**I do apologize for the incredible delay in continuing with this story - I shall post it chapter by chapter as I write them and I thank you all so much who have read and reviewed and emailed! Enjoy...Dia

Captain Kirk leaned back from his desk and frowned at Sulu's message. Damn it, what was Chekov pulling! He'd been out of touch through his check-in time (every two weeks) - late now by four days and of course Sulu and Uhura were wondering what the hell to do.

It was what they had feared. Sulu and Uhura were standing by - but to do what?

Walk in and pretend to join? Good luck! A Japanese man from San Francisco and a Swahili woman from the Bantu Nation were going to have fun trying to join a Russian cult.

Go in with phasers blazing and try to break Chekov and his cousin out? They could do that of course, but they could then kiss their Starfleet careers dosve-damn-danya.

Kirk was beginning to regret having okayed such a plan. Hell, you couldn't even call the thing a plan, just a cockamamie escapade some of his officers had planned for their extended leaves while Enterprise underwent whatever Scotty decided she would undergo.

If there was one thing Kirk hated it was sitting and waiting while someone else was in the middle of some action. And, all he'd been doing was sitting and waiting for a considerable time. He was not happy. Neither were the crewmembers doing their best to avoid pissing off their increasingly irritable Captain.

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"He's going to be really pissed." Sulu said. Again.

Uhura sighed, watching him pace the confines of their very luxurious prison, the Blithe Spirit. Uhura was not a person usually bored. She had too many interests to be bored, and as her mother always told her, "A bored person is a boring person."

Hikaru Sulu was bored.

And Nyota Uhura could not believe it. Sulu, who was king of the hobby-of-the-week club was driving her mad because he couldn't think of anything to occupy his time while they waited for a communication from Chekov.

Time ticked away on the little ship while Uhura distracted herself with planning a mosaic pattern for an occasional table in her quarters. She always painted some of the tiles with a design and then smashed them with a hammer.

Smashing something with a hammer would feel really swell right now.

She allowed herself to focus once more (possibly the four thousandth time) on the problem at hand. What do we do about the silent navigator?

A thought popped into her head at that moment, "What would happen if we were to make inquiries about doing some trading with the Muscovites?"

"Trading for what?"

"I don't know, I just thought of it!" She hadn't intended to reply so sharply but honestly her nerves were on edge as well - and she couldn't always summon the renowned Lt. Uhura cool when she needed it. "Sorry."

He smiled an acceptance at her and mulled over her idea in silence for a moment.

He decided to use that moment to put tea on to brew - he loved the fact that the Blithe Spirit not only had replicators, it had gadgets for making 'real' food, it wasn't logical, Spock would have said, not to regard replicated food as 'real' since its molecular structure was identical to the 'real' article.

Still, there were many humans, and Sulu and Uhura were two of them, who swore they could taste the difference. Blithe Spirit was stocked with an astonishing number of exotic teas, several of which Dr. Reed had warned were hallucinogenic.

"Oh, my God!" Uhura jumped up. "The tea!"

"The tea!" Sulu shouted back. "What will we do with it!"

Uhura sat back down. "I don't know. Something."

"Drug some people?"

"Well...we could maybe set up a trade with them. Go in with some of our more exotic Non-hallucinogenic varieties...and keep with us, on us, I mean, when we meet with them, some of the others - we might need them if we can't get Pavel out easily, I mean, hell I have no idea how we're going to get that boy out of there, even if he can walk under his own..."

Sulu saw it almost before it showed on her face. Uhura had a habit of mothering Pavel to an extent that drove the young man nearly mad - she had curtailed her behaviour in the past year as she acknowledged his maturing - but she could not stop the emotional investment she had in the welfare of the 'bridge baby'.

She did not ariticulate her fear here - she knew Sulu had the same fear - it was just that she was stopped by the phrase she had nearly said, 'walk out under his own power' and the fear he had been hurt put a stop at her sudden amusement at the fact that they, Sulu and Uhura, would have to-

"We have to test the tea." She decided to put aside her fear for now - she could do nothing about it at this very instance anyway - and turn to an action plan.

Sulu blinked at her sudden reversion to the subject of the tea and then grinned, "I've already put the kettle on!"

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"I've put the kettle on." She smiled at him - Irina always smiled - his thoughts darkened as he thought of his cousin and the smile now pasted eternally to her face, a smile of vagueness, of blind obedience, of a destination of mind, isolated and exclusive, reached and never to be forsaken.

He studied Galiulin's smile and couldn't tell the difference between this smile and her old smile. How the hell did she keep getting herself tangled up with these fake gurus? What was she looking for?

Acceptance. The word came to him in Standard in his mind. He had been concentrating on thinking in Standard, hoping to keep a barrier, a buffer, between himself and his cultic environment. If only she could have found it in herself.

His gut tightened, remembering his own judgment of her.

"You are very quiet, Brother." She smiled, again, as her small fingers quickly crocheted some lilac coloured thing in front of a lace covered window.

He smiled back at her, noting the way the afternoon sun was highlighting around her hair - like a halo. He almost laughed out loud.

She was no angel! Far from it!

