Chapter 2
"Never did catch that first name," Jim drawled.
Uhura rolled her eyes. "Can it, Starfleet," she snapped. She checked the battery power levels on her phaser, and slapped it against the magnetic clip on her belt. "Everyone on board? Clear for takeoff?"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Jim said, still irritated that after three years all he knew of Uhura was her last name and that her first language was Swahili. "Who gave you permission to take over?"
Uhura glared. "You heard Pike. We're our own commanders this weekend. "
"Nuh-uh," Jim corrected. "We have to work together to find why the explosion occurred, not to mention reassuring the civilians. Don't come crying to me when you get your pretty little skirt dirty."
Charlie Johnson looked up from the pilot's seat. Jim swore the cadet was never out of the athletic training facility. "Cleared for take-off," Johnson said.
Jim grinned at McCoy and the other two cadets in the back of the shuttle. One, a human female named Jonna Larkin, wore the insignia buttons of a third-year cadet in the navigation track; the other, an Eshari'i male named SEl'kna, was in the anthropology & ancient civilizations track. That left Jim and Uhura for the command track, although at the rate Uhura soaked up languages, Jim was pretty sure she would be in Communications for whichever ship she was assigned to.
"Let's stick together on this one, yeah?" Jim said to the shuttle at large as Johnson fired up the engines. "Alpha Base is pretty big and we need backup if we're going to do this right."
The small group of cadets clustered around the bulkhead of the docking bay, phasers at the ready, waiting for their section of the bay to pressurize. Their shuttle had been among the last to arrive. Beyond the bulkhead, they could hear sounds of a firefight. McCoy cursed and leapt aside as a thin stream of phaser fire pushed its way through the crack of the door.
"I hope you managed to memorize plans for this place, Jim," McCoy hissed. "'Cause right now that's our only way out."
The main docking bay door opened its maw to let in another shuttle. "That's the last shuttle," Johnson noted.
"Terrific," Jim muttered. "We're sitting ducks, caught between a rock and a hard place."
"Not unless get we the arrivals new on our side," SEl'kna said. As usual, the universal translator was having problems with the verb conjugation and grammatical syntax of the Eshari'i language. "Have I friends on that shuttle."
Jim caught sight of one particularly hulking cadet amongst two husky female cadets—Ingrid Petersen and Erica Sullivan, both of whom had been in the simulator on Tuesday but had escaped the explosion with only light burns—and three males Jim didn't know. Jim recognized the large cadet as the cadet who'd given him the bloody nose in Riverside. "Great. Just great. SEl'kna, I hope you can work your magic on them. Because that big guy hasn't liked me since we met in a pub in Riverside."
SEl'kna tipped his head in acknowledgement and went to the docking bay doors. After a hushed conversation with the new arrivals, he turned to the others. "Have we their ally," SEl'kna announced. Jim was definitely going to have to make fixing the universal translator conjugation and syntax programming a top priority if he ever got his own ship. Getting the gist of what someone was trying to say could mean the difference between "I like you very much" and "Will you marry me because I love you so much?" Jim knew enough of alien language syntax that it was a fine line that the Starfleet officers walked if they relied just on the universal translator all the time.
"Okay, guys," Jim said. "Listen up. As soon as we get into the main part of the base, make for the commissary. Secure it and wait. Confiscate the weapons of all the cadets and civilians who enter it."
"Why the commissary, Cupcake?" Hefner drawled.
"It's one of the places everyone will need to go eventually," Jim replied, forcing himself to ignore Hefner's slur. "Or would you rather hole up in one of the restrooms?"
"Commissary is fine," Hefner muttered. Ingrid Petersen smirked.
"Good," Jim said. "We need another way into the base. Any ideas?"
"The air vent?" Uhura suggested. She pointed to the grate above the bulkhead.
Jim pursed his lips, thinking hard. They'd be able to just barely reach it by standing on each other's shoulders, but it meant that whoever was last had to go through the bulkhead door, not the air vent. Not to mention it was a pretty tight squeeze for a normal human. Hefner was huge, and there was no way he would fit through that tiny space. SEl'kna was going to have problems with his wings in that tight of a space, because if anything at all pained an Eshari'i's wings, it put the Eshari'i into shock so badly that it rendered the being mostly unmovable and otherwise useless. Now, if the Eshari'i wings could actually work like real wings, the air vent wouldn't pose that much of a problem. But the Eshari'i had nearly evolved out of being able to fly at all.
