Chapter 7: A Particularly Long Hallucination

Isara's POV

Khan glared at me over Bones's shoulder as I separated out the plasma from his blood. I smiled lightly at him in the way I might to a patient to whom I wasn't paying much attention and concentrated on my task.

Khan kept trying to get my attention, much to Bones's annoyance. He would lean over slightly and try to make eye contact, so I made a point of moving around to all parts of the lab to make Khan sway back and forth to keep up the effort. When I was behind Khan's back, Bones would look at me, clearly annoyed, and I would just roll my eyes and shake my head. I wasn't going to let him fight some imagined battle of possessiveness over me.

Finally the comms came on as a distraction. Kirk was allowing us to hear what was happening on the bridge so that we would be prepared for anything that might happen. Bones nodded to me and I began securing all of our supplies and patients in preparation for a jump to warp.

I moved my way to the opposite part of the med bay in an attempt to avoid the tension. As much as I liked to think that our problems had been solved, I knew that Bones was still pissed. Suddenly, one of the information screens on the wall pinged, and Bones nodded me towards it distractedly. I opened the new message.

Starfleet Headquarters

Stardate

RE: Dr. Isara Jones Aboard the Enterprise

Dr. L. McCoy,

We have considered your request to have Dr. Isara Jones as your second medical officer aboard the USS Enterprise, and we regretfully decline it.

My heart stopped beating for a second.

Starfleet regulations state that only one superior medical officer may be stationed at any one time and must be chosen prior to launch of the ship, excepting emergency situations.

However, the position of ship's historian is available. Dr. Isara Jones minored in galactic history during her time at the academy, and so is technically suitable for the job. Unless that position suddenly becomes necessary, however, she may continue to assist you in the medical bay.

I sighed in relief, but my attention was quickly stolen by the exchange now audible on the comms. Admiral Marcus had pursued us, apparently because Khan was an experiment gone wrong. I listened carefully, trying to fill in the holes in my knowledge of Khan.

It was true, galactic history had been my academy minor. The past had always fascinated me, and I knew that that information might become more pertinent than ever if Starfleet somehow perfected that time travel program that I wasn't technically supposed to know about. Medicine had always been my field of choice, but history was useful, too.

I thanked every god that I could think of that I had taken those classes.

Okay, Khan… genetic engineering… SS Botany Bay… I snapped my fingers. There were a few fairly hush-hush selective breeding experiments in the 1990s, and it later came out that the experimental specimens had been deemed unsafe and launched into space. Botany Bay was a penal colony in Australia a very long time ago, so it made sense that a ship full of dangerous superhumans would be named after it.

I heard Dr. Marcus get beamed off of the bridge, and my heart sank; first she had saved Bones, then she had tried to save everyone on the ship in the face of her own father. She was a nice girl, and I was sorry to see (or hear) her go. I may not have known her personally, but she had saved Bones and she was our last line of defense.

My heart sank even deeper when Kirk was about to give away Khan's location (surely he had had a better plan than that?), but then he gave Admiral Marcus the wrong location and we jumped smoothly to warp. Maybe the kid had more sense than I gave him credit for.

I wandered back over to Bones, trying not to show how worried I was about the whole situation. It figured that my first mission would turn into a total fiasco. Apparently I failed, because he said soothingly, "At least we're moving now."

Khan tilted his head to look Bones in the eyes. "If you think you're safe at warp, you're wrong."

"Well, aren't you just a little ball of sunshine and rainbows." I snickered in spite of the situation and I saw Bones's eyes light up. The comment had been meant for me, not Khan.

"If this is some twenty-third century expression, I do not understand it." I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. The adrenaline still rushing through my bloodstream wasn't helping.

Just then, an enormous boom shuddered its way through the ship, making me stagger into a wall and crack my elbow on the corner. There was an unfamiliar whooshing sound in the distance and it took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of emergency doors sealing; the hull had been breached.

"Isara! Sit down and strap yourself in!" Bones hollered from across the med bay.

"No!" I screamed back, trying to treat one man for oxygen starvation as I treated another for a shattered rib, while a third cried out with the pain of his mangled leg. We had run out of pain medication a few minutes previously and were already running low on basic supplies. There was screaming and moaning everywhere, shuffling and crowding and groaning as more people tried to find bed space. I sidestepped a stretcher loaded with two bodies, their torsos deeply gashed, and tried to focus. We had gone back to the old rules of wartime doctors: ignore those who will live without your help and who will die no matter what, just focus on those on whom you can have an impact.

