Technical Difficulties

Chapter 2: Of Surgery and Silver

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Even though the Enterprise was safely back in orbit around Earth, it was still in a state of hell. The engines were still running on emergency power, and two thirds of the crew was critically injured or healing.

Bones thought about a time-travel paradox they might have ensued… But dismissed it. The first time they went through October 23rd, the Enterprise left orbit in about a minute. Everything and everyone was already accounted for.

He knew that he needed rest, but he couldn't stop working. He had finally gotten through his monumental stack of paperwork after the Captain had declared a week of rest after conferring with the Admiralty with their odd predicament, and now he didn't know what to do except work. So he did.

Bones realized he was sleeping when he was woken up by Nurse Chapel. "Doctor. It's an emergency."

"Yes, Nurse?" Another one, and so soon? It was barely seven.

"Doctor, Chief Engineer Scott sustained severe injuries when he stopped the ship from going backwards in time."

Bones raised his head hurriedly in alarm.

"Why has this taken so long to get to my attention?"

"Doctor, Chief Engineer Scott was beamed immediately down to a hospital on Earth when we arrived, and they weren't competent enough to effectively treat his injuries." Chapel paused. "You are the best, Doctor. We need you."

Bones cursed. Colorfully. "Nurse, bring him into the operating room. Close off his table and do standard bacterial cleaning procedures before his entrance. Cool down his body into a moderately cryogenic state. Depending on the extent of his injuries, evacuate all personnel from the vicinity. Mobilize a surgical medical team and procure two decent sets of surgical tools. Do the necessary scans, and notify the Captain that surgery is about to be performed in Sickbay on one of his senior staff officers. After that, bring me the data on Scotty."

"Already done, sir." Chapel handed him the charts and qualitative measures of the injuries Scotty had picked up in his desperate but life-saving plan of action.

Surprised, Bones looked up at Chapel gratefully. "It's a good thing we haven't lost one of our best officers in all this havoc. Remind me to promote you."

Chapel smiled. "Of course, Doctor."

And then they got to work.

It was pretty messy and gory; a few of the weaker stomached nurses had to leave during the procedure, and Bones noted each one's disappearance. There was no room on a Starship of Death like this one for some pansy nurse who can't even stand the sight of a little gore.

But as he worked on Scotty, he had to admit that it was pretty awful, with all the tiny pieces of embedded metal, the deflated lungs, the sliced spine, the hand ripped down the center and utterly demolished. And there were burns. The skin melted off the bones easily, and there was only so much the dermal regenerator could do at one time. Blood was obviously everywhere, and had the right to be; Bones had to look for any surviving skin to duplicate. His small intestines had been dangling from his gaping chest cavity when he was hurriedly carted into Sickbay, and his liver looked as if someone had bitten out a chunk of it. The only untouched primary organ was the heart, which Bones thanked God profusely for. One of Scotty's sockets was smashed into his skull. There was possible serious brain damage from the freed, sharpened chips of bone from the eye socket, so Bones worked on that first.

He pieced together the tiny chips of bone and fused them as if they were puzzle pieces, both hands doing different tasks: the left was finding pieces, while the right was taking them and fitting them together. After each piece's removal from the brain tissue, Bones carefully welded the gray matter back into its proper place. He knew exactly where all the brain's neural pathways led and what they did, he could recite them when drugged and beaten, and so each neural molecule was carefully yet quickly snapped back into place. The chips of bone were in the general pattern of a spider web, and so Bones began digging deepest in the center of the hit and worked his way up. When he had finally collected all of the pieces, Bones held up the finished eye socket up to the light and closely inspected his handiwork. Not a single crack. This eye socket could now take a bullet and remain intact, with all the strengthening adhesives Bones had added to it. Slowly, he inserted the bone back into the skull, and pasted it securely back into place with a bit more bone adhesive. He quickly sewed up the cut muscle back across the forehead and cheek with a laser. Now all that was left for the head was the skin of the face, and that could be done with a dermal regenerator and a monkey. He left it to the slightly more capable nurses, who had been attempting to regenerate the more serious burns, administer a constant supply of oxygen, and alleviate the bleeding.

