Title: A Woman Struck
Author: Kelthammer
Series: MU TOS
Pairing: Uhura/Chapel; Lester/Coleman, situational K/S/Mc
Coding: Seriously adult themes. Sex doesn't squick me; violence does.
Parts 5-7 out of 7Feedback: Sure Archive: Sure, just let me know
Disclaimer: This is not real. We obviously don't have lives, so tend to your own, Paraborg.
Summary: After the events of SHE TAKES COMMAND, Kirk goes too far. Steps have to be taken.
= = = = = = =
The CAPIL was very quiet in the hours of artifical dawn. Uhura sensed that neither of her roommates wanted to speak. Christine was trying to mark time by scrolling and re-scrolling her gathered krypta on the alien artifact. Leonard was just as absorbed with his own tric, only his data had to do with dead people, not the relics they left behind.
Nyota sipped her rooibos. She felt *quite* useless.
Leonard glanced up from across the table at her, his blue eyes flat and strange. She saw him look at whatever was on his screen, then at his newly healed wrist. He didn't make a sound, but his chest lifted in a sigh.
"Did you find something?" Christine missed little.
"Yeah." He grumbled. "Those marks of injury on the laborers. Maybe some of them could have been work related. But not all of them." He pushed away his screen with a disgusted face. "I'm taking a shower." He announced to no one, and stalked off.
Nyota wondered if his obsessive cleanliness had to do with his mental and emotional state. She'd noticed that whenever he did something that made him feel as though he'd compromised his principles (talking to Kufe case in point), he'd go right for the water and start scrubbing.
"This just sucks." Nyota said, her voice a blurt out of the blue.
"What?" Christine stared.
That legally, the captain and Spock could do whatever they wanted, to Leonard, or to THEM for that matter. "Recreational activities" were overlooked indulgently among officers. Only when it interferred with the safety (and profit) of a ship, could anyone call for help. And because Kirk and Spock had proven themselves profitable, capable, and a huge asset to the Empire, they had even more freedom to power-around their crew. That was how things were run in the Empire. The rights of power were manifested in more power.
How to explain? Nyota could only shrug.
Christine set her machine down for his. Uhura angled, but medical krypta was highly specialized. You had to take training and possess perfect pitch just to decipher the subtle whirrs and chirps of the "salt shaker" scanners.
"What's it say?" She poked Christine.
Christine slowly shook her head, getting her hair in her eyes. She brushed it out absently. "Ritual torture. The man Leonard was studying...the injuries almost precisely mirror his."
"Oh." Oh, my.
Christine was quiet for a long time. "All the cases are like this." She said at last. "The older injuries, they're the mildest. Small burns, cuts...but there's signs of some dreadful stuff going on at the end. I'm presuming that when the victims no longer fulfilled their function, they were killed off, or their deaths were arranged."
"Same difference." Nyota pointed out grimly.
"Too true." Christine sighed.
They looked at each other, while the sounds of the shower hissed in the background.
"Do you think he's telling the truth?" Nyota rubbed her arms quickly. "Do you think the captain, and maybe Mr. Spock, picked up something here that was causing the same...the same..."
"I don't WANT to believe him." Christine was always curt when deeply upset. "Every rational portion of my brain is wanting to prove that he's cracked up under the stress and is looking for answers in witchcraft. But do you think he looked maxed out on stress?"
"No, he doesn't look or act like it..." Nyota poked her tea. "You said he has some psychic ability...what if that's influencing him?"
Christine blinked. "I hadn't thought of that." A moment later her expression drooped. "No. No, that won't work. He's empathic, Ny. When he's paying attention and not blocking himself, he can't be fooled. He can SMELL when somebody's lying to him or trying to trick him."
"When he's not blocking himself?"
"Well how long would you like to be like that? Getting drunk's the easiest for him. Or to be so fired up on caffeine that he can't pay much attention to anything but what he's doing at the moment."
"But...possession?"
"It's happened before. Look at Mira Romaine. Or, actually, all those other energy aliens who've found ways to influence sacks of matter like us?"
Nyota shivered. "What if he IS right? I'm thinking, what if Lester and Coleman picked up on whatever this IS, and they went too far, tried to kill the captain, and when the captain killed them, this theoretical possessive entity rode home with him as the host?"
"It fits a lot." Christine pushed plates and cups away. "But I don't want to swallow that just yet. We still need more information. Maybe your logs will tell us something."
Nyota shrugged helplessly. "It takes time to retrieve data. At least 36 more hours."
"At least?"
"At least."
Christine tried not to be depressed at that news.
* * *
Leonard came back out looking more human and less hag-ridden, but Nyota didn't like the new set in his jawline.
"We're changing our tactics." He announced without preamble, and obviously, without objection. "From now on, no one splits up or does anything alone when we leave the ship. FULL sleep cycles. I'm including myself in this; Christine, you're in charge of the Somidoses. We're all getting plenty of rest, plenty of in-team support, and a high protein diet. And starting now, we're going to take turns scanning each other for unusual brainwave activity."
Maybe he was being a little alarmist, but by all means, they would never protest cautious measures. Christine got to her feet and began setting up the specs for the single biobed on ship; it normally set in the wall like a Murphy bed. He sank down in his usual chair and watched while Nyota got sick of her old, dead drink and rep'd another.
"How are the archaeological specs coming?"
"Oh, Leonard..." Christine looked disgusted. "I know I said we should have something to talk about over the breakfast table, but I didn't think we'd be having breakfast this early."
He smiled faintly. "I hear you. What is it, 4am?" He looked over his shoulder. "0445. Well, I'm no Vulcan."
"For which I'm grateful." Nyota muttered.
Christine slapped the biobed. "You first."
Leonard rolled himself on. Nyota understood the purpose of some of those floating graphs, but not much more. His heart sounded normal enough. Too bad THAT wasn't an indicator of demonic possession, or whatever...
For the first time, she could see the attraction in superstition. Its very principles were rooted in EXTREMELY simple solutions to complex problems. Somebody possessed? Blow them off the map. Somebody cast a spell on you? Ditto. Talk about a seductive philosophy!
Her turn. Christine decreed they were normal, and went over the treatment herself. McCoy said they were all normal but stress was physically manifesting itself in high acid buildups, which could lead to ulcers and ruptured capillaries in the brain if left unchecked.
"We're not going exploring today." He ordered. "We're collating data. Nothing more violent."
Nyota sighed. "I won't be doing much. The data bars are still in the station."
Surprisingly, McCoy snickered. "You could always finish decontaminating those fiction tapes I brought from Coleman's room."
She rolled her eyes upwards. She was getting royally sick of his gibes about taking book tapes along with a new romance. On the other hand, his persistance was a good clue as to how utterly ridiculous he thought it all.
Nyota P. Uhura, Lt. of Communications, didn't need his, or anyone's, help, advice, input or whatever on how to conduct a torrid affair.
"I just might do that." She answered sweetly, her teeth glinting like steel in her wide, wide smile.
* * *
Barely three days on Camus, and they already had a day off. Nyota was resignedly unsurprised when Christine promptly stretched out on the lounge couch and fell asleep. She saw Leonard scowl at her, shake his head once, and mutter "quanked" under his breath.
