It took a little more than twenty seconds after the mass of life signs appeared on the scanners for the transporter room to beam up the security officers who had gone down to look for Greg.
In that twenty seconds, one had been killed. Two more were injured, badly but nothing Doctor McCoy couldn't repair.
Pavel hadn't been allowed in when he finally made himself move off the bridge and down to sickbay. He had caught sight of three occupied beds, two hovering with nurses and one still and silent. But Kirk had stopped him at the door and ushered him back to the lift.
"There's no point, Pavel," he'd said quietly.
There was blood on his uniform. Dots of it, scattered, as if he'd been there when the wounds were inflicted. It spoke to how chaotic it must have been in Sickbay and the transporter rooms, trying to keep those men alive.
The one who died was a younger officer, a Lieutenant Pavel had met once or twice but didn't know well. Jacob McCarthy. Kirk seemed to be rather affected by his death, though of course he took any loss of crew hard. After he ushered Pavel safely to his quarters he planned to go right back up to his own rooms to call earth, to inform McCarthy's family.
Pavel didn't ask for details. He was still in that numb place, a surreal, distant sort of fog. It was strange, almost off-putting, that he couldn't manage a real reaction.
Things had simply happened too fast, that was all. He went from not even knowing that Greg was gone to being told that Greg was in danger, and then lost, or dead, in the course of minutes.
And no one could help him get his footing and adjust to it all, because no one could tell him what was actually happening. All he had was a planet that he couldn't see, and messages that went unanswered.
Pavel's mind, the way it had always worked, didn't do well with not knowing something. He had always gone in search of answers if there was anything he didn't know. He had crammed his head full of everything he could fit in there simply because he couldn't stand the idea of not knowing.
Maybe it was because of that, because he could almost look at this in terms of the same desire for knowledge that he'd battled since he was a child, that he was able to stay calm.
Maybe it was just that he had absolutely no idea how to react to everything that had happened.
It was morning as Kirk left Pavel to his quarters. His shift would have begun in another hour or so, but Kirk had already told him not to bother showing up.
He didn't sleep last night, obviously, but he didn't feel tired. He felt blank.
He ended up standing there for a while, just a few steps inside the front room of his quarters, as his mind tried to work through everything. But his brain was as useless and blank as a scanner sweep of that planet below him.
His padds were still on the dining table, still scattered where he had left them when Hikaru knocked on his door the evening before. His research. Wasn't it strange that he didn't immediately go over there and start firing those padds up and learning about the place that had Greg trapped?
He didn't, thought. He didn't move. His gaze drifted over them and didn't even pause. He looked over the vodka bottle he hadn't put away, and past the small sofa and little hard-backed armchair, the blank vid screen, the gym bag in the corner.
This was Greg's quarters. It was strange sometimes to realize that. Pavel's room was technically down a level with most of the other ensigns. Smaller than this, one room, and a bathroom shared with the room beside him.
He hadn't slept there in months – by then it was so crammed with old research and half-finished experiments and bits of projects he was working on with Scotty or Spock that it wasn't functional as anything but a storage room.
These rooms were his home on the ship and had been from the start. Everyone knew about it, though it wasn't official – Starfleet didn't officially let any non-married officers room together, but of course Kirk didn't care.
If Greg never came back, the quarters would be reassigned. Pavel would have to clear out his cramped little storage room.
What an utterly absurd thing to think about.
Pavel moved slowly across the front room, his gaze catching and staying on that gym bag, so carelessly dropped beside the couch.
He picked up the bag, and sank down on the couch, laying it half on his lap.
If it was daytime hours and Greg wasn't in uniform, odds were good that this bag would be hanging off his shoulder. He had worn thin spots through the shoulders of some of his undershirts, friction from the strap. He always seemed to be on his way to or from the gym, or a class, or a private session with Kirk or Hikaru or any of a dozen of his students.
He loved the act of being physical. It was just the other morning...God, just that morning, just twenty-four hours ago...that Pavel had lay there with him in bed thinking such soft, awed thoughts about his lover's body, his physicality.
