Kirk and Spock walked the halls and rooms of the Enterprise in reverence and horror. The ship was a floating tomb, hallowed ground sanctified by the life's blood and tragic deaths of her crew. Kirk's heart was lead. Every body, every blank staring eye he confronted seemed to condemn him. Where were you? Why weren't you here? Why didn't you save us? At times he seemed to hear their voices calling out to him and wondered if he was going mad.
Perhaps it had been a mistake to get to know 429 people so intimately. The only one he had left was Spock. The worst kind of hell he could imagine lay at his feet - walking his ship among the dead, broken, mutilated, bloody remains of his crew. War in all it's glory had come to the Enterprise and left behind the severed limbs and shattered skulls, the blood and guts of battle.
One day grief would come. At the moment all he could feel was a white-hot rage that burned with intensity and the power of angels. Some force had taken his crew from him and raped his ship; and Fate had intervened to prevent him from even meeting death with them much less fighting it. The Captain of a starship was not supposed to be the last man standing. He was supposed to lead the charge. Kirk felt furious, and cheated.
They turned down the hallway that led to Auxiliary Control. The majority of halls they had traveled had been bloody, filled with corpses of crew and enemy alike. Exploded walls and blackened carpet had been their companions. This one was no different. The walls were destroyed, every door, including the one to Auxiliary Control was ripped open. A body, wearing the now familiar mottled gragonoth armor, was collapsed face down on the floor.
Spock and Kirk exchanged a solitary long look and advanced slowly. As they got closer it became clear this one was as dead as all the rest; but unlike his comrades, he was not torn by explosions. He was all but untouched, except for the weighed piece of leather wrapped around his neck. They crouched cautiously and Spock reached out to touch the weapon with one disbelieving finger.
"Isn't that?" Kirk prompted.
"The ahn-woon from the wall in our quarters?" Spock finished. "Yes; and there is only one other person on board who would know the security code to get it off the wall, and who has the skill to use it."
They locked eyes. Kirk's were blazing fire. Spock's were glittering black ice.
"Daphne," Jim whispered his sister's name as if it was too precious to say out loud. Suddenly unable to speak, Spock only nodded.
They rose in unison and finished walking to the door of Auxiliary Control. The door sluggishly slid open onto another nightmare. Lying in a puddle composed of dark red blood and the oily blue-black blood they had come to recognize as that spilled by their attackers, was M'Ress. Her lovely russet mane was soaked with it. She had been shot at point blank range by the enemy she had wrapped in her lethal embrace. The claws of her feet had disemboweled him, leaving a long trail of unfamiliar internal organs spilling out between them. She had died, but she had taken her enemy with her.
Most of Auxiliary Control had simply been shot to Hell, the panels turned to slag. There was a body in a red uniform draped over the Communications station, shielding it. Jim's soul endured an icy hail of horror as he realized it was Uhura.
He was temporarily robbed of the ability to move. He could only watch through eyes blurred by sudden tears as Spock reverently and with great tenderness untangled M'Ress from her killer and laid her against a wall. He then lifted Uhura the way one would lift a sleeping child and laid her on the floor. Jim shook himself forcibly from his stupor and pulled emergency blankets out of the damaged cabinet on the wall. Stepping around the blood and destruction he covered both women with grave dignity.
Kneeling beside Uhura, he met Spock's unusually grave expression and waited. The Vulcan had sunk deep into thought and ancient disciplines designed to suppress everything but cold, hard logic. Spock always frightened him a little when he was like this.
Jim looked away finally, unable to keep looking into the fathomless depths of his First Officer's eyes. He looked down at the dark blanket that now covered the remains of his Communications Officer.
The woman who had tackled her career and her enemies with wit, patience and prowess was somehow gone from the Universe. He had known, in the back of his mind, that he had often been a royal pain in the nether regions to Uhura. But she had always shrugged off his rants and bad temper, fixed the problem, coordinated damage control, shore leave parties and made sure he was up to date on everything happening at Star Fleet even when they were days away from being able to receive updates.
Lovely, generous, tenderhearted enough to forgive thousands of tribbles even as they overran his ship, strong enough that it had taken two armed Triskellion warriors to subdue her, confident enough to tell him she was frightened by the Platonians.
And now she was gone.
He had taken her far too much for granted. The pain was like a fist around his heart. Coupled with losing the technically brilliant, graceful feline M'Ress, it was almost unbearable.
"All her wounds are in the front," Spock said, suddenly, almost to himself, "Yet she was face down over the console. Her last action was to protect the Communications console."
Spock rose. The front of his uniform was stained with blood now. Jim followed a heartbeat later and dared once more to look at him. The Vulcan was still cold and distant. He reminded himself that when Spock was like this, it meant that he was balanced on the knife edge between killing emotion and logic. He had been on the receiving end of Vulcan rage. He didn't relish seeing it again.
"You have been asking what they wanted," Spock reminded him, "It seems the crew was asking the same thing."
