Chapter Eight: The Scream
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, but I take credit or blame for everything else.
The forward viewscreen on the bridge goes dark. In the command chair, Spock steeples his fingers and stares silently into the middle distance.
Around him, McCoy hears the crew quietly checking their monitors and doing their jobs, but the tension is palpable. With a sudden motion, Spock rises and moves toward the communication console.
"Lieutenant," he says, looking intently into Uhura's upturned face, "I need you to assemble all senior medical and engineering staff in the weapons bay."
Uhura's face reflects the surprise McCoy feels, but she doesn't question the odd orders.
"Alright," she says, turning to her display. Spock steps back towards the command chair where McCoy is standing.
"Dr. McCoy, earlier you inadvertently activated a torpedo. Do you think you can replicate the process?"
For a split second McCoy is at a loss for words. Then he hears himself bluster, "Dammit, man, I'm a doctor, not a torpedo technician!"
"The fact that you are a doctor is precisely why I need you to listen very carefully."
Leonard McCoy struggles to rein in what at some level he knows is his knee-jerk annoyance with Spock. Yes, the man is brilliant, but he's also so damned irritating that McCoy often hears himself replying before his mind has time to catch up. He's not proud of that, but there it is.
Normally reserved to the point of seeming frosty, the Vulcan first officer leans so closely into McCoy's personal space that the doctor flinches.
"As you undoubtedly heard," Spock says, flicking his eyes quickly to the forward viewscreen, "Khan is not trustworthy. The captain and Mr. Scott are in grave danger."
McCoy opens his mouth to reply but Spock hurries on.
"As are we. Once Khan and the boarding party have neutralized the threat of Admiral Marcus, he will attempt to recover his crew. I propose that we assist him."
McCoy's face flushes.
"Are you out of your mind! His crew are like him, Spock, a bunch of megalomaniacs! Augments who believe they are stronger, better, smarter than the rest of us. And you know why they believe that? Because they are! And more violent, dangerous, despotic—"
"Those facts are not in question, Doctor—"
"Then the last thing we need to do is hand them over to him! Imagine what will happen when he wakes them up. Universal Armageddon!"
From her comm station, Lieutenant Uhura calls out.
"Commander, I've alerted the engineering crew to report to the weapons bay, but the intercom connection to the medical hub on deck seven is down. I can't get in touch with the medical staff there."
"Lieutenant Hannity," Spock says. McCoy sees Hannity turn with a quizzical look from her long-distance scanner. Something indefinable passes between Spock and Uhura—a look given and received, and with it a message. Standing up, Uhura directs her comments to Hannity.
"Take over here. I'll go to deck seven and alert the lab personnel."
Without a backward glance she heads into the turbolift as Hannity replaces her at her station.
"Time is at a premium, Doctor," Spock says to head McCoy off. "You will proceed to the weapons bay to explain to the engineering crew what you did that armed the torpedo."
Despite Spock's caution about time, McCoy lifts a hand to interrupt him. Spock narrows his eyes and glares in obvious annoyance; McCoy lowers his hand and takes a breath instead of saying anything.
So much for that myth about emotionless Vulcans.
"It should then be a simple matter for the engineers to set a timing device for detonation," Spock says. McCoy's hackles go up at once.
"I can't believe you, Spock! I know they are Augments, but they are still human beings. You're just going to blow them all up!"
Spock knits his brows together and the corners of his mouth turn down a fraction.
He's irritated? Well, he should be!
"Doctor, moments ago you said the Augments were too dangerous to wake, yet now you argue—"
"I know what I said! It doesn't change the fact that killing Khan's people is immoral."
"I concur," Spock says, and McCoy does a double take.
"You do? Then what—"
"Once engineering has control of the detonation process, your medical staff will remove the cryotubes carrying Khan's people. Store them in sickbay, but leave the torpedoes in the weapons bay."
Suddenly McCoy understands and a slow smile crosses his face.
"You sneaky bastard," he says appreciatively. "When he comes for his people—"
"I will give them to him," Spock says, finishing his sentence.
X X X
Nyota waits until the last group of medical personnel from deck seven enter the turbolift before she joins them. When the doors open onto the weapons bay and they exit, she stays in the lift, intending to take it to the bridge. Instead, Dr. McCoy catches a glimpse of her and calls out.
"You in a hurry?" he says, and she slips out of the lift into the cavernous weapons bay.
"What do you need?" she says, but the doctor rushes ahead without answering.