Marcus's weapons had torn huge holes in the sides of the Enterprise and damaged everything else almost beyond repair—not that engineering wasn't trying. In the med bay, time was nonexistent as we simply tried to keep up with the steady flow of patients who limped, crawled or were carried in.

Bones was cursing me and my stubbornness, but I was just paying attention to the tones of his voice in order to keep myself sane. Bones speaking, Bones yelling, Bones grabbing my arm—

He shoved me away from my patient and down into a chair before slapping the back to activate the seatbelt. I struggled against it halfheartedly, waiting until he was a few feet away to smoothly retract the restraint and carry on with my duties.

This one wasn't going to make it, so I didn't waste precious energy on the gaping hole in his stomach. This one was vomiting and needed to be moved away from the others, though there wasn't enough room to get away from anyone. This one…

"Ensign Chancey?" I stopped just long enough to register her presence but had to keep moving when my exhaustion caught up with me. Only years of training and experience in small, crowed clinics were keeping my face neutral and my body upright.

"Dr. Jones." Chancey deposited an unconscious comrade in front of me before turning around again. "Have to get back to engineering. It's hell down there."

"Can't be much worse than up here." I looked around me grimly, feeling nausea curl in my stomach despite all my training. I knew enough to realize that, as soon as the shock and adrenaline wore off, I was going to need some serious therapy.

Soon after, the gravity simulators began to fail. Everyone who had the energy leaned uphill in a synchronized motion and I dashed around to secure all of the patients. My feet slipped around on the floors—I didn't stop to think too much about why they were slick—as I fastened belts wherever I could. After a few tense seconds we stabilized but I kept working, ignoring the hair sticking to my sweaty face. I knew Kirk well enough to know that this would be the least of the turbulence.

Speak of the devil. Kirk marched through the doors to the relatively isolated area where we were holding Khan. I could see him talking to the fugitive, then to Bones, who was finally working on the tribble experiment. If it worked, Khan's blood might well be the only medicine we had on board.

"Isara, hold down the fort for a minute. Be right back." Bones stuck his head around the glass just barely long enough to complete his sentence. I glared at him and blew a tangled clump of hair out of my face. How much time did Bones actually spend on the med bay? Since I had been aboard, much of his time had been spent standing on the bridge keeping Kirk from blowing everyone up. As much as I acknowledged that it needed to be done, I felt that our head doctor could be of more help elsewhere.

I switched on the comms so that I could listen to events on the bridge as I worked. They were distant and irrelevant, both to me and to the sobbing woman in front of me who clutched a partially-severed arm, but I needed to know. I looked down at the blood on my hands, full of detached disgust, and set about completing a neat amputation. The engines thrummed through the floor and up my legs, making my teeth rattle and my vision blurry. My exhaustion might have had something to do with it, too.

Mouth set in a grim line, I twisted against the tourniquet to break the last strands of tissue (even blades were scarce now) and suddenly I was holding an arm. The woman's eyes rolled back as the pain overwhelmed her and I dropped the grisly object. The Enterprise was a brilliant ship, but she wasn't prepared for the kind of combat that involved heavy injuries. Her seemingly-endless medical supplies had been exhausted; I would have preferred a sterile operating room, plenty of anesthetic, and at least three nurses on hand for such a messy amputation.

I don't know how much time I spent treating patient after desperate patient, but it must have been a long time because I was snapped out of the blur by Bones carrying Dr. Marcus into the med bay.

"Oh my God!" I exclaimed when I saw the unnatural extra joint in her leg and the clearly-visible boot print. I gripped Bones's upper arm tightly, both to guide him and for the sake of the contact, and dragged him to an empty biobed. The regenerator would be useless with this kind of break, but I could do things the old-fashioned way. I ended up using a spare pillow case and a spanner that an engineering worker was still clutching to make a makeshift splint. "This is going to hurt," I warned, and gripped her leg tightly. She nodded and squeezed her eyes shut so I quickly set the leg, causing her to groan. When I had made her as comfortable as I could, I turned back to see Bones elbow deep in blood again.

