Chapter 31- Checkmate
I was left in the company of a guard while appropriate accommodations could be made. The rest of the compliment of guards left with the Queen when she retired. McCoy was left hanging by himself and he looked very bored and uncomfortable.
I turned my attention to the woman who stood straight as an arrow by me. She looked as though she couldn't have been more than 20. Her skin was a beautiful light mocha although it was marred by scars from battle. Like the others, her head had been shaved until only dark stubble remained. I smiled softly at her and asked, "What is your name?"
She quickly glanced at me and stammered, "Antonia." She reminded me of Pavel in some strange way. "May I ask about the colony you found?" She almost whispered. I began to wonder if she was still in training or of a lower rank, she didn't carry herself the way the older women did.
"Sure." I smiled. "There were ruins that looked like the buildings here. It was abandoned, though. We found scrolls that said there was a Queen Octavia and her armies destroyed everything." Even as the words fell from my lips I realized it didn't make sense.
Antonia smiled at me and said, "The legend says that Octavia was a great Queen who ruled the stars. She had machines that could travel far across the sky. She made deals with people from other lands, but one of the men she made deals with crossed her and he brought enough machines to darken the sky. Queen Octavia died in battle defending her people. It was a long time ago, but we all pass down the story to remind ourselves of her bravery and the treachery of man." I nodded appreciatively and tried to commit it to memory to tell Uhura later. Almost as a post script to her story, the temple shook with a thunderous boom. The guard was stunned as were McCoy and I. "Are your people attacking us?" She growled through clenched teeth.
"No!" I shouted shielding myself from falling dirt and stone chips. "They would never fire on us!"
"Like hell they wouldn't!" McCoy yelled. "This has bat shit crazy written all over it and by extension that means Jim." There was another round of blasts and the ground shook under our feet.
I looked to Antonia and said, "You have to let him go. The Queen personally chose him as her servant. He can't die here."
She looked back at him and replied, "The life of one man is nothing. His death will be meaningless."
"He is special." I interjected remaining calm. If I could just get her to believe me… "He has abilities the Queen cannot live without. Release him so we can return him to her."
Her eyes wavered between her indoctrination and the apparently conflicting wishes of her Queen. I felt bad lying to her, but I was so soiled by deceit that it hardly mattered. What was one more fetid lie? "Do it!" I commanded appealing to her respect for authority. If she was accustomed to taking orders from older women then I could bark them. She removed a tool from her belt and unfastened the cuffs that held McCoy with an almost unbelieving awe. The poor girl was traumatized and scared, but I didn't have time for that now. I had to get us out of here and I remind myself that I couldn't save everyone I encountered, Meyers was proof of that concept.
The blasts continued in intermittent bursts and it continued to rain debris in ever increasingly large chunks. One good sized pieced glanced off the side of my head as McCoy and I made our way through the hall in a mad dash, but thankfully he was ahead of me and didn't see it. Still, I knew I would catch hell for it among other things. We had to stop briefly for McCoy to rest. The kick the guard gave him to the ribs was worse than it looked on the screen and he found it hard to breathe. I took his medical bag from him in an effort to lighten the amount of weight he was carrying and encouraged him to keep moving. Jim had a very dull axe to grind and was trigger happy. I wasn't sure how much longer the stone structure would hold before it came tumbling down around us.
Finally, the entrance came into view and McCoy and I rushed out into what felt like a war zone. People were running in all directions and screaming, trying to avoid the mysterious red thunderbolts that rained down from the sky and exploded all around them, throwing up dirt and rocks like so much shrapnel. I instinctively ducked and covered my head while I followed McCoy to a very large rock. He fell with his back against it, panting and squinting. I squatted next to him, but kept an eye out for any guards that may head our way even accidently.
"Keep your damn head down!" McCoy barked while he fished in the bag to remove his phaser. He handed it to me and I looked down dumbly at it. It looked pristine as though it had never been fired. "It is on stun. Aim and shoot." He instructed still wheezing. I kept my head down as much as possible, my eyes skimmed across the top of the rugged rock and widened when I saw a body moving toward us. Another blast altered their trajectory somewhat and I raised the gun to fire but paused when I saw that it looked like the person was trying to read a handheld device while they ran. The closer they got, the more I noted the slim frame and the short blondish hair…
"Chekov!" I yelled over the din. He paused to look up and another much closer blast sent him scrambling. He crawled past the rock, eyes blinded by dirt and blood. McCoy reached out and grabbed his shirt and pulled him toward us. He scurried backwards until his shoulder crashed into the rock and he wiped his eyes desperately.
"Careful!" McCoy admonished. "You will grind any rocks you got in there deeper. Goddamn it, kid! Are you trying to get yourself killed or go blind?" He once again dug in his bag and pulled out a bottle of water to wash his eyes out. "Hold still." He commanded as he gently laid Pavel's head in his lap and began the process of removing the mud from them. I couldn't watch. My phobia extended to other people's eyes as well. I resumed my surveillance until he was finished.
"Thank you, Doctor." Pavel sighed blinking rapidly as he sat up.
"Yeah, kid." McCoy grumbled. "You can thank me by getting us out of here before one of those men with tits gets us."
