Chapter Nine: Beat the Clock
Disclaimer: The "missing pieces" of this story are mine. Everything else is borrowed for no profit at all.
All the way from engineering to the bridge, Nyota runs in Spock's wake, stepping around debris in the corridors and skidding on loose tiles and broken pieces of plastiform. Just as the bridge doors sense their approach and start to open, the Enterprise shudders so violently that Spock throws out one hand to right his balance and Nyota almost falls forward.
"That was close!" she hears Sulu call out. The forward viewscreen shows a blur of black and gray smoke. Sulu's hand dances over his console and the screen image changes to show the huge ship plummeting to Earth below.
In fascinated horror everyone on the bridge watches as the ship lumbers out of the sky, shearing off the old prison at Alcatraz before tilting crazily into the bay. The momentum takes the saucer section forward into several of the bayfront skyscrapers, toppling them and sending a wall of water into the crowd of retreating pedestrians.
Finally, finally, the ship comes to rest among a roiling cloud of smoke and dust, the skeletons of buildings collapsing around it.
"Search the enemy ship for signs of life," Spock says, his voice oddly raw. Sulu swivels in his direction.
"Sir, there's no way anyone could have survived that impact."
"He could."
Nodding, Sulu says, "Yes, sir. Got something. One life form. Whoa! He just jumped 30 meters!"
Sulu's facial expression echoes his tone of voice.
"Can we beam him up?"
From his position at navigation, Chekov shakes his head.
"He's moving too fast to get a lock on him. But I might be able to beam you down."
An electric current judders up Nyota's spine and she feels Spock's unspoken question. Turning, she sees his eyes searching her face.
Gone is his resolve to feel nothing, to set aside the emotions that almost overwhelmed him on the day he lost his planet, his mother, felt again when he watched Admiral Pike die. Gone is his concern that she will be angry with him for risking his life, for running into danger as a way of running from his own grief.
But gone, too, is his willingness to proceed without taking her feelings into consideration.
Not that he needs her permission or even her approval—but he does need her understanding. He isn't willing to lose that again.
Nyota?
"Go get him," she says, and without looking back, Spock dashes off the bridge.
Moving to her station, she opens a channel to sickbay.
"Dr. McCoy," she says, her voice almost a sob. "It's the captain—"
"Uhura?" McCoy says. "What's going on? Where's Jim?"
"Mr. Scott is bringing him to sickbay," she says, unwilling to speak the words that will make the captain's death real. "He's—he went into the warp containment field. They're decontaminating the area now. Scotty asked me to tell you."
She swallows hard and says, "To let you know…before you see him."
X X X
Carol Marcus winces as Dr. McCoy presses a hypospray to her knee.
"Sorry," she says, and then because he gives her a startled look, she adds, "I was raised in Hertfordshire. Old habit, apologizing for making someone uncomfortable."
"I thought I was the one making you uncomfortable," McCoy says, eyeing the gauge on the hypospray before tucking it back into his medkit.
"Yes, I know. It's just—"
With a wave of her hand, Carol exempts herself from saying more. It's too complicated to explain middle-class British sensibilities to an American without sounding like a stereotype.
Or sounding like she is rehashing her own parents' cultural missteps—her English mother's polite deference irritating her blunt American father to the point of crossness.
Just say what you mean, for God's sake, he would say, imploding a dinner conversation while Carol looked on. That's the problem with people today. No one wants to take a stand.
In the end her parents had been two people better off apart—Alexander Marcus settling in an apartment near Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, her mother accepting a post at Haileybury boarding school teaching A Level biological sciences to the Sixth Form.
When Carol was young and her father was a captain away on a starship, she spent more time in the UK than the US, but when he accepted a promotion and a desk job at headquarters, Carol moved into his apartment on North Point Street near the Presidio.
She fell in love with San Francisco at once and with Starfleet almost as quickly—the city a vibrant, diverse mishmash of Earth cultures intertwined with a large alien population, and Starfleet, if anything, even more diverse. If she had stayed in England she would have followed in her mother's footsteps as a biologist or biology teacher. Once she moved to San Francisco, Carol knew she was headed to Starfleet Academy.
She could have pursued her first love—xenobotany—in Starfleet, of course. In fact, botanists were in high demand on spacefaring vessels.