Oh, no, he wasn't going to get away with that this time. Nyota surrepitously looked the word up. "overpowered by fatigue, dating back to--Great Chango, Oxal, and Dhambala too. Didn't the man consider the benefits of not using language 700 years out of date??
Not a little exasperated (living with a living etymological dictionary was without a doubt, irritating), she looked up from the computer. Oblivious to her thoughts, he had retreated to the back for a regime of some truly sadomasochistic exercises. Being a lover of hatha yoga and naught else when it came to activity for self improvement, Nyota preferred to put her attention in other places besides her CMO's sudo strikes.
All right. Quality reading time. Nyota defiantly went to the stack of plastic wafers sitting in the decom box and lited the lid. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Leonard pay a disbelieving look that said, "I can't believe it."
*Sugar, don't try to dare me.* Nyota barely kept from sticking her tongue out at him.
YAUM ASAL, YAUM BASAL, Moroccan Poetry of Modern Times. Well, that looked...uh, absorbing enough. She skimmed such promising looking titles as, "Soapmakers of Aleppo" and, "Apple-flavored Tobacco in the Marketplace." None of the poets' names were even remotely familiar to her; so that meant it was probably pretty awful. A privately printed title somewhere along the literary ranks of "The History of Chewing Gum"...
*Oh, quit whining and read.* Nyota resolutely plugged the wafer in the computer screen.
***I love her. I have always loved her. Such a bright, shimmering soul trapped in a body she despises. How can I convince her that the shell means nothing? But no, too many people have lied to her, too much damage and pain. I can only stand by her side, and give her what I can. She means everything to me.***
Nyota's mouth fell open. This was not poetry.
* * *
After two hours of Dr. Arthur COleman's hidden journal, Nyota needed a break. Her brain felt bruised and battered from the abuse of looking inside the mind of a very unhealthy man. Leonard and Christine, more used to rolling in filthy psyches, were still reading with the same amount of nauseated fascination.
"I can't read this anymore." She protested. "I can't process."
"It's ok, take a break." Christine insisted. Leonard was scribing notes left-handed with record speed, catching observations as fast as they hit him. It was his dubious honor of creating a psyche profile from all of this, although Nyota didn't see much point in micro-analyzing which particular subspecies of "lunatic" Coleman was.
Ohhh, gods. She rubbed her aching eyes and sank back for some comfort food. Despite her contrary desires, bits and pieces of Coleman's horrific lfe kept looming up, letter-perfect, in her carefully trained memory:
***She says she cannot love me with all her heart; that it had been given long ago by a man who betrayed her. I told her I understood and would continue to love her all the same. How could Kirk do this to her? When I think of him all I want is violence and death. He sickens me. She gave him the Tantalus Device, and he now uses it to control his ship with an impervious hand.***
***We cannot touch him. If we step foot on the ENTERPRISE, his device will detect us, and we will be one more untraceable act of murder. Janice obsesses over this night and day; I cannot blame her. I see the pain in her eyes and want to return it to Kirk, trebled.***
***Why do I do this? Her games with the common laborers; psychologically they mean nothing to me. I think of them as dull, tiresome drudges. But Janice enjoys toying with them. I see in her actions that they are nothing more than replacements for James Kirk. Some of them even enjoy her cruelty. I can understand that she needs this release--***
**The shell means nothing. Only the soul. I would love her no matter what form she would wear.***
***The LET performed successfully today: Tech. Bourne's soul was easily switched inside Tech Jakob's--***
(Nyota hurridly gulped strong coffee, doing her best to block out the minute, agonizing, horrifying details of that seemingly simple experiment. As if switching minds in bodies was as simple as a parcheesi game! Coleman had not left out. One. Single. Tiny. Detail.)
It was no wonder Leonard was calling this a "downward spiral into mental illness."
Christine kept muttering, "Home, home on Derange."
It was 0700.
Leonard, obviously his stomache the stronger, compiled a list of facts:
*The Life Entitiy Transfer relic was the only object left behind on Camus. Coleman's own records indicated that the alien species had left it behind on purpose, after the subdued slave caste got sick and tired of being the host bodies of the ruling, wanna-be-immortal master caste. Bad luck that Lester had figured how to get the thing going again.
*Lester's sadistic tendencies had already existed in her psyche before coming to Camus. The small, enclosed environment where she wielded all the power had been to her tastes. She must have been in ecstacy to discover and decipher the LET.
*Coleman's profile portrayed a man who carried a lifelong tendency to fixiate; Lester had simply become his entire world and no one else mattered. While he did not approve of Lester's indulgences, it went against his personal programming to commit the treason of defying her. Eventually his personality adapted wholly to her wishes, and he began "assisting" her games.
*Lester's experiments with her workers had been for a specific purpose. James T. Kirk.
*Coleman had been very, very willing to assist her in THAT.
They sat looking at each other across the triangular table. Plenty of things needed to be said, and no one wanted to say it.
"Well, here's the problem." Leonard said at last. "We have proof, be it circumstantial, that Kirk DOES have a secret weapon on his ship that's used to spy on the crew. And it sounds pretty damn omnipotent."
"Janice Lester was comitting about 45 acts of treason by not reporting it to the Empire." Chapel put in. "Kirk walked off with it and she didn't dare report it was in his possession. I doubt she ever reported she had anything like it!" She rubbed her forehead. "Once he accepted the gift, he didn't dare report it either--that's reason in itself. I'm betting that she gave it to him, and then told him what she'd done AFTER it was in his hands, trapping him. Only he out nerved her and left."
"Which means we'd best be DAMN careful before WE try to report such a thing!" McCoy exclaimed. "We don't know what the hell it looks like, or even how to begin to look for it, and just THINKING of it fits my definition of legal insanity!"
"I'm thinking that whatever it is, it did get messed up inside Daystrom's M-5." Nyota began polishing her nails, an old trick on how to think in charged situations while staying cool. Sometimes, it bothered people. One former lover complained she was "sharpening her claws" when certain expressions flitted over her face. "After all, he was too brilliant to have *two* things go wrong with his machine. Acquiring intelligence is one thing. Going off haywire is another."
"Kirk could make it to the Senate with such a device." McCoy had gone pale as thought after thought struck. "Hell, he could make Caesar so long he plays it low and never makes it obvious. Ohhhh, God. The old James Kirk I knew, he didn't want anything more than the ENTERPRISE. It was Marlena who kept eggin' him on to do this and that. And this Janice Lester-thing possessing him now...on her thumbnail psychological profile, she's more ambitious than Georgina Weldon!"
"Who the devil is Georgina Weldon?" Nyota demanded.
"Oh, she was a mess. A ridiculously ambitious Victorian woman, and equally incompetant. Disasters far and wide flocked to her." Chapel shuddered. "You're right. We've got to do something. Janice Lester with her hands on this Tantalus Device, it's got to be an apocalypse brewing!"
"Hah! You women have any IDEA how much trouble we're in??" McCoy smashed the table with his fist, eyes burning. "This is something we don't dare tell anybody! Nobody's safe from that kind of power! Kirk was vaguely safe with it because he didn't want more than the autonomy of his ship! Now you find me just ONE person in this Galaxy who fits THAT description!" His color was waxing white again, and he swallowed. "If he finds us, we're dead as soon as we step in the ship. Assuming we get that far. He'll want to know how much we've learned from this place. There WILL be interrogations, if I know past history."
