The bridge was almost always quiet during beta shift. Even in the middle of assignments there was often nothing to do on beta shift except maintain orbit. It took only a skeleton crew.
But when the doors opened and Pavel found himself blinking out at the bridge, there were more people there than normal. Spock's terse voice was reciting some mantra of commands to the beta navigator, Riley. Sensor scans, Pavel could tell right away. Constant, obsessive scans of every single area on that planet that they could access.
Under Spock's voice was Nyota's constant hum, and Pavel found himself drawn to her. He moved on heavy feet behind the captain's chair, behind the weapons arrays, hugging the outside row of panels until he reached Nyota.
He thought he was already feeling about as ill as possible, but her words seemed to squeeze at his stomach in a whole new way.
"Enterprise to Lieutenant Harris. Harris, come in please. Enterprise to Lieutenant Harris. Harris, please respond. Enterprise to Lieutenant Harris..."
Again and again, with only brief pauses between to give him time to answer.
Pavel looked past her, down towards the helm and the screen.
It was strange. The viewscreen wasn't sensor-run until they called up special programs or scanner sweeps, so the view from outside the spread of the transparent aluminum screen was as boring as any orbit over any planet.
There were no dead spaces to the naked eye, nothing but flat, boring spreads of green and brown, dark sweeps of water. A normal planet, at least until they had to call on the sensors or try to beam down. Normal-looking, at least, perhaps even more geologically dull than most. No mountains that Pavel could see, no gaping canyons, no swirls of snow or lava. There were trees, huge green fields of uninterrupted forests, but no clue what might have lurked within them.
Greg was down there somewhere.
He turned back to Nyota during one of her brief pauses. He knew it was a pointless question, but he asked it anyway:
"Nothing yet?"
Nyota looked back over her shoulder, and her calm face seemed to soften somehow even more than usual. "Not yet," she said softly, reaching to lay a hand over his arm.
Pavel looked out at the viewscreen, the calm stillness of the planet's surface. "The communicators work in the dead zones," he said softly.
She didn't answer. Her hand slipped from his arm and she turned back to the panel.
"Enterprise to Lieutenant Harris. Please respond."
Pavel didn't need her to say anything out loud, his loud brain was already working through the facts: the communicators worked in the dead zone, and Greg was in the dead zone somewhere. So if Greg wasn't answering, it wasn't equipment failure.
It was something else.
Frank Porter was one of the few men on the Enterprise who had served in Starfleet for years before coming aboard.
Jim's crew was made up of at least eighty-five, ninety percent cadets, pushed into duty thanks to Nero, staying in service afterwards because no one could argue that that one mission was the hardest kind of final exam, and they'd all damn well passed.
But there were some vets, too. The officers that were earthbound at the time of the Romulan attack were divided among the different responding ships along with all the cadets, and a few of them remained when the Enterprise started its five year mission.
Olsen had been an engineer for a few years. Not a chief but a crewman, for all the good it did him in the end. The original CMO, Puri, had been an old-timer, Spock of course, a handful were running the beta shifts.
And Porter.
Olsen had died, Puri died. Jim and Spock had made their peace during the first mission. The commanders littering beta shift were dutiful enough – if they had any complaints Jim hadn't heard them.
Porter was a different story, and Jim walked a strange path with him. He'd never defied Jim before, but he tended to regard Jim with a kind of bemusement. Maybe it came from the fact that he was years older, and had years of service under his belt more than Jim. Maybe some of it was Jim being hyper-sensitive because he was well aware of how hard it was for a punk like him to earn respect from the old-timers.
Maybe it was just Porter's personality. He didn't seem to have much of a sense of gravity to him, always had some little glint of amusement in his eyes. Aloofness. Something.
Whatever it was, it didn't stop him from being a good chief. His crew was a strong, devoted, fucking brave group of people, and generally when that happened it reflected on the leadership they received.
It occurred to Jim when he told Porter about his place on the away team that he hadn't actually gone planetside with Porter before. Not into active combat, anyway. Porter had a good reputation – all the men Pike ended up with for that first rushed mission were good. But Jim had yet to see it for himself.
