dressings, his mind had bid him to look away.

Now the fatalism he had fought so diligently among his crew on the Audubon and in his rescue team, and even in himself, broke upon him and he almost panicked.

God, what am I to do without hands!

To pull himself away from the abyss he thrust his right hand at Dax, like a hasty offering.

"Show me. I need to see it," he said urgently.

Dax nodded and gingerly removed the bandage. Kirk stared when the last of it was unwound.

Not like in the dream. Not recognizable either, or particularly pleasing, but clean… uncontaminated. The thumb was shorn off at the root, but of the other fingers the knuckles and small stumps remained. He looked closely while flexing the muscles. His hand was stiff, but everything seemed to work.

He could almost feel his fingers, his fingertips… They felt cold.

"As you can see, though you lost the fingers, I did manage to save the hand. Of the fingers enough remains that your Federation doctors can graft on new bone and on that regenerate nerves, muscles, flesh and skin. No one, not even you, will ever notice. Like I said, I can't do that, but I have some prostheses. They don't look natural, not by a long shot, and you won't have the dexterity you're used to, but you'll find them serviceable enough."

"How long will it take?"

"I can set them right now. It's not a pleasant surgery, though," Dax said, "and the first twelve hours are pretty painful as it's best to go without local anesthetic. It's in fact the pain that will make your brain take control while the prosthetic nerve-endings connect to your own severed nerves. Are you sure you're up for that?"

Grimacing, Kirk nodded.

"Let's do it, Doc," he said.

"Good," said Dax, readying his instruments. "If we work hard at it, then after 48 hours you'll have the sensation and motor control to pick up your pen again."