Now that the brain damage was taken care of, Bones went to the rest of the body. He quickly scanned the list of injuries again, and decided to start with the basics and move up from there. The most dangerous and deep injuries took precedence over the mostly superficial injuries. Like Bones always said, start at the base and work your way up to the roof to build a house, not the other way around.

So Bones started recreating Scotty's shattered bone structure, beginning with the spinal cord, which was dangerously sliced by shards of metal. With the spinal cord, there was always a difficulty in removal, because if the object was twisted the wrong way, the patient could be paralyzed for life. With a pang, Bones recalled Lieutenant Romaine, whose spinal situation had been similar to this, though already twisted. Then he continued to work, pulling out his scalpel and tongs with a practiced ease and habitual flourish, and easily tugged out the shards one by one. The nurses stopped to watch, knowing that this particular section of the surgery was the most delicate and dangerous. If Bones messed up here, Scotty would be lost. When Bones came to the last, most problematic shard, after a touch of a regenerator on the last area, he descended mercilessly. There was no pause, no prayer. Bones just dove into the area and yanked the shard of metal from its spot, easily and almost carelessly from the nurses' perspectives. He swabbed the spot, injected a small amount of stem cells directly into the spinal cord's gray matter, closed up the white matter, injected the white matter with a stimulant, and then seared the bone shut.

During a surgical procedure, Bones considered applause to be a pain, an unwelcome distraction, but when the nurses cheered for his flawless spinal procedure, he relaxed his aching hands for a second before continuing on instead of screaming. There was not enough time. He had to get to work on the open chest cavity.

Working on the organs themselves was simple; the doctors on Earth had apparently patched up the stomach puncture and the nurses had gotten to work on the liver and intestines. The kidneys had been slightly damaged, but Chapel was currently working on connecting all of the capillaries, vessels and tubes already. The main concern of the chest cavity was the opening. The ribs around what used to be the cage of the chest looked as if they had been forced to break in half, and it was going to be no easy task to find the pieces as Bones floundered in the fluids of the cavity. His plastic gloves sloshed through the blood and God knows what else as he searched for the tips of the ribs. He found one while his hand was blindly groping under the liver. It had taken some communication between him and Chapel, but all in all it went quickly. He knew they had to be quick, because all that poking around crushed more capillaries than Bones wanted to think about but knew anyway.

Bones picked up his trusty brush for bone adhesive, and began to patch the ribs back together. As he worked, he realized that Chapel had finished. He wordlessly handed the rib he was working on to her, along with his tool, and called out another nurse to aid her.

He had to begin the restructuring of the cavity with the tissues, now that the ribs were being taken care of. Quickly scanning the depth of the opening, Bones surmised that he would have to completely restructure the capillaries, nervous systems, blood vessels, muscles, and membranes in the front two-thirds of the entire torso.

He spoke for the first time since the operation started. All the communication before that had been in grunts and pointing. All the nurses were immediately on the alert, stopping their work.

"Medical Team." He paused. "I need a specialized four-man team for the chest cavity. I need one capillary, muscle, membrane, and nervous tissue specialist. All the life-signs nurses stay on task."

Instantly, his team was assembled, and he started the work. The muscle specialist began generating muscle fibers, as the nervous tissue specialist generated nerves. The capillary specialist got his own team, and had them all constantly generating more capillary systems. The membrane specialist began delicately forming and connecting the membranes to the organs in preparation for the weaving of the entire chest cavity. The stomach, lungs, and intestines were put firmly back in place with the combined efforts of all four specialists under Bones' direction. He himself wove the muscle, neurons, and capillaries together as if he were weaving an intricate tapestry, connecting the proper colors and textures in a beautiful pattern.

They began with the central cavity around the heart, carefully placing the organs between their respective muscles and connecting the nerves to the spinal cord. The lungs were glued to the walls of the ribcage, which had been covered by the membrane specialist after the muscle specialist had finished with the intercostals. Finally, Scotty could breathe on his own again with the realignment of the diaphragm. The dermal regenerator nurses began to move down from the face and arms and began working on the first half of the chest that Bones had finished with a sigh of relief.