But in a funny way, her sometimes fraught relationship with her father led her in a different direction towards an expertise in weaponry. Most evenings the two of them shared duties making a meal, usually while discussing—or in her father's case, arguing about—whatever non-classified news had come across his desk that day.
"Don't let anyone fool you," Admiral Marcus said on more than one occasion. "We're going to be caught flatfooted if we don't take threat assessment seriously."
He railed against the Federation's bias for budgeting exploration over security—a utopian naïveté that would get them all killed, he said.
"We've lost our way," he told her. "A hundred years ago—two hundred—people knew how to arm themselves better than we do today. Believe me, Carol, it's going to cost us in the future."
Not that she agreed with everything her father said, but Carol had the growing conviction that helping to keep starships safe—even ones concerned primarily with exploration—was the best use of her time and talents. By her senior year at the Academy, she had narrowed her focus to torpedoes and was running an independent research project with a manufacturer in Brazil.
Then the next two years she worked in Starfleet's R & D in while she finished her graduate degree and kept an eye on her father's new prototype torpedo program—until her access was suddenly cut off, her questions unanswered, her father strangely hard to reach.
Of course now she knows why.
No time to think about it, she tells herself as all around her the Enterprise medics scramble to help crew members injured when the ship was swung around like a top in Earth's gravity well. An image of her father—Khan bent over him, his hands pressed to his skull—threatens to undo her if she lets it. Blinking back tears, she sits up and scoots to the edge of the biobed.
"Where do you think you're going?" Dr. McCoy says. Carol slips off the bed and tests her weight on her leg. So far so good. The sharp pain in her knee is reduced to a dull throb.
"You look like you could use some more help."
She starts forward to a nurse struggling to assist a wounded crew member to a chair. Behind her she hears the doctor say, "I can't argue with you about that."
For several minutes Carol keeps her focus narrowed on the problems at hand—a technician with a badly lacerated finger, an ensign burned when fire broke out in the auxiliary control room. Despite her wobbly knee she makes herself useful fetching and carrying and holding equipment for the medical personnel.
She's picking up the pieces of plaster wrappings and straightening one of the med bays when she hears the room go silent. All of the murmurs stop. No one moves.
Slowly she turns and sees four security officers, their fingers looped through the handles of a large body bag that they carefully, almost reverentially, place on the nearest biobed. Following behind like a funeral mourner is Scotty, his face flushed, his eyes stricken.
The captain.
As she watches, Dr. McCoy unzips the bag and pulls back the coverlet, exposing the captain's discolored face.
She's known Jim Kirk only a day but she feels a stinging at the back of her eyes, a pressure in her chest.
In another life she would have been dangerously attracted to him—would have been at risk of becoming part of his story, his reputation. She had known that the minute she introduced herself on the shuttle—saw his unearthly blue eyes meet hers and crinkle slightly at the corners, as if he was letting her in on a private joke.
If they had met under ordinary circumstances, if she hadn't been quaking in her boots afraid that her forged transfer was about to catch her out, she might have fallen under the spell of those eyes, that smile.
She feels a pang of remorse for tweaking him earlier—for mentioning Christine Chapel and implying that her transfer was because of him. Of course it wasn't. Carol had kept in touch with Christine since they roomed together her second year at the Academy. In her letters from the Enterprise's shakedown cruise Christine never once mentioned the captain.
His first officer, on the other hand—
"She transferred to the outer frontier to be a nurse," Carol told Kirk, not untruthfully. "She's much happier now."
Still, misleading him that way was unfair, and even her annoyance when he ogled her in the shuttle as she changed into work coveralls didn't quite make up for it. He was, she had decided then, just an immature boy.
Now she looks at his unnaturally still body and sees not a boy but a man.
Dr. McCoy lets the coverlet go and makes a noise of disgust in the back of his throat. With a jerk he sits down heavily on a lab stool and rests his forehead on his hand.
And then Carol hears it, a trilling purr, like bubbles in a straw or a noisy kitten.
McCoy starts up like someone electrified.
"Get me a cryotube, now!"
For a moment Carol is confused. Following the direction of McCoy's gaze, she sees a fuzzy tribble on the lab table, the noise clearly coming from it.