Our eyes met for a brief moment and the bridge of his nose crinkled in concern. I must have looked pretty terrible; it had been about three hours since we had been hit, and I had barely sat down since then. My ponytail was matted, my shirt in scorched tatters, my eyes must have been bugging out of my head and I was completely splattered in blood and even less pleasant things.

"Isara, didn't you hear Spock call everyone to the torpedo bay?"

I looked around. A few engineering staff were pushing large hover carts through the doors of the med bay. "No. I was kind of busy keeping everyone from dying. What happened?"

His mouth set in a grim line. "Khan had Kirk and Scotty aboard his ship. Spock thought he planned to make a trade, his crew for ours. He had me get all of the crew out of the torpedoes so that they could arm them. Khan just transported them over; they'll destroy his ship and everyone will live."

"Clever," I mused. Then my brow furrowed. "Is Kirk all right?"

"He's fine. A little bruised and shaken, but he's heading down to engineering."

Spock's urgent voice rang down the hallways. "PrepareEnterprise for proximity detonation!"

The engineering staff halted and locked the carts into position. I strode over to put one arm across Dr. Marcus's waist, holding her down, and gripped the side of her biobed with my other hand. When the explosion rocked the ship, the lights flickered and my smooth-soled shoes slid a few inches along the floor.

"Well, I guess that's that," Bones sighed tiredly. Both thinking that the entire incident was resolved, if not very satisfactorily, we both returned our attention to our patients.

My mind went numb soon after that.

Bandage. Comfort. Bandage. Comfort. Shake head sadly. Bandage. No more bandages: use spare bedding. Comfort. Hold bucket. Hold hand. Bandage. Comfort.

Suddenly, the Enterprise was caught in Earth's gravity and we were tilting wildly. Of course, I didn't know the why at the time, only that PADDs and records and instruments were sliding all over the floor and my patients were crying out in terror. I was glad that I had strapped everyone in at the first sign of turbulence, but now I was having a hard time getting a grip on something.

Suddenly we were completely sideways. I managed to clutch at the end of a bed as I slid by. It was securely fixed to the vertical floor but my arms were burning. Bones had managed to slide down and sit on a wall, but I had a gaping expanse of hallway beneath me—my hands were slipping, cramping and turning white as pressure forced the blood out of them. My legs waved feebly. Well isn't this just brilliant.

"I think I'm in trouble!" I screamed at Bones. One hand jerked loose and I frantically swung it back up to grasp at the end of the sheets. The sweat on my fingers made them slippery and I gasped in huge breaths in an attempt to stop them from shaking.

"Are you sure? I hadn't noticed!" he bellowed back, trying to scramble his way across the wall without falling into any rooms or hallways. The Enterprise was still in motion, so the angle kept changing and he kept losing his balance.

Every muscle in my body was stretched to its limit, burning and convulsing. I had never been the most athletic of people, and my overstressed body was quickly showing signs of wear in my shaking elbows and trembling fingers. I slipped. I slipped a little farther. I couldn't feel my hands.

"Isara!" Bones was yelling at me, but it sounded like I was hearing his voice through a mile of water. All of the patients were screaming, and every now and then someone in a red shirt would slide by on their path from engineering. I looked up and saw that I was only hanging on by my fingertips.

"Isara!" Bones was so close now, he was almost able to catch me.

But not quite.

I fell for what seemed like forever. I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole, watching everything pass in slow motion and not worrying too much about the end of my journey.

At one point I looked up to see Bones reaching a hand towards me, and that's what pulled me back to my situation. I felt an involuntary scream convulse from my chest as the world around me accelerated. The air, so sterile and perfect when I had first boarded the ship, sped by me in smoky, overheated gusts. Branching hallways and doors flickered past too quickly for my eye to properly register them. The only things that I was able to make out with any clarity were the bodies falling around me—one directly above, two farther below.

Since when had this hallway been so long?

As the end approached rapidly I tried to adjust myself so that I would land on my feet and roll back to my rear. I only just had time to get into position before the pure white wall was within view. I counted down in my hea:- three, two, one—

A lightning bolt of pain exploded up my legs, then I felt my neck whip backwards with the weight of my head. Then everything went dark.

I suddenly remembered what the photographer had said when he took that picture.

