"…Jim."

"That's our assignment, Bones."

"Jim..."

"There are people in danger. Maybe."

"Jim."

"Hey. Starfleet calls the shots here, not me. And I'm not gonna turn the assignment down because of one little complication."

McCoy blinked, incredulous. "One little..." He looked around at the other faces around the table, probably seeking support.

Pavel just tennis-matched his gaze from the doctor to the captain, silent, along with the other crew brought in for the post-Starfleet-communication briefing.

There was something especially entertaining about these briefings when McCoy was present.

McCoy didn't stay silent long. "Allow me to summarize, Jim, since I can be slow about these kinds of things and I want to be sure I'm not missing something: this planet has some kind of bogus charge in its atmosphere." He glared at Spock as he gave a quiet sigh to McCoy's simplified translation. "Whatever this charge is screws up every piece of technology we rely on, and so far about a dozen people have vanished thanks to it."

Jim grinned. "Nice summation."

McCoy stared at him. "And you call that one little complication."

"Starfleet calls it one complication." Jim shrugged. "With a subset of minor related complications."

"Minor related..." McCoy rubbed his temple. "Save us from bureaucratic doublespeak."

"It's an interesting mission, Bones, and it's a hell of a lot less deadly than some we've been sent on lately. Stop scaring the kids, okay?"

McCoy scowled out at the table, as if it were the rest of the crew's fault for staying silent.

Pavel smiled, but ducked his head to hide it.

He had never been scared of Doctor McCoy the way many of the crew were. McCoy's terseness didn't come from a place of cruelty. He snapped out of worry, he argued for justice and right. He was the most terse with the people he knew best.

Pavel saw no difference in McCoy at the bedside of a sick or injured crewman - the gentle and quiet and kind doctor - and McCoy in a briefing, tense and snappish and upright.

Pavel wasn't scared of that. In fact, it reminded him at times of his own father.

When Pavel was a child Andrei Chekov was a good deal more stern than he was now. He kept his distance, he worked long hours and came home to eat and grunt out a few words, and then go to bed. He was blunt to the point of being terse, but even right after Pavel's mother died, when it was at its worst, Pavel never had a single doubt that his father adored him.

There was a difference between being terse and being cruel, and Andrei was never cruel. He wouldn't speak a great deal, but he would listen to Pavel for hours as he rambled on about whatever lessons he was learning in school, whatever theories he had come up with from the used college textbooks his father would find and bring home to him.

His bluntness came from love and grief and having to deal with a life alone when he had expected a life beside his wife.

McCoy, Pavel suspected, was much the same.

Which wasn't to say that Pavel didn't get as amused as everyone else in the crew when McCoy got his most snappish.

"I'm scaring the kids?" The doctor's accent grew ten times thicker when he was angry, which only tended to amuse people more, "There's a planet out there eating people, we get to beam down and see if it's still hungry, and I'm the bad guy here?" He jabbed a quick finger towards Spock. "Shut up."

Spock's opening mouth closed and he sighed.

Pavel grinned, like most of the people at that table.

"Let's not be more melodramatic than we have to be," the Captain answered through his usual Bones-inspired grin. "The planet isn't eating people. For all we know those people are alive, maybe even uninjured. Just lost." He nodded towards the viewscreen at the front of the room. "And as far as we know, the only reason that they're lost is because we can't get a sensor reading on about ninety percent of the planet's surface."

"It seems to be a rather interesting problem," Spock said, turning his bemused gaze away from McCoy and back towards the viewscreen. "Starfleet sent a ship in once before, almost a decade ago when this planet first came to their attention. But there wasn't much interest in a minor unpopulated planet at that time, and there was little priority given towards solving the problem of the planet's atmosphere. That first Starfleet crew left without finding a cause. They never even ventured to the planet's surface."

"Some nerd at the science academy – no offense," Kirk directed with a quick grin towards Pavel, "came across the old report about a year ago and did some paper on it, and in response a civilian science vessel decided to do some investigating. They mapped out the planet's surface as much as they were able, which as you can see wasn't much at all."

He reached out, flipping through a few screens on the panel until the viewscreen displayed the basic outline of a planet, sheer black except for small, random patches of terrain, pale and bumpy and odd.

"Those spots of actual terrain are the only spots on the entire planet that the sensors can collect readings on, and they're as ordinary as the surface of any average planet." Kirk sat back, frowning at the display in that intent-eyed way that reminded Pavel even in his most casual moments why Kirk was such a good commander.

"Stand in the middle of one of those patches of ground and everything's completely normal. We can transport you back and forth, the sensors pick up everything. But once you leave those areas the sensors go blind, the transporters can't get a signal."