"Let's see what they found out," Jim murmured.
His stomach churning, Kirk helped Spock use another emergency blanket to wipe Uhura's blood from the console. He stood, trying not to rock or pace, while Spock interfaced the the auxiliary communications station.
"The aliens spoke in sounds the humans couldn't hear," Spock relayed the information as the computer revealed it, "M'Ress must have discovered this. She's the only one on board whose hearing is the equal of mine. She was working with Uhura in recalibrating the Universal Translator so they could be understood and what we say would be heard in their range," he paused, listening to the recordings, "Their language still makes no sense. Certain words and phrases have no meaning for us. It also seems M'Ress was not catching every frequency on which they were communicating."
"But you can?" Jim said, anxiously.
"More of it than the Caitan, in the lower range," Spock replied, listening intently and making minute adjustments to the UT. His forehead furrowed with concentration, his brows forming a deep V. He glanced briefly at Jim, "She caught nearly 99% of it. I am uncertain the missing 1% really made a difference."
"What were they saying?" Jim was almost vibrating with impatience, even though he knew that ranting and raging would not make Spock move any faster, any more than it had ever ruffled Uhura's feathers.
"They are demanding to know why we attacked them," Spock said.
"Attacked them? Why would we attack them? How did they get on board?" Jim hated answers that left him with more questions.
Spock was still listening. He held up a hand to ask Jim for silence.
"We brought them on board," Spock said, finally, "They are referencing their destroyed vessel. It has to be the wreckage we brought into the cargo hold."
"There wasn't anything alive on that, certainly not the numbers of aliens we've been seeing,"Jim said.
"Nothing our sensors could detect. But there were many different forms of technology that we could not identify - the cylinder for example."
"You said that device held us in some kind of time suspension,"Jim was calmer now that he had a puzzle to unravel, "Could it, or one like it, have been holding them?"
Spock nodded, "Indeed. It would be an efficient way to transport a crew. They may have expected to arrive at their destination in the time they were being suspended, or they escaped into time to await rescue. Instead they arrived on the cargo deck of the Enterprise, where upon they assumed they had been attacked and taken hostage."
Now Jim did pace, restless, impatient fury compelling him.
"You mean the wholesale slaughter of my crew was caused by nothing but a miscommunication? An inability to hear them, or understand them, or be understood by them?"
Spock phrased his answer very carefully. "The deaths of the crew were caused by the alien presence on board the Enterprise."
"An alien presence we couldn't communicate with,"Jim snapped.
Spock lowered his eyes. "There is more," he said.
Jim stopped walking and speared him with a look. "What more?"
"They are asking for the return of 'the one who bends now'," Spock answered.
"Who?" Jim's mind seized on another puzzle.
"For that I have no answer. We have no word for it in our languages and that is the best the Translator can do with it," Spock continued, "They may have thought we had one of them held prisoner, perhaps their captain. Also, they consider themselves far superior to us. They reference us as inferior vermin, call us 'those unworthy to live'. It is as if we have met the Klingons, who also despise anyone but them as inferior, but with technology that is alien and in some respects superior to ours."
"We've met many aliens before that were far advanced from us without being slaughtered by them," Jim mused, quietly, "The Metrons, the Organians ... they managed to encounter us without destroying us, though it may have been a near thing with the Metrons. Even the Vulcans when they first came to Earth considered themselves superior to the Humans. Sometimes I think they still do."
He paused and gave his sometimes terrifying First Office a look of quiet affection. It was the softest expression that had crossed his features since this whole bizarre event had begun to unfold.
"We have met an equal number who hate us. The Klingons, the Orions, the Romulans. None of them are in the position of destroying us however. It is unknown whether the vessel carrying these aliens could have damaged the Enterprise. But clearly, in hand to hand combat, they are a formidable opponent. They forced the crew, by means of their superior armor, to resort to far more primitive measures to defeat them."
"They defeated them only at the cost of all their own lives. Some of them didn't even have a chance," Jim said, remembering whole rooms and corridors that had been filled with bodies that had simply been gunned down. The casual destruction of his crew had hit like a hammer blow.
"It appears that they were killed because they were unable to answer their demands," Spock sounded as if he had swallowed glass. His expression was still unreadable.
Jim paused to gather himself. "We still need to get to the Bridge," he said finally, "Can you unseal it from here?"
Spock only nodded and complied, "Provided the way is not blocked by wreckage, we should be able to access the Bridge now."
"Then let's go," Jim said, taking a long deep breath, "And I... I want to find Bones."
Spock stood. His uniform sleeves were streaked with dark red blood where they had rested on the console.
"Jim," he said, with a trace of warning in his voice.
Kirk cut him off, "I have to, Spock."
Spock had stood at his Captain's shoulder for too many years not to recognize that tone of voice. Kirk would find McCoy with or without him.
"During such a crisis, I am certain he would have been in Sickbay."
Spock's flat, dispassionate tone reminded Jim that under the right circumstances and for the right reasons, Vulcans could kill.