Eighteen

"Forty feel below and the comms are still working, am I right?"

"You got it," Uhura's voice was scratchy, but still coming through the hand-held device that Victoria clutched against her chest. "Last known readings say you're closer to Jim than McCoy right now, if that helps, but I think they're moving around."

"I'm not going to be picky about who I punch harder when I see them," said Victoria dryly. "I'll check in again in a few minutes, Uhura. If I don't, please remember you have three hours until the next quake. Don't let Spock leave without us."

Uhura snorted. "Roger that. Over and out."

Victoria shoved the comm back into her pocket and edged along the side of the tunnel, keeping her back pressed to the wall gingerly. This was her second crater – fortunately, the thirty mile radius that Scotty had identified had approximately seven craters, all relatively close together, which meant she had thoroughly explored the tunnels branching out of two of them within an hour. She hadn't found McCoy or Jim, but she had found a discarded water bottle and a decompressed bandage container, which meant at least one of them had frequented the tunnel before her. All she had to do was find them, and then rely on her adequate sense of direction to get them out of here. It sounded simple enough.

But it wasn't simple.

Almost as if Fate was playing a cruel joke on her, Victoria heard a sharp crack echo through the tunnel, and reflexively took a step back. Unfortunately, it was the wrong decision, because a large rock that had been lodged in the roof of the tunnel had come loose, and landed with a sickening thud behind her, knocking into her back as it did. Victoria swore and hobbled forward, both out of pain and from the pressure, feeling her knees buckle. She allowed herself to fall and gasped in pain, swatting the dust away from her mouth and quickly trying to assess if she was injured. Her shoulder ached, but the pain in her leg was overpowering everything else; she was sure the rock had either hit a nerve and shocked her system, or the little supplement keeping her leg together had been dislodged. The second option was infinitely worse than the first, but when the pain receded enough for Victoria to be able to stand up and limp a few steps forward, she sighed in relief.

She looked up and glared at the hole in the roof of the tunnel. "Is this karma for lying to an entire ship of innocent people?" she asked rhetorically. "Honestly, all I want to do is save the guy I think is cute and the kid I raised to be reckless. Give me a break, would you?" there was no answer. Victoria snorted. "Okay, fair enough, it isn't exactly an easy task. How do I get myself into these situations?" she asked the empty tunnel in front of her.

Again, there was no answer.

!

McCoy paused, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. He could have sworn he'd heard a voice echoing through the tunnel, but considering the loud thud that had signalled the roof was collapsing in, he didn't think he should push his luck and stick around to be sure. The mission brief hadn't said anything about the tunnels collapsing, but he didn't need to be a geoscience officer to know that was what happened every time a quake hit. His watch was broken and his PADD was malfunctioning, so he didn't know when the next shock was due, but it had to be soon – all he needed to do was get to the surface and try and get in touch with the Enterprise, and then he could focus on murdering Jim Kirk.

The tunnel was fairly straight for a few more feet, so McCoy sped up to a jog and made sure to keep away from the sides of the small passage; previous experience had shown him how fragile the walls were, and one wrong move could cause another collapse that he wasn't prepared for. Of course, Fate absolutely hated his guts that day, because as soon as he made up his mind to stay away from the wall, it crumbled to dust and a figure came tumbling through it, bringing with them a collapsing roof.

McCoy reacted reflexively. The person was clearly from the Enterprise, and the uniform told him it was probably a member of a search party. It was also a woman, and he was sure one of the security officers with Jim had been a brunette. Mentally wondering how on earth this woman had ended up here, he yanked her back roughly and shielded her body with his from the falling debris, conscious of the fact that he had no idea who she was but unwilling to let a fellow officer get injured because he'd wasted time trying to ask her what her name was.