He glanced back at them, focusing on Spock and then Scotty for brief moments in turn. "Strangely enough, the communicators still seem to work even in the dead zones."

Pavel leaned in - this was a new bit of information, and he found himself studying the planet in sudden interest. "There are quite a few things that might cause sensor blindness - atmospheric make-up, some sort of electromagnetic or irradiated compound in the minerals of rocks or trees or the planet itself. But those things would cause complete failure of our equipment, not selective failure."

"Yep. Weird, huh?" Kirk's eyes went back to that black ball of a planet for another long moment before he shot a grin over at Pavel. "So this first science team went to the surface to figure out what was going on. They monitored them from the ship as they left and re-entered the few live spots on the surface. They got a few readings, initiated a few theories. But before they could find anything solid, the team stepped into a dead zone and just didn't come back out."

Most of the amusement McCoy had inspired was gone by then. Pavel frowned up at the viewscreen.

"That's it. That's all we know about them. They stepped in and didn't step back out as they were supposed to. From the communications logs it seems like they went in too far and got turned around somehow and simply couldn't find their way back. A few hours later they stopped responding to the ship's hails, and that's the last we know of them."

Kirk nodded back at the planet, solemn again. "A second civilian science vessel came in response to the report filed by the remains of the first crew, and almost to the letter the same thing happened: they went down to the surface to search for signs of the first team and vanished into a dead zone. They left a record of a couple of hours of confused comm calls back up to the ship, and suddenly stopped answering. They haven't been heard from since."

"So naturally the best idea is for us to go down there and make it three-for-three."

Kirk ignored McCoy's grumble. He flipped off the viewscreen and turned to face the group.

"These are civilians, maybe alive, maybe hurt. They need our help, but..." He hesitated for the first time, mouth drawing down at the corners. "Starfleet has taken the rather Bonesian view that losing a third group of people won't help anything, and so the help we're going to be providing isn't in the form of search parties. Instead our mission is to solve the puzzle of the planet itself."

He faced the crew one by one, quick but intent, reading their faces. Pavel met his brief gaze steadily, fascinated by the mystery of the planet and not bothering to hide it.

Kirk smiled after a moment. "I'm not leaving innocent civilians trapped on this planet. Starfleet's right that our focus needs to be figuring out the cause for the sensor failures, but only because the sooner we find that out, the sooner we figure out how to compensate for it, and the sooner we find these missing people. We've had a bit of good luck on a lot of missions so far, but that dead zone is hundreds of thousands of square miles, and nobody's luck is that good."

He sat back, looking everyone over. "This isn't a diplomatic mission, we're not spoiling for a fight. It's straight-up research, and so the makeup of the landing party is going to be a little bit different than usual. I..." He hesitated, obviously having to push the words out. "I will not be going down."

Luckily Pavel wasn't the only one to gasp at that, so he didn't feel too sheepish.

The captain constantly defied that one regulation more than any other - the captain of a starship was not to endanger himself on a landing party if his presence was not specifically required by the assignment. More often than not he also defied the regulation that said that a captain and first officer were not to leave the ship at the same time, that in the instance that a captain was required to be part of a landing party, the first officer was absolutely to remain on the ship to preserve the chain of command.

It said something that Kirk wasn't going down himself. The captain was scared of nothing, not even hundreds of thousands of miles of a mystery planet's dead zone.

Kirk nodded his grim acceptance of his crew's shock. "The idea here is to avoid trouble, to stay out of the dead zones and get some serious research going. And let's face it - avoiding trouble isn't my particular specialty."

No one was foolish enough to agree, but no one was deluded enough to argue.

"Spock, you're in charge of the landing party and of the research angle. You figure out every single element and compound on that planet that might be interfering with our equipment. Scotty..." He shot a faint smile at his engineer. "I know how you feel about leaving the ship, but I need you on this one. You know sensors, you know the things that might interfere with our signals, and you'll know before anyone else how to compensate for the problem when we find it."

Scotty sighed, his eyes mournful. "Aye, sir."

"Whiz kid." Kirk turned to Pavel.

Pavel sat up unconsciously.

"You get to stay on board this time around. You know the equipment here, you've worked with Spock and Scotty enough to be comfortable being their main contact up here. They get to do the grunt work, you get to process their results from the comfort of the ship. Lucky guy."

Pavel nodded, sharp, but it took him a moment, and took Kirk turning away from him and addressing someone else, before he could actually breathe. This was a level of trust, a show of confidence in his abilities, that he hadn't been prepared for.

He had to force himself to tune in, to push his instant reactions to the side.

"-knew you were going to say that, damn it."

