Getting buried in his research was nothing new for Pavel, and this was a particularly interesting case. Still, as he finished with the first scientific team's research notes about the planet they were now orbiting, and started on the second team's, he began to get more and more distracted.
Hours were passing. It was late; late enough that his body was starting to complain for want of sleep. Late enough that the mess would be closed and the gym would be empty.
But Greg hadn't returned.
He tried to keep his mind on his work, and usually that was never a problem for Pavel. But more and more as the minutes ticked by without the door sliding open, Pavel's brain left science behind and focused instead on the warmth of their bed that morning, and Greg's nervous smile and awkwardness as he asked Pavel to come home on time.
He didn't have the luxury of being able to feel guilty, not while people's lives were at stake, but it was harder and harder to distract himself from it. Why would Greg still be gone? He didn't teach his class that night, he wasn't working night shifts, not for another few months when shift schedules flipped again.
But if he was somewhere else, why didn't he leave a message?
Greg had been angry at Pavel maybe once in all the time they'd been together. Maybe. When Pavel was being a child and storming around throwing tantrums because he misinterpreted something Greg said. And Greg really only got mad, if he could even call it 'mad', because Pavel never gave him the chance to explain.
Just thinking that he might have stirred Greg to anger again was enough to make Pavel's stomach ache.
He wasn't a particularly good boyfriend, he was well aware of that. He was obsessive, temperamental, he wasn't good at talking about feelings. Of the two of them it was Greg who pushed Pavel to talk, to say something if he was in a bad mood, to explain how he felt.
Pavel could talk for hours, of course, but not about the things that mattered. He was determined and stubborn and self-absorbed.
He wasn't horrible, at least. Whenever Greg needed him, he stepped up. He could be self-focused, but he didn't think he made Greg unhappy or anything. He didn't. He made Greg happy.
Usually.
As the time ticked by his eyes left the padd and went to the silent door again and again, and the nervous flutter in his stomach started to sour into something stronger.
When the silence was broken by a chime at the door, finally, he was out of his seat so fast that he didn't even set the stylus he was toying with down first.
"Greg?" He was talking before the door was even in motion.
It wasn't Greg. Greg would have simply come in.
For some reason that made his nerves flare up all the stronger, and the strange urgency on Hikaru's face didn't help.
"He isn't here?" Hikaru asked instantly, moving around Pavel and striding in as if Greg might have been hiding behind a chair or something.
Pavel swallowed. The rumble of nerves in his gut was starting to make him nauseated. "No. He's at the gym. Or dinner, or something."
"You haven't seen him?" Hikaru faced him, almost accusing.
"I was working late on this mission. He wasn't here when I got...Why? Why are you looking for-"
"Shit. Come on." Hikaru was out the door in a flash, his hand looping around Pavel's arm and dragging him along behind.
Pavel didn't bother to protest. He went along on stumbling steps. "Hikaru."
"Something's going on," Hikaru said fast, answering the question without giving Pavel time to ask. "The landing party ran into trouble already, they called for beam-out. There are injuries."
Pavel frowned, matching Hikaru's hurried strides. "When did-"
"Just now. Five minutes ago. I was having dinner with Jim, listening to him whine about McCoy being gone."
They piled into the lift and Hikaru punched the level down to engineering. To the transporter rooms.
Hikura faced him the moment the lift doors shut. "You haven't seen him all day?"
"McCoy?" Pavel blinked, but his already-anxious brain zoomed in fast. "Greg? No, not since this morning." And when he said it that way it chilled him, made him search Hikaru's face fearfully. "Why...what does any of this have to do with Greg?"
Hikaru frowned. "He made the call."
"What call?"
The lift doors slid open and Pavel was out faster than Hikaru, jogging down the curved corridor to the transporter room.
Hikaru didn't bother answering, but Pavel didn't need him to. All he knew was that something was wrong and somehow Greg was involved.
The doors to the transporter room slid open into chaos.
Kirk was there already, yelling to be heard over a rumble of other voices. There was a small crowd around the transporter padd, a prone body, red. The blue of medical uniforms, a transport stretcher hovering behind their backs.