He avoided Porter, for the most part. As much as a captain could avoid his head of security, anyway. They didn't talk on any kind of personal level, they did their jobs and that was it. Jim didn't know him, didn't always know how to approach him or how to treat him.
That day, though, he didn't have the slightest question in his mind.
"You want to tell me why the away team I assigned to this mission isn't the away team that went down to that planet?"
Porter obviously knew what was going on. The air in his office, in the whole security wing outside, was tense. When Jim had stopped the first security guard he saw and ordered him to gather up a fast, strong team to go planetside, the order was met with a terse, unsurprised nod.
But Porter seemed somehow surprised at the question.
He stood up behind his desk and frowned at Jim. "Sir?"
Jim marched up to the desk and leaned in, palms pushing into the edge of the desk. "Why did you disobey my direct order, Commander?"
Porter's temple furrowed into lines, but even then he somehow seemed to be smirking. Might've been Jim's imagination, but Porter seemed to be one of those guys who regressed in age with every grey hair. Trying to make up for wrinkles with some kind of pissed-teenager petulance.
He straightened up, looking at Jim like he was confused. But his voice was deliberate when he spoke.
"Starfleet policy gives division heads the authority to select which of their officers can and can not go on certain assignments."
That fucking line was thought out ahead of time. Porter knew just what he was doing, and just what kind of response it would get.
Jim stood stiffly, staring at him with unblinking eyes. "Unless," he said through his teeth, "that decision interferes with a direct order from that division head's captain."
Porter shrugged. "I don't consider it disobeying your order, sir. You said you wanted the best man down there. I felt that Lieutenant Commander Harris was a stronger officer than the one you selected."
"You mean you."
Porter nodded. "Doesn't shame me to admit it. Chief of Security is a different skill set than the one you needed. Harris was better for the assignment."
"Then why," Jim asked him, soft, "was I first informed of it by Harris himself, on an emergency broadcast from planetside, hours after the team first went down? If your logic was so sound why the hell didn't you come to me with it?"
Porter had a fast answer for that, as well. "Sometimes we bend the rules in the interest of the assignment, Captain. That's a lesson your crew learns - by example - almost every day on this ship."
Jim's mouth curled up a little, hearing the implication but letting it pass, for the moment.
He couldn't help but remember Bones saying that no one had questioned Greg showing up to go planetside; they were just glad to see him. Jim could say unequivocally that his own personal choice for any dangerous away mission would have been Greg Harris.
But Jim knew Porter's reputation, his record. He trusted him to have earned the position at the head of security. If his officer was good, Porter had to be better. That's how the fucking system was supposed to work.
He could almost hear Bones in his mind, mocking him for being so fucking naïve.
Porter had been tested for years prior to getting assigned to the Enterprise. It wasn't like he didn't have experience, and a good enough record to grant the promotion. He'd been tested. But he hadn't been tested by Jim.
Jim knew in a thousand different ways that his own vision of what serving in the Fleet should be wasn't all that close to what it actually was. In Porter's Starfleet, as he himself said a minute before, the chief had a whole different skill set than the officer.
In Jim's world?
In Jim's world a leader would never fucking well ask a single member of his crew to do what he himself wouldn't do. Like Porter he could admit when his officers were better than him at some things – they had to be. Jim sure as hell wasn't going to crew his ship with pilots he could outperform, or engineers with a smaller knowledge base than his.
But he didn't consider himself above or outside of their duties. Not a single officer on that ship, not a single position.
He spoke carefully. "You sent Harris down in the interest of the assignment. I can buy that. If you'd asked my opinion, I probably would have okayed it. But you didn't. You didn't ask ahead of time because you thought I'd disagree, which means you thought it was more important to send someone else in your place than it was to obey a direct order."
Porter scowled. "If you're calling me a coward-"
Jim didn't give him a chance to finish. "You didn't tell me once you'd made the choice, or after the landing party was gone. You haven't come to me now that you know that I'm aware of what you did. You can claim you were acting in the interest of the assignment, but keeping it quiet this whole time was in the interest of your own ass."
Porter clamped his mouth shut tight, and there was no trace of his ever-present bemusement suddenly.
