Chapter Two: Change of Plans
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters nor make any profit from writing about them. These missing scenes are from my imagination only and are my original creations.
When Jim Kirk signals that he's beaming up to the Enterprise, Nyota says, "He's coming."
From his place in the command chair, Scotty nods.
"Aye, he'll be wanting to give us his side of the story," he says.
What Scotty doesn't say is that Kirk will also want to meet with his senior officers in private, will want to record a message for the rest of the crew, giving them an explanation as much as a goodbye.
Or at least he should, Nyota thinks. He owes them that much.
Blinking back the threatened tears, she feels her mouth filling with the taste of ashes. Forcing herself to focus on her console in front of her, she tries to ignore the heaviness in her stomach.
As she monitors the traffic and communications between Earth and the ship, she waits for Spock to return her messages, but since he beamed down this morning, she's heard nothing from him. His message queue hasn't been accessed either.
At one time she would have said that being incommunicado was unlike him. Lately she isn't sure.
Sitting at Spock's station is Lieutenant Hannity, a dark-haired woman a few years older than Nyota. Something about Hannity's movements—her hand going suddenly to the comm link in her ear, her other arm thrown out to her side—catches Nyota's attention.
"There's been an attack on a Starfleet facility!" Hannity says, her voice garbled with emotion. "In London! The news reports are coming in."
Sure enough, the channels dedicated to Starfleet communiqués are suddenly flooded. Frantically Nyota sorts the most pressing ones and sends the others to a priority list. Over her comm link she hears a cacophony of voices calling out damage assessments and casualty projections.
"On screen!" Scotty says, and Nyota pipes in a BBC newscast, a dazed anchorwoman standing near blackened, smoking heaps of twisted girders, ambulances blaring in the background, the police and rescue workers already sorting through the destruction. Across the bottom of the screen scroll updates about the numbers of workers found so far in the Kelvin Memorial Archives.
Mentally Nyota goes through the list of her friends working in London…Janice and K'reth at Starfleet's communication hub, Ariel at the transport center. She gives a sigh of relief that she knows no one at the Archives—and then is instantly ashamed of herself. People died. Whether or not she knows them is immaterial.
An audio message from Starfleet Headquarters comes in and Nyota cuts the feed to the BBC broadcast. It's a recording from Admiral Marcus putting everyone on high alert—but no specific orders yet.
Why hasn't Spock checked in?
Are personal comm signals getting through? The thought crosses Nyota's mind briefly as she struggles to keep up with the increased electronic traffic.
"If we have to leave in a hurry," Scotty says, waving Sulu to the captain's chair, "I want to make sure engineering's ready."
Nyota turns to remind him that Jim Kirk is somewhere aboard but Scotty is already gone.
The transporter request signal beeps, causing Nyota to jump. Finally! Surely when Spock gets back up he can sort out what must be a miscommunication in his orders and start organizing the Enterprise's ready response. Why would Starfleet transfer him to another ship, especially after Jim Kirk had already been removed from the Enterprise? It makes no sense.
On one hand, Nyota has always known that she and Spock were fortunate to be assigned the same duty posts.
On the other hand—well, she isn't ready to consider the other hand just yet.
Glancing at the transporter tagline, she's startled that it is a notice about an impending beam down instead of a beam up. She had assumed Spock was signaling from the transport station at HQ. Flicking open the screen, she sees that the request is from Jim Kirk.
He's leaving the ship without a word to the bridge crew?
"Break!" she says, standing up so swiftly that Lt. Hannity looks up in alarm. "I'll be back in 15 minutes."
Even as she presses the button to deck seven and lurches slightly as the turbolift takes off, even as she runs down the corridor to the transporter room, Nyota isn't sure what she will say to the captain.
That she's sorry, certainly. That Spock's reason for writing the report was duty and nothing more—not out of any desire to embarrass or harm Kirk. Not to cost him his command.
Words that should be coming from Spock and not her, of course. Communications officer, indeed.
She gets to the transporter room as Kirk is stepping onto the pad. Already dressed in dark civilian clothes, he carries a duffel in one hand, a suit bag in the other.
"Captain, wait!" she calls, and he looks up.
"Not the captain," he says, and for a moment she thinks she's too late, that he's going to nod to the transporter officer and leave in a swirl of light and motion.
Then he sets his duffel down and steps off the pad. In the dim light of the transporter room his expression is hard to read, his eyes set at half-mast, the set of his jaw almost angry.
