This story takes place in the late movie era, between "The Final Frontier" and "The Undiscovered Country", and I imagine Doctor Christine Chapel as having rejoined the crew at that point.
Chances are you're not reading this around Christmas. Well, have fun reading nonetheless!
Season's Hauntings
The women were dead: to begin with. This is not a trivial detail, but the backbone of the account you are about to read. It is vitally important to remember that Doctor Christine Chapel and Lieutenant Saavik were dead. It is as integral a part of this story as Jacob Marley being dead is an integral part of 'A Christmas Carol'.
Mr Scott had tried in vain to beam them up, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy had witnessed his ill-fated attempt, the computer had failed to locate them. They had vanished, left our plane of existence, and there was no doubt about it that they had died in transit, met their demise in the transporter's matter stream on the 22nd December.
Christine and Saavik were dead: to begin with. Without this circumstance in mind, little of what followed their accident will make sense.
We will soon find out that 'dead' in this instant is relative. And how could it not be, in a tale of ghosts and split reality? Being dead, in that case, is just a matter of perspective.
How did it happen, you ask?
It happened quickly and without any chance to prevent it, in an unprecedented transporter accident.
Starbase 12, situated on a planet in the Gamma 400 system, Sector 25712, Alpha Quadrant, signalled ready for transport. Beaming up, of course, were Doctor Christine Chapel and Lieutenant Saavik.
The Starbase was used as a base for starships patrolling the Romulan Neutral Zone and Christine could only assume that Saavik being there had something to do with that. All the young lieutenant had told her when they had met was that she had been assigned to a secret mission concerning the Romulans and, having finished that mission, would stay on the Enterprise for a while before returning to her standard assignment.
Christine had taken a small shipment to the medical facility on Starbase 12 and had met with Saavik afterwards. They had spent a short while wandering the base together.
Saavik had assumed it was only sensible to familiarise themselves with one another if they were to spend time together on the ship during her stay. Christine, meanwhile, had been curious to get to know this young woman that she had heard so much about.
Sooner than expected, they had been ordered to beam up to the Enterprise. Christine would have liked to visit the gift shop on the base, especially as it was Christmas, but it was too late for that. The formation of an ion storm over the planet had made their timely return a priority as it would make the transport process and the ship's departure impossible a short while later. As it was, the storm was interfering with instruments already.
And so, they had taken their positions down on the planet, and the Starbase signalled to the orbiting Enterprise that they were ready to be beamed up.
The transporter room was manned by Mr Scott, and Spock and Dr McCoy were standing by to welcome the two aboard.
"Energizing," Scott said.
The familiar hum of the transporter sounded from the platform and a shimmer of blue light began to appear over two of the transporter pads. Ten seconds passed, then twenty more.
Leonard McCoy shifted his weight and waited, eyeing Spock and Scotty. This was taking too long for his liking.
Working the main controls with one hand, Scotty pressed a few additional buttons with the other. "Their signal's wavering, I'm tryin' to compensate for disruption by the ion storm."
Spock joined Scotty at the console, his fingers moving rapidly over the controls as he tried to compensate for ionic interference and the degradation of the signal. Forty long seconds passed in this fashion, Spock and Scott at the transporter controls, McCoy waiting.
On the platform, the beams of light slowly grew bigger. Leonard thought he could already see some humanoid shapes form within them. But it was taking long. Too long.
"It's taking too long," he grumbled. "How long can a person even survive in transit?"
No one answered; Spock and Scotty continued fiddling with the controls. McCoy tapped his fingers against the side of his leg.
Jim Kirk's voice rang from the intercom. "Kirk to transporter room. What's taking so long?"
"We seem to be experiencing issues with the rematerialisation process," Spock said. "We're trying to compensate."
On the platform, the beams increased in width and brightness, and this time Leonard was sure he could see the outline of two people in them. Just a moment longer and they would be safe aboard.
The beams shone even more brightly and, in the flash of a second, vanished, together with the forms in them.
"Try again," Spock said.
Mr Scott pushed a few buttons, then looked up at his superior officer and shook his head. "I cannae get a new signal on them, Mr Spock."
Doctor McCoy stared at the empty platform. "Well, where are they?"