Now there was nothing but silence and a bed that hadn't been slept in.
He shook that thought away fast – it was far too fatalistic, and Pavel tried to be an optimist. He wasn't going to start thinking about this silent room and his own uncertainty about Greg's fate as status quo. That wasn't what his life suddenly was, it wasn't a thing he had to get used to. It's just how things had been for a little while, and might be for a little longer.
Nothing more than that.
He found himself unzipping the top of the packed duffel bag, wanting some distraction. No doubt half the clothes Greg shoved in there were dirty, and Pavel had more than enough time to run the recycler a few times.
A beep distracted him as he reached in for the balled-up socks already threatening to spill out of the bag.
He looked up and saw the flashing light of the vid screen. A call.
An off-ship call?
Frowning, he rested his hands over the bag and cleared his throat. "Computer, connect call."
There was a slight hum as the dark screen brightened with sudden light, and the face waiting for him, searching the room until they found him, made him freeze.
"Papa?"
"Pasha!" Andrei Chekov didn't waste a moment. "You have news to tell me!"
Stunned, Pavel pushed the gym bag to the side and stood, moving around the narrow coffee table closer to the screen. "I...how did you know?"
"I have my ways, moj syn." But Andrei was smiling broadly under his beard, so wide that his eyes crinkled from it. "Come, tell me everything! Where is Gregor? I told him I would be checking up on him!"
His steps slowed to stop halfway between the sofa and the flat vid screen on the opposite wall. He opened his mouth and shut it.
Maybe it was Greg's name, or the smile beaming from his father's face that meant his father really didn't know, or just his father suddenly being there in his view, but with Pavel's next breath something in his chest seemed to almost cave in.
He drew in another sharp breath, his throat working. "Papa..."
Andrei was intuitive at the best of times, and eerily perceptive when it mattered. It didn't take more than that moment for his smile to vanish and his stance to change.
He leaned in towards the screen, lines appearing in his forehead. "What is it, Pavel? What's the matter?"
So Pavel told him.
And as he recounted Greg's strange absence last night and the sudden news that he had been gone for hours, and all the preceding events of all the hours until his father called, his words began to quicken and his breaths tightened, until by the end he was rambling like an over-anxious child.
"-and I know that the captain will not send anyone else down, not after someone died so suddenly. Not without knowing whether he is alive or dead. But they call down to him every minute, almost, and no one has heard...they think that the communicator stays silent because he's dead. Because there were so many of them and they kill so quickly. No one has said anything to me, but I know they think it. And I know what will happen."
"Pasha." His father had sat back again during Pavel's rambling words, and he was a direct opposite to the smiling man who had appeared on the screen. His eyes were grave.
He wouldn't lie to Pavel. He wouldn't bother with tact. Andrei was a blunt man and the Chekovs prized their honesty with each other. He would tell Pavel that of course no one else would go down there, that they couldn't lose more men to recover one.
The needs of the many, as Spock himself said often. Greg was one man.
Greg was lost, that was what Andrei would say. Like the first two landing parties that they were there to recover, Greg would simply be added to a list of missing people until the mysteries of the planet could be solved and they could all be recovered.
Of course his papa would tell him that, because that was the truth. The captain hadn't said anything about it, but Pavel had been thinking around the issue for hours. Starfleet would never condone risking men in a situation like this, without proof that Greg was even alive. And Kirk, who rarely cared what Starfleet would or wouldn't condone, would agree with them in this. Because he sent a party down, and a man died, and the captain had to message earth, to inform the family.
"He might be hurt," he said, his voice so thin it hardly sounded like him. "He might not be answering because he just can't. His communicator might have broken. He might be just beyond the reach of the scanners, bleeding. He might die now, as we sit here and do nothing."
Andrei sighed, low and grim. "Your captain is a good man. He will do anything in his power, will he not?"
"Of course, but there isn't enough in his power to do!"
"You would do more?"
"I would do anything," he answered without hesitation, with all the sincerity in the universe.
Life without Greg was simply a thing that he could not accept. Of course he would do more. But his role in this was to research, to plot equations and test theories, to play with frequency levels and dampeners. To do nothing.