Jim flashed a humorless smile. "Yeah, sometimes I'm a disobedient fucker, Porter, you got me there. But not in the interest of protecting my ass. That's something I don't tolerate."
"Okay, sir, now let me ask you a question."
Jim's eyebrows lofted, but he didn't cut him off.
Porter straightened, folding his arms over his chest. "From the reports we're getting down here it seems to me like my officer performed above and beyond his duties. And you yourself said you would've okayed sending Harris down if I asked. So what exactly are you pissed off about? That I didn't beg your permission first, or that I'm not the one stranded down there? Are you pissed because the officer that is down there is the same officer that's shacked up with your little golden boy from the bridge?"
Jim would have laughed if anything about this situation was funny. "All of the above. You think I won't admit that? You want to make this personal?"
Porter cocked an eyebrow up, and the bemusement was back in place in his eyes.
Jim smirked at the sight of it. "You know what I've realized, standing here? I knew before now that Harris would step into danger if he had to to save other people's lives, He's proven himself, he's done his job. But I don't know if you would. Worse, I've got reason to doubt it now that I didn't have before."
He could practically watch the smugness drip right back off of Porter's face as he talked.
"And yeah, I know Harris. He's a pal. He's banging my navigator, as you were classy enough to bring up. But let me tell you something, Porter: Len McCoy's my oldest friend in the world, and if he'd left that briefing and decided to send M'Benga to that planet in his place without consulting me, I'd be just as pissed off."
There was a quiet beep, the strangely muted sound of an entry request.
Porter didn't take his eyes off Jim, speaking through his teeth. "Come."
The door wisped open behind Jim.
"Captain, the away team you requested is ready to go."
Jim nodded, and even with his back to the door that was enough to send the new arrival out through the door again, leaving him and Porter alone.
Jim regarded Porter. "You said it was in Starfleet regs that you could choose your own officer to send on an away team. You're right. That's the only reason I'm not going to court-martial you."
Porter's throat worked, but though his eyes glared he stayed silent.
"I'm about to send five more of your officers into danger to rescue the first one. While they're gone, you need to start working up your transfer request." Jim flashed a cool smile. "You might not've gone against Starfleet policy, but you went against mine. If you want to stay an officer you're not going to do it on this ship. Understood?"
Porter's jaw worked. He drew in a breath, sharp, but nodded once.
Jim turned on his heel and moved back through the door.
Wasn't the meeting he wanted to have – hell, he wanted to call Porter the coward he was and sock him in the face. But even though he didn't respect all of Starfleet's regulations, and even though he let his officers witness his own disobedience of Starfleet rules time and again, he was still a captain. Still in charge, and well aware of the requirements of his position.
Being Jim Kirk meant he was a stubborn shithead who wouldn't hesitate to do his own thing if he thought it was right. But being Captain Kirk meant he had hundreds of people living and dying at his command. Being captain meant that sometimes he had to put the health of the ship and its crew above his own personal wants.
Anyway, once Greg was back on board and Porter was on his way out...Jim could always sock him then.
If the air out in the main room of the security department had been tense when he first arrived, it was thick with tension as he stepped back out from Porter's office. His steps slowed as he moved in, and he found himself looking out at an entire crowd of red uniforms and grim faces.
No one moved, no one said anything.
For a brief, paranoid second that came from facing too many grim faces on the other side of a bar fight, he almost thought that they knew he was in their sacking their boss and they were there to avenge the guy.
But the man he had first sent to arrange the away team, a baby-faced lieutenant who was probably the brief intruder into Porter's office a minute ago, spoke from the front of the line.
"Away team volunteers reporting as ordered, sir."
Jim's paranoia slipped away in an instant. He looked over the faces of almost three dozen men and women, his expression staying neutral with some difficulty.
"I didn't ask for the entire department."
The lieutenant glanced back at the officers beside and behind him. "You didn't get it, sir. But if you'd give permission for the on-duty crew guarding weapon lockers and arrays through the ship to leave their posts, you'd have the rest of them down here pretty fast."
There was a quiet hum through the crowd, a mostly silent affirmation. There wasn't a shred of hesitation or doubt on a single face in that group.