The weapons bay isn't a place Nyota visits often. As large as an exercise gym, it is dominated by a huge robotic arm that slides along a track in the ceiling. Along one wall of the bay are photon torpedoes held apart by metal stanchions. The opposite wall is part of the outer hull and is punctuated by torpedoes already loaded in their tubes.
Right now a group of engineers are gathered around a torpedo resting on a pallet. As McCoy comes up, one of them—Lt. Shera, a Deltan woman Nyota knows from poker nights at the Academy—looks up and hands him a PADD.
"We're still having trouble," she says, shaking her head. "As soon as we try to disarm the torpedo, the cryotubes power down. When we try to shift the power source, the cryotubes ignore the feed. It's like they refuse to even talk to our systems."
"That's why I need you," McCoy says, shoving the PADD at Nyota.
With a start, she says, "I'm not an engineer!"
"You heard the lieutenant," he says. "These torpedoes are telling the cryotubes to turn off. And then the cryotubes aren't speaking to the Enterprise. I need to you help them communicate."
"Machine language doesn't work like that of sentient beings!" Nyota says, genuinely flustered.
Without missing a beat, McCoy says, "Machine languages were all invented by sentient beings. And the torpedoes have an encryption key that's keeping us from being able to access their programming. I'm betting Khan wrote it and put it in place."
"But—"
"And I'm betting you know enough about translating one language into another to help these engineers figure out how to get these two systems to start talking to each other."
"But—"
"At least take a look at it," McCoy says, tapping his finger on the PADD in her hands. His eyes drill into hers until she reluctantly nods.
Glancing at the diagrams, she sees immediately why McCoy thought she might be able to help. Rather than looking like typical encryption programming, it is an old style substitution cipher, written in what looks like a vaguely familiar Earth language. A Cyrillic alphabet, perhaps? Toggling the zoom switch, Nyota zeroes in on the script.
Not Cyrillic but a pastiche of the Arabic alphabet and something fanciful and spiderlike. Something with a whiff of unreality, as if a fiction writer had made it up.
Could it be—elvish?
All around her the engineers and medics are buzzing like bees, but Nyota tunes them out. Wracking her brain, she tries to remember everything she can about the languages created by fiction writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Long before Zefram Cochrane's first contact with Vulcans, fiction writers had imagined a powerful race of creatures with pointed ears and more-than-human strength. Unlike real Vulcans, however, these were fictional elves. In some novels their elvish languages were described in loving and elaborate detail, something Nyota had marveled over as a young girl.
Surely Khan wouldn't—
With a flick of her thumb, Nyota calls up a copy of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. There in the index is a description of Sindarin, one of the elvish languages. Scrolling through the lexicon, she looks for a match with the encrypted code.
Yes! She can make out the word that means immortal. The code is definitely written in elvish Sindarin. Now if she can sort out what it means.
Nyota begins tapping in a decoding algorithm but the PADD is slower than a direct link to the ship's computer. She needs to get to an access point.
At the engineering console, Lt. Shera and two redshirted engineers are huddled over a monitor.
"I may have something for you," Nyota says, and all three swivel in her direction. "I think this is the kind of code people used several hundred years ago. It replaces normal programming language with this."
She holds out the PADD and places her finger on the elvish transcription.
"What is it?" Lt. Shera asks, and Nyota shrugs.
"I think this is what the programming code looks like when elves write it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Never mind," Nyota says. "Help me run it through the ship's computer."
Her hunch is right. Less than a minute later, she hands Lt. Shera the encryption key, and a minute after that, she hears one of the medics say, "Got it! The cryotube's still up and running."
Suddenly the room is a hive of buzzing activity again. Engineers kneel before the torpedoes inputting the deactivation codes into the control panels, releasing the seals and exposing the cryotubes inside.
Other engineers tug the cryotubes free, placing them on a moveable pallet for easy transport to sickbay. The medical staff attach power packs to each one and check to make sure the temperatures inside the tubes do not fluctuate.
Once the torpedoes are emptied, they are resealed and their firing sequence reset.
Nyota stays long enough to be able to report each step in detail, and then she heads to the turbolift.
"Oh, no," McCoy says, intercepting her. "You aren't thinking about leaving, are you? We have 72 of these things to deal with. We can use you."
Hesitating for a moment, Nyota looks around at the frantic pace.
Taking a breath, she says, "Tell me what you want me to do."
"Come with me to sickbay. We need to make sure we get these tubes stored safely."