"Leonard," Chapel swallowed hard. "Coleman's diaries are very very clear. Lester preferred to take her indulgences out on men. Forgive me for saying so, but you have a lot more to worry about than Nyota and me. We'll probably just be killed. I don't want to THINK of what she's done to people in the past."
"Tell me about it." McCoy leaned back in his chair. "Spock."
"What?" Nyota asked.
"Spock." A sudden spark had hit his eyes, a glitter of foxfire. "Spock, or should I say, Arthur Coleman, is her weak link. And the only hope we have."
* * * * *
What do you mean, Spock's the weak link?" Christine flushed as the solution came to her. "Oh. He has Coleman's personality, which is supposedly weaker than Lester's?"
"Not just that. Spock himself. Think. Can you imagine anything controlling him against his will?" Fired up with his theory, McCoy was pacing. "It took time for Lester and Coleman's LE's to take over Kirk and Spock. It had to be slow and subtle, or they would have caught on. There's plenty of opportunities for it to have happened; nobody knows everything that happened when Kirk left Camus II and Spock met him. I'm thinking that it was a simple physical touch. Kirk stumbles, Spock catches him--something like that. Coleman hitches a ride. Or maybe Lester's personality orders him to take the next available body. She didn't stike me as the type to share."
Deep in the privacy of his mind, McCoy unwillingly replayed the memory of that "conversation" inside the car on Andromachea. Spock's reaction to his gibe, a hair-trigger from murder, furious that a human had read him so well. Hell, McCoy had almost accused him of treason, implying that Spock followed his captain reluctantly. Vulcans considered that an insult of Biblical proportions.
*He hates obeying Kirk, but he's a Vulcan. Until he knows why he's in conflict, he literally can't do anything.* Gawd, Coleman had the perfect host in Spock, didn't he?
"Hah. Me either." Nyota snorted to his last spoken comment, and he reluctantly pulled himself back to Planet Reality.
Both women were looking at each other with mixed expressions. It gave his heart a sick wrench to take them in. They were beautiful, inside and out, and Kirk's adapted personality had wanted them. There had been no mistaking the hot, hungry eyes in the dark room. Those eyes had said, "devour." And conjured images of the forgotten, selebium-murdered corpses lying in the Camus II station not five hundred yards from the shuttle.
Kufe had always accused him of not "playing the game" and leaving himself vulnerable where another man could have a hundred strings, favors, and resources to pull. But as he'd so often countered at her, he'd never been *good* at making connections, or building favors. If so, Nyota and Christine might be safe on the Unaligned Planets now, rebuilding a new life together.
*And me, I can't go anywhere. Starfleet or death.* Joanna might not know him from a birch tree, but as long as he was in service, there was still a chance he could see her someday...
"I guess," Nyota said carefully, "we now know why Kirk was making us miserable getting "Daystrom's Ghosts" out of the computer. It wasn't just Daystrom's stuff, it had interferred with the Tantalus Device as well."
"Lester's obsessive toy...or weapon." Christine agreed. "All that ambition. And equally insane!"
"The Tantalus Device did more than screw up Daystrom's computer. It has TOTALLY BOTCHED our hopes of calling in the cavalry." McCoy's color kept going up, with his rising anger, then paling as realization returned. "Our lives aren't worth our organ donor cards with something like that. Whoever comes to take care of Kirk and Spock, well, they'll "take care" of them all right. And the three of us in the bargain. No witnesses, nobody to tell any stories, and they can sail off to wherever they want with a device tailor-made to make a tyrant of any soldier of the Empire."
Christine muttered, "I'd be depressed if I wasn't so terrified."
Nyota had been about to ask about Kufe, then decided that would be very stupid. She gave her lover a quick squeeze on her shoulder. "You're saying it's up to us to get Lester and Coleman out of Kirk and Spock. Leonard, I *don't* see any other solution to this, but its hopeless!"
"Hopeless? You're being optimistic!" Chapel retorted. "We won't be able to get within four miles of them! And how could we rip out the possessive entities?"
"Maybe there's a set of instructions on the back of the LET." McCoy was always at his worst when his temper was up. Comments like that often made the crew ponder his sanity. Just as well; crazy CMOs were left well alone. Look at Piper.
Chapel was used to it. She let her hands fall to her sides. "Fine. I'll check the translation-glyphs when my tricorder finishes processing!"
"And," She added with a look at her boss sharper than raw horseradish, "you're taking a sominol. No sleep for over *how* many hours, Leonard? 18? 19? I saw the acid levels in your brain. Get a nap in while I look over my tricorder again."
He glared at her, briefly. Then caved in. "Wake me up if *anything* shows itself." He warned.
"I promise." She told him softly.
She made no oaths, so only spoke in her usual quiet voice, but it was enough for him.
"And don't sleep in one of those awful berths!" She called after him. "Take the captain's cabin!"
"Oh, *very* funny, Christine! I'm going to remember that!" A manual-operated door rocked on its hinge.
"Huh?" Nyota asked.
"Eeps." Christine put her hands over her burning face. "I keep forgetting. He's probably *been* in that bed. With Kufe."
"Gods. I can't imagine. It'd be like sleeping with a mugato. Or a salt vampire. Or a--"
"Well, Leonard would be the first person to tell you, there was rarely any *sleeping* involved. Oh, me." Chapel had, unbelievably, turned even darker. "But yes, I think he'd agree with your comparative values. Let's look these translations over."
"Ok, hon." Nyota chuckled, taking pity on Christine. She didn't often get to see *that* woman blush. It was really rather charming.
* * *
They brewed medium-octane coffee, and pored over the thin plastisheets of data, getting dessert crumbs over most of the table as "morning" tarried on under the radioactive clouds of Camus II. After a suspicious glance in the back berths, Christine confirmed Leonard was "dead to the world" on one of those glorified slabs. For future reference, she warned Nytoa that incessant pacing was a warning sign that he was about to crash like a decayed atom.
Nyota promised to keep that in mind--as well, she mentally added, all the warning signs Leonard had told her about *Christine.*
No archaeologist, the linguist in Nyota was quickly enthralled at the language structure written on the broken artifact. It put her on even keel with Chapel, who'd had impressive research credits racked up with Korby before their accidental parting of ways. Christine pointedly never mentioned Roger except in a very objective, past-tense kind of way.
"The sentences are short and crisp." She showed Christine. "Very logical in structure. Sort of like the way most Native American languages are designed. You have male gender-specific for inanimate objects, and female gender for animate."
"Huh, but that's only in the very oldest glyphs." Christine pointed to another section. "Five hundred years later, they have completely neuter specifics."
"Hardly surprising, isn't it? If you can switch your mind into another body, you can be whatever you want."
"Please. I'm eating." Christine defiantly picked up her coffee cake.
"If you can handle the content of the language itself, you shouldn't be upset at *this*." Nyota told her. And it was damned true. Most of the deciphered writing, so far, dealt with a sickening political bushwa on the "proper way of things" which translated to, naturally, a slave caste that supplied young, healthy bodies to a master lord-amighty caste that used the LET machine in a concentrated effort on immortality. Nyota decided that as bad as trivid entertainment could be, she'd rather be watching a Tellarite Group Mating than make this stuff her career.
"HERE'S a word for you." Nyota grumbled. "schlorich. If I remember my Chief Engineers right, it means "mind-boggling mess."
