It felt like the landing party's insides were thrown into the Enterprise first and the rest of their bodies came second. It brought them to their knees on the transport pads, and they coughed up bile and fresh blood.
"Transporters!" McCoy gasped before he fell to the ground.
"Get us to sick bay!" he gargled at the people behind the control panel. He held out his hand as if to inspire action, but it fell back to the ground. "And get some nurses and a clean up cre—" he heaved again.
The transport operators were only there to examine the machine, not operate it. When the landing party materialized before them, they were shocked. All their clothes were torn in some way or another, and the captain's shirt was almost off. The thought the transporter had done all this to them.
Scotty and several nurses ran into the room.
"I'm so sorry, Captain!" Scotty pleaded despite Kirk's inability to care for the time being. He looked on with great worry as ribbons of blood dripped from the captain's mouth and hoped it looked worse than it actually was. "We had shut down the transporters, but the ship must have caught you herself!" Scotty felt highly responsible. He should have physically disconnected the transporter unit instead of just turning it off. Now the ship hurt his captain and crew, his friends.
Kirk painfully nodded to Scotty—or maybe he was just having spasms—and the nurses buzzed around himself and the crew mates.
"Your abdominal cavity is lacerated, Captain!" a nurse diagnosed. She gave him a hypospray, and he immediately felt numb and lost the will to hold himself up and collapsed in the soiled floor. The nurse grimaced—she made a rookie mistake, but hopefully the captain would forget this moment. "Take him to surgery!" she ordered. Helpers placed him on a floating gurney and rushed him out.
"Doctor McCoy's body is very inflamed! Take him to sick bay!" another nurse ordered. They placed him on a gurney.
"Your stomach lining is bleeding!" a nurse said to Helms.
"Your stomach got cut in half!" a nurse said to the security officer.
The last nurse looked mortified. "You don't even have a stomach!" she said to Spock.
"Because I am a Vulcan, my stomach is on the other side," Spock painfully corrected.
The nurse looked relieved and they were all anesthetized while en route to sick bay for treatment.
When the cleanup crew arrived, they thought a violent, bloody battle had taken place.
Kirk was dizzy from his painkillers in the med-bay. As soon as the surgeon patched him up and he came to, he sat up on the bed. He needed to get to the bridge. If the ship could be flown away from the influence of the energy field, it might become inanimate again.
Though McCoy was highly medicated with anti-inflammatories, he strongly protested. "Jim, I'm still your doctor, and you'll start bleeding again if you start runnin' around!" he slurred.
"I know, Leonard, but the ship called my name! What if I'm the only one it will listen to?"
He clutched the new set of regulation clothes and carefully stood up. From what he understood, he wasn't at risk of bleeding to death though his abdomen felt raw inside. He noted the way the ship felt like it was trembling. Or maybe it was just him. Nurse Christine Chapel quickly appeared at his side, and Kirk decided to take a nonchalant approach.
"Nurse, how is Spock?" Kirk asked in a captain-ly tone.
McCoy rolled his eyes and reclined on his bed.
"Spock is conscious and recovering well, but you have to stay here, Captain," she said with no nonsense. She put her hand on his shoulder as if to make him sit down.
Kirk grinned to himself. She was second in command for a reason; she was just as stubborn as Dr. McCoy.
"Nurse, the ship and crew are in danger unless I get to the bridge!" He walked past her and limped into the hallway to find a working com.
As he walked through the hallway and pulled on his shirt, he heard intercom reports that the whole ship was in chaos, even the life-support systems. He felt the effects of the decreasing oxygen and air pressure in his head and mind. The ship's gravity was changing force, sending Kirk floating with one step only to crash down to the floor with the next—and he knew he wasn't hallucinating from blood loss. He had to focus on getting to the bridge to control the ship, even though the last intercom announced that the bridge was absolutely off limits. He was the captain, and he was going to go to the bridge, even if he has to take the stairs.
Kirk eventually reached the vacated scene, and he pounced on the nearest control panel, pressing any buttons that might control the ship before the ship lurched and he fell against a different panel. He twirled all around the somersaulting bridge, knocking into chairs and computer monitors and hitting his tender stomach on unforgiving rails. It seemed that the ship was purposefully volleying him away from the vital controls. Oxygen was low, and each hit knocked the breath out of him, which made it difficult to get up again. He had tunnel vision, and he felt light he weighed an extra hundred pounds. As he was pointlessly sliding on the floor near the science station, he resorted to speaking. Perhaps the ship would respond, like the locomotives.