Now came the lower half, the abdomen. The intestines were loose, but other than that, fixed. All that remained was another weaving from the team of restructuring specialists. They got to work once again, piecing together the entire inner workings of the human abdomen. Bones once again took the reins, taking the materials from his team and weaving the most intricate and difficult parts for himself while the other specialists fixed the important yet supporting parts of the operation. When the abdomen was finally complete, and all that remained was the red and bloodied surface of muscle needed to be covered by skin, the specialists cheered for themselves, considering this the biggest accomplishment of their careers so far. Bones didn't even glance upwards; he grabbed a dermal regenerator himself and worked the skin back on delicately.

After the main problems had been completely dealt with, and the cavity was closed once and for all, the only major impediment was Scotty's right hand. Bones idly wondered how Scotty had possibly managed to destroy his hand so thoroughly as he easily found the bits of bone in the arm from the broken hand. Having extracted the last of the broken bone, Bones took back his handy bone brush, and perfectly fit the pieces together again. This hand would be able to break through steel after this operation, though the skin would undoubtedly rip off. He fitted the last segment of bone back into place, and began work on slowly refitting the halves of the hand together. Sewing them with a laser, Bones took pains to perfectly fit the cells into their respective places. The hand was the most delicate apparatus a man had, and he was pretty sure Scotty was right-handed. He had to be extremely careful in the refit, or Scotty would have to forgo using his right hand effectively for the rest of his life. Once fixed, never changed. Once these wounds were healed, even if they were healed in the wrong way, they couldn't be tweaked for further efficiency. This was it, the defining moment. As every moment is in a surgery.

As he stitched the hand together with his trusty laser, Bones knew that Scotty would pull through with flying colors. All of the main injuries had been successfully taken care of, the only thing left after the hand being the less dangerous and mostly superficial shards of metal embedded into the lower half of his legs. There was a ridiculous amount of blood that had to be replaced after the shards were removed, and then the surgery was over.

But Bones didn't stop working. As nurse after nurse and doctor after doctor collapsed from exhaustion, Bones battled on. When the last piece of metal was finally plucked out of Scotty's left femur, some of the nurses had actually come back from a good night's sleep. Bones vaguely wondered how long he'd been working, but then snapped back to the task at hand. It was almost finished, after all.

All that was left were the blood transfusions. Bones was especially quick at transfusions, so he figured that he would be better than some random nurse. Scotty needed the blood sooner rather than later, and he was the best there was. So Bones kept on going. He hooked up all the machines, looked up the blood type, sent the nurses to get the blood, and then manually transferred a pint and a half of blood into Scotty's circulation system. Easy. Now he just had to heat up Scotty's body from its induced state of a significantly lowered temperature, and he would be done.

As Bones heard the scanning monitor beeping out data, he picked up his PADD and stylo and wrote out his whole report of the surgery relatively quickly, in about a half an hour.

Just as Scotty's heartbeat increased to the normal rate, Bones collapsed onto the neighboring surgical table. He straightened the hard, uncomfortable pillow and closed his eyes. Bones was out like a light. He had been working nonstop for three days, counting the first October 23rd. Fixing Scotty had taken almost 48 hours in total, and he had been at the operating table for the entire surgery. Bones was officially wiped out. If there was another emergency, he didn't think he would be able to get up, much less give a damn.

Bee-bee-beep.

Bones' communicator was beeping. He didn't move.

Bee-bee-beep.

Bones sighed.

Bee-bee-beep.

"The things I go through."

He answered the call.

"Bones here."

"Hey Bones, it's Jim." There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Bones, I need you to get down to Engineering stat. We have a problem."

Bones paused this time. Jim knew that Bones had just been through a grueling surgery, and he knew that all the resources of Sickbay needed to be restocked.

"Jim, fill me in from here. I might not be able to help you."

Jim paused again.

"Bones, we found the alien that caused this whole mess. It's seriously injured and wants revenge, so it took over the Engineering room to try to destroy us. That's the reason why our engines stalled the first time, and the reason why Scotty got so hurt. The alien did that to him. Bones, we need you to treat the alien. Now. If you don't, when it regains some of its strength, it could try to take over again."

