McCoy stretched his neck as he leant back in the chair. He always liked the first few days of an extended mission - Kirk didn't get them into any pointless scraps, no part of the ship was exploding and he could delegate any of the injuries accumulated to any number of junior doctors. It meant that he could actually pretend to stay on top of his paperwork to begin with, could actually have a look at the new equipment that Starfleet was always throwing his way.
The Sick-Bay was his home, and it was clean, and it was uncluttered, and there were no irritating green-blooded hobgoblins to pester him about logic.
"Dr McCoy."
"Go away." How the hell did thinking about Spock make him appear? McCoy gritted his teeth and spun himself around in his chair. "You aren't bleeding and you're still conscious, therefore, I do not care." McCoy could feel the eyes remain on him and slowly spun back around in his chair, sighing dramatically and waving for Spock to continue.
"We seem to be approaching a nebula rife with plasma storms. The Captain wishes you to research any potential medical issues we may encounter," Spock said calmly, his hands still folded behind his back. "He requested that the reports be on his desk within the hour."
McCoy raised an eyebrow at Spock.
"And he sent you here to tell me this, instead of just using the comms, because…?" McCoy stood and moved over to Spock. Spock raised an eyebrow in retaliation, tilting his head slightly.
"The Captain was under the impression that you would simply ignore him," Spock held his gaze. "I do not understand why he would suspect such a thing, but I am always happy to comply with his wishes." Spock did not wait for a response before turning heel and stalking out of the Sick-Bay, inclining his head politely to Cat as he passed. She responded in kind, but did not stand to attention as the junior doctor next to her did. She waited until the doors closed behind Spock to turn to said junior doctor and tease her about practically straining something.
"Dr Pike." McCoy's call cut through her gentle ribbing of the round doctor. Cat rolled her head to look at him in a manner reminiscent of a stroppy teenager and acknowledged his call with a tight smile that did not reach her eyes. McCoy leant against the door frame to his office, folding his arms as he spoke. "What do you know about plasma storms?"
"Plenty," Cat smiled, picking up a PADD from the side and toying with it. She scrolled through it for a moment or two until it became clear that she wasn't going to add anything to her sentence.
"Care to share with the group?"
"Not really," Cat smiled. She handed the PADD to McCoy and beamed. "I'm not the one who has homework to do. I don't write reports, I read them." McCoy took the PADD without thinking then looked down at it, and back up at Cat. She rolled her eyes and tapped the screen, pointing to the title of the article she'd pulled up. Negative Effects of Plasma Storms on individuals inside a Constitution Class Starship.
"This is a dissertation," McCoy frowned. Cat beamed at him.
"Yeah, but I tested the hypothesises and realities behind the argument in a bunch of different holographic simulations. The author is correct," Cat said, twirling away from him. "And as this is a constitution class starship, I would have thought you'd appreciate not having to hunt for your information."
"It's an undergraduate's dissertation," McCoy repeated, looking at Cat incredulously. She rolled her eyes at him and pushed the PADD further into his chest.
"And it is right." She emphasised the final word, taking a step towards him as she said it. "Now, you can waste half an hour hunting for different articles, but I promise you that this author has covered all of the details you might want to know, because I checked it last Easter because I was bored to death stuck behind my desk."
McCoy read the article.
Cat was right. It had every scrap of information he could possibly have wanted, and all he had to do to form his report was either copy and paste or bullet point it. He went with bullet points and summaries, after all, Kirk stopped paying attention to medical drivel after about ten seconds. He didn't even pay attention when the medical drivel was directly related to him - the amount of times that McCoy had to repeat himself, telling Kirk what he really ought not to do, only to have Kirk do the thing and end up back in Sick-Bay ten minutes later, was ridiculous.
McCoy was even kind enough to include a 'Kirk version' of the report:
'So long as no one is pregnant, and there are no coherent tetrion beams or major plasma storms that could mess with the ship's systems, we'll all be fine. Someone might get a rash for a day or two.'
McCoy still sent Cat to the Bridge, working on the basis that if anything did happen to them in the nebula, it was better for the two most senior doctors to be in different places - spreading out their ability to help get the ship back up and running. It made sense for the CMO to stay in the Sick-Bay, as that was where everyone would migrate, but the Bridge was surprisingly vulnerable. People always seemed to be thrown about and injured up there, so there really was no choice as to where else McCoy would send his newly gained mini-me.
