Chapter 30- The Razor's Edge
On Sulu's orders, Uhura replayed the Klingon transmission for the benefit of their guests so they could see what the away team was dealing with. Mohinder looked on with his mouth agape in awe. Theories were spinning in his head regarding evolution and genetics that could create another humanoid sentient being and he was humbled that new life could be found among the trillions of stars, but to see two different races of humanoids- Klingons and Vulcans- seemed beyond all statistical probability and he was deeply moved.
Matt vacillated between fascination and disgust as he squinted at the image on the screen. Finally he chuckled and said, "Check out the forehead on that dude. I could wash my shirt on it." It may have been insensitive or perhaps even un-pc of him to say so, but it was the truth and it did get a laugh from Sulu so he felt vindicated.
Ando and Hiro chatted amongst themselves in Japanese. "He doesn't look friendly," Hiro observed in a dark tone, "I hope Peter will be alright."
"You can't judge people by the way they look!" Ando chided. "Look at us! Who would think that we are superheroes? We are total nerds. All we need are thick framed glasses with tape on them and pocket protectors. We are nerds squared."
Hiro smiled at the pun his friend had made and laughed a bit when he realized that only a nerd would get the reference and he did, but he was ok with the designation. "Every superhero needs a cover." He explained excitedly. "Peter Parker was a photographer, Clark Kent was a journalist, Bruce Banner was a scientist, and Bruce Wayne was a businessman. They were all nerds by day and heroes at night!"
Ando sighed and shook his head. "Why can't I be more like the Iron Man, Tony Stark? He has more money than he can spend and he is always surrounded by beautiful women. That is the kind of hero I want to be." He smiled. Uhura stifled a laugh as she concentrated on her controls. Once more Ando was embarrassed because he had forgotten that she understood Japanese.
Noah just looked on with an expressionless face, the reflection of the Klingon glancing off his horned rimmed glasses. After all he had seen in the business, nothing surprised him anymore. He knew people who could shape shift, make black holes appear, shoot microwaves, and well….blow up over New York like a nuclear bomb. An alien being who apparently did nothing but look menacing failed to impress him.
Nathan wanted to be impressed, but he couldn't manage more than a glance before returning his head to his hands with a sigh. To think his brother was on a ship with them was just too much to contemplate. The nightmare scenarios began to flood his head and he fought to keep them out- everything from cannibalism to bizarre science experiments all seemed an equally horrifying possibility and he just knew this wouldn't end well, but he didn't know what to do about it other than sulk.
Claire looked up and muttered, "Oh, Peter. What have you got yourself into?" She seemed more resigned than upset. She knew that pulling him away from this mission would have been impossible. No matter how many times he had been burned, his faith in a better world was unshakeable and he would always choose to do the right thing no matter what that meant for his own well being. Surprisingly it wasn't the Klingon she was worried about, it was his being more or less alone with Sylar that had her on edge. She knew firsthand how manipulative and downright forceful he could be if he sensed an opportunity and he certainly had the motivation to act on his desires.
Chekov noted the worry etched on her face and he quietly asked, "Is he your boyfriend? Is that vhy you vorry?" If his hunch was correct, he could understand why he would never stand a chance compared to a powerful person like Peter no matter how cool she thought his star charts were.
Claire glanced at him sideways and burst out laughing. "Peter? Oh God no! He's my uncle…" she looked straight ahead and muttered, "That's just gross" as she shook her head.
Chekov was supremely confused. Relieved, but confused. "But if Nathan is Peter's brother and Noah is your father, is Peter Noah's brother too?" It just didn't make sense because Noah seemed too old to be Peter's brother and none of them looked anything alike.
"No." Claire smiled. "Nathan is my father too." When Chekov's brow knitted even tighter over the conundrum, she sighed and added, "It's sorta complicated." Chekov tended to agree. He could easily do complex mathematical computations, but this one had him stumped. He thought he would quit before she told him Ando was her brother.