These creatures, whatever they were, were dangerous. And they seemed to be getting worse. The first two times those civilian landing parties had gone down they had spent time, days, on the planet. They had managed to lose themselves in the woods, in the dead spots, before they stopped answering their comms.
Even the first Enterprise landing party had been given hours to set up equipment, to begin taking readings. But then those creatures had come into the open for the first time to attack them, and when the security team went down they were attacked even faster. The creatures were deadly and they were obviously watching and waiting.
Against them, against the threat of death, Pavel was to remain on the ship reading his padds and writing his notes.
Whatever the solution to the atmospheric problem around that planet, it wasn't a thing that would be solved in a day, even a week. Just diagnosing the cause would take time, and there was no guarantee that a solution would be found once they knew that cause.
Pavel's role in the coming days, then, would be to do his reading and theorizing in the silence of empty quarters that didn't belong to him. To listen for updates from the planet, to hope constantly, and be constantly crushed, when the planet remained silent and the messages went unanswered.
One day ago, twenty-four hours, Greg lay with him in their bed. Now his life was this.
Pavel knew even as he realized all of those things...he couldn't allow that.
He couldn't do nothing. Not this time.
He looked up suddenly, focusing on his papa's face on the viewer. "Papa..."
Andrei held up a hand to silence him. He studied Pavel through the viewer, and his eyes were sad. Strangely, deeply sad, as if he could suddenly feel all of the millions of miles between them in some tangible way.
Pavel drew in a breath, because his papa understood. Again, always, his papa knew.
"You would risk your career. Your life."
Pavel nodded. "I'll be smart."
"I do not doubt that."
"I have to, papa. I can't...he is the only..." He faltered suddenly, unsure if he could put into words all that he was feeling.
Andrei regarded him. "My Pasha...this is a sudden-"
"It isn't sudden," Pavel interrupted. "It's the only choice I can make. It was only...shock, or hope, that kept me from making it the moment I first realized that he was trapped down there."
He wasn't used to making spontaneous decisions. Particularly not that kind of decision. Still, even though he was entirely out of his comfort zone, even though this had nothing to do with any of the things Pavel was skilled in or capable of, he knew it was right.
"He would go," he said quietly, more to himself than his father. "He would do it."
"Were it you trapped down there?" Andrei nodded, but it only seemed to make him more troubled. "He would."
There was no doubt of that, and the reminder only made Pavel's sudden decision that much easier.
"I love you, papa, and I will try to be safe. But...I can't do less for him than he has already done for me. I love him. I think I am only right when I'm with him."
He hesitated then, studying his father's pale face. There was dismay there, a hesitation that his loud and blunt papa rarely showed. As if he were trying not to say something.
Pavel swallowed. "Maybe you think I'm too young to know, when I say things like that, but..."
Andrei drew in a breath. "Tell me, Pavel, do you know how to ask the one you love to marry you in your native tongue?"
Pavel hesitated. "I...what? Of course I..."
"So does he."
"He?" Pavel frowned at the screen, but drew in a sharp breath as he realized. "Greg?"
Andrei nodded. "He asked me to teach him and I did, happily."
"He asked you to teach..."
For some reason Pavel thought suddenly of a few hours ago, the words McCoy seemed to not mean to say about how this shouldn't have happened tonight of all nights.
He thought about Hikaru, summoned away from the bridge by McCoy earlier that day, coming back with strange words about how Pavel was so lucky, and his strange choices always seemed to work out so well.
When Pavel said he didn't understand what Hikaru meant by his words, Hikaru told him that he would.
And his father. His father called him minutes ago, beaming in anticipation, wanting news and expecting to hear something good.
Greg wanted him to be home on time. He wanted to talk. He brought out the vodka, and he seemed so nervous that morning.
"If I hesitate in encouraging this," Andrei said quietly into the stark silence, "it isn't because I think you're too young to know what you're saying. It's because I trust that you do know. Because even I know, from so far away." Andrei rubbed his face, pale and drawn and a shadow of the beaming man who had first appeared on the screen. "I know better than you think."