"The only Scots word I know is tartle." Christine confessed absently. "Not much excuse with my ancestry."
"What's tartle?"
"It's what happens when you have to introduce somebody, and you can't remember their name."
"Oh, that's a real word? Brilliant! That's just brilliant!" Nyota guffawed--quietly.
Christine abruptly grabbed her arm and pointed to the last page:
"The shell is nothing. The spirit is all.
A truly strong spirit can never be enslaved."
"This is obviously an add-on." Christine tapped the screen with a long nail. "The style of writing is different; cruder and a little clumsy, etched on top of previously existing glyphs. It's the youngest-dated writing, about 7,000 BCEE, with almost no selebium damage. *And* there's nothing else written after it...I would submit that this was left behind by one of the rebels as a statement of triumph."
"A truly strong spirit." Nyota murmured. "I wonder. Does it mean that someone can...expel an invading spirit?"
"Well, it does sound like it, doesn't it?" Christine leaned back, sticking her stylus behind her hair (and holding her hair up out of her eyes.) "I'm no real expert on exorcism, but I seem to remember, at least in the horrible old vids, the key to driving out demons and hungry ghosts is to force them to admit they don't belong."
"Maybe there's a way to chemically stack the odds in our favor. Some agent or blocker."
"Now that's a thought!" Christine's blue eyes gleamed with more life than Nyota had seen in days. "Nyota, you're not just gorgeous. You're brilliant!"
"Tell me something I don't know." Nyota chuckled deep in her throat, her lips vibrating against Christine's earlobe.
"Go wake Leonard up. I'll re-page this."
* * *
"Ummmm." McCoy was one of those people who woke up slowly under Sominols. He listened with barely a grunt as they filled him in. Occasional sips of coffee proved he was capable of motor control.
"Ok, here's what we gotta deal with." McCoy reached for the sugar and began making his newest cup of coffee, thick as mud, and probably about as healthy. "The brain is an entity in itself; it "recognizes" or reorganizes, itself constantly throughout life. At least, if you're healthy. I don't think its much of a linguistic stretch to call Kirk and Spock, mentally unbalanced."
"No arguments there!" Nyota exclaimed.
"Synaptically lopsided." Christine muttered, and got a poke for her pains.
"Schizophrenia." McCoy muttered under his breath. His eyes had "that look" again.
"Schizophrenia?" Christine blinked. "There hasn't been a case of that in nearly 200 years."
"What's schizophrenia?" Nyota went ahead and admitted her ignorance, getting that over with.
"It's an ancient form of mental illness." Christine explained as Leonard leaned back and stuck his boots up on the counter-rim. "If you can imagine a human developing more than one personality, and the personalities aren't always aware of each other..."
"Are you serious??" Nyota gaped. "Multiple personalities, like the Subdivided Species have?"
"Totally. It caused all kinds of problems for millenia." McCoy was glum. "Some societies accepted some forms of the illness and there were very little problems with it. For example, Kali Ma was the split personality of a gentler goddess when her people were placed under demonic attack. But mostly, what people thought was possession, was a divided personality, or, worse yet, an unforseen physical cause for some really awful things. Somebody takes a walk in the woods and an oak tree tells them to sacrifice their child. Or they see people that aren't there at all, stalking them. Like a bad chemical "trip" their brains get so confused they can extrapolate false data from any of their senses. Just finding a legal definition of reality vs. consensual reality wasn't settled until DECADES after the Eugenics Wars."
"And that was just the definition. Finding the solution happened almost overnight. It had been around for centuries, but nobody had actually been paying attention." Christine toyed with her cake, no longer hungry.
"Nonstop warfare tends to do that to medical research." McCoy offered bitterly. "We can do wonderful things with biological germs, virus-bodies and prions, but keep a clean desk and take notes? Hah." To spare Nyota further bafflement, he explained: "Almost by accident, we learned schizophrenia can be treated by angiogenesis."
""Almost by accident..." Too right." Christine rolled her blue eyes upwards.
"Once they learned how to master angiogenetic drugs, most physically-enacted mental illnesses became obsolete." McCoy suddenly yawned. "Sorry...oh, hell." He yawned again.
"Angiogenesis? That's the growth of capillaries in the body." Nyota was confused. "What does that have to do with schizophrenia?"
"Not too much, in itself." Christine smiled wryly. "Angiogenesis is actually the formation of NEW blood vessels. If you get too much of it, say, in your retina, you can easily go blind. And it can happen without any design; you never know how or when, but suddenly new blood vessels will begin to form. Most physicians are qualified to instigate or inhibit angiogenesis to treat disorders. Such as, starve tumors, increase circulation, prevent blood clots...before they started using the inhibitor-drugs, people were actually using radiation and chemotherapy to get rid of tumors."
"Barbaric."
McCoy snorted drowsily. "I'll show ya barbaric. Read your agonizer manual: "Prevention of incipient frostbite, lowest setting uses of.""
"ANYway," Christine struggled not to get sidetracked. "Angiogenetic inhibitors were gradually discovered to be useful for other things; neovastat, a naturally occurring inhibitor was found to have a range of properties besides targeting cancers of the nonsmall cells. It was soon noticed that it eased schizophrenia."
"You think we can use neovastat to cure Kirk and Spock?"
"I doubt it'd be as simple as "cure." Despite a nearly-toxic intake of genuine coffee bean, McCoy was still yawning. He leaned his head in his hands. "It isn't one of those zap, wowee instacures they advertise on the Medical Channel. It has to be absorbed into the bloodstream, and then on to the brain."
"So how long are we talking?" Nyota demanded. "A full day? Two? Three?"
"At least a week." Christine said for Leonard.
"A week!" Nyota was disheartened to say the least. "That's a real problem!"
"No, our real problem is administering the neovastat in a way that won't arouse any suspicions." Christine grabbed her stylus and promptly began making scribbles on her padd with it. Leonard looked away, unable to stand witness to such a useless activity. "It'd be easy enough to flood the ship with it; its harmless. No security camera could pick it up."
"None of the organoleptic sensors in the ship's security system *would* pick it up." McCoy shrugged. "It's already in most people's brains. But I betcha if I scanned two certain men, they'd be remarkably low in it!"
Christine hesitated. "Is Spock's brain chemistry that much like ours?"
"HIS is."
"Mnph." She began tapping with her stylus. "We're speculating in the dark, you know."
"I know. LORD, I know."
"Ok, it's not a brilliant plan, it's just only the plan we've got. And we're running out of time." Nyota wet her lips. "So now what?"
"Figure out some way to expose them with neovastat." McCoy shrugged bluntly. "And if that doesn't work, think of something else."
"Gee, is that all?" Christine snorted depressively.
"I say we just go back." Nyota blurted. She of course got an instant incredulous audience. "Well? Hide in plain sight!"
"Just how do we do that?" Christine wondered.
"If we returned to Andromachea now, we'd still have some leave time. I say we do that, and act like our much-wanted shore leave was spoiled by Admiral Kufe's orders. If Kirk wants to know what we were sent out for, we smile and say that Admiral Kufe wanted us to..." Nyota thought fast. "Something that would make Lester very very paranoid. What if she thought we went to Camus to re-evaluate data on the "artifact" because Kufe thought she found another artifact just like it somewhere else in the Galaxy?"