Kirk was grinning again. "Look, Bones. This is going to be a small team and a sharp team, and if there's any chance at all that anyone gets hurt down there and we somehow can't get you back in a hurry - if anyone gets stuck in a dead zone, if those scientists turn up injured - I need my best man down there. And that's you."

McCoy scowled, but he glanced towards that black planet and didn't argue.

"Same with you, Porter." Kirk nodded at McCoy's other side, where his silent security chief sat. "Limited men here, but I need them protected. The Federation officially classes this planet as unpopulated, but there's way too much we don't know about it, and for all we know that's completely wrong. I want you down there yourself looking out for my guys here."

Pavel looked over at Porter - his first instinct was to be relieved that Greg wasn't going to be sent. But almost immediately after that he couldn't help but think that if Kirk wanted his best man down there, Porter wasn't the right one to send.

He didn't like Chief Porter, but his opinion wasn't based on anything solid. It was based mostly on the fact that Greg wasn't comfortable with him. Greg didn't quite trust him, and considering how loyal and overly-aware of the chain of command Greg could be, that was saying something.

So maybe it was with an over-critical eye that Pavel noticed Porter's hesitation, his raised eyebrows and casual smirk as he answered.

"You're telling me that we have no clue who or what is actually down there on that planet, only that two teams of people have vanished already. But you're only sparing one slot on the away team for security?"

Kirk shrugged. "One doctor, one tech guy, one science nerd, one bodyguard. That's how we keep the team small."

Porter's brow furrowed, but he sat back and waved his hand. "Your call, captain."

"Thanks for acknowledging that." Kirk flashed him a look, not losing his smile. But there was a hint of a note in his voice that made Pavel think that maybe Greg wasn't the only one not sold on the security chief.

But no. If Kirk didn't trust him he wouldn't send him on this landing party. He was putting McCoy's life in Porter's hands, and that said something. Trusting Porter with any of his crew said a lot, but McCoy more than anyone on that ship was special to Kirk.

Maybe Kirk just didn't like him. Pavel had learned a long time ago that just because a person was unpleasant didn't mean they were bad at their jobs.

Porter might well have been the strongest security officer on the ship; he was chief. Then again, something else Pavel had learned by then was that just because a person rose in the ranks didn't mean they were good at their jobs.

Still. It kept Greg safe on the ship with Pavel, so he wasn't about to complain.

"Vyhodi za menja zamuzh. Vyhodi za menja zamuzh." Greg frowned as he paced the floor, looking around the bare quarters and wondering if he'd made the right move.

At first he wanted to make kind of a big deal out of everything - maybe replicate some food, dim the lights, get the computer to play something, like, classical or something.

But he didn't really know any classical anything to ask the computer for. All he knew to ask for was music, but the computer kept bleeting that polite fucking voice at him, asking him what composer, what piece, and what the fuck did a guy like Greg know about composers and pieces?

When he started thinking about making some kind of dinner his doubts buried him. Did he make something Russian? All he knew about Russian food was that Pasha wasn't crazy about the pirogi that came out of the replimat, but all Greg knew by name was pirogi. He thought about asking Andrei for suggestions, but Andrei had already done enough. Greg didn't want Pasha's dad thinking he was completely fucking useless on his own.

So, he thought, maybe something American. He knew the kinds of things Pasha liked, at least, but none of it seemed right. Pasha was kinda big on junk food, and Greg wasn't sure a couple of replicated cheeseburgers would set any kind of mood.

Then he got really corny and thought -why not cheeseburgers and pirogi both? Like America and Russia all on the same plate, like a symbol. Or whatever. But when he couldn't stop rolling his eyes at his own dumb ass, he figured maybe that wasn't the best idea.

So the quarters were silent, the table was empty, and the little replimat in his kitchen hummed uselessly without a command to respond to.

He did go ahead and dim the lights, though. So even if everything looked exactly the same as it always looked, it was in forty-percent lighting.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

He didn't have access to, like, flowers or candles or anything fancy. All he was really doing, spending so much time waiting for the end of Pasha's shift, was pacing the same plain old front room Pasha always came home to, and worrying more every second that it just wasn't gonna be enough.

Pasha deserved the flowers and dinner and music and all. It wasn't that Greg didn't want to give it to him. It's just that he was useless when it came to that stuff. The only music he ever listened to before Pasha was old rock and country shit he heard back home, and the fancier stuff Pasha sometimes played in the background while he was reading or whatever.

Greg wasn't an idiot. Really. He just didn't know a hell of a lot about some things. The problem with something like this, wanting to set up a nice night so that he could show in some clumsy way how much he really did love Pasha, was that it involved all the kinds of things he didn't know shit about.

He thought for a while about asking one of Pasha's friends, someone who knew something about something, to get in there and help. But no, in the end he didn't ask anyone. No matter how nice someone could've made the place look, it still woulda been Greg's unromantic ass standing there when Pasha got there.