Scotty. Scotty was laying there, hurt, deep red seeping through the brighter red of his uniform. McCoy knelt on the padd beside him, but Pavel couldn't see through the crowd enough to tell if he was hurt or if he was helping Scotty.
Kirk's voice was sharp above the rumble, yelling into his communicator.
It was a hum, strange and busy, as Pavel stumbled in. It was only when Hikaru pushed past him and moved up to the padd that Pavel could even begin to make any sense out of it.
Greg wasn't there.
Of course.
Greg was at the gym or something, Greg wasn't there. It would have made no sense if he had been. Greg had nothing to do with that mission.
He relaxed a little, enough to back out of the way as the stretcher sliced through the air with half the medical team following behind it, fast. Poor Scotty lay there, eyes shut too tightly to be unconscious. In pain.
Without all that red drawing his attention, Pavel spotted Spock standing to the side. His uniform was disheveled but his expression was as calm as always.
Pavel went over, leaving Jim shouting into his comm unit and Hikaru helping McCoy to his feet.
"What happened?" he asked under the quieting sounds of the chaos dying down.
Spock glanced at him and then back at the group – at McCoy, Pavel saw.
"The planet is not unpopulated," he said, calm but terse.
McCoy was limping, leaning on Hikaru, and they both ignored the two nurses still hovering over them. They headed for Kirk.
Whoever Kirk was shouting at, his voice was quieting fast. He spoke into his sleeve even as he watched McCoy approaching. "Then sit there and wait for it. I don't care how long it takes, you get him back on the comm and you damn well call me the second you hear from him."
He dropped his arm, quieting for the first time since Pavel entered the room. His eyes were grim, locked on McCoy.
"You need to get looked at."
McCoy straightened, as if leaning on Hikaru was somehow making him worse. "Nothing?"
Kirk shook his head, scowling. "Nothing on the sensors, and he isn't answering hails."
McCoy cursed, low and heated.
Pavel, forgotten about in his corner beside Spock, spoke before he could stop himself. "Who isn't answering hails?"
Kirk's eyes left McCoy and found Pavel, and his scowl melted into something softer. "Shit," he muttered.
It was as good as an answer, but it was the wrong answer.
Pavel shook his head. "Greg isn't even assigned to this mission."
But even though that was the truth and they all knew it, no one relaxed or agreed or spoke up to tell Pavel that of course he wasn't, it wasn't even Greg they were talking about.
Kirk just caught McCoy's other arm to brace him, and their eyes stayed grim on Pavel, and no one said anything at all.
Pavel's memory wasn't eidetic, but it was close enough that only experts in the field of conscious recall could tell the difference.
Spock left the transporter room to go to the bridge, summoning Nyota as he went. Pavel was torn between going with him and wanting some rational explanation for what the hell was going on.
In the end he stayed with Kirk as they finally talked McCoy into going up to sickbay, rationalizing to himself that whatever happened on the bridge, Kirk would be informed of it within moments.
Still, even as he hovered behind Hikaru and Kirk, still supporting McCoy between them, all he could see in his traitorous memory was the crystal clear image of a black ball of dead space that was all the sensors could see of this planet.
"Can you give me the short version?" Kirk asked McCoy as soon as the were on the lift.
"Shit," McCoy answered. "As soon as I figure out what the hell happened, you'll be the first person I tell." But he sighed audibly, his shoulders wilted between Kirk and Hikaru.
Pavel could only see the backs of their heads, but he could hear the darkness in McCoy's voice.
"We weren't there but a few hours. We'd just got done setting up all that equipment Scotty lugged down. Suddenly...hell, Jim, I don't even know what the hell those things were, but there were dozens of them. Came out of the trees, like..." He shook his head. "I guess they were some kind of intelligent species – they were wearing clothes, at least. I didn't hear anything that sounded like language, though, and they didn't seem to have weapons. Just...these things fucking rushed us, Jim. Shrieking like some kind of medieval banshees."
Pavel stared at the back of McCoy's dark hair, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.
"They got Scotty hard. He was closest to them, hemmed in by all his equipment. Got to me when I was going for Scotty. Spock took a few of them out, but we couldn't...not like we could run anywhere to get away. We had like a square mile of space to work with before we got into that dead zone, and most of it was flat terrain. There wasn't anywhere to go."