Jim forgave himself, in that moment, for thinking that Frank Porter was a good man. He'd assumed it because Porter's officers were so damned good, and usually a leader has something to do with that.
The officers in front of him, though...seemed like they were as good as they were in spite of their chief, not because of. Which meant Jim had done the exact right thing in removing that chief from his position.
Fuck anyone who thought he was bragging when he said it – the officers on Jim Kirk's ship were the best in the fucking universe.
He cleared his throat. "If I could send all of you down I would, but I need a team small enough that we can beam you out at once in case you're attacked." He hesitated, his throat oddly dry. "But you have no idea how much I appreciate you all volunteering." He almost looked back at Porter's office, but stopped himself. "Lieutenant..."
"McCarthy, sir," the baby-faced guy nodded with a faint smile.
Jim returned the smile briefly. "McCarthy. You and four others be ready to transport in ten minutes."
"Aye, sir."
They slipped to the sides as he approached, giving Jim a clear path out the door. Right as the door opened in front of him, McCarthy spoke again.
"Captain?"
Jim glanced back, stopping in the doorway.
A less-than-subtle hand from behind urged McCarthy closer, and he slipped through the group of officers and spoke in a softer voice. "Porter was assigned to go down, wasn't he? That's what we've been hearing."
"Porter..." Jim hesitated. "Porter felt like it was his right to delegate that assignment."
"Was it?" came another voice, a fierce-looking red-headed woman Jim had been unable to not notice around the ship.
Jim flashed a smile, much less sincere than the one he'd given McCarthy. "By Starfleet's rules? Yeah."
He looked over the grim group, shaking his head a little in surprise that on the best ship in the Federation, the best crew of security guards a captain could want had been shackled to that self-centered asshole he'd just left behind. His only regret was not realizing the truth about Porter before now.
"But I don't agree. So Porter's going to transfer to a ship that follows Starfleet rules more closely than this one," he said finally.
A murmur went through the group, a few eyebrows flying up. But beyond the mild surprise there wasn't a single negative reaction to the news. This group was probably too disciplined to let much reaction slip at all, but Jim figured if anyone there wanted to protest that decision they'd do it.
Instead, he turned and left without being stopped again. And the silence was just one more sign that he'd done the right thing.
There was this drone around him, this echo of words from beside him and in front of him that had turned slowly into white noise in Pavel's head.
The constant refrain from Nyota as she tried for the hundredth time to get an answer from the planet. The orders from Spock, regular as clockwork, to scan the clearing that the away team had landed on, and the ones closest to it on all sides, again and again and again.
The reply from the helm, again and again, report results. Negative, sir. Nothing, sir. Negative, sir.
It had become this horrible kind of music, this background noise to the quickening thud of his heart, and the growing dryness in his throat, the churn of his nervous stomach.
Greg had been hurt once. It was early on in the mission, almost two years ago now. He had gone down with an away team and had come back up with a seared, smoking uniform sleeve and a phaser burn through his arm.
It hadn't been that bad, at least according to Greg and Doctor McCoy. He'd beamed back to the ship conscious, on his feet and under his own power. He was out of sickbay within hours. Every morning for a few weeks he started his day a few minutes early, running through some exercises McCoy had given him to do to help the healing, but beyond that not a single thing changed. It didn't even leave a scar, thanks to McCoy's skill.
It was nothing, really, compared to what all might have gone wrong. A wound barely worth mentioning that healed without a trace.
But Pavel had panicked when he first heard the captain's call saying that Greg was wounded, and had only stopped panicking a couple of hours later when he walked through the door of their quarters and found Greg there. He was pale and half-sedated, but he laughed with Pavel at the box of condoms and pamphlets about sex education that McCoy had handed off to Pavel. (Because it was during that time that Pavel, in his panic, had basically outed himself and Greg by jumping Greg in the transporter room in sheer relief.)
By the next week Pavel had mostly forgotten what that panic felt like.
It was only on the bridge at that moment, listening to the hum of voices around him repeating themselves into static, that he realized he had felt sick like that once before.
It seemed absurd to him right then that anyone could ever forget that kind of feeling.