The shower of rocks seemed never-ending, and McCoy swore profusely when he felt the sharp objects hit his back. Nothing would break, but he'd have some painful bruises to deal with later. The woman pressed up against his chest was facing away from him, her dirt-stained hands resting on top of her head as she curled forwards towards the wall. He was close enough to see the side of her face despite the lack of light, and it hit him that she was very familiar, but something about her seemed out of place at that moment.

Finally, the rocks stopped falling and McCoy gingerly took a step back. The woman didn't move, but her tense posture eased slightly, her arms coming down to rest at her sides. She didn't turn around. Scowling, he flashed his penlight at her. "And who the hell are you?" he demanded, not caring that he sounded rude.

Slowly, she turned around, and again the familiarity of her features hit him full force. It was Natira Woodville, dusty and slightly stooped, which was a change from the immaculate woman he'd seen in passing a few times. But her glasses were off, and her hair was piled up in a bun, a single loose curl brushing against the creamy skin of her cheek – McCoy blinked, as she offered him a wan smile and an awkward wave.

"Hey," she said, and her voice was the final piece of the puzzle.

The surprise made him fumble with his penlight, but he managed to keep hold of it, focusing back onto her face to make sure he wasn't seeing things. Sure, he'd found Victoria More attractive and easy to talk to; she made a killer cup of coffee and she had been amazing with his daughter, but it was a little extreme to be imagining this random lieutenant as a woman he hadn't seen in months. Maybe the oxygen was low down here and he was losing his mind, or he'd hit his head…

"Dr. McCoy?" she was talking now, her voice soft and soothing. "Listen, I can totally explain everything, but right now I need to ask you some questions, okay?" when he didn't answer, she seemed to hesitate. "Umm, you do know who I am, right? Victoria More, we met –"

"I know damn well who you are," said McCoy finally. His voice was even gruffer now, because confusion and frustration were not a good mix. "What the hell's going on here? Does Jim know you're pretending to be someone else?"

McCoy expected her to lie or deflect, but she didn't. Victoria didn't even blink. "Yes, he does," she said calmly. "But I would appreciate it if you could stick to calling me Woodville, or Natira, in public. Now, if you could just –"

"Hold on," he held up a hand to silence her, and she stopped talking, though now she was frowning as well. "I've been authorizing a cocktail of hyposprays for someone called Natira Woodville, without ever meetin' her, because Jim ordered me too."

To her credit, Victoria winced. "I can explain that."

"You mean to tell me that was you?" he demanded. She nodded sheepishly. McCoy felt his veins turn to ice. "D'you realize what a medical license is, Victoria?" he was trying very hard not to shout. "I saw that damn file, and none of the shit in it is about you, everythin' from the age to the place of birth is wrong!"

"None of that information impacts your treatment of me!" Victoria protested, but McCoy wasn't listening to her. His head was spinning.

"So you're tellin' me I've been treatin' you for god only knows what, without even doing a basic check-up?" he felt slightly sick. "You know if anything had gone wrong I would have gone to court martial, right? Or you could have died? Hell, I knew Jim was a reckless son of a bitch, but I thought Spock would have the sense to know this is completely unethical, it goes against every vow I took when I became a doctor," the sheer amount of ways he could have killed her, or gotten himself thrown into jail, were endless: hadn't Jim realized what he was getting McCoy into? Groaning, he ran a hand over his face. "Damn it, I knew I shouldn't have –"

"Okay, that's enough!" snapped Victoria finally. McCoy scowled at being interrupted, but she glared right back, so he decided not to speak. "I understand the position you're in and you can be sure I'll apologize to you when we're out of here, Dr. McCoy, but I'm alive, you're alive, and trust me when I say that's all we should be focusing on at this moment. For now, please remember that there's an earthquake coming very soon and we need to keep moving. Not only that, I also need to find that reckless son of a bitch, as you so eloquently called him, and I only have two hours to do it. So learn to multitask and you can yell at me while we walk, okay?"

McCoy paused, his mind focusing on only one part of her speech. "What d'you mean, find Jim? He was with the rest of the away team a few miles back."