Bones didn't know what to say for a second.

"…Good God, Jim… If I fix this monster, do you really think he'll just smile and say thank you? He'll probably just try to kill us all again."

"Your opinion is noted, Doctor. However, it is vital that we assist this life-form." Spock just had to cut in. "If we do not, it will surely keep trying to destroy this ship. The only reason it has not is because of Chief Engineer Scott's valiant efforts to anger it and force it to waste its energy on destroying him. We must repair our relationship with this powerful unknown being before it kills us all."

"…What type of life-form is it? What supplies do I need to bring? How is it hurt?"

"It appears as if the entity was wounded by phaser fire, and its structure is basic humanoid. The coloring is odd, as is the speech. The noises made are quite unique, and the pigmentation of the skin is silver, and sparkles like gold. I would say the creature is made of up rare alloys and basic metals from a basic tricorder analysis. A medical scan would increase understanding exponentially."

"Thank you, Mr. Spock. Be down as soon as I get Scotty's ass out of Sickbay and into recuperation."

"Affirmative. Spock out."

And that was that. No rest for the doctor.

Bones woke Scotty and informed of his surgery as the two of them stumbled towards the rehabilitation ward.

It kind of went like this:

"Mornin,' Scotty."

"Doctor, wha's goin' on? Whatse situation?"

"You've been damn near killed by a silver bastard who's trying to take over the ship who I have to go and save. C'mon, man, we've gotta getcha to the rehab ward. We might need you when we get past all the preliminary shit with the thing. You specialize in mechanics, and the creature might be a strange combination of metals and electricity – in other words, a machine."

"That sounds exciting. Ah'm sure ih'll be fantastic." Scotty yawned. "Jes' weke me up when ye need me."

He nodded off once Bones got him onto the nearest bed.

Bones headed back to Sickbay for medical supplies. He wasn't sure what exactly he needed, so he took a little bit of everything, with a little more of the essentials. Bones made sure to overstock on diamonds and other ores that were specially replicated for random uses like this. If there was ever a time to use them, it would be now.

He set the turbolift for Engineering.

The doors slid shut, and Bones closed his eyes for a rare moment of acknowledgement: he was tired, he was in pain, he was working too hard. Then Bones opened his eyes and set his jaw. He had a job to do, dammit. And he would do it damn good.

Bones stepped out of the turbolift, his limp still evident but reduced from his earlier attempts to patch himself up. He knew he looked like hell; anyone would, after what he'd been through recently. He glared daggers at any ensigns or lieutenants who looked aghast and frightened by his very presence, and they scurried away like mice.

"Bones, stop scaring the ensigns." Jim was smiling tiredly, with a considerable amount of bruises on his face.

Bones pulled out his tricorder.

"Okay, so how did you get into a fight this time?" He scanned Jim's entire body, and sighed in relief to find that he only had bruising, a small cut on the inside of his right ankle, and a pulled muscle in his arm.

"Well, the thing, the silver thing, can hit hard as hell." As he listened, Bones pulled out his dermal regenerator and fixed the bruises and cut. The pulled muscle would only heal properly with rehabilitation or special surgery, so Bones didn't touch it. He filed away the information for later, to make sure Jim got treatment. "Once we discovered that it wasn't a malfunction but an intruder, we assumed that it was a dangerous enemy. I ordered the Security teams to put their phasers on High." Jim sighed. "After we found out what it was, it was too late: the engines had already been compromised. It had already been wounded before we were able to figure out what it was, so we don't know why or how it was injured. Mr. Spock seems to think it was injured by phaser fire, which is possible. After we cornered it with no weapons, the thing, which is obviously intelligent, came right for me, almost as if it knew I was the leader. We had a small tussle before Spock hurled it against the nacelle, which broke. It wasn't working before that, but it still sucks. I'll have to file so much crap for that. Anyway, I was lucky to get away with just bruises. It didn't look like Mr. Silver Surfer knew how to fight very well. After he was thrown into the nacelle, Silver Surfer got even more angry. By this time, Scotty had finally started the engines back up again so our orbit wouldn't decay into Colony IX, and so the nacelle had ignited up again. I don't think Silver Surfer appreciated it. He thrashed around. I bet his injuries are gonna be hell to fix, Bones."