Behind his back, Sulu gave a knowing glance to Uhura who gave a broad, tight lipped smile and minded her controls. Chekov was a good kid in her mind and he deserved to be happy once in awhile. She knew he would treat Claire right and be a gentleman unlike the pig she knew Jim would be if he got his hands on her. Then again, she knew that Jim was a smart man and he would have a day of reckoning from Noah and perhaps even Nathan if he was anything less than sterling and he would avoid that at all cost. If nothing else, Spock would dissuade him from such an ill advised pursuit.
She paused and thought of Spock and wondered how he was doing on the Klingon vessel. She hadn't talked with him since the Peter incident and suddenly she realized that should anything happen to him, she wouldn't get the chance to tell him how much she cared about him. Yes, Peter was a passing fancy but that's all he was. She took a deep breath and focused on the transmissions that drifted by. Spock would be fine. He usually was when he went on away missions even when Jim and occasionally McCoy came back a little worse for wear, Spock usually had the good sense to stay out of trouble. She began scanning the communicators of the away team and bolted upright when she pinged Scotty's and didn't like what she was hearing.
"Hold on, now!" Scotty protested scrambling down from his pipe and placing himself near the helpless Klingon. "Ya can't just off him like that! I know that's what's goin though your skull, right?" He tapped the side of his own head with his wrench for emphasis.
Sylar looked coolly down at him and calmly replied, "He knows my secret now. He is a witness and therefore he can't be left alive to tell the others."
"Bloody hell you will!" Scotty exclaimed excitedly. "Whadda think will happen when they find him with his bloomin' head cut off? Do ya think they will let us off the damn ship? Then what? Isn't there somethin' else ya can do?" He nearly pleaded.
Sylar thought about it for a moment before answering, "No. But Peter might."
"Right." Scotty nodded decisively. "Then let's give him a yell before it's off with his head, shall we?" He slowly removed his communicator from his belt all the while wondering exactly how it was that he of all people would get stuck with the unbalanced one of the group.
Sylar heard him, but he was distracted by a hastily constructed box that was just visible over Scotty's head. Instinctively he knew what it was. He himself had been kept in structures such as that- albeit on level 5 with a huge picture window so Bennet could gawk at him like a fish in a small bowl- but it was the same idea. His curiosity got the better of him and he summoned some rods and small diameter tubing from the broken machines with his free hand and hurled them at his victim without so much as a glance to pin him to the wall, freeing him to check out the box.
"Och!" Scotty gasped while the engineer howled in pain. He wanted to say more, but it was all he could do to keep from dropping his communicator and breaking it. As it was, all he could do was stare wide eyed between the rods driven so deep that only a few inches remained visible and the remorseless man who had lost interest in his prey and was now slowly making his way to a rusty steel box a few feet away as though he had already forgotten what he had just done to another living being.
Sylar approached the hastily constructed box and ran the tips of his fingers along the jagged weld line. Flashes of the welder filled his mind along with the purpose of his creation: to contain a prisoner, an enemy that might bring an end to his way of life.
Scotty watched with anticipation. Clearly something had caught his attention and as he had to believe that his powers gave him access to information that he personally couldn't pick up, he had to give him the benefit of the doubt. When Sylar's posture froze when he looked into the slat, he couldn't take it anymore. There was something in that box and he had to know what it was. Against his better judgment, he scurried up next to the crazy man and peeked in. Staring back at them were the dark eyes of a Romulan and Scotty's stomach turned.
Koth had been correct when he said most of his crew would refuse medical treatment and Peter found this more than just a little frustrating. If supplies were low or injuries incredibly minor, he might have understood, but the overt machismo that he was faced with time and again nearly blew his mind. It was as if they were hoping to die from infection or blood loss and the more they suffered during the process the better. It was disheartening to him, but McCoy had warned him against trying to persuade them otherwise so he didn't although he felt like he wasn't really doing his job if he didn't at least try to talk them into it. It wasn't the first time he had patients refuse treatment and each had their own reasons for doing so, but he could live with that as long as he knew they were making an informed decision. He wasn't so sure they were being rational about it and it gnawed away at the edges of his heart to think they might die or at the very least be disfigured when he had the means and know-how to fix the problem.