"...ohhhh..." Leonard's jaw had fallen down. "Nyota, that's mean, that's sneaky, and that's completely devious. You have a KNACK for this kind of thing!"
"And we can remain as ignorant as we want." Christine took to the notion easily. "Complain bitterly the whole way about our lost leave."
"Hold it. How are we going to make all this believeable?"
"Talk to Kufe." McCoy closed his eyes. "Again. I'll ask her to cover for us, we get our stories straight, bingo."
"What are you going to tell her?" Christine suddenly frowned.
He fixed her with a glacial eye. "Neither of you need to know that. In fact, as far as you're concerned, you're on this wretched mission on my orders."
Nyota opened her mouth for a protest--so did Christine--and all thoughts of grand speeches about women's lib and anachronistic, misplaced chivalry dried up and died. Leonard wasn't really expecting to walk away from this alive; maybe he hadn't from the very beginning. But he was covering their trails so one or the other could do what was necessary to free the captain and Spock from their parasites.
* * * * *
McCoy always figured dignity was a rare commodity in his world, and it was a good idea to conserve it at every opportunity. Re: conversations with ex.
Kufe heard him out without a single comment, noise, or flicker of expression over the twice-scrambled channel. That unnerving mannerism meant she was taking what he said 100% seriously. Maybe later she'd pull out the claws and use him for a whetstone, but for now, business came first.
"I'm glad this is shielded." She said at last. "Of course, there are those who would think this entire story is a cordrazine flashback."
"Thanks a lot." He said without thinking. Kufe knew of that malfunctioning hypo--Dr. Piper's last claim to fame before his AMO took him off the food chain.
She smiled briefly with her snow-white teeth, still leaning her chin in her hands. "Ummm...I don't know how plausible your "rescue effort" is, since I'm no medic. But the three of you are willing to go for this, and I KNOW you aren't going to lie to me. More your style not to tell me something I might want to know."
Years of training kept any expression from betraying him.
"So." Kufe pursed her lips, thinking. "I think it would be good if we gave Kirk...or, Lester-Kirk, a good shock. Don't you?"
"What kind of shock?" Kufe's idea of shocking people could cause some to die of fright. She especially preferred large, aggressive snakes that spat venom, and 30-ft alligators cranked up on mating hormones.
"I'm going to directly beam him. Tell him that I had to borrow you and two helpers for a private mission." Kufe's razor-sharp mind was already grasping the points that had taken the CAPIL'S crew days to come to. "When of course, he fishes for information, I'll let him know that I had a rumor there was a deadly relic left behind at Camus II. You of course, destroyed it on my orders to be on the safe side." Her obsidian eyes chilled. "I mean it. Destroy that thing. I don't care what you tell Kirk at this point, but I don't want more than two molecules sticking together when you leave Camus."
"No argument at all." He said fervently.
"He'll want to know why I didn't call him, of course." She added. "This is the part you won't like, Melungeon. I'm going to tell him that the last time I sent him down there, he killed people I didn't want dead. I'm going to tell him in no uncertain terms that you can follow orders better than he can."
McCoy nodded silently. It was a perfect, if grisly ploy. Lester's persecution complex (well documented in excruciating detail) would come out swinging, combined with Kirk's natural defensiveness and pride. Together, the being that was the ENTERPRISE captain would be so busy being infuriated at Leonard, there'd be no, or minimal attention being paid to anything else; somewhere Kirk would leave the field wide open for a nice, ship-wide flooding of neovastat.
Kufe was looking at him with as much sympathy as she was capable of.
He gallows-grinned at her. "Oh, well. I leave it to you to bring him to a foaming rage. Don't let me down now."
Kufe snorted. "Have I ever given you cause to doubt? But seriously, I'm going to be *watching* that ship, boy. Kirk probably won't kill you--"
"*Kirk* probably wouldn't." He corrected her.
"My mistake. Just watch out for Lester. I'll do what I can to make sure you stay alive. From what you tell me, she'll find something to hang you on, and then try to sell me a load of goods. And then," Kufe added in a voice of ice and eyes of diamonds, "I'd just have to kill her. And her friend. We'll see how Sulu makes captain."
"Sulu as captain is three of the ten reasons why I'm trying to salvage Kirk!" Leonard protested.
"I know. But that's a promise. Just make sure Sulu doesn't *make* captain, hmn?"
Long after that miserable communique had switched off, Leonard remained sitting stock-still at the dead terminal. Dead terminal. Wasn't that bad grammar? Oh, well. He was just trying to put his mind off the all too near future.
His reflection threw back at him on the shielded glass: getting too thin, eyes starting to show far too much. The wiry boy who picked up bulls on his shoulders for tourist-money had somehow become a hard-bitten, jaded man who was never anything more than awkward and clumsy in a uniform he hated to wear. A man who for practicality's sake, had been taught since childhood to hide as much of himself as he could. Chameleons were the only pacifists that could survive, but he wasn't much of a chameleon. He wasn't much of anything, if you liked to stick people in nice, neat, rigid labels.
God, what had the Empire fallen to? Every once in a while, that despairing wonder hit him with power enough to shake his marrow. To hear the old timers talk, and to study history, things hadn't started getting really bad until a few years before he was born. And compared to now, his childhood was paradise. Had so many people wanted to degenerate into this semi-respectable form of anarchy? He feared things would get worse before they got better. Look at assassinations. Bad enough that they were rife, but at least people took pride in doing their own work, seeing it as cowardice to have someone else kill for you. Kirk might order entire cities leveled by phaser, but he never failed to take responsibility for it. What if the Contractor's Guild rose in power again? Talk about a nightmare. His mind shied from the thought.
Kufe never wasted time. By now she would be having Lester-Kirk strangling on his own rage and frantically trying to think of a way out of the land mine of paranoia she'd sown. By the time they returned to Andromachea, things ought to be...very interesting.
***
Christine's skills at maintaining co-pilot were good enough that McCoy was making her help him instead of Uhura. Uhura was glad for the break. She was also champing down her nerves as the Andromachean System came into view.
She had decided she hated Admiral Kufe. The word-puzzles she favored were a unique form of punishment. The kind of reading material you might find in hell.
"Leonard, what's a five-letter word for ten Irishmen?" She called forward.
Leonard glanced up from his latest piloting course with Christine. "F-I-G-H-T."
"Oh, cute."
"Try it."
She did. It fit.
"OK," she squared her shoulders. "What's a five letter word for ten Georgians? You've got to know that one."
The doctor snorted. "B-A-R-B-Q." At her expression, he openly laughed. "You never heard that proverb, huh?"
"No."
"What do you get when you have ten Irish-Georgians?" Christine muttered. She was trying to practice the x2y2z2 spherical co-ordinants in her head.
"A barbecue with a *lot* of deliberately bruised shins at the hoedown." He shot back. "Here we go. Ny, you ready for the hailing frequency?"
Relieved, Nyota got up and quickly replaced Chapel. "So now it starts."
***
Andromachea never changed, Nyota thought. It always hummed with life and movement, the way cells bumped along the highways of blood vessels.
After so much time in silence, and putting up with only two other people, the planet was bewildering. She winced at the bright light, and the attack of odors.
"Whew." Christine must have been thinking the same thing. "Now what?"