"Look at that, Isara!" Alanna pointed towards the majestic peaks of the Cascade Mountains. "We should get a picture in front of them!"

"I'll take it," Bones offered, holding out a camera.

"No, silly, you have to be in it!" Alanna scolded lightheartedly. Bones and I rolled our eyes in synchronization as Alanna dashed off to the first random person she saw. After a moment she returned, her eyes glowing as she dragged a cadet that I knew by sight behind her.

"Hugh is going to take it!" She grinned. I rolled my eyes again as we shuffled into a line.

"You know Isara, one day your eyes are going to freeze rolled back into your head, and then you'll only be able to talk to people who are taller than you."

"At least I won't have to talk to you then," I retorted, rolling my eyes with an extra dramatic flair for effect.

"Ready, Hugh?" Alanna ignored me and called out to the youth holding the camera.

Hugh sighed dramatically, adjusting the camera for the shot. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done."

I laughed at the literary reference—history class required me to do a lot of classic reading—and Bones and Alanna just stared at me with wide eyes. They clearly had never read A Tale of Two Cities. For some reason I found their expressions insanely funny and started laughing harder. They started laughing at me, too, and I laughed harder, and they laughed harder, and soon Bones had his arms around both of our shoulders and we were all three leaning on each other for support. I the midst of this, the shutter on the camera clicked.

Now I was falling again—why was I still falling? I thought that I remembered an impact. Quite a painful one, in fact. I decided that I must be dreaming.

I really was Alice down the rabbit hole now; my blue Starfleet tunic had lengthened into a blue gown which billowed around me as I fell.

Kirk leered at me from an opening in the wall, and I started backwards. Then Kirk's face turned kind and smiling, but it was elbowed out of the way by Jimmy. Bones pushed Jimmy roughly aside and was soon joined by Alanna. They smiled and waved, and Bones blew me a kiss.

"Am I dreaming?" For some reason I needed assurance that my guess had been correct.

"What, you don't think I'd actually kiss you?" I had to laugh at Bones's mock-grumpy expression.

"I miss you guys." A thought suddenly squeezed at my heart. What if I was dying and I would never see them again?

Bones and Alanna were joined by Kirk, Chancey, and Pike.

The latter smiled in a fatherly way. "Dr. Jones, theEnterprise needs more minds like yours. Take care of her for me." He jerked his head at Kirk. "And this one. It'll take a few of you to look after him." Then he was gone.

Chancey spoke next. "You really helped me out, Doctor. I'll never forget how kind you were to me on my first day."

I smiled back. "It's my first day, too. I hope our next mission goes better." Then Chancey too was gone.

It was Kirk's turn. "Jones, you're a good egg and I'm glad to have you aboard. I'm sorry I was rude to you. Any friend of Bones's is a friend of mine."

My eyes widened. "I really am dying, aren't I? Why else would you be so nice to me?"

Kirk shrugged and rubbed the back of his head. "I'm your subconscious. You figure it out." A pause, then, "I don't think you're dying. I think you're in a hospital somewhere and Bones has you on really strong pain meds and you're hallucinating."

I rolled my eyes. "I'm always glad to have the opinion of my subconscious."

Kirk disappeared, just leaving Bones and Alanna.

"I wish I was on the Enterprise," Alanna pouted. "Nothing cool ever happens on the Bradbury."

"As happy as I am that I remembered your assignment after all," I told her, "I'm glad you're not here. It's good to know that at least one person is going to make it out of this alive."

Her lips quirked into a smile. "You're sweet, Isara, but you worry too much. You'll be fine." Then she too faded into the shadows at the edges of my dream.

There was only one face left now. I was still falling but slowly, like the air was thick.

Bones looked me in the eyes and opened his mouth. His eyes were wide and serious as they had been for months after Pike's death.

"Look, Isara. You're amazing and I really missed you when I was away last year." He scowled. "Also, if anything happens to you I'd never forgive myself, so you had better pull through, okay?"

I pretended to look thoughtful. "I'll think about it."

Bones disappeared without another word—before I had the chance to give him a serious answer. I looked down at the deep blackness of the pit beneath me. Maybe I really am dying, I thought as the first tendrils of darkness reached up around me. Maybe this is the end.

"It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known," I breathed as I wafted downwards.