He resented the acquisition of a mini-me a little. He couldn't help but feel like someone, somewhere, was trying to tell him that he couldn't do his job without a babysitter. Perhaps that was the main reason why he sent Cat to the Bridge instead of going himself - trying to treat Kirk normally was a nightmare. Trying to treat Kirk in the middle of the ship malfunctioning was even more impossible.
Kirk glanced at the door as it beeped, alerting the Bridge to someone lurking in the doorway. Cat grinned at him, raising an eyebrow questioningly. She was a conundrum - earlier she'd been acting like a coy young ensign, intimidated by the Captain, and yet, here she was, waiting to be allowed on the Bridge but not quite asking. As though she didn't need the permission, but still felt like playing into the role somewhat.
"Can we help you, Dr Pike?" Kirk asked, turning his attention back to the screen. Cat took that as permission to enter the Bridge and strode towards him.
"McCoy believed it prudent to separate the senior doctors in case of a plasma storm - I believe he sent the report?" She said, folding her hands together behind her back. Kirk frowned then nodded at her.
"He mentioned something about rashes," Kirk said slowly. Cat visibly resisted the urge to roll her eyes and pulled her hands apart. She grabbed them once more in front of her, physically restraining their movement. Kirk frowned. "Did Bones really use the word prudent?"
"I'm paraphrasing."
"Don't - what did he actually say?" Kirk sat up slightly in his chair, turning to look at Cat more fully. Her lip twitched, the smothering of a smile a fraction too late.
"I believe he said 'I don't need an f-ing babysitter, go deal with the actual toddler on board'," Cat grinned as she heard Uhura smother a laugh behind her, swiftly turning it into a coughing fit. "I assumed the toddler was you."
Kirk turned back to the screen, and slouched down slightly in his chair. Cat bit back her laugh as he pouted, fulfilling the characterisation by McCoy only five minutes earlier. She was going to like it on board this ship - she'd been here all of two days, and already there was tension between the three people she'd been told were very close friends. The kind of tension that led to snarky comments and the fun kind of rule-breaking, not the kind of tension that made everyone on board the ship suddenly gain a fascination in cleaning their own quarters.
"Did you read anything else in his report other than the bit about rashes?" Cat asked, moving slightly closer to Kirk. He shook his head slightly. Cat sighed and tutted lightly. "Well, plasma storms also have a bad habit of messing with circuitry in a ship - if we get hit by one, I'd strongly recommend not touching a console on impact."
Kirk moved his arm from the arm of his chair, placing it on his knee instead.
"Captain, I am reading a coherent tetrion beam scanning us. A displacement wave is following behind it." Spock turned around, looking from his console to his captain. Cat swore under her breath, so quiet that Kirk barely heard it escape her. "I am unable to determine its origin."
"On screen."
The screen flickered from its general outlook of smatterings of stars and streaks of light as they hurried through space, hurtling towards God-knows-what, and instead showed a rushing of grey light. It seemed to be a kind of cloud, building and rushing, particles and light all blurred into one being, reaching out towards them, as though it were almost sentient.
Cat barely noticed the flurry of words that passed around her, staring at that image that crackled over the screen. It seemed to urge her towards it, dulling her senses to the red alert that flung itself up around the Bridge.
"The wave will intercept us in 12 seconds," Spock said with a calmness that did not fit the situation, and Cat was rushed back to her senses. Suddenly, noise seemed to fill her ears, movement was everywhere. She scanned the room swiftly, saw dozens of hands on consoles, dozens of points of contact between the oncoming surge of energy and the crew of the Enterprise. She swore once more as Sulu informed them that they couldn't go to warp - not until they cleared the plasma field at least.
"Brace for impact," Kirk demanded, his hand wrapping around the arm of his chair. The arm that was coated in small buttons, a miniature console.
The displacement wave hurried towards them, filling the whole screen as Cat rushed towards Kirk, snatching his hand off the console as the ship erupted around her.
People were flung across the Bridge, bodies colliding with hard metal.
Spock somehow managed to look mostly unfazed by the collision, straightening himself immediately and returning to his station, assessing the damage. Kirk pushed himself back up, still somehow in his chair, but flung to the side, his ribs aching from the impact against its metal arms.
Cat picked herself up, groaning lightly, and pushed the hair back out of her face. She felt her hand come away slightly sticky, and looked down at it, surprised to find it coated with slick blood. She lifted her hand in front of her eyes, focusing on it carefully. She stayed there for a heartbeat, then picked herself up, snatching up the medical tricorder that flung itself towards her when the beam collided with them. She scanned the room quickly, glad to see Kirk on his feet and assessing damage.