"Y'all go on." McCoy rested his hand on her shoulder with a quick grin. "If I can, I'll hook up with you later."
"But how do we find you?"
He lowered one brow. "You don't." He murmured. "Trust me."
"Ok...talk to you later, when we get back on ship. I guess..." Christine shrugged a little awkwardly, finding it hard to look him in the eye.
He didn't press her. "S'ok. Have fun with your lady-love. And try to eat something besides something with gills or siphoning teeth, ok?"
"Hmph." Christine rolled her eyes,, trying like hell not to be nervous. "I'll remember that on your birthday."
"C'mon, let's get back to the hotel room." Uhura tugged with a sigh. "I want to get the smell of recycled air of my skin, out of my clothes, out of my hair..."
Christine let herself be towed away into the crowd. But as soon as she could, she glanced back to where she'd last seen McCoy. He was already gone, swallowed up in the milling crowd.
* * * * *
McCoy scanned the boiling crowd uneasily, looking for anything out of line or suspicious. Just because someone was on Andromachea...
Uhura and Chapel's departure had been a relief; they might be grown women, but they were still innocent. Of course they would deny *any* kind of ignorance at how the Galaxy ran itself, but Leonard couldn't forget the shock in Ny's face to see the bruises on his wrists those weeks ago in the main marketplace.
Likewise, Chapel's horror when she fixed him up from Kirk-Lester never got numb, never ended. Each time she helped him, he saw the same emotions.
If true disillusion ever came to their eyes, he'd feel their loss as if it were his own, reliving his own fall from higher beliefs.
Aliens and native bodies jostled easily as he threaded through the refurbished hanger; in its heyday it had even been used for early aircraft, but now was little more than a public transportation relay and whatever small vending stalls the dealers could stick in. And he was being trailed. It was that familiar knowing in the back of his neck that, once experienced, was never lost.
What really stuck in the craw was knowing he couldn't really react to what his own senses were telling him. Fighting the first threads of adrenaline, he abruptly marched to the right, hoping to avoid the majority of the life around.
*here...we...go...*
Here the alleyways were narrow; clean yellow sand streaked ochre from a recent rain. McCoy navigated shallow puddles that steamed with insect larvae and reflected lime-green patches of sky. He nodded at the obesience of a passing beggar wrapped in black rags. The man's stench was strong in the humid air, and the doctor hurridly stepped away. Just as he was leaving McCoy's line of vision, however, there was a clutching movement to the side.
Burning fire lanced out; a phaser beam on KILL glanced at his head, struck barely at the bricklike wall to his left. The aftershock struck him in a wave of radiant heat; its force pummelled his body like a tennis ball off his feet and into the opposite wall of the narrow alleyway. Green sky spun crazed wheels, then the damp yellow sand of the earth struck down hard.
***
Spock barely refrained from "Kroykah!" As Sorv aimed his own weapon at the assassin. But Sorv knew his work; a heavy stun beam struck the grizzled beggar full in the chest. Rags flapped; an oily odor of Kalar sweat rose up, activated by the energy weapon. Like a broken bird the man flopped in a steaming rainpuddle that grew rancid and muddy.
Sorv promptly stepped to the side, weapon up, body tilted backwards to cover Spock's trail. Sakar and Sond formed a wedge and marched forward, ready to strike at any target or be a target to decoy from Spock.
Spock followed crisply, apprehension settling his dark face as something seemed amiss about the black-clad body.
Sakar knelt swiftly, made a quick diagnosis. "Dead, sir. A Capsule." He turned the limp head; it lolled, revealing a blackened hole in the temple where the phaser beam had activated a sensitive bomb.
Spock's lips tightened in displeasure. At least, he could tell the captain there was no doubt that *someone* was after McCoy, and possibly Uhura and Chapel for performing the Admiral's work.
Leaving the body, he stepped over the shallow pool to the doctor. McCoy had seen his killer just in time to avoid the killing nimbus. The side of his face and neck that had been closest exposed to the phaser blast was red from the radiation burn. It would need medical treatment, and quickly.
At a curt nod, Sakar slapped an appropriate kit in his hand. Spock was counting the time by the half-second now, judging the possibility of further assassins, or if they had been seen. He sprayed the burnt tissue with a regen spray, and set back on his heels to wait for a reaction. When there was none, he pressed a frostpack against the temples.
"Doctor? Can you hear me?"
McCoy's fingers twitched, thumb pressing inside the palm; "yes" in military sign.
Spock exhaled as the human's eyes fought to open.
Sorv glanced once to each side, verifying they were alone. With a press of a palm phaser, the corpse ceased to exist. Within the hour, the dissolved molecules would be dispersed into the air and atmosphere, impossible to trace, impossible to prove.
Kufe was good at what she did because she understood people on an ultimate level. McCoy was used to her ways, and he knew damn well the man Spock's guards had just killed had been sent on this suicide mission to further confuse Kirk and Spock from the truth.
It was one reason why he'd been so grateful to get away, he mused bitterly as the icepack bore down on his aching forehead. After seeing people willingly volunteer to go on these suicide missions for her, just because she knew the price of their loyalty and would pay it...
Get away? He asked himself. There was no getting away from Kufe-Soma. Not unless one was dead. Permitting him to join active duty on a dangerous ship where he could be killed of had been her kindest possible act.
Around him, quick orders were being snapped in the whispering dialect Vulcans employed when they didn't want to be heard. To his human ears, it was like a dry wind whistling through an endless desert of looped and holed stones, leafless sagebrush and cactus. Too-hot hands cautiously slipped underneath him, and he closed his eyes at the sensation of being lifted. A straight line of shade fell over his skin, and the cool tingle of the transporter took consciousness away.
***
Incapacitated in the extreme by the fake attempt on his life (one thing about people on suicide missions, they strove for realism!), McCoy simply laid there and didn't feel any keen interest in his surroundings. Spock was frowning as deeply as a self-respecting Vulcan was capable of.
"Doctor, do you know where Lieutenants Uhura and Chapel are?"
McCoy decided now was as good a time as any to start the game. "Decoy." He managed.
"Decoy." Spock repeated. "In what way?"
"Should be...in Kufe's office by now." The blue eyes closed again, resting.
Spock considered. McCoy then, had been the decoy. Either he was protecting females with his anachronistic beliefs again, or the women had something Kufe wanted.
"The captain wants a full report." He said finally. There were too many factors to consider; only further information would help him discern useful information from the useless.
"He'll get it." McCoy said simply, and let the fatigue take over. As he slipped into a noncommunicative state, he used the quiet to ponder the Admiral's dark threat. It hadn't been the first time she'd hinted that there were other agents on the ENTERPRISE besides himself. And it was smart that McCoy didn't know who the hell they were. But he sure wished he knew now, because it was now up to Ny and Christine. His help was nearly over, and that was going to involve doing what he did best. Stall for time.
* * * * *
Using a bluntness of language Nyota had never heard from Christine, the nurse requested they beamup at the medical transporter, telling the bored tech on duty she was weighed down with a lot of stuff for the Sickbay.
Tech Danticat, who was as no-fuss, no-muss as one could get and still be Jamaican, made no protest, and complied with a rather bored acknowledgement over the beam.
Christine caught Nyota's curious glance as she flipped the comm shut.