"Not here, and not in the pattern buffer," Scotty said grimly.
Spock moved to a nearby scanner and peered into it. "And neither are their patterns floating outside," he said calmly.
Dr McCoy shot him a shocked glance, beginning to realise that he had just witnessed two people, one of them a close friend, vanish into thin air.
Scott pressed another button on the console. "Starbase, do you have them?" he asked.
His tone betrayed his pessimism. If they did not get a signal on them, it was unlikely that they were still on the base.
"Negative, Enterprise. They vanished more than a minute ago," a voice from the other end said. "I'm sorry."
Scotty looked up from the console and shrugged helplessly at the two others. Spock sighed and nodded. There was nothing the engineer could have done differently. McCoy, meanwhile, didn't have it in him to do more than look perplexed and bite his lip.
"Kirk to transporter room. Do you have them? The storm is picking up."
Spock stepped back to the transporter console and pressed the button of the intercom. "Captain, this is Spock. They did not materialise, and there is no trace either on the Starbase or outside. I recommend putting some distance between ourselves and the ion storm before instrument damage becomes more severe."
"Understood," Jim Kirk said, and they could hear him instruct the helmsman to leave orbit immediately. Talking to the three officers in the transporter room again, he asked softly, "What happened down there?"
"I assume they died in transit," Spock said, his eyes flickering to the empty platform. "Their matter stream must have taken damage while passing through the ion storm, leading to a degradation of their signal to a point at which there was nothing left for rematerialisation."
McCoy watched him closely. Not a single muscle twitched in the Vulcan's face as he recounted the accident, but he seemed unable to meet either of their looks.
"Understood," Jim said again. "Can you come up to the bridge?"
"On my way," Spock said and closed the frequency.
He turned towards the door but was held back by a hand around his wrist.
"Are we abandoning the search?" McCoy asked.
For the first time today, he thought he saw something akin to empathy in Spock's eyes as he answered, "Doctor. There is no one left to search for."
McCoy looked from Spock to Scotty who shook his head, dashing the last of the doctor's feeble hopes.
Spock freed his hand and turned to go. The doctor followed him silently.
When they entered the closest turbolift, he turned to Spock. "Anything you want to say?"
Spock raised an eyebrow. "This is highly irregular," he said.
"Highly irregular?" McCoy bristled. "That's all?"
Spock only nodded curtly.
"They just died in a transporter accident and you find it irregular?" McCoy continued. "Well, if you ask me, accidents like these are too damn regular. Face it, Spock, you're the only immortal one around here."
"And what do you expect me to do about that now, Doctor?" Spock replied icily.
McCoy fell into a bashful silence and both returned to looking at the lift door as they moved upwards.
"So, they really are gone," he said after a while, more softly this time. "Their subatomic particles scattered in an ion storm."
"Yes," Spock said. "The interference makes it impossible to scan for their remains within the storm, however."
"And you ruled out parallel universes, or whatever unthinkable scenarios tend to happen to us?" Spock raised an eyebrow at him. "Of course, you have, Spock. I might have expected that."
"They are lost, Doctor," the Vulcan said. "We cannot do anything but grieve their loss, and carry on."
And there we were at the point I made in the beginning. Christine and Saavik were dead.
They would, however, strongly disagree with this statement.
To be specific, they did disagree. Vehemently. But no one would listen or even acknowledge their presence. It had become all too clear immediately upon beaming up that to their friends, they did not exist anymore.
Because they had beamed up. They had watched the transporter room of the Enterprise materialise around them. They had witnessed the subsequent explanation of their death, long having stepped off the transporter platform unscathed. They had talked at Scotty, Leonard, and Spock, but realised that they could neither hear nor see them. With nothing better to do, they had followed McCoy and Spock into the turbolift where they had watched their little spat, pressed against the back wall of the lift.
They exited onto the bridge behind the two officers, Lieutenant Saavik looking faintly bemused, Doctor Chapel frowning at the mess they had found themselves in.
Spock moved toward the science station, and Dr McCoy stepped next to the captain's chair, while Saavik and Christine remained next to the turbolift.
Christine Chapel opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again, for the second time since arriving, resisting the temptation to ask what could be considered a stupid or unanswerable question. She was a Starfleet officer, after all, with the rank of commander.