The lift doors hissed open, and Jim and Hikaru immediately started moving, leading McCoy out towards the wide doors into the Sickbay.
Pavel saw Scotty in one of the beds, a cluster of nurses around him. He followed McCoy, though, needing to hear the end of the story.
Kirk and Hikaru led the doctor to an empty bed across from Scotty's, and McCoy grimaced as he sat.
"Keep going," Kirk said almost tersely, his eyes moving across the aisle to the group around Scotty.
McCoy hiked his leg up on the bed, and leaned over to press some controls on the bed's panel. "I was trapped over by Scott, Spock's firing to keep those fucking beasts away from us, and I hear Harris shouting into his communicator, calling for transport."
Pavel wanted to shake his head, but his desire to keep denying the whole thing was getting overwhelmed by his own common sense.
"Took the ship a few seconds to answer, and those fuckers just kept on coming." McCoy straightened with a laser scalpel clenched in his hand. He hesitated, looking at Kirk. "Then they stopped."
"They stopped?"
"They stopped coming up on us. Didn't realize why for a few seconds, until I saw they were all tearing off in the same direction. And I could hear Harris still shouting..."
Pavel closed his eyes, sagging back against the empty bed beside McCoy's.
"We weren't gonna make it, Jim." McCoy was hushed suddenly. "Those things were like animals sweeping over us."
The high whine of the laser scalpel made Pavel's eyes open, and he watched with some distant horror as McCoy carefully sliced up the leg of his uniform.
The fact that he had limped at all, even leaning on Hikaru, seemed miraculous. The uniform, shredded as it was, had hidden a mass of gouges, thick red clotting blood and split lines of skin and muscle.
Like something with impossibly sharp claws had raked them down the doctor's leg.
He looked towards the cluster of nurses around Scott's bed and swallowed, remembering how much red he'd seen in the transporter room.
McCoy went on, hoarse, even as a couple of nurses reached them and took the scalpel from him to get to work on him themselves.
"The half a minute until we got beamed out...we'd've been dead. I don't have any kind of doubt about that. Harris must've seen it."
"He made himself a target," Pavel heard, distant, the words mumbled in his own voice. It wasn't a question, because he knew Greg. He knew what Greg would do to protect the officers under his charge.
McCoy glanced over at Pavel, sucking in a harsh breath as the nurses finished slicing around his uniform leg. "Must've not given it a single thought, as fast as it all went down. He shouted for pickup and then shouted at those little shits to come after him. And most of them listened."
"He went into the dead zone." Pavel could remember Kirk back in the transporter room saying there was nothing on the sensors.
McCoy grimaced, losing color, as they tended his leg. He sagged back on the bed, looking away from Pavel.
"Saved our lives," he said, voice thinner as he lay back on the bed. He was starting to shake, fine tremors all up and down his body.
Shock, Pavel thought.
He looked away from McCoy, facing Kirk.
"We'll find him," Kirk said before Pavel could speak, though his eyes didn't move from McCoy. "Dead space or not, we'll find him."
Pavel couldn't let himself think of that yet. He wanted to work out the story, make sense of how they got where they suddenly were, before he could start to lose himself in the possible futures.
"He wasn't chosen for this assignment."
"No. He wasn't." Kirk's eyes went to the side, sharp and angry.
McCoy's closing eyes opened. He looked over at them behind a glazing expression. "He showed up right before we left. Said Porter reassigned him. Didn't even occur to me that it didn't get cleared with you first." He flashed a small, sick, unhappy sort of smile. "Frankly, we were glad to see him."
Kirk frowned at McCoy for a long moment, then suddenly turned on his heel. He nodded at Hikaru. "Stay here, call me when there's news for either of them."
Hikaru nodded, grim and silent.
Kirk turned to Pavel. "Get up to the bridge. They're watching the sensors for the slightest trace of anyone, and Uhura should be up there by now trying to reach him on the communicator."
Pavel hesitated. He wasn't ready to dread yet. "Where are you going?"
He wasn't ready, but the steel-cold blue eyes Kirk turned on him made his argument dry up in his throat.
"We're not leaving him down there. I'll arrange a security team to go down." The same poisoned coldness was in Kirk's voice. "And then I'm going to find out why the hell Greg was on that planet."