Prior-Chapter Author's Note: Yeah, so I've taken forever with this update. My defense? Moving in to college is more difficult than I thought. Takes a bunch of time and effort. Actually, it takes time and effort to make time, which is kind of ironic. Besides, I didn't get any help from anyone on the whole 'science' thing, which I needed. So I researched a bunch of stuff on my own and rolled with it. If you find anything wrong with the science, well… Just remember that I don't actually know anything about it. And roll with it.

Thanks for following me through this rough patch in our relationship! It's amazing for anyone to still be so devoted after we haven't seen each other for so long! I have a new appreciation for people that make long-distance relationships work.

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Technical Difficulties

Chapter 11: Of Guilt and Gall

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Finally, after much consternation and finagling, Scotty set up all of those tricky blighters that Starfleet called connection grids but Scotty called something much less appropriate and less socially acceptable. And he had finished treating the antimatter with magnetization, which had been much more difficult than it seemed because it took too much of Scotty's precious time, and he was raring to go. Finally, after weeks of theoretical imaginings over this wee little project, he could make something out of it! Scotty grinned.

He really liked this ship. He really did.

Spock gave the order.

He flipped the switch.

The ship was still.

Then everything thrummed with new life as the Heart began working, slowly at first, then faster and faster and faster until –

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Bones stalked the transporter room like a wild animal. The apparently incapable engineers were still muttering over the consoles, furrowing their brows in almost comical confusion. Bones had given up on them long ago. The only engineer he could really trust to get anything done in a crisis was Scotty.

He kicked the wall, a poor, innocent, inanimate bystander. His face darkened with blood as his anger levels jumped off the scale. Bones' mouth hardened into a grim slash across his face, peppered with five o'clock shadow. Reflexively, his arms leapt behind his back and gripped each other tightly as his shoulders tensed.

The room quieted as the engineers' minds ran blank in surprise. Then Bones spoke, filling the silence with his growl.

"Goddamn technology. We make it, but we sure as hell can't control it. We're a goddamn danger to ourselves. Man just ain't ready for the level of responsibility it takes to run such goddamn complicated tomfoolery."

Slowly, Bones turned back to the center of the room and sauntered back to the steps, joining Chapel. The engineers quickly busied themselves in their charts and graphs and sketches, in earnest to show that they had heard nothing. Bones didn't even spare them a glance; honestly, they could have been invisible and he would have looked at them more often. He was trying to forget they were there. Bones knew that he might blow up if he admitted they were still over there, theorizing.

Chapel stood from the steps of the platform after finishing the last level of 4DTetris. She was too much of a lady to stretch and yawn, though it was what she desperately wanted to do. Instead, she simply adjusted the fringe of her uniform, flattening out any creases and looking for any wrinkles in the fabric. It was purely reflexive; the material used for the uniforms was specially designed to never wrinkle and stay exceptionally clean despite extensive use.

"Chapel?" Bones looked up at her, taken out of his moment of pure, unadulterated loathing by unexpected surprise.

She smiled briefly. "Is a woman still allowed to powder her nose in these types of situations, Doctor?"

Bones looked down in embarrassment. "Yes, yes, of course." She started walking to the door.

After he had settled back down on the step, surprise melted from his face to leave a distinguished, deep exhaustion. Lidded eyes gazed across the room, seeing nothing.

Glancing back, Chapel caught an image of the Doctor. She burned with curiosity. What does he see? she wondered.

Then the doors shut, and she had no other option but to move on.

But Bones was still very much in a standstill. It was as if he was literally stuck within that tiny little room, stuck inside himself.

What did he see?

He saw flashes of what had been, and what might be. He saw countless gored officers, except he counted every single one of them, painstakingly, caringly. There were so many cases, so many patients, so many tears, so many lost. Spock, with his glazed eyes and shaking hands, gripping his skull in a futile attempt to wrench the pain from his head. Jim, who had been injured in every way imaginable and more on countless away missions, always sacrificing himself for the good of the other officers. He saw Scotty's body spread before him on a slab, opened to reveal his insides, his hands fishing through his guts in a wild attempt to save him.

He saw the blood on his plastic gloves, saw the blood soak through.