The red shirt by Cat was dead. She didn't need a tricorder to know that. She moved past his limp figure, and promised to grieve for him later, promised to feel something for this stranger later. But for now, she needed to make sure that everyone - everyone still living - on the Bridge was fine. Or if not fine, treatable and treated.
Gas sprayed down from the broken pipe on the ceiling, a spark nearly colliding with Cat's head as she pressed two fingers against the yellow-shirted man's neck. The pulse against her fingers sent a sigh of relief out into the Bridge, and she fumbled for her equipment, the young man rousing himself as she did so.
"Dr Pike, how's Chekov?" Kirk asked, breaking off from his ordering of the Bridge crew. Cat peered into the young man's eyes, flashing a small light into them as she did so.
"He'll live, but he is not fit for any kind of duty," She said, words hurrying out of her. She pulled Chekov upright, supporting him with one arm. He swayed slightly, but then supported himself. She steadied him for a moment longer, then pushed him lightly, demanding he go rest - not Sick-Bay. He took two steps, and then she caught his elbow, walking with him to the nearest spot she could find for him to sit. They vanished from the Bridge, the doors slowly closing behind them.
"Captain, there's something out there."
Kirk didn't know who had spoken, didn't really care who. The screen flickered to life at his request, and slowly a pixelated image appeared. It was a ship unlike any Kirk had seen before, a sprawling complex of metal limbs and a pulsing white light that shot towards some distant unknown.
"If these readings are correct, we are over 70,000 light years from where we were, Captain," Spock reported, his fingers deftly pressing on the screen of his console. He glanced at Kirk, holding the concerned gaze that was shot his way with his typical Vulcan calm. "We're on the far side of the galaxy."
Cat hurried away from the Bridge, having treated everyone treatable as best she could, having left Chekov sitting in a darkened room, a bandage pressed to his head. She was back in Sick-Bay in a matter of minutes, having passed a variety of different injuries along the way, scanning them swiftly and dealing only with the most urgent. The blood on her forehead dripping into her eyes more than once, and she had to keep sweeping it away in order to see clearly.
She limped along the final corridor, propping up a security officer with one arm around his waist, the ache in her own limbs protesting as she moved. He swayed dangerously close to walls and exposed circuitry, but she guided him to Sick-Bay, only to find it crammed full of individuals.
"McCoy!" She called over the din. He glanced at her as he pushed someone down on the bed, restraining them in order to let the two semi-circular halves met over their chest. "Where are most of the injuries coming from?"
"Engineering," he shouted back, already tapping away on the black screen that restrained the injured crew member. "Mostly burns and bruises."
Cat nodded curtly. She quickly scanned a handful of people on her way out, dismissing them with a quick:
"You'll be fine - go to your quarters and wait there. I will come round once we've treated the worst injuries."
Only two tried to argue with her. They were met with the full force of Cat's authority as she commanded them, pulling them away from the wall they leant on, then abandoning them as she hurried to Engineering.
Chaos reigned.
She heard the pain before she saw it. Dozens of people lay dead and dying by consoles, dozens more writhed in pain, unable even to scream the agony was too great. Cat felt herself squash down the panic, a reaction she hated that she'd developed, and then dived into treatment. She made her way slowly around the department, beginning in the centre, by the warp core, and slowly spiralling out. She sent people to quarters, sent others to Sick-Bay, and patched them up as best she could. Away from operational equipment, 'patching' was the best she could do. Superficial wounds were easy to treat, as were broken bones - but organ damage? She needed more than a tricorder and a handful of serums to help with that. Even her handheld device that was designed to knit bone and flesh back together wasn't a huge amount of use for someone with a punctured lung - and it was rapidly running out of charge.
Soon, she had to rely on archaic techniques to help to mitigate some of the damage - literally sewing flesh back together.
She hadn't needed to deal with this level of damage control since the Khan ship scraped apart half of California, the ship splintering apart so dramatically that her hospital hadn't just received injuries from the city, but had people beaming in from all over the state. At least then, there had been an entire hospital full of senior doctors, brimming with fully qualified, fully experienced individuals who all were trained to deal with this. So much of the Enterprise's medical department was youthful trainees who were just getting their first taste of life as doctors - and even Cat was only experiencing her first disaster in space.
"This is going to be a long five years," she muttered to herself, stepping lightly over the dead red-shirt. "Sorry," she mumbled to him, before refocusing her gaze on the next injured individual. There were always more people to treat than there were to grieve. Focus on the living. It was the only way to get through this without hating herself.