"Wait, wait, wait. Why did the engines start going back in time, then? When did that happen?"

"Oh, that was a result of starting up the engines right away with no warm-up time in the middle of a decaying orbit. It had nothing to do with Silver Surfer. At least, that's what Spock says, and I believe him."

"When did Scotty get attacked?"

"Oh, that was before he went off to start up the engines, when Silver Surfer attacked me. Y'see, when Silver Surfer was cornered, he was still hijacking the servers and controlling the ship all on his own. After he went after me, he was still connected, because his fingers stretched like wire across the room. So we needed to separate him from the computer. Scotty called him a few names, shot him with a phaser on kill, which had been instituted on my orders after we decided that the High setting wasn't nearly enough to stop this creature, and then the Silver Surfer completely focused on him." Here Jim paused. "I can't believe you fixed Scotty, Bones. I'll have to see it to believe it.'

"Go on, go on, what happened?" Bones needed to know. What if the same thing happened to him?

"Silver Surfer disconnected his wiry fingers from the control panel, and then used them to wrap around Scotty's hand, crushing the hand and shattering the phaser."

That explained the crushed bones in the right hand, along with the metal shards sticking everywhere. Bones figured the vertical slash of the hand had happened then as well.

"Then…" Jiim faltered again. He must be tired, thought Bones. I wonder if he's in the same boat I am. "Then Silver Surfer pulled Scotty towards him, and smashed his cheek in. The blood or whatever of the Silver Surfer was like electricity, and got all over Scotty when it happened. He was pretty badly burned, right?"

"…Yeah."

Bones crouched down. He took a breath, and supported his falling head with his palm.

"Jim…How did Scotty's entire central cavity get ripped open?"

Jim sighed and crouched down to his level.

"Well… After hitting Scotty's face, Silver Surfer started ripping his organs and tissues out of his body. He started with the skin, and then just got further and further down until he was sure Scotty wasn't going to live." Jim shuddered. "It was… ruthless. He didn't have any qualms at all. After he got to the spinal cord, Silver Surfer started… crushing Scotty. We got Scotty out of his hands right about then."

Bones crossed his arms and set them on his knees.

"…Wow. And then he got sent to some shitty Earth hospital."

Jim hesitated. "Not exactly… He… Scotty was the one who got the Enterprise working again, remember? Right after we recovered him, Scotty got the manual control online, and set in the equation Mr. Spock came up with. He was also the one who got the Enterprise to stop traveling back in time."

Bones fell on his ass.

"What the hell?"

Jim knew a volcano when he saw one. He nodded his head. "Yeah, yeah, Bones, don't get mad at me, there was no stopping him. You know what Scotty's like, with the ship. Obsessive, that's what. He wasn't about to let some alien destroy it along with him."

Bones deflated again. Once again, Scotty's sincerity and dedication awed him in a way that broke the professional doctor persona he put up in a crisis. That was a good thing; afterwards, it felt more refreshing to know that someone was still out there in this crazy world who wasn't completely insane. He always calmed down after meeting Scotty in a life-or-death situation because that assured Bones that he wasn't the only one seeing crazy things happen.

Bones sighed and smiled faintly. He rolled up and stood and so did Jim.

"Ready to see the patient, Captain."

"Right this way, Lieutenant Commander, Chief Medical Officer, sir." Jim mock-saluted him and led him in the right direction.

Bones smiled fully, and pulled out his tricorder. He wasn't sure if he would be able to pull through, but he would do a damn good job at patching up that alien.

Even though his instincts screamed for him to get the hell out of there and leave the killer alien to die, Doctor Leonard McCoy would follow Jim into the nacelle section to the Silver Surfer, because he was a professional, dammit. He would do his damn job, even if it killed him.

On that note, Bones marched back into Engineering Hell.

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END OF PART 2