Chapter 25 - Incident, Part 1
Spock and P'Losiwst passed through the rear gate to campus closer to the first year dormitories. The low triangles from shielded lights marked the edges of the abstract open areas between the buildings. The night air hung breezeless and the fog had settled in dilute and glowing. The walkway narrowed and their footsteps echoed.
"I said it already, four times, but thank you, Spock." P'Losiwst said. "I really . . . It was really nice of you to push for me."
"I simply made a logical suggestion."
"Still. You don't expect anything in return. I'm not used to that."
They passed a rise of grass with a brass sundial upon it. The sundial and everything else carried a weighty darkness below it. Ahead, within campus proper, the pavement seams glowed, marking a grid around the benches and concrete planters and casting shadows upward.
P'Losiwst walked with her antenna bent forward, a posture Spock would have expected to be one of defeat. Perhaps it could be a kind of defeat to rely on others.
They reached the long gymnasium building on the right side. Pounding on mats and sports balls bouncing thudded between the buildings. The long row of low square windows cast an orange glare out onto the grass and walkway. Quite a few cadets congregated outside the closed double doors at each end.
The areas ahead between the dormitories and the curved glass of the connective corridors were deserted. It was well into night, well after curfew if there had been a morning muster. They had permission to return late, but Spock thought it simpler to not encounter anyone official. He looked forward to meditation and two hours of sleep before Astronomy at oh eight hundred.
Spock heard rapid movement and sensed hot psychic attention behind him. He turned. Three figures in Academy blues were approaching with dark hoods over their heads, the seams of which gave the appearance of a Gorn head beneath the fabric.
"What the?" P'Losiwst muttered.
The first figure took hold of Spock's right forearm and the third tried to grab his other. Spock flipped the first figure upside down, then had to catch him and lower him to the ground to avoid injury. The second figure leapt at Spock from shunting P'Losiwst to the side. He put an elbow hold around Spock's neck. The significant bulk of him pressed against Spock's back, pulled weightily as if he had lifted his feet to drag Spock down. Other silhouettes shifted in and out before of the gymnasium windows. Spock expected them to interfere, but as they moved farther from the light, he saw that they too were hooded.
Spock dropped violently, heaved, flipped the bulky figure over his head into the midsection of the next closest assailant. Someone new took hold of Spock's left arm. He verified that it wasn't P'Losiwst before knocking this assailant's feet out from under her. She fell on her backside with a colorful, high pitched curse. Another figure with exceptionally long legs stepped over her and came at Spock. Spock feinted one way, then committed the other and neck pinched this one and lowered her to the walkway beside the first, who was rolling to get up. He tapped her hand out from under her with his foot and she cursed again as her body smacked the pavement.
Spock stood straight. The figures hesitated approaching now. P'Losiwst was in the middle of a scuffle beside an overflowing flower planter rimmed with ivy. The scuffle quieted. All the figures wore third year Academy blues. One of them whacked another on the arm with the back of a hand and both approached. Spock felt a parallel approach of three from behind. Two more joined those in front.
Spock waited until the last moment to shift to the right, on the assumption that they'd expect him to head toward his companion. He bent the assailant behind to the right full over, lifted a thigh, pushed her body horizontally into the arms of two approaching in front. As expected, they caught their compatriot and stumbled backwards into another running forward. Spock let the other three lay hands on him so he could sense precisely where they were. He swept his right foot behind his own left leg and spun to knock down the closest on the left, fell with him to neck pinch him. Did the same to another who hadn't the sense to let go as the four of them fell, with Spock dropping his legs to drag everyone down as hard as possible.
Spock shoved the last one down fully under him as he regained his feet. Two more approached. One of them stood in the orthogonal limbed pose of an earth martial arts practice. Spock sighed aloud, waited. He caught the woman's arm out of the air, which turned her enough he could take up her knee and drop her gently to the ground on her side. She curled and scissored her legs to flip back to standing, immediately kicked out at him. Spock caught her leg, lifted it up, forcing her into a handstand, which she rolled out of away from him.