She isn't the only one confused. The medic nearest to the doctor says, "A cryotube?"
"The tribble!" McCoy says. Surely he doesn't mean that he wants to put the tribble in one of the crytotubes? Why would—
"It was dead!" McCoys shouts, throwing his hands in the air. "I injected it with some of Khan's blood. Now look!"
And all at once Carol understands what he intends.
Is it possible? She glances around at the captain. How long has he been without brain function? Three minutes? Four? Would the radiation affect the rate of decay?
"I can help," she says, realizing that she knows as much or more than most of the people in the room about the cryotubes. She moves to the cryotube where two medics are struggling with the controls.
"Here," Carol says, hitting the necessary sequence of numbers on the control pad. The cryotube unseals with a hiss and two medics pull the sliding pallet out, exposing the frozen Augment inside.
"Keep him in an induced coma!" McCoy calls across the room. "I'm going to put Kirk inside. It's our only chance of preserving his brain function."
"How much of Khan's blood do you have left?" she asks, anticipating the next step.
Picking up an empty hypospray, McCoy gives a dour look and says, "None."
Then with the flat of his palm he smacks the intercom button.
"Sickbay to Spock! Spock!"
Nothing. Not even the buzz of interference.
The medics finish sliding the captain onto the cryotube pallet and McCoy nods at Carol.
"Activate the cryogenic sequence," he says, and she keys in the initiation sequence. Almost at once the tube seals and frost forms on the small plate glass, fogging her view of the captain's face.
"McCoy to bridge," the doctor says into the intercom. "I can't reach Spock from sickbay. Listen to me. I need Khan alive. You get that sonofabitch back on the ship right now. I think he can save Kirk!"
X X X
"Can you beam someone down?"
Nyota isn't sure if she is more frightened or relieved when Chekov taps his screen and says, "I think so."
"Sulu," she says. It's not a request but a statement.
I'm going down there.
From the corner of her eye, Nyota sees Sulu open his mouth to respond, can see from the cant of his brow that he is going to turn her down.
"We don't have time to argue about this," she says, cutting him off. "You heard what Dr. McCoy said."
Every week for at least a year, Nyota had played poker in one of the Academy underground games, usually with Sulu and Leonard McCoy in the medical school dorm. It was valuable practice—not just in playing cards, but in getting a read on her adversaries. She can tell that Sulu doesn't want to let her beam down into danger, but she also knows that if she presses her point, he will relent.
"Spock must be in trouble," she says, punctuating her point by turning her palm upright, "or he would have Khan in custody by now. You have to let me go."
For a beat more Sulu waits. Then he turns to Chekov.
"Can you?"
"They must be on a transport," the young navigator says. "They are moving so fast. But, yes. I can get her there."
"Go," Sulu says, and Nyota pelts out the door and down the corridor to the transporter room.
"Phaser!" she shouts to the security officer inside the door. He hesitates only a moment before unstrapping his sidearm and handing it to her.
"I'm sending coordinates now," Chekov says over the intercom, and Lt. Doohan at the transporter controls punches them in.
"Good luck!" he calls, his voice ringing in Nyota's ears as the transporter room is replaced by the surface of the automatic garbage scow.
X X X
The lights in the hospital corridor are dimmed for the evening and most of the visitors have left by the time Carol Marcus is comfortable enough to try to fall asleep. She feels a little silly taking up a private room with nothing more than a torn ACL and broken knee cap, but the medics who triaged the wounded Enterprise crew were insistent.
It's just as well, Carol thinks ruefully. She has to climb steps to get to her apartment, something she will have trouble navigating for awhile. And although her father's apartment is at ground level on North Point Street, she knows she won't be able to face going there any time soon.
Thinking of her father brings a lump to her throat and tears spring to her eyes.
She'd managed to hold herself together earlier during a preliminary briefing—a JAG officer coming to her bedside to ask questions that sounded unreal. Things about what she knew and when she knew it—how much her father had confided in her—and why she was aboard the Enterprise when there was no record of her assignment there.
She knows she will have to answer more completely and face a reprimand about the forged transfer papers.
That worry, however, pales in contrast to her concern about Jim Kirk.