Taking her elbow, he shepherds her into the turbolift for the short ride to sickbay. Already it is almost full of cryotubes, looking like eerie sarcophaguses lying on the biobeds and on the floor.
"Go down this row," McCoy says, waving her forward, "and make sure each one is still operational. I don't want to accidentally defrost anyone."
She's halfway down the row when the ship gives a sudden lurch. Another power failure? Possible, after all the fire they took from Admiral Marcus' ship.
Again the ship shakes, this time so hard that the cryotube closest to her visibly rocks back and forth. Then a series of jerks—the deck wobbling beneath her feet.
Spock's voice comes over the intercom.
"All decks, brace for imminent proximity detonation."
This time the ship rocks so hard that Nyota is slammed to the deck, one banged knee bringing stars before her eyes. Making her way shakily to her feet, Nyota tenses, waiting for another sudden motion. Nothing. Whatever was shaking the ship has stopped.
The door to sickbay whooshes open and Captain Kirk stumbles in, his right arm supporting Dr. Marcus. Bringing up the rear is Scotty. All three look bruised and disheveled.
Hurrying to Dr. Marcus, Nyota reaches out to keep her from toppling over and leads her to the nearest empty bed.
"I'm okay," Dr. Marcus says, wincing. She's obviously not okay, but Nyota doesn't have time to spare. She has to get back to the bridge.
First, though, she finishes checking the row of cryotubes before heading to the door. Before she gets there, her stomach drops as the artificial gravity gives way and the ship starts to roll. The warning klaxons begin to sound.
"Emergency lockdown!" McCoy yells. "Strap yourself in!"
Nyota reaches for the nearest safety harness, a wide tether attached to a med console. With a sickening yaw, the ship twists and turns, jars and boxes tumbling from shelves. Someone screams in pain.
Her heart hammering in her throat, Nyota struggles to slide into the safety harness. She has one arm in when the ship begins another roll to the side. Hanging on to the straps, she feels her body lifting from the deck as the ship tumbles.
When it rocks back to the other side, she lands hard on the deck. Slipping her other arm into the harness, she presses the catch closed. Only then can she get her breath.
The ship is obviously badly damaged if the stabilizers are inoperative. Next to life support, the ship's stabilizers have priority over every other system. Even life support seems iffy, the lights flickering wildly and the temperature starting to rise.
Beating back her panic, Nyota tries to imagine what is happening on the bridge. Spock is there, of course, and Sulu and Ensign Darwin at the helm. She feels a wave of dismay that she is here in sickbay instead of at her post.
Closing her eyes, she reaches into her mind for any echo of Spock that she can find there—an artifact of the times they have melded. Sometimes when she least expects it she feels his presence, almost as if he is looking over her shoulder, or she feels a rush of warmth on her face, her hands, as if he is physically close.
"Your imagination," he assured her when she asked him about it once, but she had the unmistakable conviction that he wasn't sharing all of the truth with her.
The ship rolls and shudders. The klaxons hurt her ears, and now she catches a faint whiff of smoke.
We're going to die.
For the second time in one day she knows this as sure as she knows anything.
An image streaks across her vision like something both real and imagined—the Earth spiraling up through a blanket of clouds.
And then she knows. This is what Spock sees on the viewscreen. The Enterprise is falling out of the sky.
All at once the flickering lights steady and hum to life. The ship gives one final shake like a dog after a bath and then rights itself. Nyota's stomach stops reeling and she knows that the artificial gravity has kicked back in. For a moment she doesn't move, waiting to make sure that the reprieve isn't temporary.
In the distance someone lets out a yell of relief.
With a tug, Nyota unhooks the safety harness and pulls her arms loose. She stands and waits for a moment to regain her balance before heading to the door. This time no one stops her and she makes her way to the nearest Jeffries tube, not bothering to try the lift. The bridge is only one deck away but her banged up knee slows her progress up the ladder.
At last, however, she climbs out. All around in the corridor are crew members with various injuries, some of them serious. Broken tiles and pieces of plastiform paneling litter the deck.
Anxiety shortens her breath and makes running harder, but she pushes herself forward toward the bridge. At last the door looms up and she reaches out to it. As she does, it opens and there's a blur of blue and black as Spock runs past her, his hand barely brushing her own.
Relief that she is not badly injured, that she has made her way back to the bridge—she feels that through his touch.