The young Vulcan, who had stood calmly next to her, hands clasped behind her back while she watched the proceedings on the bridge, raised an eyebrow at her.
"I do not know exactly what happened, either, Doctor," she said.
"What do you mean, 'exactly'?"
"I have what you might call a guess," Saavik answered, tilting her head as she watched Spock consult his station's scanners.
"A hypothesis?"
"No, not yet," Saavik said dryly and Christine thought she saw a hint of frustration pass over her features. Just like Spock.
They were distracted by the Vulcan getting up and joining Kirk and McCoy in the centre of the bridge. While they listened to the conversation between the three of them, their attention was turned to the viewscreen where Starbase 12 slowly vanished from sight as the ship moved to a safe distance.
"Bones told me what happened down there."
Spock's face was inscrutable. "I see."
"There's nothing you could have done, Spock," McCoy grumbled, leaning on the left armrest of Jim's chair.
"It was most unfortunate," Spock said, nodding gravely.
After a moment of contemplation, and before the two could begin squabbling again, Jim looked around the bridge and said, slightly louder so that the other officers could hear him as well, "I'd say a ceremony later today would be fitting, don't you think? Nothing spectacular, just a small service for those who knew them. Christine was with us for over twenty years and God knows we owe Saavik a lot. Reserve the forward observation lounge for 1800 hours, will you, Mr Chekov?"
"Aye, sir," the navigator said, then turned around. "Sir, although the holiday decorations are already up in there?"
"Doesn't matter, Pavel," Jim said and shrugged.
Christine, meanwhile, had stepped next to Leonard, intent on resorting to more drastic measures of getting attention.
She grabbed his sleeve and tugged at it. Or, rather, she tried to. Her fingers passed right through the fabric. She was about to grip his arm when she noticed what had happened.
"Saavik," she whispered over to the young woman standing next to Spock, and then added, considerably louder, because no one could hear her anyway, "Lieutenant Saavik, look at this."
Saavik came over to her side and watched her pass a finger through Leonard's sleeve.
"I tried to touch him and this happened."
Saavik merely raised an eyebrow at her.
"I assume we should try not to touch them, then," Christine said, suddenly very glad she had only tried to grab Leonard's sleeve. "Who knows what our bodies passing through theirs could do to them."
"Indeed," Saavik murmured and took a step back to get out of the way of the officers.
When the shift ended, they followed Spock off the bridge.
"Why him?" Christine asked as they entered the lift.
Saavik raised an eyebrow.
"Why are we following him of all people?"
Saavik straightened up almost imperceptibly. "As a telepath, albeit a touch telepath, he might be able to sense our presence if we try to reach him," she said a little too quickly, addressing the back of Spock's head. "And he does not move as erratically as other people, limiting the chance of injury."
Christine shrugged as they hurried after Spock along the corridor. "And because he's a senior officer, we'll become aware of more important developments in keeping to him."
"Exactly," Saavik said curtly as they followed Spock into his quarters.
Inwardly, she sighed. She did not know if Doctor Chapel had caught on, but her motivations for following Captain Spock were not only logical. While the reasons she had cited were truthful, there was another reason she had not mentioned. Of all the people aboard, she had always felt safest with Spock. An instinctive yearning for comfort and safety had played heavily into her decision to follow him. She took a deep breath, about to forcibly stifle the emotion. But then her eyes fell on the doctor.
Christine Chapel was leaning against the support beam in the middle of Spock's cabin and watched him sort some PADDs away. She was smiling, and when Saavik saw the look in her eyes she thought that maybe their motivations were more similar than she had thought.
"You love him," she said and stepped next to the taller woman.
Christine's smile widened. "Why, yes." She turned to Saavik, her smile not quite leaving her face. "He means a lot to you, too. Doesn't he?"
Saavik averted her eyes. If Spock's cabin wasn't as dimly lit, Christine would have seen her blush slightly. And Saavik was very glad that Spock's cabin was as dimly lit.
"Don't worry," Christine said, "we'll get him back."
In what had been meant as a reassuring gesture, she reached out to touch Saavik's shoulder. The young Vulcan stiffened immediately and she dropped her hand.