She had been in sickbay when Khan was brought in—unconscious, his face crisscrossed with cuts and bruises, his arm fractured in two places. Spock stayed long enough to see McCoy prep him to draw blood, and then he left abruptly despite the doctor's insistence that he, too, needed medical attention.
Carol has no doubt that the doctor would have pulled rank to get him back for observation—except that the clock was ticking and no one was sure if what McCoy proposed for the captain would actually work. The data suggesting it might was sketchy, to say the least—a single letter from a suicidal Section 31 officer saying that Khan's blood had reversed his daughter's incurable disease, and McCoy's own little experiment with a dead tribble.
Not much to go on.
Still, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain if it works.
From her corner of sickbay Carol had watched as McCoy drew several vials of Khan's blood and took them into his lab, leaving the other medical personnel to set Khan's arm and deal with his other injuries, keeping him sedated.
Soon enough she heard Spock's voice over the intercom announcing their approach to Space Dock, and shortly after that, his command to secure stations and prepare to disembark.
The injured crew still in sickbay were the first to be taken off the ship, transported directly to Starfleet's hospital facilities near Headquarters and the Academy.
"I need you," McCoy told her as he motioned to two engineers charged with moving the crytotube carrying the captain. "Don't let him out of your sight. I'll follow you down as soon as I finish testing this vaccine."
Her arrival at the hospital is a blur. She remembers following the cryotube to one of the operating theaters, McCoy dashing in soon afterwards. Vaguely she recalls leaning against the tube to take the weight off her knee, her hand shaking as she punched in the code to reverse the freezing process.
"We've got this, Dr. Marcus," someone said, shepherding her out of the way as the crytotube unsealed and Jim Kirk's body was removed and hooked up to life support monitors.
The last thing she saw as she was led away to have her knee attended to was Leonard McCoy hovering over a computer readout as one of the medics adjusted an IV.
No word yet on whether or not it will work—though Carol realizes that she won't be the first to know. She's not a member of the crew—not really—not like these people who have worked together for months, learning to trust each other like family.
The pain medication pulls at her wakefulness and she closes her eyes, willing herself to stop thinking, but an almost inaudible susurration, like silk rustling over polished wood, catches her attention. Someone in the hallway outside her door? She opens her eyes and sees the silhouette of a tall Vulcan, his profile revealing distinctive ears and hairstyle. Beside him is a shorter woman with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail.
Commander Spock and Lt. Uhura. Of course. She remembers the Commander refusing medical attention earlier in the day. Apparently the lieutenant has prevailed on him to be more sensible.
Carol closes her eyes again.
"Spock tells me I have you to thank," a deep male voice says.
Not the Commander's voice, Carol thinks, opening her eyes again. The tall Vulcan shifts slightly, bringing his face into the light. An older man, his features lined and his hair streaked with gray, his posture and movements so like the Commander's that they might be related.
The lieutenant looks petite next to him, her chin tipped up.
"We're a team," she says, and even in the dim hall light, Carol can see that she is smiling.
"For this I am grateful," the Vulcan says. "And for you."
Lt. Uhura dips her head down and nods.
"Thank you," she says.
For a moment both are silent and then the Vulcan says, "You have a place to go when Spock finishes here?"
"Oh!" Lt. Uhura says. "I hadn't thought about that. He gave up his faculty housing when we left for the shakedown cruise. The housing office at the Academy might still be open. I'll call and see if they have some dorm space—"
"My home is yours," the Vulcan says. "I leave with the Vulcan delegation for the Federation conference in Paris within the hour, and I suspect I will be away for some weeks. Spock knows the entry code. That is, assuming the doctors do not want to keep him here tonight."
"They might," Lt. Uhura says, a note of playfulness in her voice, "but that doesn't mean he will do what the doctors say. You might be surprised to hear this, but he doesn't always do what he's told."
"A Vulcan trait," the older man says, unmistakably bemused. "Or so I have been informed."
A/N: Welp! I apologize again for repeating some lines from the movie…but again, I needed to give some context for things I wanted to show. Thanks for being so forgiving!
Thanks, too, for sticking with this story and sending reviews my way. I appreciate them all. They truly keep me writing.
Almost done! Keep an eye out for the last chapter soon.