And relief that the warp core is functioning again, that the ship isn't going to burn up in free fall while reentering Earth's atmosphere—she knows at once that this had been, in fact, a very real possibility.
But overlaying his relief about the ship, over the intense affection and longing that is a constant underpinning of his feelings for her, over the ghost of grief that he has carried around since losing his planet and his mother—over everything else, Nyota feels the bright, sharp edge of his fear.
"Where—" she starts to say, but Sulu answers her before she can finish.
"Engineering," he says. "I think it's the captain."
Nyota tries to take a step toward her station but her feet are too heavy to lift, as if she is nailed to the floor. Placing her hand over her heart, she feels it beating an alien tango.
From the comm station Hannity says, "Are you alright? Uhura?"
She's not alright. Not at all. She stands immobile by the door, her face flushed, her eyes swimming with unshed tears.
Tears that are not just hers.
Spock! she calls out silently. There it is again, the conviction that she sees what he sees, knows what he knows, as if in one corner of her mind he is always there, like a dim light hidden at the end of a corridor.
And more than that—she knows what she has never known before, that part of her is tucked away in his mind, rarely acknowledged, like a keel on a sailboat, somehow helping him stay upright.
"I—" she says, startling herself. Hannity and Sulu turn to look. "I, I have to—"
"Go," Sulu says, and Hannity nods.
In two steps she is through the bridge door and pelting back down the corridor. This time she sees far more than before—looking through Spock's eyes? As she passes crew members wrestling to repair broken access panels and assist the wounded to the nearest medical bay, she hears a steady, persistent tally in her head: 2.7 hours to replace the main power coupling on deck four; the hull breach on the starboard bow will require a month in Space Dock; 17 crew are unaccounted for; the air exchanger is working at 43% efficiency.
This is how Spock sees the world, with a layer of complexity that would distract most humans.
Turning a corner, Nyota spies the opening door of an arriving turbolift. She bolts inside and presses the button to the engineering deck.
Her heart is still hammering so hard that she feels lightheaded, almost dizzy.
Don't lose control now, she tells herself. Tells them both.
Yet despite her determination, she feels a rising well of shared sorrow. Closing her eyes, she is flooded with images of dusty red rocks swirling beneath her feet as if she is seeing everything from Spock's point of view—Amanda Grayson's keening cry pitched above the roar of the destruction—
Another scene. A sensation of falling, a river of steaming lava flowing around a rocky outcrop where she is suddenly on her back, skittering to the edge—the realization that she is beyond recovery, that the mission will be compromised if she doesn't ignite the cold fusion device she and Scotty have designed to stop the supervolcano from erupting—the sadness when she picks up the control and sets the timer, and the choice to set aside that sadness and wait for the inevitable—
And yet another image—this one inside the K'Normian shuttle, crouched low inside to keep the Klingons from spotting her and the captain as they wait—
"You will incur the wrath of Lieutenant Uhura as well," she hears herself say, her words masking the very real terror she feels as she is forced to watch the brave young woman outside—
Opening her eyes, she is relieved to see the turbolift walls around her. Her face is wet and she stifles a sob.
The turbolift door hisses open and she looks out into engineering. At the other end of the room she sees Scotty in a work coverall. Behind him she can barely make out Spock kneeling before the warp containment door.
Already she is too late.
The images of loss and destruction, from Vulcan to the Enterprise in shambles, crowd her mind as she runs forward.
And now joining them is the image of Jim Kirk, his mottled face staring into nothingness.
It can't be. It can't be.
But even as she says this, even as she wishes this, her anguish overwhelms her.
Jim Kirk, who annoyed the hell out of her at the Academy, who played fast and loose with regulations, who lost his ship because he saved Spock—
She bumps into Scotty's shoulder and he reaches around and encircles her with his arm. She hides her face in his chest but feels her mouth opening, ready to shout out in grief.
But Spock beats her to it—his cry of anguish and fury so unhinged, so unmoored and uncontained that the hum and whir and staccato beats of the engines fade into the background.
A/N: Two apologies are in order. First, I am sorry for the tardiness of the update. The last chapters will be swifter in coming. And secondly, I apologize for showing bits of actual scenes. When I wrote the missing parts without at least a little bit of the scene as it appears in the movie, it was difficult to follow. I hope the slight repeat is an acceptable compromise.
Thanks for continuing to read and review. The movie has left my local Cineplex but is still pulling in viewers in the large city nearby. If you haven't seen it more than once, it holds up well on a second view (or third, or * cough * more).