"Saves time." She explained tightly. "I don't want to wade through senior officers and salutes."
"No doubt." Nyota agreed, and the tingling pull of the transporter carried them away.
***
His head was really hurting him.
Dispersal-range energy beams tended to leave lingering effects on even its mildest victims. Stunning one's electrical system was simply not a safe everyday policy. Spock manged to shoot him full of a vitamin and electrolye complex before they met Kirk in the private briefing room. By then, McCoy's head was starting to clear of the angry wasp-nest. He only hoped there was enough residue in the blast that sticking him to the lie detector would be impractical. One could tell whoppers with impunity, with a subdued nervous system.
Spock satisfied that worry by letting that be the first thing he greeted the captain with.
"Well, that's all right." Kirk's--Lester's--gemstone eyes glinted over not just McCoy, but Spock too. "If something's askew we'll ask again...later."
Worlds of promise in THAT tone.
***
Uhura followed somewhat meekly behind Christine as the taller woman led the way to the main storage of Sickbay. A few medicos flicked off rapidfire salutes but otherwise paid no attention to them. This was hardly SOP for her own department.
"I didn't know Sickbay was...so efficient." She murmured.
Christine grinned. "Everybody knows what they have to do." She explained succintly. "Leonard's down on some horrible planet, patching up somebody in the line of duty half the time, so we're used to doing without him during that time."
She grunted as a box of what looked like nothing so much as a beige spongey material was yanked off the shelf. The soft-looking surface even gave like a sponge would. Chapel gripped and pulled sharply, getting the lid off to show another box of blue metal.
"We keep neovastat in bulk." She explained. "We use it so rarely, but when we do..." Chapel lifted the second box out, carelessly dropping the outer one, which bounced lightly at her boots. "Huh." Her long fingers slid over the narrow liquid-crystal gauge on the side. "I thought we had more than that."
"Is that enough?" Nyota was beginning to break into a cold sweat.
"Oh, of course. I just had it in my head that we had a new supply. It's nothing." She went to the lab table with a shrug. "Come on, you can give me a hand..."
"You're sure this won't show up in the sensors?"
"I'm sure." Christine chuckled softly. "It's as innocuous as cheap perfume."
***
"So there's another settlement that matches the one on Camus II?"
McCoy opened his hands, watching Kirk (apparantly absently) clean his Officer's Dagger with a clean cloth. "I have no idea. We were just told to take pictures and level the research station to the ground."
"So you were in demolition too?" Kirk's lips went up. "That's funny to think about. It doesn't seem as though Kufe told you much."
"She never does. She never did." THAT was pure honesty right there, and it rang in his voice.
Kirk's--Lester's--eyebrow popped up. "Well it was an extremely unpleasant conversation we had with her, if you must know. And you grew up with her?" He shook his head in mild wonder. "But why would someone be wanting to kill you for this?"
Leonard felt himself turn green at the thought of the man Kufe had sacrificed for the sake of a reliable story. She had a habit of finding people who either were terminal, or under sentence, and paying them well for one last mission.
"Just working for Kufe would be enough." He stuck to the truth as much as possible. "It happened all the time when I was *directly* in service with her."
"I do *not* envy you." Kirk declared, pointing with his daggertip. "Why in the world did you ever agree to work with her?"
"It's not like I had a choice." McCoy pointed out, still being very honest. "I've had to ever since I started treating her for anemia. When the laws against genetic augmentation were adapted for hereditary disease, I was off the hook."
"Hmn. What kind of anemia?" Kirk was always curious about another's weakness. Any weakness.
"It's a rare form of sickle-cell..."
Spock had been listening in silence the whole time. Then, behind Kirk's shoulder, he appeared to freeze in place. His eyes widened. Kirk faltered, a frown creasing his face.
McCoy held his breath, breath caught on the details of Duffy's Antigen and the treatment thereof.
*Too soon.* He thought. *Unless...they only needed a fraction of the neovastat we calculated...* No, that wasn't possible. Something else had to be happening...
"Captain?" He murmured.
Kirk's mouth opened. His skin went dark as an inner turmoil began to play under his skin. Spock's lean features were dawning with astonishment...and rage.
The doctor had only thought he'd seen Spock truly angry before. The reality was quite different. There was no name for the degree of loathing that crossed the Vulcan's features. Spock's sense of self had been violated...repeatedly...and he had not been aware of it until now.
"Spock?" Kirk whispered. Wonder and shock colored his voice, made him younger, took the hard edge that had been with him for so long. McCoy's throat went dry at the sight of Lester's personality fading away from him. He'd not known it was possible to...to *see* another entity so clearly. But as Lester wavered, Kirk waned. And when Kirk grew stronger, so did his very aura.
"Fight it, Jim." McCoy heard himself snap. "Get her out of your skin!"
He hadn't spoken to James Kirk like that since the other had been a frightened boy on his medical ship. It had gotten results then. It did now.
"Spock!" Kirk grabbed at his face. "Coleman!" Lester flickered over the pale face, was gone. "Spock--get him out of you!"
McCoy was forced to conceed the impossible. The neovastat--or something--was exorcising the possessed.
***
Officer's Mess was usually empty this late at night. And the pancakes were harmless. Nyota punched up a huge plate with strawberries for herself; Chapel took a blackberry syrup.
"What kind?"
"Buckwheat."
"Don't you always get buckwheat?"
"I can't stand buttermilk, Christine. And if you're going to live with me, you're not going to bring it anywhere near me."
"I'm living with you? why don't you live with me?"
"Is this room taken?"
They looked up at the doctor's tired voice. He looked like he sounded.
"Sure. Have some sugar and carbohydrates."
"No, no thank you." McCoy sank into a nearby chair and leaned back for a moment. He was back in his uniform and moved awkwardly. Nyota thought how at ease he had been offship and thought he was *really* unsuited to the military life if it affected him on that level.
"You *look* alive...How's it going?"
"Believe it or not, the neovastat already kicked in."
"It did?" Christine's voice went up to a minor squawk. She stopped cold. "Did it work?" She whispered.
"Like a...like a charm." McCoy sounded anything but thrilled. Maybe he was too tired.
"Well...how are they?" Nyota asked. She was holding Christine's hand across the table.
"Better." McCoy smiled a little to see the display of affection. "It's going to take some time for them to get back to the officers we remember..." He hesitated a moment, then plunged ahead. "I gave'm a piece of my mind. Pointed out this never would have gotten so far if they had let more people trust them."
"That's true, but I wouldn't have said anything." Nyota confessed.
"Don't have to, I guess. We stuck our necks out. They'll never mention it, but I doubt they'll hesitate to ask for our help the next time they need it." McCoy added grimly. "But what I said, I had to say."
Nyota held her breath. She'd ask this, to close a chapter, then never delve again. "Was it Spock and Kirk that hurt you, or was it Lester and Coleman?"
He regarded her, and Christine, in silence for a long minute, his gaze never blinking.
"It was Lester and Coleman." He said finally.
***
Floating Jungles, Rigel Luxury Moon
For reasons that were very obvious to himself, McCoy was celebrating this offtime alone.
It was night, and the greenery around the small deck of the rental property was choked with explosive blooms. The doctor had mixed feelings about the ensemble: this floating space station-resort was the closest thing to the wilds he could get to for now, but genetically tinkered plants never left him feeling all that good. The vine that stretched across the rail had four different blooms on its woody stalks.