"Chekov to Enterprise- I found them. 3 to beam up." He yelled into his communicator. A final blast landed not more than 40 feet in front of us and it was like being near a lightning bolt. At first there was no sound, only a flash of light and a tremendous blast of heat before the sound caught up. The reverberations shook my ribcage in a most sickening way, but I instinctively squatted over McCoy to shield him from the flying dirt.
When the last pebbles fell, McCoy looked up at the sky and yelled, "He said beam us up, not blow us up goddamn it! God so help me, Jim, if I live through this I am so coming to kick your ass!" He shook his fist at the clouds for added emphasis.
As if Scotty somehow heard him, I felt the strange floating sensation that came with having your molecules slowly disassembled one by one and I smiled in relief. We were going home. We all reappeared without incident on the pad in the transporter room, falling backwards with a collective thud when the rock was no longer there to support us. Scotty jogged around the control panel to us to help us up with a goofy smile. I might have kissed him in gratitude if I didn't think Uhura would have something to say about it.
I sat up and looked around in a daze. Medical was standing by, but scattered like dry leaves when McCoy waved them off as they tried to help him to his feet. I accepted the hand of one of the few male nurses on staff and thanked him for waiting until I could maintain my balance before he started for Chekov who by that time had already sprung to his feet and brushed himself off. McCoy hustled Chekov and I into the lift and grumbled, "Deck 5." He stood looking up at the roof of the lift, but I could tell he was absolutely seething just under the surface. It wasn't long before it boiled over. "McCoy to Kirk- you had better be in sickbay or well on your way to getting there! Don't make me come find you! I swear to all that is holy you won't like it!"
"Sir, I do not think he vill be in the sickbay." Chekov observed quietly.
"Of course he won't!" McCoy snapped. "He's like a damn two year old. I will have to play hide and seek with him all over the damn ship until I find him under a bed or something. Then I have to drag his ass kicking and screaming all the way."
"Why don't you let me try?" I asked. "I might be able to get him down there with less fuss."
"Oh really?" McCoy scoffed. "You're on, woman. But if he's not down there in 10 minutes the manhunt will begin." He and Chekov got off on 5 and I continued to the bridge where I was most likely to find him.
Sure enough, he was standing at Spock's station talking with him. I gave Uhura a high 5 when I passed, prompting Spock to pause in midsentence to observe the odd human congratulatory custom. "Well done, Doctor." He said in his usual perfunctory tone. "It appears your estimations of character were correct."
"Yeah, my X-ray vision comes in handy sometimes." I quipped sarcastically.
Back at ya', Spock!
He gracefully accepted the backhanded comment with a very slight bow as his only admission of culpability. "However, I was only responsible for half of the plan. Jim did the rest. I thought you were going to blow it!" I laughed turning to him. "God! The way you were fighting those guards I thought you were going to screw the pooch."
Jim busted out laughing when Spock missed the meaning of the phrase and raised his eyebrow. "Hey! I was trying to sell it just as much as you." He chuckled. "What kind of Captain would just skip out and give his crew the finger as he walked out the door laughing? I had to at least pretend I was pissed."
"Captain," Sulu called shakily standing from his station, "The new course has been plotted and all systems are go. May I report to sickbay?"
Jim's eyes grew somber for a moment recalling all that they had suffered. "Yeah, go Mr. Sulu." He answered quietly. It was obvious he felt guilty about dragging them all down to the surface. He probably felt as though he were the cause of their suffering. If he had just listened to Spock…
Almost as soon as Sulu left, Chekov returned with a salute. "Reporting for duty, Captain." He clipped while taking his seat. "Thank you for letting me go." Jim smiled faintly while he watched the young man go to work at his station.
"Jim, can I talk to you?" I asked quietly.
He jumped slightly as though I pulled him back from a deep thought. "Yeah, sure." He agreed reluctantly. As soon as I closed the door to the conference room, he blurted out, "I know, I fucked up. I feel bad about it, ok? I don't really want to talk about it right now."
I looked around the room suspiciously. "That's good," I said slowly, "because I wasn't going to go there with you today anyway. We will save that conversation for later. I just came up to ask you nicely if you will go down to sickbay and get checked out before McCoy forms a posse with pitchforks and torches."
He seemed relieved that I wasn't going to force him to talk about the obvious guilt that had exploded out of him seconds earlier. "Um…I really should stay up here for a little while…"
"Jim." I sighed.
"What? I do have responsibilities as a Captain, you know." He exclaimed playfully.
"What about your obligation as a friend?" I asked rhetorically. "You know he only gets pissed off because he is worried about you and the longer you make him wait the more anxious he gets. It is a vicious cycle. You know as well as I do that he won't let anyone touch him if you aren't down there too and this time he needs it more than you. Do the both of you a favor and go down there without his having to nag and obsess and mark my words- he will be calmer."
He put his hands on his hips and smiled. "Ya think so?" He chuckled. "I never thought of it having anything to do with him, I just thought he was a sadistic control freak."
"He may be those things as well," I admitted, "but this is a secret you will have to keep between the two of us. I never told you anything."
"Hell, if it keeps him from attacking me the moment I walk in the door, my lips are sealed." He replied as we headed for the lifts. "You'd better be right about this."