Despite the problems, in reality, the air vent was probably their only chance. But there went the idea that they were going to stick together.
Maybe somebody would have his back this weekend after all.
"Hefner, you and your bunch stay here with SEl'kna," Jim said finally. "Johnson, Larkin, you stay here, too. We'll need your help getting into the air vent, but otherwise it looks like it will be too tight for some of you. And all of us in there will be too many in a single air vent anyway. Sorry, guys. Wait here with Hefner's bunch until that firefight on the inside dies down and meet us in the commissary. Got it?"
"May I ask what will you do, Jim?" SEl'kna asked.
Jim smiled grimly. "What needs to be done," he replied. "Don't worry, SEl'k." He squatted down. "Uhura, get on my shoulders. You get to do the honors of opening the air vent. Bones, you're with us."
Jim winced as a muttered curse was snapped behind him. "Okay there, Bones?" he asked quietly.
"These damn rivets keep digging into my ribs!"
"I know," Jim replied. He could see another vent ahead of them, and through it the light from another fire fight. Damn it, hadn't the cadets listened to Pike when he told them that their job was to stay alive? Fire fights just didn't fall under that category, and he didn't care that the phasers were on stun—it was still as good as killing someone in this simulation! "I think we're nearly there. Let's hold up for a minute." He rolled up against the wall of the air shaft as much as he could so he could extract his comm unit from his uniform pocket. Consulting the map of the base he'd been able to find, he groaned. Damn it. He'd thought they were closer. "Two more vents to go, then hang a left, and the commissary vent should be the vent at the end of that shaft," Jim said. "Uhura, you okay up there?" He could practically hear her eyes rolling.
"Yes, Kirk," she snapped, glaring over her shoulder at him, then swore heavily in Swahili when she whacked her head on a beam in front of her.
They were finally at the commissary vent. Uhura crawled ahead to give Jim space to observe the room. A handful of civilians were in there: An Elenari and her youngling, two Tellerites, three Andorians.
"What's the holdup?" McCoy hissed.
"There are people in the commissary," Jim whispered back.
"Come on, hurry up with that vent," Uhura complained quietly. "You weren't kidding when you said it was going to be a tight squeeze in here."
Jim took a deep breath. "Scoot forward a bit, Uhura." Once he had enough room, Jim rolled onto his back, braced himself with his arms, and gave the vent grate a solid kick. It crashed into the room below and he quickly dropped down into the commissary after it. McCoy and Uhura followed him, only to find that Jim already had his hands full with the civilians.
The Andorians and Tellerites Jim could handle, no matter how much the Andorians despised the Terrans and no matter how much the Tellerites wanted to argue. But the Elenari were one of the telepathic races of the Federation species. Except, their mind skills included telekinesis.
There was a lot of debate by Federation scientists as to exactly how the Elenari did it, and even the anthropologists who had studied them were heavily insulted by other scientists for not using proper study methods. Jim remembered reading a paper by an anthropologist who had done the most detailed study to date. She had claimed that in some Elenari, the ability was latent; that is, it required almost no tutorial by the individual to wield the ability. Others could be taught it, and still others couldn't use it at all. However they did it, the Elenari called their people with this ability Mages, ad Jim had already found out that at least one of the Elenari in Alpha Base's commissary was a Mage. He was placing his bets on the mother.
Trying to breathe around the invisible hand choking him, Jim gasped out the formal greeting of the Elenari he had learned from SEl'kna: "By the name of the Mother Sun I greet thee and bid thee welcome!" He waited tensely, trying to breathe and hoping the damn universal translator was still working after the beating it had taken during the trip to the commissary.
Meanwhile, Uhura and Bones were watching with bated breaths. Jim could tell that Bones was torn between staying out of the situation and trying to help his best friend.
The Elenari female, on the other hand, still held Jim in her invisible grip. "When we came here," she sneered, her deep voice dripping with loathing, "we were not informed that we would be unwilling participants in a … training drill." Jim gasped for breath, scrabbling his hands against the unseen bonds around his throat.
Finally, Bones spoke up. "Dammit, woman, you're killing him!"