He knelt by what he assumed was a female a few feet in front of McCoy. If it weren't for the presence of breasts, he could easily mistake her for a male and as touchy as Jim warned him they could be, he was extra careful to walk on eggshells. "Do you want me to take a look at that?" He asked gesturing to a wound on her arm. It was a laceration and nothing more, but it looked as though it happened days ago and he was worried about infection or possibly tetanus given the amount of rust floating freely in the atmosphere.
She looked him over with a growl, but curtly nodded yes. Peter started to smile, but remembered that they were not like humans and may take that as an aggressive gesture, so he kept a straight face and inspected the wound by scanning it with the tricorder McCoy gave him a crash course on. It was difficult for him not to try and form at least a tentative bond with her because he always did that with all his patients, even the most difficult and belligerent drunk he was called to check on in Central Park at 4:00am, it was just in his nature but he had to fight it now because at least in this case it wasn't adaptive and may give him away.
As he carefully dressed the wound, he casually scanned her thoughts and then deeply regretted it. She thought he was handsome even for a human and wondered what it would be like to mate with him. But it didn't stop there because the thoughts were accompanied by brutal mental images of incredibly rough sex in which he was bleeding badly and may have suffered some broken bones. He was relieved when McCoy gave him a tap on the shoulder and informed him, "Scotty needs us down in the engine rooms." He tried his best not to judge them because as a culture they were entitled to their own beliefs and practices, but he didn't want any part of a society where the women killed their mates like black widows. He didn't stick around to find out if she would eat his carcass afterwards, but he wouldn't have been surprised.
"I knew it!" Matt hissed as he listened to Scotty's transmissions stream down from the intercom. "Let him out of your sight for a second and he tries to carve up people's heads like a pumpkin at Halloween." Claire shot him an offended look and he hastily added, "Sorry. Bad example, but you know what I mean."
"At least Scotty was able to talk him out of it from the sound of it." Mohinder mused. "Unless that god awful screaming was him being finished off." The words tasted foul in his mouth and he didn't want to think about possibly hearing someone murdered live over the intercom.
"He didn't kill him." Noah sighed with such certainty it earned him a few incredulous stares. "You could still hear him moaning in the background when Scotty called for Dr. McCoy," he calmly explained as though he were instructing a classroom of preschoolers, "if Sylar cut his head open he wouldn't have survived that long. Dead men don't moan. Logic, people." He gently chided with a smug smile.
"Have you ever considered putting mittens on him so he can't point at things? Or a blindfold? Or a muzzle…" Uhura trailed off.
"If only it were that easy." Nathan mumbled into his hands. "You could put him in a straightjacket and suspend him upside down in a tank of cement and somehow he would Houdini his way out of it. He is a curse that we all have to live with, so you might as well just get comfortable."
Sulu was listening to the banter that flowed in the room, but he was stuck on the fact that there was something unusual in Scotty's voice when he called for McCoy. There was a distinct tightness that hinted at a larger problem than he was letting on that gave him away. Scotty was not a man who was easily rattled, so whatever this new development was it was worrisome. "Uhura," He called swiveling just like Jim in his chair, "continue to monitor all communications. There is something going on down there and I want us all to be ready to act at a moment's notice if need be. Chekov, see if you can work in a few scans now and then just to make sure everyone is present and accounted for. But I want you to stop if there is even a hint of their systems coming back online. We don't want to provoke a reaction."
After he received verbal confirmation of his directives, he sat back in the chair and wondered if this is what Jim felt: the constant second guessing, the wrenching guilt if things went wrong, and always walking the razor's edge between missing some minuscule yet important detail and completely overreacting. All he knew was that his shipmates were down there along with civilians and if any of them came back in less than perfect shape he would always feel as though he failed.