Bones' eyes crunched together as he clasped his hands, as he let his forehead fall onto his white, threaded fingers, as he prayed for the outcome to be peaceful, to be successful, but most of all, bloodless. He prayed to God for an end to this hellish torture of powerlessness, and for hope.

Because that was all he could do.

((()))

Giotto had just been going through the typical security routine when the Red Alert was given. That meant trouble, and so did Commander Spock's message about the pursuit of the spacecraft Sealion. He changed gears.

Following procedure, Giotto focused on inter-ship security details instead of shipwide details. Instead of constantly getting updates from parading squads from around the ship, Giotto made certain of invasion teams for possible transport onto the other vessel, fully equipped and competent officers that he trusted on his life. He went over proper procedure for overtaking and claiming a ship for the teams, and gave them the full designs of the Sealion, gleaned from scans. They hashed together a cohesive plan through quick decisions and agreements.

Also corresponding with his position, in the event of a Red Alert, all crewmembers had certain positions to take aboard the Enterprise, and it was one of his many jobs to check that all Security personnel were properly in place. This was extremely handy in case of an alien invasion or enemy transport on their ship in attempt of takeover.

It was not the most exciting of jobs, but it was quick and efficient. Giotto would send an activation sequence to every Security station' position, and the officers would individually respond with the shutdown sequence. When the activation sequence was not shut down in time, it would loop back to Giotto, informing him of that crewmember's absence.

He only remembered that there was a Security detail in the brig looking after a murder suspect after the crewmembers absent from their positions were mostly from the detail he had assigned earlier that day. He switched over the activation sequences directly t the brig. He waited for a response.

There was none.

Giotto knew that the guys he assigned were usually very animated and couldn't have fallen asleep or started drinking during their shifts. They also weren't the type of guys who were supremely interested in staring at a wall for an entire shift, either, and would customarily respond to any sort of message in a heartbeat.

He also knew that, not only was the Siresian imprisoned in the brig a security threat because of his possible wrongdoing, but also because of his earlier attack on the Enterprise's engines and other unknown abilities. Shortly put, the alien was unpredictable, both in mind and action.

So Giotto was suspicious.

The suspicion crawled in the back of his mind, beginning with a prickle and spreading until he was absolutely sure. Giotto knew a Security risk when he saw one, and he was not going to let it become another disaster, like the Engineering Hell incident. That particular incident showed him as a failure of a security chief, and he was damned if he was going to let something equally embarrassing happen again.

Dashing out of his office, Giotto pulled out his communicator and headed towards the brig.

"Security detail in the brig, please respond." As he suspected, there was no answer. He called another detail and requested their backup. They would be a few minutes; Giotto was going to end up at the brig first and completely alone.

He pulled out his phaser and set it to kill.

It was empty when Giotto finally reached the brig. Well, the bodies of his Security officers were strewn across the floor inside the containment chamber, but there was no criminal suspect in sight.

He picked up his communicator and tried to contact the bridge before he was flung across the brig from the sudden shift to warp.

((()))

After being encapsulated in an abyss or cloud or sea of extreme concentration for what seemed like an eternity, Bones was shocked out of his reverie by the exit of the incompetent engineers.

The vague shuffling noises paper makes had disappeared, and the footsteps were quickly fading. They were gone. Probably to ask Scotty for directions on the damn thing. He snorted and then stopped in surprise. He hadn't meant to snort, and was startled by the noise in the suddenly quiet room.

Well, it wasn't quiet, exactly. There was a slight humming noise from the machinery of the ship, of course. But Bones almost didn't hear that particular sound; his ears had catalogued that pitch so completely that he didn't think he could anymore. He was solemnly contemplating the silence when his communicator went off.

Beep beep beep!

He almost stomped on the damn thing, but decided to see if might actually be a call. Maybe Spock had something important to say and the damn thing was deciding to work for once. He flipped it open after retrieving it from the ground.

"Chief Medical Officer here." After a beat of silence, Bones guessed that there was nobody on the other line. He was just about ready to shut the damn thing and smash it to pieces when there was a slight

blip!

Again, Bones was shocked out of his anger by surprise. His eyes widened and he held the thing up again, inspecting it like a curious cat.

After a moment of indecision, he held it back up to his ear. With the hum of the ship, he couldn't hear anything coming from the tiny speaker on his communicator. Bones tried to remember which button thing was for volume, and twisted it with relish, back and forth, when he finally found it.