"He was, and the rest of the search party found him," Victoria turned her back on him and inched forward, peering through the hole in the wall that she had made when she had practically landed in his arms. "Of course, because he's Jim, he stayed behind to look for you, and then I stayed behind to look for both of you."

"Why the hell would you do that?" asked McCoy. He left the fight leave his body. Jim was missing? That meant a rescue mission, judging from the steel in Victoria's eyes, and McCoy wasn't about to let this woman save his friend alone, not when every judgement call she made seemed to be emotionally motivated, at best, and suspicious at worst.

"Because there was no one else, and no time," replied Victoria evenly.

"Protocol says you don't send someone down here alone as a search party," pointed out McCoy coldly. Despite his tone, he joined her in examining the tunnel. He wasn't going to yell at her, not yet, but that didn't mean he couldn't criticise her. She was clearly insane if she thought she could get away with whatever she was trying to pull.

"I know," Victoria sighed: his tirade against her was getting annoying. She took a step back and looked around. "If you start walking back from here in my tunnel, you'll reach a crater in less than an hour. You can call the Enterprise and get beamed back up from there."

McCoy raised an eyebrow. "And where d'you think you're goin'?"

"This way," Victoria gestured forwards. "We still haven't found Jim."

McCoy snorted. "You're not lookin' for Jim alone."

Victoria narrowed her eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know what it means," McCoy shone his penlight into the tunnel, not trusting himself to look at her. She still had hypnotic eyes, even if they were the wrong colour.

"You don't trust me," she didn't sound surprised. Instead, she sounded offended. "You think I'll try to hurt him."

"Can you blame me?"

"I would never hurt Jim," Victoria said flatly. "You can mistrust every word I've said since the day we met, I don't care, but this is different. I practically raised that boy, okay? I've wiped away tears and kissed away cuts and bruises, I went back to Iowa every other month after I got into college just to make sure he was still being taken care of, I've even gotten him out of jail when everyone else thought he deserved it. I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life, Dr. McCoy, but I have always, always, looked out for Jim. Are you, as a parent, trying to tell me you don't know how that feels?"

McCoy stared at her. Her words had caught him completely off guard; Jim had never mentioned how much Victoria meant to him, even though he had figured out they were close. Still, this was different. Jim had never had a real, maternal figure in his life. It had been sorely obvious when they had met, but McCoy had always sensed that, if nothing else, at least the kid was loved. Now he knew why. This woman, who was almost his age, was all he had. And she was looking at him right now as if daring him to argue with her, and her eyes were still wide and, for once, completely open. She wasn't lying.

"Okay," McCoy wasn't convinced, not entirely, but he didn't have time to argue. "Look, I'm not saying I trust you, and I'm not saying I don't trust you. But I'm sticking with you until we find Jim. If he's hurt you're going to need help, and then you both can explain to me what the hell's goin' on here."

Victoria considered his words. Now that was a conversation she wasn't looking forward to. But it was unavoidable: unknowingly, she had decided to let Leonard McCoy in on everything very early on. Now was as good a time as any, especially because it was very clear he didn't trust her. Victoria tried not to think about how her chest had clenched uncomfortably when he had looked at her just then, as if she was some sort of convict that needed to be watched constantly. How long had it been since someone had looked at her like that? She felt a shiver crawl up her spine at the thought.

Shaking her head to expel those thoughts, Victoria looked around once more and then made a decision. "Well, then I think we should just keep heading this way, but we'll use my tunnel instead of yours. If they run parallel it won't make much of a difference, and if not we can always turn back and use this hole as a starting point. We don't have much time," she glanced at her watch and grimaced. "A little over two hours, if we're lucky and the quakes stick to this schedule."

"Sounds good to me," McCoy gestured for her to walk on. "Ladies first." She didn't miss the way his hand was resting casually on his belt, where his phaser was.

Victoria complied quietly.