Well, that's to be expected. Nyota takes a breath and swallows.
"You aren't going to address the crew?"
She tries not to sound accusatory but her voice breaks. He narrows his eyes at her.
"Not my crew, or didn't you see the orders? I'm headed back to school, apparently."
Nyota feels her face flush—partly in shock and partly out of shame for Kirk. Getting demoted would have been one thing, but being sent back to the Academy is the equivalent of being booted out of the service altogether.
"I'm—I'm sorry. I didn't—"
Kirk shrugs his shoulders.
"Look," he says, "I don't really want to talk about it. I've got lots of things to do."
She knows that's a lie, that he's dressed in a leather jacket and casual pants because he's on his way to a bar—or to the comfort of someone in a bar.
A wave of desperation and despair washes over her.
"You heard about the bombing?"
She isn't sure why she says this. To remind him that he's still part of Starfleet, no matter what he thinks right now? A hope that he will set aside his personal disappointment and rise to the aid of those who might need him?
"I heard," he says, turning and stepping back up onto the transporter pad. His face is an odd mixture of regret and rage, like someone both wanting and not wanting to react. When he speaks, his voice is not as harsh as his words would suggest. "Not my fight."
Picking his duffel back up, he purses his lips and nods to the transporter officer.
"I'm sorry," Nyota says again, but this time she means something else—that she's sorry to see him broken, sorry that he's giving up so quickly.
"Don't worry about me," he says as the telltale swirl begins. "I don't have to work with Spock anymore. You do."
She lifts her hand to call him back, to ask about Spock's reassignment. Is Kirk saying that Spock will be on the Enterprise after all? But the transporter hum fades and Jim Kirk is gone.
"You okay?" Hannity asks when she returns to the bridge, and Nyota nods, appreciating her concern.
She will be okay, one way or the other.
For the next few hours she holds herself to that mantra. No matter what happens, I will be okay. The horrifying news from London—the pictures in graphic detail, the list of casualties—keep her from any drift toward self-pity.
And then another order comes across her screen—Admiral Pike reassigned captain of USS Enterprise, effective immediately.
She barely has time to register what that means when the baffling news that Jim Kirk will be his first officer crosses the boards.
Was the threat of sending him back to the Academy just that, a threat? Or some sort of Kobayashi Maru test of character?
That means it's true, then. Spock will be transferred to the Bradbury. She feels her heart fall.
"Coded message coming through," Hannity says, and Nyota switches on the decryption program. An emergency meeting at the Daystrom Center at Starfleet Headquarters. All available ship captains and first officers to attend.
She patches the message to Sulu, still in the captain's chair, and Scotty, still in engineering, but there's nothing they need to do. Presumably Admiral Pike and Kirk have been notified and are on their way.
And Spock. Surely by now he's heard about his transfer—though Nyota sees that he has not tapped into his message queue all day. She has no doubt that he knows—that part of his silence is his unwillingness to talk to her about it.
He'll be at Daystrom, too, with his new captain.
No matter what happens, I will be okay, she thinks, but the words ring hollow.
Thirty-seven minutes until the end of her shift, and then she can escape to her quarters and think about everything that has happened today—the whiplash of so many events unfolding at once. Spock's asenoi comes to mind and she has an image of herself sitting cross-legged in front of it, the way Spock has shown her, using the flame to block out all the mental noise that is keeping her unsettled. If he isn't back soon she may try to meditate for awhile.
"Another coded message," Hannity says, and Nyota turns on the recorder with a weariness that surprises her. Giving herself a mental shake, she starts to read the message as it comes in.
Attack on Daystrom Center, Starfleet Headquarters, San Francisco. Extreme casualties. Assailant unknown.
X X X
Before he opens the door to his quarters, he knows she's here. Spock doesn't know how he knows—and he's never spoken to Nyota about it—but her physical presence is like a trip wire in his brain, alerting him when she's nearby.
Not the kind of formal bond between Vulcan couples, steady and unspoken, but something connects them.
Hesitating for a moment and slipping out of his gray jacket, he enters the room. The automatic sensor recognizes his biosignature and turns on the heat. Palming the control on the wall beside the door, he turns the heat back off—a compromise he often makes for Nyota's comfort.