He was pulled from his thoughts and the hum of white noise around him by the soft sound of the main bridge door sliding open.
"-know what the hell is happening, Jim. For God's sake."
He looked over slowly, and tried not to feel too sick at the sight of McCoy, moving carefully in beside the captain.
He had changed his uniform, obviously. He was barely even limping. But all Pavel could see were those gashes down his leg, and the hideous claws that must have made them.
"Spock." Kirk kept pace with McCoy, but spoke sharply.
Spock answered without pause. "No change, sir. No response from the planet, no sign of lifeforms, human or otherwise, in any of the areas our sensors can detect."
"The away team should be in place." Kirk reached the captain's chair Spock had smoothly slid out of when he first arrived and hit the communication channel on the arm. "Transporter room, are we ready to go?"
"Aye, sir."
Kirk looked out at the planet for a moment, so slow and peaceful-looking on the viewscreen. "You men be careful down there. We're taking this slowly – you find out of you can see any trace of a trail away from that clearing, let's get a sense of which direction Harris went in. Report in when you've got something, and we'll talk about how we're going to infiltrate that damned dead zone without losing track of anyone."
"Aye, sir," came a different voice in answer.
A voice that made Kirk smile, if only for a brief, tight moment. "We're trying to find someone, not lose someone else. Transporter room is standing by, watching as closely as we are. No heroes, McCarthy."
"Understood, captain. We'll be careful."
"Kirk out." Kirk tapped the communication console and turned back to the viewscreen like he could stare the planet down.
The white noise behind Pavel, the hum in Nyota's voice, changed suddenly.
"Enterprise to Lieutenant Harris. Lieutenant, we are sending a team down. If you can hear this but are unable to answer, return to your original transport coordinates. Repeat, we are sending..."
Pavel tuned her out again.
"Hey, kid."
He blinked and looked away from the viewscreen. "Doctor?"
McCoy was making a slow way around the panels, and it was apparent that he was on his feet far too soon. His sickbay could repair gashes and tears, but nerves and muscles needed recovery time. McCoy himself was usually the first one to mention that.
Pavel didn't say anything.
McCoy regarded him with his Doctor expression. The kind, bedside manner eyes that reminded Pavel why he had never for a moment been intimidated by McCoy.
"How you doing?"
Pavel shrugged, since the answer seemed obvious enough to not require words.
McCoy reached his side and turned, following Pavel's gaze as he looked back out at the viewscreen. "I keep thinking about Greg walking into that transporter room," McCoy went on after a moment. His voice was low. "Keep thinking how I didn't even ask. Didn't care why it was him instead of Porter, I was just glad it was."
Pavel could understand that. He would have been glad too, if he had been going down.
"He wasn't even in full uniform," McCoy said after a moment, a frown in his voice. "Didn't think about it at the time, but he looked like he got ready in a hurry."
Pavel nodded. There was no note in their quarters, no message left, no attempt by Greg to pass the word along to Pavel that he was going down. That wasn't like Greg. However it was that he found out he was getting sent to the planet, he must not have been given any time at all to get ready.
"Shit." McCoy sighed as the silence ticked by. "Tonight of all fucking nights. I should've said something."
Pavel swallowed, his eyes staying carefully on the screen. "If Porter had gone instead you might be dead now. Greg would never...and I wouldn't, either...any of you..."
He stopped, hearing his own scattered words, but a glance over at McCoy showed him that the doctor understood what he was trying to say. Porter wouldn't have done what Greg did. Scotty at least would be dead now if things had happened as they were supposed to. Pavel had little doubt of that.
Something else in McCoy's words registered, and he frowned.
"Tonight of all nights?" he repeated uncertainly. It seemed an odd qualifier, and it was less 'tonight' by then than early morning. "What do you mean?"
Doctor McCoy blinked, looking back at Pavel. He seemed almost surprised, like he hadn't meant to say those words or hadn't meant to be asked about them.
He shrugged, just a beat too late to be casual. "Nothin. Just...you might be right about how things would have gone down without him there, but I'm still gonna regret not even asking what he was doing there."