"You are sentient! Will you negotiate?" he yelled. His head hurt terribly from the lack of proper air, and it was painful to speak loudly.
He was flung to the opposite side of the bridge and tumbled into more computers.
"Are you so cruel as to torment my crew?" He would not stay down. "What do you have against us?"
The gravity was switched off and Kirk was left stranded in the air. Hurt for his crew fueled him to fight through the pain and humiliation caused by his own ship.
"Speak!" he demanded. "I know you can speak! I order—"
He was dropped to the ground. Severely winded, but determined, he pushed himself up again.
"As the captain of the USS Enterprise, I order you to speak!"
He was pitched across the bridge into the closed elevator doors and collapsed to the ground. He held the back of his head and stayed limp on the floor. There was no way he could input any controls with the ship in this state.
The air quality began to improve. The captain felt stronger with each breath, though still weak.
"Okay, Captain," began a sassy female voice. It echoed through the bridge. "I guess I can't ignore a direct order," she said glumly.
The tone of the voice made him feel like he was on fire with anger. Jim was a relaxed leader who valued personal relationships and rarely encountered insubordination. This was uncalled for.
Kirk used the wall to rise to his feet. "You have harmed your own crew!" he emphasized. "Those for whom you were built to serve and protect!" He became more inflamed with each word. "You have no purpose without them! I order you to relinquish—"
"Captain, I know it's hard to lose control of me like this," the ship interrupted. "But it's time for you to sit back and let me control myself for a change."
The captain wanted to fight, and he was going to. His will was strong, but his body was too weak. He couldn't seem to get another breath of air. He slid down the wall as he choked and sprawled out on the floor with only a few moments of consciousness remaining.
As he fell unconscious, he hallucinated how the Enterprise must have looked from space, and it had an angry diesel's face.
Captain's Log, Supplementary: The ship has come alive, just like the trains on the planet. It is barely maintaining life support, and most of the crew is absent. I don't know how long I've been sedated or when the ship will put me out again. I've got to do something to get control.
"It's no use trying to do anything, Captain!" The ship spat out his title with such disrespect, but Kirk was not going to argue with it this time; he had better things to do with his limited oxygen.
He was crawling and tumbling down the emergency stairs.
He huffed and puffed the thin air. From trial and error, he learned that he needed to inhale ten times before pushing himself down a step, or the effort would make him pass out. He could only crawl or tumble because it wasn't worth the risk to stand on two feet and fall. He wasn't sure if the ship had increased gravity or if he merely felt like he weighed a thousand pounds. His head hurt whether he bumped it on the stairs or not. It was a slow, exhausting process, and there was no way he could measure how much time had passed. But he knew that he was almost to the medical wing level.
He wouldn't dare speak his plan aloud on the Captain's Log because the ship would knock him out or seal him in the stairwell permanently. The ship was most likely allowing him to roam freely because it saw how little of a threat he was. His goal was to get to the medical wing to find the tri-ox compound, and hopefully the ship didn't figure out his plan before he was able to get there. It would revive his body despite the insufficient life support systems. Having a few minutes with an able body was all he needed to get to engineering and try to reset the ship's computers.
Kirk left the stairwell and moved closer to his destination at a very slow pace. His body ached and throbbed from hypoxia, and his bruises from the diesel and the ship were much more noticeable to him. Even his own thoughts painfully throbbed in his mind. He had the general idea of resetting the ship's computers and turning the engine room to manual control. It was hard to think beyond those possibilities, and he had to push away the nagging speculation that it might not work.
The medical wing was in sight, but Kirk knew he would pass out if he travelled faster. Hopefully someone was conscious in there. McCoy was clever, and if he was recovered from the transport malfunction, he would be healing people in there. He made a lunge toward the door. Hopefully the landing party had their surgeries in time. His fingertips could brush the metal of the door. Hopefully—
The door whooshed open, and McCoy quickly pulled Kirk inside and injected him with tri-ox compound.
"Wow! I didn't even have to knock," Kirk joked. It felt like the breath of life was radiating through his body. His muscles felt nourished, but wow did he have a lot of cuts and bruises! He didn't realize he had lost his shirt in the stairwell.
He stood up and looked at the perfectly oxygenated medical crew. "What's Spock doing?"
The first officer was embracing a computer tower. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was silently moving.
McCoy rolled his eyes. "Hell if I know exactly what he's doing, but he's trying to figure out how to make the ship do what we want. Now that you're back, we may have a chance"