The only light in the room comes from the candle guttering into a puddle inside his asenoi, the fire pot sitting securely in its tripod, but Spock can make out Nyota clearly. Lying curled up and on her side on top of the duvet on the bed, she's still in her uniform, her boots on the floor where she must have dropped them. Her hair is splayed across the pillow, her breathing slow and regular.
Stepping as softly as he can, Spock makes his way to the side of the bed and stands there, watching her sleep, tempted to wake her.
Flexing the fingers of his right hand, he feels the tug of skin glue where a medic hastily repaired the deepest of the cuts, probably gotten when he lifted Captain Bradbury from the glass-strewn floor.
He lifts his left hand and turns it palm up, remembering how chilly Admiral Pike's cheek had felt when he brushed his fingertips there.
The memory makes his heart race and he lowers his hand and steadies his breathing until he can think again without pain.
The evening had begun badly—Jim Kirk's anger evident from the moment they spoke as they entered Daystrom Center. Then came the surprising revelation that the captain had been demoted—and the equally surprising discovery that he himself had been transferred to another ship. Unwelcome news, though Spock had been quick to point out that the repercussions could have been dire. Were, in fact, surprisingly positive for Kirk, whose career had been in serious jeopardy after the Nibiru mission.
The meeting of captains and first officers in the conference room was short lived—just enough time for Admiral Marcus to apprise them of the facts about the rogue agent before Jim Kirk began to question things—Admiral Pike's face visibly falling as Kirk spoke up, unfazed, about the inconsistencies in the data, about the fact that so many Starfleet officers were here now, assembled in this room.
Spock had looked up then and caught Kirk's eye.
What was that human phrase? Sitting ducks?
"It is curious that Harrison would commandeer a jumpship with no warp capability if his intention was to escape—" Spock began, but the whir of rotors and the lights of a ship outside the window cut him off.
"Clear the room!" Kirk shouted, but it was too late.
Unarmed, Spock could do little more than pull the wounded out of the way of fire. He had no idea where Kirk went—at least not until later, when they sat with the other survivors for a debriefing and he heard his account.
All at once Spock is very cold, shivering.
With a little gasp, Nyota opens her eyes. Lifting her arm, she beckons him to her side and he complies, lying down facing away from her, feeling her arm drape over his waist, her chin tucked against his shoulder blade.
"I've been so afraid," she murmurs, and though he knows she expects some sort of response, he cannot think what he should say.
That he was afraid, too? That being under fire in the conference room was in many ways more frightening than standing in the bottom of the supervolcano—less predictable, the violence both random and purposeful?
That even while he was steadily calculating the odds of his own survival, shifting his tactics in dodging the jumpship's fire while making his way to his fallen comrades, another part of his brain was marveling at how his sense of time was skewed, how even as he was ticking off the seconds with his customary precision—knowing, for instance, that the time elapsed from the first shot until the jumpship crashed in the courtyard below was a mere 4.38 minutes—his subjective experience was quite different. Indeed, if someone had asked him, he would have said that the attack seemed interminable, lasting the better part of an hour.
He could tell her what he saw in Admiral Pike's mind—people he cared about, who cared about him—or the sorrow and anger he felt as he realized he was dying. Or worse, the confusion as his mind shut down. And worst of all, his overwhelming loneliness, Spock unable to offer him any real companionship or comfort at the end.
But the thought of telling her any of this makes him shiver again and she tightens her grasp.
"Talk to me," she whispers.
He shifts slightly to ease the ache in his hip and something hard-edged presses into his side. Sliding one hand underneath him, he fishes out a book that she was reading when she fell asleep.
It's a real book—an actual set of paper pages bound in a nubbed lavendar cover— erotic Vulcan poetry from pre-Surakian days, a gift from him more than a year ago.
I ravish you in my dreams, her favorite poem begins.
"I need to find Mr. Scott," he says abruptly, sitting up and placing the book on the bedside table. "He may be able to assist in the investigation of the wreckage."
As he stands up he senses her disappointment and sadness with him. Through whatever it is that they share—this thing that binds them—he knows he's hurting her.
"We will talk later," he says, but even as he does he knows she doesn't believe him, that she's right not to.
A/N: Thanks to everyone for the encouraging words! If you've found this story and are enjoying it—or even if you aren't—I appreciate hearing from you.
Although I've seen the movie twice now, the pace is so fast that I'm sure I'll muddle some of the details. Thanks for bearing with me!
The book of erotic Vulcan poetry figures in several other stories, too. Check my profile if you want to read stories about how Spock and Nyota came to be a couple.