It was one of the things that had drawn Pavel Chekov to her initially. Irina was wild - an unpredictable rebel - she was exciting and funny and warm and sexy and there was this terrible sadness in her sometimes that just killed him.

Irina, the old Irina, the one he knew so well not so many years ago, had cried as easily as she laughed. She was an emotional rollercoaster and she had taken him on a ride that he endured for almost two years, the longest intimate relationship of his life.

At one point he had actually thought he might marry her. Other days he thought he couldn't take another day. The latter won out, and one day, to his everlasting shame, he just left. Just went away.

He didn't tell her where he was going. Didn't even tell her he WAS going. She went to the Academy classes one day and he had requested a leave and gone to the dacha of a family friend - a friend Irina did not know.

He consoled himself with the fact that he had not only left word with a mutual friend that he was going to be gone for awhile, that he was alright but that he had left her a note, apologizing profusely but saying he just couldn't take the tremendous highs and horrendous lows of their very tumultuous relationship.

No one had ever been as close to him as Irina. No woman had ever been as cruel - as loving - as manipulative - as fun - as jealous - as kind. He had laughed harder with her, cried harder, had more fun, more pain, more tenderness and more cruelty than with anyone in his life. He thought it might kill him.

He was drawn to her, and she to him, in a way neither of them had experienced before or since. They had often talked about it - it was so strange, so strong, it was like water or breathing - only the air would turn foul and the water stagnant and had been sustaining was suddenly poisoning.

They had gone to counselling because they both understood that love was not supposed to be this way. The psychologist had told them that each of them forced the other to work out their issues in order to satisfy their partners.

Intellectually they understood what that meant - it meant Irina, being so compassionate and kind and warm, was an easy person for Pavel to trust to a certain level of intimacy. It also meant that her own insecurities would rise as they got closer to each other, would cause her to say cruel things to him, to keep him away - to which he would reply with equal cruelty to punish her for allowing him to let his guard down.

Understanding something intellectually was a whole different thing than being able to overcome the firey emotions fueling the inferno in which they felt engulfed.

The psychologist also advised them that their youth, their inexperience with serious relationships, their emotionally traumatic backgrounds, probably meant their relationship was doomed and they would do well not to over-romanticize the connection they had made. It was not the epic, once in a century love story they might have felt it to be.

It was two scared kids emotionally tormenting each other as they tried to get closer.

Lost in his thoughts, he made a soft noise.

"Are you in pain?" Irina was watching him, her fingers still for the moment.

He shook his head. She had left off asking him why he was so quiet quite some time ago and she stood now, "The kettle didn't whistle," She laughed, "Maybe someone forgot to put water in?"

He grinned at her and she left the room.

For days she had been beside him. Silent most of the time. She was like that. She didn't mind silence - it was one of the things he always liked about her.

So many women he'd been with wanted to talk, talk, talk all the time. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do? What kind of childhood did you have?

Irina had always let him talk - never demanded it of him. She had grown closer to him in other ways than talking. Sex, yes, and she taught him a few things in bed, more than a few.

He almost laughed out loud at that. She had been considerably more experienced.

He turned his mind from memories of their time together and tried to figure out how he was going to contact Uhura and Sulu....someone had been with him twenty-four hours a day since he had been hurt eight days before...but surely they could see he was alright now, he could be alone now.

Father Grigory had been to see him several times. Pavel resisted the man's charisma as best he could - but there was no denying the man had a powerful, hypnotic presence, an overwhelming warmth and compassion seemed to eminate from him and he had actually taken the pain out of his hands with his very breath it seemed.

The scientific training in his mind had been at work overtime trying to figure that one out. There had been a strong scent, like pine, when Grigory had blown on his frozen and lacerated hands, it had to be a plant of some kind, indigenous to the planet.

He would have to ask Sulu, amateur botanist, about it. Damn it, he needed to contact them before they did something stupid!

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"That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen! Do it again!" Uhura was laughing so hard tears flowed down her cheeks and she struggled to hold her ribs together, sure they would crack under the strain.

Sulu grinned and hitched his impersonation of their intrepid Captain Kirk up a notch - matching Kirk's swagger, and especially his herky, jerky speech, "Lt. Uhura....get the....Romulans... on the horn and...tell them to...go screw....themselves...I'm not giving back....my....Orion slave girl!"

Uhura screamed and slid off the sofa, "OKAY! STOP! STOP!"

Sulu stretched and yawned and picked up his notepad. "Okay, then, Rigellian Cool Mountain seems to do the trick."

Through her hysterical laughter a red alert was bleeping for attention from Uhura, she sat up, "Hey! H'com you so...so...yooouu knooww....whwhwhhw....nor...MAL...hmmmm....hmmmm....hmmmhahahhahaha."

"Because I only had half a cup and you had three. Wait...does that mean....I'm not thinkin' so normal either...just a second here...does that mean that it's...uhm...not...not...shit what word...not....potent! Not potent enough. We need something to knock somebody on ...their ass with just a...not much you know....Isn't that sensical? Uhura? Nyota? ....Wow....she can really snore...."

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