Pavel had to pull himself out of his thoughts in order to focus on the viewscreen.
He had never seen the expression that looked back at him then; at least he hadn't seen it on his father's face.
"Had I been offered a choice, to give my career or my life to save your mama when she...had I even been allowed to think that there was a chance that I could save her..." Andrei's hands fell from his face. "But you are my son."
Perhaps Pavel had seen that expression once before: as beams of transporter light cleared and revealed Spock, reaching out for someone he loved as she fell away from him, as he realized he would never be able to catch her.
His father was the single most wholeheartedly supportive person Pavel had ever known. Pavel had gone to his father, an awkward twelve year old boy with a mind that was far too big for him. That boy had told his father that he wanted to leave. The Conservatory in St. Petersburg, and then Starfleet. And then the universe.
He had gone to his father, this solid, simple man who had already lost his wife and would never have another child, and announced that he wanted to leave him behind.
And in response his father grasped his shoulder as if he were already a man, regarding him with a solemn frown and proud eyes, and asked if Pavel needed his help to get started.
The man who regarded Pavel now through a viewscreen, years later and with a universe between them, seemed to show all the grief he hadn't shown back then.
Pavel drew in an unsteady breath. "I will be smart, and careful. I will find him, and I will find how good a language teacher you are."
Andrei chuckled, pained. "I warn you, then - I only taught him the Russian word for 'yes' in regards to your response. He was instructed to only listen for that word, and if he hears anything different he is to surrender you to your ship's doctor to seek help for whatever troubling mental state you would have to be in."
Pavel smiled, his eyes burning. "When we are back here safely I'll let him tell you how it went."
"Good." Andrei was still pale, but his sadness had either faded back or been carefully covered up. He nodded once, sharp, and waved a hand in dismissal. "Uvy, bozhe moi. The Hero of Ishevsk, risking life and limb and his fancy starship career in the name of love. I expect everyone here will see it all as very grand."
Pavel's smile wilted. "Papa."
"You will contact me when you've returned, yes? So go." Andrei sat back with a smile. "I will speak to you again soon. Be safe, my son."
Pavel couldn't bring himself to answer. He nodded, the burning in his eyes slicing two wet trails down his face.
The image on the screen, his papa's too-careful expression, flickered and went dark.
He was just going to leave, to go to the upper deck where the auxiliary transporter sat waiting and unwatched. It was the best way to handle something like that, he assumed. A spontaneous decision should be followed through with quickly, after all.
But the talk with his papa had filled him with the strangest feeling. It seemed, he felt after his father vanished from sight, inevitable that Pavel was to go down to that planet. Whether he would come back or not, whether he would find what he was looking for, those things were as uncertain as ever. But that he was to go down was entirely inevitable.
He didn't think about it twice, but it did give him a heavy, melancholic sort of feeling. And so when he left their quarters he didn't go right for the transporter room.
The lift took him up, past sickbay where he would need to spirit away some sort of medkit in case Greg was hurt when he found him, and part security where he would need to stop and get a phaser to take with him.
When the life doors opened he stepped out onto the Bridge.
Things were relatively quiet - they were simply in orbit, after all, which left little to do from one minute to the next. Hikaru sat at the helm, his shoulders stiff, beside the familiar red hair of Ensign Haines, a relief navigator Pavel knew, though not well.
Nyota sat at her usual station, and Pavel wondered if she had left at all since the night before. Spock, too, stood at the science station, perhaps monitoring scans from the planet below.
The captain wasn't in sight, but only a few moments after Pavel stepped onto the bridge, a door from one of the small conference rooms opened and Kirk emerged.
He was tense, his hands fisted at his sides, his face colored in anger.
Pavel wondered if he had been talking to Starfleet Command. He didn't much doubt it.
Kirk spotted Pavel before he could say anything about what had angered him. His steps slowed, his hands relaxing from their fists with visible effort. "Pavel. Didn't I give you the day off?"
Pavel nodded even as others noticed him there. He felt Hikaru's eyes from the helm. "I'm not here to work, sir. I just wanted to check on..."