There was some static at first, especially when he was readjusting the volume, but then the channel evened out again. This time it was much clearer – there was definitely a bunch of sounds coming out of his communicator. Mostly, they were indistinct and seemed far-off. Bones couldn't pin down one; they were all meshed together into one, complicated sound that he couldn't decipher. Almost like the hum of the ship, or any other piece of machinery…

He flipped the communicator closed. These noises probably meant that the thing was far gone, somewhere in machine hell. Bones really didn't know anything about machinery, and if the communicator was broken, there was no way he was going to be able to fix it by twiddling dials like a child.

Again, he was left alone in the small transporter room.

Alone with his thoughts.

((()))

Jim had finally gained access to the cockpit of the Sealion, which had taken much longer than he had expected. There were a great deal more traps and tricks to getting into it and staying alive afterwards than usual. Apparently, the only person who was ever meant to fly the ship was Finnegan himself. Strange… Almost as if he were specifically meant to go on this mission by the builders themselves…

Jim mused to himself as his hands moved like lightning over the controls, attempting to get some type of handle over the cleverly encrypted autopilot. Besides which, he had known Finnegan in school a long time ago, and he was never strong in computer sciences. No, Finnegan had always been especially skilled at strategy and politics; he had always gotten abysmal scores on applied sciences.

This couldn't be Finnegan's work. It couldn't possibly be his work. Every detail of the program was intact after Jim hacked away at the edges. He couldn't break it. He couldn't touch it. And Jim prided himself on his ability to hack into anything.

After a moment, Jim took in a breath to relax. He took a step back from the situation to think of different options.

The algorithm was complex, with a circular sequence as well as cascades of multiple shootoffs of postulates; it was impossible to decode whether it was deterministic or randomized. Termination was meant to never be a possibility with this particular algorithm. There were no input tests in previous usages of this algorithm in the entirety of the computer system, so Jim couldn't scan for the previously used codes.

But what could he do?

Jim steepled his fingers.

If an input sequence from an outer source like a password wouldn't work, then no attempts to alter the algorithm through standard procedure would work. Basically, Jim could throw out the entire algorithm rulebook.

Jim grinned. He was pretty used to that kind of thing now.

So what were his options? He could do the same thing he did for the Kobayashi Maru, and create a fraction of a signature from the original algorithm, splice the pattern forcefully by the combination of a bunch of trick onslaughts to make the algorithm put up its firewall against a fake enemy. Then his piece of the algorithm would sneak in, and completely take over when the algorithm restarted. It was like an infectious virus, and though it was a bit unrefined and brutal, Jim was proud of it. However, in this situation, jiggering the entire operation would take too much of his precious time, he would need more space to directly access the boards, and he would need to have access to the mainframe, which he did not exactly have at the moment.

Besides, this code was too civilized to be attacked by a sneaky stab in the back – this code was in battle armor, packed with guns, surrounded by an army of protectorates. No way was Jim going to be able to parade in with a bunch of distractions and get away with it, and get his little assassin all the way to the boss.

He needed something way more compact, way more skillful, elegant.

He needed…

( Hey, Spock…)

Spock knew what he needed, it was in the back of his mind, and Spock comprehended his situation instantly as soon as Jim sent it to him.

(I suggest that you apply the "Theory of Gravity," Captain.

Ah.

And though I do not suggest in any way that your method was not skillful, it was indeed quite clumsy and brutal as you infer.

…Alright, alright, enough. Don't hate.)

Jim could hear Spock's subtle snicker in the back of his head, and blushed. He was proud of that trick, thank you very much.

He typed in the idea Spock had instantly transferred to him.

It worked.

He had access to the autopilot.

Smirking slightly, the final victory, he shut it off.

Then he noticed the suddenly fluctuating patterns of the Enterprise.

Spock's shock and understanding flung into his thoughts.

He got out a short, "Shit!" before clutching onto the console to keep his head from smashing into screen from the impact.

((()))

Bones' ears pricked at the release of air that the door gave out when it slid open. He was turned away from the door, standing, glaring at that goddamn machine with a special level of concentration, but now his train of thought was broken. He shifted minutely, but not enough to see whoever came in.