She let Jim go; he stumbled against the wall, drawing in shaking breaths.
"Forgive my impulsiveness, sir," she said, bowing slightly. "My people are not used to freedom."
Jim looked up, sharply. "What do you mean?"
"Many of your centuries have passed," the Elenari said, "and yet my people still live under the laws set by the Usurper. Those who would have saved us have been labeled as war criminals." She held up a bronze hand at their protests. "On my world, any involvement at all in a war is terms for automatic punishment. The Usurper broke our world, killed our people. That was one and a half thousand years ago. My people have not yet recovered from his tyranny."
"I'm sorry," Jim said automatically. "Look," he said, taking a wild gamble and running with it, "I know you have a lot of emotional baggage. We have a job to do. Are you willing to help us?"
After a long moment in which the Elenari locked eyes with every one of them, she finally consented with a slight nod. "I am Nelk'knah."
"Jim Kirk."
"Leonard McCoy."
"Uhura."
"May I ask why you chose to come here, when your classmates are elsewhere?" Nelk'knah asked.
Jim bit his lip. Obviously the civilians had been briefed on the situation. "Pike—the Commodore of Cadets—said we had to regain control of the station, stay alive ourselves, and try to find out why the explosion occurred. The commissary is the one place everyone has to come eventually. If we can confiscate weapons and hold everyone here, we might stand a better chance of solving the problem as opposed to just killing everyone in sight. It was easier to get here without problems if we came through the air vent.
"We left some people in the docking bay," Jim continued. "They're meeting us here. With any luck they'll be here shortly."
"So we just sit tight and wait for folks to show up?" Bones demanded.
"That's the general idea," Jim quipped. "Unless you'd rather go out there with guns blazing?"
Bones winced. "I'll take my chances in here."
"Pink-skinned cowards," one of the Andorians muttered. "'Cowardice in battle leads naught to greatness.'"
"Cowardice," Jim snapped, rounding on the Andorian, "is what's going to save all our asses right now. So shut up, or get the hell out."
"Jim, you're threatening a civilian!" Uhura hissed.
"And if we all insist on arguing for an hour over the details, we're never going to get anything done!" Jim said, rounding on her. "Think! This is exactly what Pike said! He said that the civilians would try to hinder us. If we can't handle civilians, how the hell are we supposed to handle a starship crew?"
He glared at everyone in the room. "If you don't want to be here, there's the door. But in the end, this is going to be the safest room on Alpha Base. You have thirty seconds to make your decision."
The Andorian stared at him, and finally laughed. "A strong cadet," he smirked. "But Starfleet's finest? Hardly." But he and his companions sat down. Jim turned his attention to the problem of the communicator, and barely noticed when the Elenari child cautiously approached the group of cadets.
Jim sighed and glanced yet again at the commissary's chronometer. Two hours, and nobody had shown up yet. Uhura had struck up a friendship with the Elenari child, and was now talking to both the Elenari and recording their native language.
The Tellerites and Andorians were off in their own little groups, doing their best to ignore the cadets. Still, they kept eying them suspiciously. Jim was busy alternating between trying to make their communicators work and watching the Alpha Base security camera footage he'd managed to hack into on his PADD.
A group of cadets held the rec room on H Deck, assisted by five civilians. Things were relatively calm for them.
Three cadets were in the same wing as the commissary Jim, McCoy, and Uhura were holed up in.
Two cadets had just encountered another, larger group of cadets by the main doors to the engineering section. Five cadets in the larger group went down under the phaser fire.
It was like that all over Alpha Base. Handfuls of cadets here and there, no real purpose discerned from any of them. Jim groaned in frustration. Hadn't any of them listened to Pike? They were supposed to work together, dammit, not turn Alpha Base into a war zone!
Yet …. Jim wondered if staying in the commissary and holding it in safety was even a good idea with how spread out the other cadets were. What if the Andorian had been right, quoting that proverb about cowardice? Was it cowardice that kept him in relative safety in the commissary and not out there fighting? Was it a will to last as long as he could in this simulation?
Was it a desire to keep the flashbacks from Tuesday's fiasco in the Kobayashi Maru simulation from controlling him?
And then the commissary door slid open, four hours after Jim Kirk had entered the Alpha Base simulation.