"I thought we were the ones that needed to be gotten back," Saavik said with a quirk of her eyebrow, breaching what had suddenly become an awkward moment.
"A matter of perspective," Christine murmured, smirking back at her.
Their conversation was cut short by Spock swooping past them and out through the door.
Turning to follow, Christine led the way. Through the closing door, she could just see Spock turn left, and hurried to keep up with him.
The door stopped her. A moment too late, Christine realised it had not reacted to her presence, and she walked into it face-first as it slid shut, with a force that sent her stumbling backwards into Saavik.
"Are you hurt?" the Vulcan asked as Christine clutched her nose.
"The door didn't open," Christine mumbled.
When she raised her hand from her throbbing nose, it was bloody, answering Saavik's question. A small drop of blood fell to the floor, and Christine pressed the sleeve of her duty undershirt that was poking out from under her uniform against her nose, immediately colouring the light fabric red.
"So much for keeping to Spock," she grumbled. Her sleeve still pressed against her nose, she sat down in Spock's desk chair. "So, what's your hypothesis?"
"I suppose we picked up some alien substance while beaming through the storm," Saavik said, not moving from her position at the support beam. "Is your tricorder working?"
Christine had all but forgotten the small instrument slung over her shoulder. This would not have happened with the bulky instruments of the sixties, she thought.
After carefully taking her sleeve away from her nose and noticing that the bleeding had stopped, she slid up the top of the device and turned it on.
"It's working," she said with no small amount of relief.
She passed it over herself and frowned. Saavik stepped closer and Christine scanned her as well, frowning once more.
"Our cells are in a strange flux," she said. "I cannot get a clear reading."
"Can you scan for tachyons?" Saavik asked.
"A hunch?"
"A hypothesis."
Christine smirked, much to Saavik's bewilderment.
"It should be possible with some recalibration," the doctor murmured and busied herself with the tricorder. Then, she passed it over Saavik, and herself again. "There you are. Tachyons."
"Fascinating," Saavik said, looking down at the readout.
"So, what about them?" Christine asked. "They're subatomic, and they naturally exist at faster-than-light velocities."
"And they can be a by-product of a temporal distortion, cloaking devices, or transporters."
"Could they be a by-product of our transport process then?"
Saavik shook her head. "Unlikely. The concentration is too high and too dense for that. But because they can be a by-product of the transport process, the transporter likely did not detect their presence as anomalous." She looked down at Christine Chapel and tilted her head. "I suspect we are trapped in a temporal distortion, our bodies caught in constant spatiotemporal flux, caused by tachyonic contamination. It would explain the fluctuating results you got earlier."
"So that's why we can't touch people," Christine mumbled. "We're not in the same time as they are."
"Crude but accurate," Saavik said, earning herself a reproachful glance.
"And we can touch inanimate matter," Christine continued, "because...because time doesn't matter to it as much. It doesn't change or changes at such a very slow rate that the flux does not impede our ability to interact. The thing was there a second ago and will be there in a second, unchanged. Organic matter, however..." She looked up at Saavik, prompting her to help her understand.
"Organic matter already fluctuates more than inanimate matter, if only at a cellular or microscopic level. It is not constant enough through time for us to interact with it. Organic matter, including the crew of the Enterprise, and us, in our temporal flux, can't be in one point of time simultaneously. We are never on the same frequency, so to speak." Saavik paused and added, "It remains to be seen to which extent we can actually interact with inanimate matter."
Christine frowned. "That's just great," she grumbled. "We picked up some pixie dust and now we're ghosts of Christmas Past, stuck in Spock's cabin."
Saavik raised an eyebrow at the doctor's idiomatic language and decided not to ask for clarification. "We might be able to do something about the latter," she said instead.
Under Christine's quizzical look, she walked to the exit and, with some concentrated force, pried the door open.
Christine slipped through the crack, Saavik quickly followed and they watched Spock's door slide shut again, slightly uneven after their escape.
"This door needs security maintenance," Saavik said.
"Now it does," Christine murmured and followed her down the corridor.
Thanks for reading. We'll soon see how well Saavik and Christine will cope with their situation, and if there is hope for rescue.