He was listening to the sounds of imported nightlife and sipping a hot latte when an all too familiar figure stepped out of nowhere and back into his life.
*Bad as a plat-eye creepin' out of the swamp.* he mused darkly. *And I think I'd prefer a mythical nightstalker.*
"Not a bad place." Admiral Kufe-Soma commented, her jet-black eyes sweeping around the controlled jungle.
"Not bad, considering it was managed at the last minute." The doctor agreed blandly. "Want a drink?"
"Aren't you going to say hello?"
"You didn't. Why should I?"
Kufe laughed, an oddly soft sound. Her boots clicked on the planks of the deck. "Really isn't bad. Probably about as close to home as you can get without Alpha-C."
"Alpha C's expensive this time of year." He reminded without rancor. She folded neatly into the only other chair as if it had been placed for her use. "How's it going?"
"You mean, why am I here."
"I doubt its to discuss visitation rights."
"You're right." She agreed. There was a slight layer of frost on the civility present; McCoy blamed her ambition for making it too dangerous for Joanna to know either parent. Kufe felt her position of power ensured the girl would have the best life had to offer, and being an apparant orphan was a small price to pay for that priviledge. Kufe won because of her stripes.
The Admiral propped her feet up against the rail. "I wanted to know how the captain and Vulcan are doing."
"They've recovered. A whole damn year ago." He said curtly. "You know that. Or your little spies should have told you."
"I'm not interested in the view of anyone but the CMO." Kufe said curtly.
McCoy set his drink down. He too, leaned back, and Kufe knew that look well. "I can tell you whatever you want to hear, Admiral."
"I want to know if Lester will ever come back."
Relieved to be asked a simple question, he shook his head violently. "They didn't take chances. Brought in some Vulcan adepts to make sure of that."
"That's what I'd heard. But are *you* convinced?"
"Yes." He said quietly.
Kufe re-leaned back in her chair, the sharp heels glinting in the artifical night-light. "So long as you're sure." She drummed her long fingers on her bare arm. McCoy thought she looked like a leopard.
"As sure as I can be for someone who doesn't really know what's going on." He said sourly.
Possibly she smelled what was coming. She glared at him. "What are you talking about?"
"Well, gosh, it's just the darndest thing. We risk our necks to get back to the Enterprise to flood the air with the neovastat...only...that stuff sure did take effect *fast*, y'know?" McCoy's drawl had turned dangerous. His blue eyes were slitted lasers as he rubbed his chin. "Here we were pretty damn sure it'd take at least a week. But It didn't. It happened almost as soon as the ladies beamed aboard. Now, taken one way, it sure looks like we were responsible for pulling those entities out of Kirk and Spock. And we've graciously taken all the commendations and awards for it. But we didn't do a damn thing. You were stacking your cards again, Admiral. Somebody on my staff is working for you, right? And they flooded the vents with the neo long before we ever got back. Christine said our supply was awfully light, but I convinced'em it wasn't."
Kufe didn't deny it. Or admit he'd covered her trail. "I prefer things my own way."
"I think I deserve an explanation. Even a lame one." After all, if things had gone askew, he'd be just like that poor bastard Spock had shot down in the Andromachean alleyway.
The air chilled around them.
"Or do you have to get one? I've known you all my life, Kufe. Known you back when you were stockpilin' rifles for your daddy in the swamp. It's *just like you* to have signed off your comm with me and gone straight to whoever's working for you on the ship, have them flood the air with the stuff. That way if we get caught, we might get sacrificed, but Kirk is still...salvaged."
Kufe only shrugged. "It was acceptable."
"You must have big plans for him." McCoy said finally. Very softly. "I could almost pity him. But...he's got the edge you need."
"He could be Caesar someday."
"If he wants to. Good luck prybaring-him off the ship." McCoy's eyes were hard. "You take him off the ENTERPRISE, and he'll die. That quality you're looking for won't survive that level of ambition."
Marlena, ironically, had been the one to pin high hopes on her lover. Kirk had enjoyed autonomy as much as his ship. And now Marlena was dead and he had no one he had to please on anything...
"Don't judge others by yourself." Kufe spoke patiently. "Just because you couldn't handle command doesn't mean he can't."
The blow cut low. McCoy froze for a moment. Long practice kept his poise and he coolly lifted his drink up again. "Yeah, I know. I couldn't take it, and I didn't want to be your puppet, and you've been punishing me for it ever since." He shook his head. "Beats me why you thought a physician could get high in the ranks." Kufe's eyes were glittering in the darkness. He shrugged.
"My daddy may have taught me stockpiling," Kufe said thinly, "But it was better than yours. Tracking honey trees? Hunting and foraging like some kind of swamp trash, Melungeon?"
"I *am* swamp trash. If you think I'm going to be ashamed of that, think again." His eyebrow went up. "At least I can feed myself. And that was what got your attention of me."
"Oh, enough of this. We've had this quarrel a million times." Kufe said impatiently. "How are your ladyfriends?"
"You know we're not." He said patiently. "We're just friends."
Kufe chuckled.
"Leave them alone, Admiral." McCoy spoke tiredly, as if from a long distance. "They deserve peace in their lives. A stability that they've never had before. They're not interested in power, or command...or killing."
"You think it's fun for me?" Kufe snapped. Her lean face was suddenly panther-like. "Len, I may not like the way the Galaxy is run, but I don't run from it. I do what I can."
McCoy studied her from across the table. Kufe was serious. They might never agree on anything, but in her own way, she was as sincere as he was.
"Why don't you go for Caesar, then?" He asked finally. "If you really agreed with the way the Galaxy is run, you wouldn't have climbed as far as Fleet Admiral. Women *have* made the title, you know. They haven't just controlled from the sidelines."
"I'm not afraid of the risks." Kufe snapped.
"Never said you were. But I'd understand if you felt it was more than you felt like taking on. After all, you don't like to do anything unless you can control every step of it. Maybe that's one thing we can agree on."
Kufe took a deep breath. "Maybe. But I'm no fool, McCoy. And most leaders are."
"I can't disagree with that." Empty humor twisted his mouth.
She left the way she came, without ceremony, or a farewell. He waited quietly until he was certain he was alone again before allowing himself his thoughts.
God only knew what the future was going to bring, he thought. It might already be too late to "salvage" Jim Kirk. The man had a ruthlessness to him that was rooted in fear of being weak. When he'd been younger, it had been possible to see how he could keep that from changing him. But now? Hard to say. Of the two, Spock was still the most reliable, the steadiest, the last to act without reason.
And Kufe wanted to nudge Kirk further up the ladder? God, what an irony *that* was. If he'd wanted to, he could have been that already with his Tantalus Device. Thank all beings that Kufe hadn't yet learned of that thing.
He only hoped things would stay that way.
*Because it could get worse. So much worse. That's the problem with the Kufes of the Galaxy...and the Kirks for that matter. They spend more time being unhappy with what they have, than being grateful.*
Nyota and Christine might have a shaky relationship, but it was more real than what the others had. And they were smart enough to know it. A shame people like *that* weren't the ones in charge. It'd be a better place for sure.
Just thinking of that possibility (most likely in a really way-off parallel dimension), brought the first real smile to his face in months.
The End...
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