Spock heard the phaser only in the memory which played back as he lay with his face on the gritty cement. He wormed his hands across the cement to get them under his chest. His sense of balance skewed fifteen degrees. He feared he could roll away into the side of the nearby building. He shouldn't push up, shouldn't put a knee under himself to try to get to his feet. He shouldn't. Logically, he'd be stunned again if he did.
Spock pushed against the ground, pushed his weight up into the crooked, hazy, shifting world of orange glare. He didn't hear the phaser this time or feel the ground striking his chest.
Awareness returned as scattered, confusing impressions. These swept away to grayness, swept back, tumbled, refused to be organized into a coherent waking universe. There was weight on his chest, awkward weight with hard joints and highlights of warmth. Peeved anger in his head that was not his own. Voices, shifting attention, electric muscles and hyperactive excitement. Someone was moving his arm and now it was pinned down to the side of something warm. He focused on his fingers. Skin.
Spock began inwardly, methodically sorting through the invasion in his mind, impressions of wholly unfamiliar things kept flooding in, clothing, swirls of blue figures, pearl eyes, familiar but strangers, mocking laughter of no one present right then. It blanketed Spock's inner reality, clashed with the disjointed outer one. Kirk had accidentally flipped their mind touch into a meld of this depth. Starting from that, Spock set himself to sorting his mind out the same way he had then, one aspect at a time, barrier advancing behind the sorting.
"Spock?" P'Losiwst's voice and breath on his face, her view of the darkness, including some sweeping, burning infrared Spock didn't normally see. Her presence. With her voice, her view of his slack face, bare shoulders, he could sort her thoughts out cleanly from his own, separate their minds all at once, block his thoughts out from hers. The world washed clearly into his solitary mind, impressions connected together into a sensical whole.
"Spock?" This was urgently hissed out, then P'Losiwst's forehead rested on his chest. Her antenna bumped him on the chin.
Hands took hold of Spock's arms, his knees, a shin, pinched tight. Someone had his foot. The air brushed him everywhere. He was hefted into the air bearing P'Losiwst's bundled weight on his chest, her pointed knees pressing hard to his ribs. Awareness receded, came in on another wave with no time sense attached.
Someone grunted. The world swung one way, over compensated the other. Footsteps shuffled ungainly. "What do you think?" "Lawn?" Spock turned his head. Geometric concrete shapes went by in shades of darkness. He recognized the edge of the unlit plaza in his crooked, half-upside down view.
Spock wiggled his hands, adhesive tore at the hair on his arms. More hands took painful hold, slipped, re-gripped. They began to progress more regularly and the air felt cold on his back.
"Fountain!"
"Fountain?" Derisive. "They haven't earned the fountain." More uneven tugging, grunting, shuffling.
"I think the lawn. Just make sure they're secure."
Walkway sconces passed at eye level, receded. Night flowers in a planter scented the air then wafted away. The surface was dark here, no blue light emitted from between the squares of pavement.
Spock ignored the tearing hairs and skin on his arm and rocked his wrist to free it, shifting the grip of someone's wiry fingers. "Sure fountain," someone said just above him. "Give me a hand here, Thumper. He's getting loose." More hands grabbing hard, bunched up connective tissue. Spock tugged to retrieve his limbs but they merely quivered in the remnants of the stun. The pathetic restraint was absolute. Spock's heart began to gallop. He thrashed in his mind, tugged hopelessly against the many holds, couldn't find a discipline to equal the depression on his nerves or return himself to his own will against the instinct to thrash.
"Fountain!" Someone announced gleefully. Spock and P'Losiwst swung to the side and feet shuffled in a new direction.
Spock imagined the cold water, the shock to his skin and muscles, mouth and nose submerged. He heaved bodily against the clinging hands. His rubbery muscles responded sluggishly, uselessly. His heart raced more, fluttered. He didn't want to be carried anymore. He didn't want to be stunned anymore.
Spock threw open his mind, felt the hands on him, the cacophony of intentions, exhilaration, camaraderie, a righteousness of action. He smelled wet on the air, heard the water nozzle in the center of the fountain, flowing low at night, barely burbling. He clenched his eyes closed and projected his frantic emotions outward. P'Losiwst squeaked. Stumbling footsteps, slipping fingers, a weightless rush and then something unyielding struck hollow through Spock's skull from the back to the front.