"Chapel?"

There was no answer.

Bones turned.

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Chapel was walking back from the women's restroom when she turned a corner, and, lo and behold, there was a body stretched out upon the ground.

Immediately, without even taking in the situation, Chapel's body responded. Her fingers pulled her medical tricorder out and her legs kneeled down next to the patient. Scanning for vitals, Doctor. Assessing risk of injuries now. Postulating cause of injuries and possible methods of first response medical care, sir.

She clicked her communicator open and requested assistance from any on-call nurses who were still doing hours in Sickbay, therapies, or the labs. There was a need for a stretcher, as well as some basic first aid equipment.

Then Chapel looked up, as she swung her communicator closed, and she saw a hand laying still in the opening leading to the Jeffries tubes.

Another one.

As she worked on the next patient, Chapel failed to notice deep gashes in the impenetrable metal that led up the entirety of the passageway.

The zigzagging wounds in the pipe reflected the slow, steady flashing of the tricorder's light, the red glow running down the slices like dripping blood.

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Before he had time to recognize the Doctor, Slistas had reacted instantly to the perceived threat across the room. His thin, sharp fingers had extended and thrust forward, burying themselves in the wall behind Doctor McCoy at the neckline. There were small rivulets of blood running down the incisive silver slivers.

One twist of his wrist, and the Doctor would have been dead.

But he had realized just in time, and now the good Doctor was still alive, even though he had shallow gashes in the sides of his neck, they weren't fatal. His claws were still outstretched, stabbed deeply into the wall.

Doctor McCoy wheezed for a moment, staring at him, looking slackjawed into Slistas' eyes. Pure shock.

"I ask you to not disturb my doings, Doctor. If you do so, I will be forced to harm you." Slistas approached the situation with an implied continuation of restraint.

Though Slistas was not sure if he could possibly harm this man on purpose. McCoy had, after all, saved his life.

This statement seemed to wake the Doctor from a stupor. His blank, uncomprehending eyes snapped back into focus and flickered around, finally coming to rest on a phaser, left by another officer in a previous transport, most likely. Or perhaps it was from the stock of phasers that were kept in the transporter room for emergencies like unexpected alien transports, Slistas was uncertain.

In any case, the Doctor lunged forward, grabbed it and pointed it at him.

"Don't move," McCoy growled. "Or I'll shoot."

Slistas paused.

His fingers were still surrounding McCoy's neck on both sides.

He could kill him in one quick motion. Just one small flick.

He wouldn't get shot that way.

McCoy would be beheaded by the entrancing, elastic-like twist, and the gun would drop from his seizing hands. Slistas could calculate it to the millimeter.

But he couldn't do it.

This man saved his life. Had worked through extreme fatigue to heal him, to comfort him, to save him.

But he had to. There were important things at stake.

But he couldn't.

But he must.

McCoy was leveling the gun.

Slistas was stuck.

McCoy's eyes were determined.

Slistas couldn't move.

The ship lurched as it went into warp; McCoy slammed his head on the back of the wall.

Slistas regarded his inert form. Since his fingers were still embedded into the wall, he had not been flung unceremoniously from his place. Stabbing his fingers into the wall one hand at a time, Slistas made his way towards the platform looking remarkably like a spider.

He proceeded according to plan.

((()))

It was wrong.

Scotty knew it from the second the ship shuddered into warp.

He had to stop it.

Scotty had found a good grip on the warpcore, and so he didn't go flying when the ship went to warp. He fought the immense pressure to reach his hand back towards the switch… his fingers crawled across the smooth, unbreakable plexiglass of the core, so slowly, so very slowly, and finally he reached it.

Flick.

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End of Part 11

tbc

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Post-Chapter Author's Note: So… favorite bit of imagery in this chapter? Mine was probably the Jeffries tubes bit with the reflections. You know, the part with the gashes? Yeah. I thought it was cool. Probably unnecessary, but cool.

Oh, and by the way, by writing this story, I'm really gaining bunches of respect for almost every crew member. These people are awesome. Which moment of complete and utter badassery from one of these beasts is your fave? I'm in the mood for hearing people's opinions on all of these sorts of things.

One last thing. Do you guys have any idea where I'm going with this? I want to know what people are predicting.