Anyway, Pasha knew him by now. Better than anyone had ever known him. It was more honest without all the flowers and crap, since Greg wasn't a real flowery guy. Pasha wasn't either, for the most part, and that was the only thing keeping Greg from being fucking furious at himself: Pasha deserved flowers and wine and nice music and good food, but was happy with cheeseburgers.

Maybe that was what made him and Greg work. Greg knew the things that a guy like Pasha really thought were important - he talked to his dad first, he got the ring, and he learned the Russian for the words he wanted to say - and he had a feeling that the other things, the flowers and all, wouldn't mean much above all that.

He still couldn't stop himself from pacing, couldn't stop his gut from churning and his palms from sweating. He was pretty sure he had at least one good puke in him right then. But that's just how things were gonna have to be.

The chirp of his comm panel was the only thing that got him to stop pacing - though all it did was make him change direction mid-stride to head to the wall.

And even as he went, he couldn't help looking behind him at the dim, plain front room. This was honest, he figured, even if it wasn't perfect. Maybe Andrei had a point with his crack about how bad Greg was at speaking Russian - if Pasha could come home to nothing special, to just awkward fucking Greg, and still maybe say yes when he asked...

That would mean something. Something big, something really fucking great.

By the time Greg hit the panel to answer the comm, he was somehow actually smiling.

It had to be an issue of frequencies.

That was the only reason Pavel could think of why communicators would work on the planet's surface but scanners and transporters were thwarted. There were less likely theories – the quantum makeup of scanner waves or their quark cluster information systems versus the more basic electromagnetic waves of the communication radios and receivers, that kind of thing – but the simplest, most obvious answer was that it was a just matter of frequencies.

That was a fairly common thing, common enough that he hoped it was something else, something more interesting. Still, even earth had an ionosphere that reflected radio waves back, that absorbed some and expelled others. Every planet had protective elements in its atmospheric makeup. Perhaps in the end this black sphere was simply a much more aggressive element than Federation scientists had ever seen.

It would take a fairly detailed scan from the surface and the ship, a detailed analysis of the atmosphere, before he would know for sure. But once they knew it would be straightforward enough to design some kind of compensating dampener to overcome it.

Spock and Scotty had agreed with him, forwarding a few other ideas to add to their list but seconding the theory that frequency interference was most likely and should be the first thing tested.

They hadn't had much time to talk it over – the Enterprise had been hours away from that planet when Starfleet first called, and they only had a couple of hours after the briefing before they were close enough that the landing party had to go prepare for the trip down.

It was strange to be left behind – Pavel had a crammed padd full of initial research sent by the first two scientific vessels, and had a pile of other homework to keep him occupied in the time it took before the planetside data packets started coming in.

It would be strange when he turned off the padds in a few more hours and crawled into his own warm bed instead of shivering on some planet. Strange, but Pavel could definitely get used to it.

He was smiling as he punched in the code outside the door to their quarters - the challenge was filling his head, keeping his subconscious mind humming even as he went through the door and looked around for Greg.

The darkness caught his attention, and he looked around in bemusement. Why were the lights down so far? Maybe Greg was sleeping. It was a little late, and...

His eyes caught on the table, empty except for a clear bottle and a couple of short glasses. Vodka, Pavel recognized. One of the bottles they had brought back months ago from their shore leave on earth. They were rationing them for special occasions, though, so why...

Oh.

Oh, damn it.

He had forgotten, thanks to the mission and the research. He'd forgotten all about Greg asking him to come home straight after his shift, and him promising. He hadn't even bothered to comm down to him, since he was late so many times. Greg probably didn't even know about the mission.

He set his padd on the small dining table and sighed. "Computer, lights at one hundred percent."

The room lit up obediently.

"Greg?" Pavel moved through the empty front room towards the bedroom. "Greg? I'm sorry, I completely..."

He trailed off when a glance into the bedroom revealed no Greg. No one sleeping, no one sitting there irritated or worried.

Pavel frowned, looking around and then turning to look back out into the front room. It was a little late, but maybe Greg went to eat in the mess, or went to the gym.

Maybe he was really upset.

Pavel moved slowly back out to the dining table, annoyed at himself. Just that morning he had thought about how little Greg ever asked of him, and this one time he had completely forgotten.

Still, he at least had a good reason, and Greg for all his size and power and his position on the ship didn't have much of a temper at all. Not towards Pavel, anyway.

Pavel would just have to make it up to him some other time. For now, he really did have work to do, and there were people stranded on a strange planet who would rely on that work, so he put himself and even his lover out of his mind enough to sit down at the dining table and start in on the first padd full of research.