Pavel sighed and looked back at the screen, at the quietly orbiting planet. Kirk had sat in his chair by then, Spock standing quietly beside him. They were both watching the screen, which as Pavel looked on changed from a view of the planet through the transparency to a scanner view.
Suddenly it was a ball of black again, a muted area of nothingness where the sensors couldn't provide any information, and a patch of terrain in the middle. This was a sensor view, and the terrain was cloudy but Pavel knew that it was life-signs that they were focused on.
And after a few seconds, some appeared. Five, all human, appearing near the leftmost edge of terrain. That would be where the first landing party appeared, where their equipment would still be lying.
"I was late getting in," he said.
"Hmm?"
He could feel McCoy's eyes, but he didn't look back. "I realized it a few minutes before you got up here. He asked me to be on time tonight so that we could have an evening together, and because of this assignment I forgot. I worked too long and came back late, and I felt horrible."
McCoy started to speak, but they were both cut off by a sudden voice.
"McCarthy to Enterprise."
"Kirk here, Lieutenant. How's it look?"
"We'll have to take your word that this is where the first party set up, sir. As far as we can see right off there's not a trace of what went on here."
Spock replied softly, to the captain and not the landing party. "We left almost all of the equipment where it was, Captain. There should be something left."
"Unless a big pack of natives came back around and carried it off," Kirk replied just as quietly.
"Indeed."
Kirk sighed and tapped the communicator again. "Forget the equipment, focus on the terrain. We need to track down our missing man's path."
"Aye, sir."
The communicator fell silent.
Pavel watched those five scanner signs start moving, spreading out but not too far from each other.
"You realize he wasn't there either way, right?"
Pavel looked over at McCoy. "What?"
"Greg. He was gone before your shift ended." McCoy looked over at him and shrugged. "There's too much going on right now, you don't need to be adding misplaced guilt to it."
Pavel smiled so thinly that it felt brittle. "I should look at that as a positive? That he never has to know that I broke my promise to him?"
"If you need a bright side, and sometimes people do, then sure. Make one up." McCoy leaned in and nudged his arm. "But I know you, kid. You'll probably tell him anyway."
His edged smile softened a little, before it faded away entirely. "I hope so, doctor."
The screen suddenly swelled with color.
It was such a large mass of color that Pavel's first thought was that the scanners had suddenly stopped working right. From five little dots of body heat and chemical make-up came a swarm so tightly compacted that it seemed like one great mass of brightness quickly moving up the terrain.
Luckily it took others less time to catch on than Pavel.
Kirk was already bolt upright in his chair, already thumbing his communicator. "Transporter room, get them up!"
"Enterprise!" A tinny voice filtered under Kirk's. "Jesus! Beam us up, Enterprise! Beam us-"
The thin voice vanished in a hum of sound and a high-pitched tone, like feedback, that swelled around it.
Kirk was out of his chair fast. "Transporter room!"
"Aye, sir! We've got them! We've got..." There was a soft curse and a sudden rise in volume. "We need a medical team down here!"
McCoy and Kirk were both already in motion, and Pavel barely had time to notice how pale McCoy was suddenly before the lift doors shut on them.
"Keep the scanners running," Spock said fast, taking over for Kirk as seemlessly as usual. "Try to get some kind of visual on these creatures. Lieutenant Uhura, play back those last few moments of sound, try to find some kind of coherence in that language."
"Language, sir?" Nyota, the most learned woman in the topic of linguistics that Pavel had ever met, seemed dubious. "All we picked up was that loud whine in the back-"
"Those are their voices, Lieutenant. At least so far as we heard them ourselves."
Nyota turned back to her panel without questioning it.
Pavel didn't for a moment take his eyes off that screen.
Perhaps he should have followed Kirk and McCoy down to engineering. Perhaps he could have been some help if someone was injured. He was the only one on the Bridge who wasn't working.
But he couldn't move.
He watched the swarm of color as it started to slide back towards the blankness of dead space, out of the sensor's range. The entire field of light, the mass of life signs, melting away as suddenly as it appeared.
It was just as McCoy had described it. A sudden swarm, dozens and dozens of creatures. Except the last time those creatures vanished back into the dead zones, they were chasing someone.
Someone who was now all alone again.