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Chapter Three

McCoy stood at his newest patient's bedside, performing another check her vitals. The doctor could not help but sigh in relief. The past ten hours he'd been some of the most nerve-wracking of his medical career. He had never actually had to unfreeze a living patient before. When they could find no "thaw" setting on the machine, they had to break it open and unfreeze her the old-fashioned way.

He let his eyes rove her features. She looked fairly normal for a teen; she looked thoroughly human. She could have literally been any Terran kid. She was petite, slender, but toned. Her hair fell to her shoulders in loose coppery curls. Her complexion was quite fair, and was only broken by a faint sprinkling of freckles dusting the bridge of her nose. Nothing to worry about.

What bothered him was the dark circles under her eyes and how she was dressed. Her dark outfit looked like a military uniform and included a black shirt, pants, and combat boots of a unusual design. The deep purple smudges under her eyes spoke of hard training with little sleep. McCoy secretly hoped she would sleep for a while longer. Not only was she healing from the thawing, but she also looked like she needed to recover from whatever happened to her before she was frozen.

He pulled the thick blanket covering her a little more firmly over her shoulders, and he suddenly found himself linking down into a pair of wide hazel eyes.

"Hello, there," he said, quickly taking out his tricorder to scan her. "I'm Doctor McCoy." All of her readings were normal for humans, though this all meant that she healed much faster than anticipated. "Can you tell your name, Miss?" he asked, adding his readings to her PADD chart. The girl remained silent. "Can you understand me, darlin'?"

No response. "I guess you only speak Russian," McCoy sighed. "Well, it's the dead middle of the night, Uhura and Chekov are asleep, and you should be too. I'm just gonna give you a sedative to help you sleep."

She watched him warily as he prepared the hypospray and shrunk away when he approached. "It's just a sedative, darlin'," he soothed. Oddly, she tried to keep him away from her arms instead for her neck. All those injections, he thought. She's scared because of all the injections those Russians gave her. He managed to jab her neck as gently as he could and breathed a sigh of relief when her eyes fluttered closed.

"Good morning, one and all," Kirk greeted as the senior officers seated themselves at the table in the officer's lounge for the daily meeting. "Spock, anything to report?" he asked before sipping his coffee.

"Nothing, sir. However, I do expect a report from the botany lab within the next two day regarding the medicinal qualities of the plants taken from Centauri V."

"Thank you, Mr. Spock," Kirk looked down the table. Only Spock, himself, and, oddly enough, Chekov seemed fully awake. Sulu, Uhura, Scotty, and McCoy all cast bleary gazes at their captain as they clutched mugs of coffee. "How's Engineering, Mr. Scott?"

"Jus' fine 'n dandy, Cap'n," Scotty answered with a yawn. "The ol' girl seems tae be happy with the calm we've had these las' few days, yesterday's little adventure excluded, o' course."

"Very good. Speaking of which, how's our guest in Sickbay, Bones?" Kirk turned his attention to his CMO.

McCoy took a large gulf of coffee before answering. "Healing much faster than anticipated," he answered. "We're wondering if accelerated healing is an effect of one of those dang serums those blasted Russians shot her up with."

"Take it easy, Bones," Kirk warned with a subtle nod toward their youngest crew member.

McCoy dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand. "The kid isn't a blasted Russian; just the ones who did all that crap to her."

"Eet ees okay, Doctor," Pavel nodded. "I am not happy vith ze vons who did zis any more zen you." McCoy saluted the young Russian with his mug.

"Anything else, Bones?"

"Well, she woke up momentarily about 3 AM," McCoy said. "Wouldn't talk though. She was wary of the hypospray sedative I gave her, understandably so."

"Sedative?" Spock whirled an eyebrow. "If she had sufficiently recovered enough to wake, why did you sedate her?"

"Because she looked like crap, Spock. She looked like she had been through a fight and four days of no sleep before they stuffed her in that glorified freezer unit."

"How is she now?" Uhura asked.

"Still asleep. Hopefully for the rest of the day."

"Keep me informed," Kirk nodded before dismissing them for their first shift on the bridge.

Four hours later, McCoy was bandaging the burnt hand of a Engineering technician when a nurse tapped his shoulder.

"Sir, she's awake."

McCoy nodded and motioned for her to finish bandaging the technician's hand. He had given explicit instructions for the nurse to get him as soon as the girl woke. He was just not expecting it to be this soon.

Slipping behind the privacy curtain he had pulled around her joined, he found a pair of hazel eyes boring into his. He could see fight in those eyes; she was silently daring him to do his worst. With an internal sigh and some...unsavory...mental remarks for the ones responsible for holding this girl captive, he checked her vitals.

"Well, your pupil responses and blood pressure are fine," he said conversationally. "respiratory rate, pulse, and temperature are all within normal ranges...You seem to be bouncing back quite well, Miss..." He deliberately left the end of the sentence open, hoping she would give a name. When none was for coming, he pretended to not notice. "Well, I don't know how much you remember from last night, but I'm Dr. Leonard McCoy," he said with a gentle smile that he usually reserved for child patients. Her eyes had not left his face the entire time. After a moment, she nodded.

"Can you understand me?"

Another moment passed. Hazel eyes stared up into a nearly matching pair. Slowly, she nodded again. "Yes." Her voice was raspy as if she had not used it in a long time.

McCoy quickly shook himself out of his surprised stupor. "You got a name, darlin'?"

Her brows knit together for a long moment, eyes closing. Finally, her eyes opened. "I do nae know."

McCoy nodded. "That's alright; maybe it will come back to you. Do you know what year it is?" He was hoping she could confirm how long she had been frozen.

A moment of silence. "Nae."

Clearly, she has a case of fairly full-blown amnesia. "Okay...Well, we found you in some kind of cryo-chamber. Do you know who did this to you?"

Confusion joined the frustration already on her face. "Cryo?"

"Yes," McCoy nodded. "You were basically frozen."

She firmly shook her head. "I do nae remember any freezers. They ne'er told me their names. Th-they ne'er spoke English." Her eyes were pleading with him, as if she expected punishment for her answers.

"It's okay, I think we leave off the questions for now," McCoy soothed, seeing her confusion and agitation. "Maybe you will remember more when you've rested up some more." He laid a hand on her shoulder for a moment, but she flinched away from his touch. "No one is going to hurt you, sweetheart," he said softly. "You just rest easy."

He slipped out from behind the privacy curtain, heading right for the bridge. Though her answers had not really told him much, her words did reveal one thing: their guest was not Russian.

Thoughts? I'd love to hear them.