"We'll call you, kid." Despite the quick words there was a gentleness in Kirk's voice. "The second anything happens, you know we'll call you."
Pavel tried to smile, but it felt strange and strained and so he gave up the attempt. He moved slowly down to the helm, and Hikaru's solemn dark eyes watched him as he approached.
"You doing okay?" Hikaru asked softly when Pavel was near enough.
Pavel nodded, looking past him at the viewscreen. "As okay as possible, I suppose." He hesitated, his hand finding Hikaru's shoulder without turning his eyes from the viewscreen.
Hikaru was his best friend. His first real close friend on the Enterprise, and the second person after Greg that Pavel felt truly knew him and cared for him as he was.
He had many friends, of course. People who came later, who got to know him during the course of this long assignment. But Hikaru had been first, and best.
"Hikaru..." Pavel spoke quietly, unable to look own at his friend. "Whatever happens, I wanted to say thank you. For everything you've done for me and Greg. And just for me."
He wanted to say more, but he was so awkward at that sort of thing. And if he said too much Hikaru would understand why he was saying it, and might stop him.
As it was Hikaru's voice was already wary when he answered. "There's nothing to thank me for. I'm your friend, it's my job."
Pavel drew in a steeling breath and turned, dropping his gaze to Hikaru.
Which might have been a mistake, because he could tell that Hikaru already sensed something. Hikaru looked up at Pavel as if he could look through him, as if he could pick out his thoughts.
Pavel smiled faintly. "I want to say it anyway."
"Pavel." Hikaru's brow creased suddenly. "What's going on?"
"Nothing. I might have...I might lose Greg," his voice caught strangely on Greg's name, "and I didn't say enough...to him. So I think I should say more to...to the people who..." His smile went tremulous.
Hikaru relaxed a little bit, though his gaze didn't waver. "You don't have to, Pasha, come on. There's nothing you could say that I don't already know. And I bet you anything Greg would say the exact same thing."
Pavel looked up, looking around at the whole quiet Bridge. Nyota was still hunched over her board, Kirk and Spock were in private conference by the science station.
When he stopped by sickbay he would pay a visit to Scotty, and no doubt McCoy would be there, already working again and probably against his own doctor's orders.
It was inexpressively strange, feeling like he was saying goodbye to these people. He couldn't say goodbye, of course. He couldn't say much of anything. He said too much already to Hikaru.
"Hey." Hikaru reached for his arm. "Maybe you should ask Jim if you can work your shift. Maybe being alone right now isn't the best thing for you."
Pavel shrugged, looking back at Hikaru with a small smile. "There isn't enough happening here to distract me anyway."
Hikaru glanced out at the slowly drifting planet. "Maybe not. Okay, but I'm going over for dinner after my shift, okay?"
Pavel had to fight not to give himself away. He nodded. "That would be good."
"Okay." Hikaru studied him for another moment, then let go of his arm and sat back. "
Pavel turned and moved behind the helm back to the doors of the lift. He couldn't say anything else and expect to get away with it, but maybe he didn't really need to say goodbye. Maybe if he was safe and careful, as he promised his papa, he might actually find Greg and get them both back to safety. Maybe this was just one rash decision that he would have to answer for later, and not really any sort of ending.
He was almost to the lift doors when the humming calmness of the bridge was interrupted.
"Captain!"
It was Nyota's voice.
Pavel froze where he was, the sick twist of hope in his stomach now an old familiar friend.
"What is it, Lieu-"
Nyota slapped a control on her panel so hard that Pavel could hear it.
And then the air over his head, the hum of the still Bridge air, was filled with a hoarse, low voice suddenly piping in over the speakers. Pavel turned so fast he was hardly aware of it happening.
"-rris. Repeat, this is..." The disembodied voice from the speakers was cracking, uneven. Hurt, or exhausted. Or both.
Alive.
Pavel found his hands pressed over his mouth, his breath frozen in his chest, fearing any sound or movement might spook that voice away.
"Enterprise. Come in, please."