P'Losiwst jerked against the tape securing her to Spock's naked body. She wriggled free just enough to grab hold of and shake Spock's arms.
"Please be all right. Please be all right. Oh, Andoris Goddess, please be all right." She looked up. "You idiots. You dropped him on his head."
"Call medical, someone," a masked figure said before ducking and stepping away.
Figures moved away to the shadows, came back unmasked. Figures in white with reflective badges and cuffs beamed in, put equipment cases down beside them there at the edge of the plaza. One dug out a safety cutter and ran it along the crooked strips of engineering tape.
Another figure beamed in. Lt. Grange turned around with a scratch of boot on cement. His eyes stopped at each face cast into reverse shadow by the medical team's worklamps. "What happened?"
P'Losiwst tugged free of the remaining strands of tape and stumbled to her feet. She picked at and ripped at a scrap on her arm. She was naked, which showed off her two primary and four secondary breasts.
"These blithering idiots . . ." She stepped up to Grange without regard to her lack of uniform, stared him down. " . . . dropped Spock on his head."
Grange leaned back from the vision before him. "You should maybe get a covering, cadet?"
P'Losiwst put her hands on her hips, tilted her head. "When I get a chance, sir."
Grange blinked. He wasn't exactly shy, but he was distracted.
One of the medics turned his head. "Lieutenant. He has to go to Med One."
Grange stepped past the vision of P'Losiwst. Spock was lying senseless on the ground with an IR blanket stuffed around him. "That bad?"
The other medic said, "He's a hybrid. We can't take him if Med One is accepting incoming."
"Move aside."
Grange stepped over Spock to stand astride him, signaled for Med One ER and only had to wait four seconds for the dissolution scan to begin.
Everyone in Med One's emergency unit moved with the same deliberate rapidness. Grange was grabbed by a bulky Tellerite on the transporter platform and forced to step aside. A backboard was unclipped from the plexi flooring of the transporter pad and raised up with Spock on it. More staff moved in in their wake, laid another board into place.
Spock's backboard was latched to a hovering gurney and four staff converged on it. The silvery blanket was pushed aside, scanners warbled, a complicated sensor strip was pressed across Spock's chest amidst the crooked strips of engineering tape.
"Pulse and respiration is within a standard deviation of Vulcanoid normal." "Who's on xeno tonight? Anyone on the floor right now?"
Spock's head tipped to the side and his eyes cracked open. Grange shuffled closer, tried to get into Spock's field of view through the movement around the gurney.
"Put him in 5C. You with him?"
"He's coming around." A strap was brought up over Spock's thighs with the blanket bunched under it.
"Lieutenant? You with him?"
Grange looked up. Nodded.
"Keep him awake. We're lucky he is. Got it? Get him talking."
The gurney was pushed out of the room into a brightly busy corridor. Grange had to trot to keep up. At a corner where they stopped to wait for traffic to clear, he leaned down. "How are you doing, Cadet?"
Spock blinked, seemed to think about the question.
"I need you to tell me aloud, Cadet. Just tell me anything." It was easy to sound obnoxiously commanding when desperation threatened.
Spock's lips moved and Grange tried to guess what he'd said.
"You're at Med One. They're going to take care of you, okay?"
They moved again, turned into a partitioned space with a solid horseshoe of equipment. The gurney was locked down to a frame and the hover disengaged. Staff donned gloves and bodily raised Spock to remove the backboard. Someone in doctor's whites with a badge that read "Wrey, NEURO" moved in beside the bed. He pulled a padd stylus out of his pocket and used it to try and straighten the clawed fingers of Spock's left hand which were curled far over at the wrist and pinned awkwardly to his chest. The fingers sprang closed again when released.
The doctor noted something into a mic at his shoulder. Grange bent close to Spock, relieved his eyes were still open.
"What happened, Cadet?"
Grange wanted to reached out to shake Spock to get him to talk, balled his fists at his sides instead and leaned closer.
"Spock. That's an order. Tell me what happened."
