“Quiet!”
“You were right. What we talked about... I was going to tell Hunter...”
“You’ll still be able to. Shut up, what kind of talk is this?” McCoy waved the tricorder across Kirk’s body. Jim’s heart was undamaged, but the artery was half severed. The sensor showed a pierced lung, but that was obvious without any mechanical information. The essential thing was to get him on oxygen as fast as possible, then hook him up to a fluid replacer, a heme carrier: he was bleeding so badly that oxygen starvation was the biggest danger.
“Where is the trauma unit?” Spock said, his voice tight.
“On its way,” McCoy said, defending his people though he was angry himself that they were not yet here. But he knew he could save Jim Kirk.
“You’ll be okay, Jim,” he said, and this time he meant it.
But there was something else, a danger signal from the tricorder. McCoy thought immediately of poison, but the readings were in the wrong range. He had never seen anything like this signal before. “What the devil...”
Jim thought he had blood in his eyes. A shimmering cloud passed across his vision.
“I can’t see,” he said. He reached blindly out.
Spock grasped his hand, holding him strongly, deliberately leaving open all the mental and emotional shields he had built during his long association with human beings.
“You will be all right, Jim,” Spock said. He put his right hand to Jim’s temple, completing the telepathic, mystical circuit linking him with his friend. Pain, fear, and regret welled out into him. He accepted it willingly, and felt it ease in Jim. “My strength to yours,” he whispered, too softly for anyone to hear, the words a hypnotic reminder of the techniques he was using. “My strength to yours, my will to yours.”
McCoy saw Spock’s eyelids lower and his eyes roll back till only a crescent of the whites still showed. But he could not pay any attention to what the Vulcan was doing. The lift doors opened and the trauma team rushed in with the support equipment.
“Get down here!” McCoy shouted. They hurried to obey.
They hooked up the trauma unit and oxygen flooded Jim’s body. His starving nerves spread new agony through him. He gasped, and blood choked him. Spock’s long fingers clasped his hand. The pain eased infinitesimally, but Jim’s sight faded almost to pure darkness.
“Spock?”
“I am here, Jim.”
His friend’s hand pressed gently against his temple and the side of his face. Jim felt the closeness, the strength that was keeping him alive. He could no longer see, even in his mind, but in some other, unnamed way he sensed the precision of Spock’s thoughts, their order twisted by Jim’s own pain and fear.
Jim Kirk knew that he was going to die, and that Spock would follow him down the accelerating spiral until he had fallen too deep to return. He would willingly choose death to try to save Kirk’s life.
James Kirk, too, had one choice left.
“Spock ...” he whispered, “take good care ... of my ship.”
He feared he had waited too long, but that terror gave him the strength he needed. He wrenched away from Spock, breaking their contact, forsaking Spock’s strength and will, and giving himself up alone to agony, despair, and death.
The physical resonance of emotional force flung Spock backward. His body thudded against the railing, and he slumped to the floor. He lay still, gathering his strength. The deck felt cool against the side of his face and his outflung hands. The echoes of Jim Kirk’s wounds slowly ebbed. Spock opened his eyes to a gray haze. He blinked, and blinked again: the nictitating membrane swept across the irises, and finally he could see. Spock pushed himself to his feet, fighting to hide his reactions.
Jim’s body now lay on the stretcher of the trauma unit, hooked up to fluid and respirator, breathing but otherwise motionless. His eyes—his eyes, wide open, had clouded over with silver-gray.
“Dr. McCoy—”
“Not now, Spock.”
Spock felt himself trembling. He clenched his fists.
McCoy and part of his medical team floated the trauma unit into the lift, while two of the paramedics stayed behind to take Braithewaite, knocked unconscious in his fall, down to sick bay.
The captain’s body was alive; it could be kept alive indefinitely now.
But Spock had felt Jim Kirk die.
Mandala Flynn leaned against the back bulkhead of the turbo lift, closing her eyes and seeking out the damage to her body in her mind. The bullet tracked diagonally from her collarbone in front on the left, across her back and down, and lodged against her lower ribs like a molten bit of lead. As far as she could tell, it had cut through without doing critical damage. But her collarbone was shattered, again: she knew what that felt like.
She cursed. The bullet had entered almost exactly where the shrapnel had got her two years before. Now she would have to waste a month in therapy; the jigsawpuzzle of bone would never return to its original strength.
Her blood pressure was way down: she had to will herself not to go into shock. The biofeedback techniques were working. So far she had even succeeded in holding the pain, most of it, back one level short of consciousness.
She was well aware that she could not stay on her feet much longer. She had lost too much blood, and even with biocontrol, the human body has limits which she had nearly reached.
The lift doors slid open onto an empty corridor.
There should be guards at every level! Fury rose in her, fury and shame, because however badly or insignificantly Captain Kirk was hurt, the responsibility was hers alone. Even if no one at all had been hurt, the prisoner had escaped. There was no excuse for that: she had thought her command of the security force was competent, even outstanding. She had watched morale rise from nothing, but here she was, revealed as a sham.
Face it, Flynn, she told herself savagely, they could have replaced your predecessor with a rock, and morale would have gone up. That doesn’t make you adequate to lead. They ought to bust you back to ensign, that’s where you belong. They were right all the time.
A lunatic wth a pistol was running around loose in the ship, and not so much as a single guard stood at the bloody-bedamned lift doors.
She stepped out into the hallway. Her feet were numb, as if they had fallen asleep, and her knees felt wobbly and funny.
Is this shock? she wondered. This isn’t a symptom of shock. What’s going on?
She took a few steps forward. Mordreaux’s cabin was right around the corner. Cliches about locking barns after horses got loose crept through her mind along with her usual uncertainty about what a horse actually looked like ... or a barn ... she forcibly pulled her attention back. If her people were not at the
lift, Mordreaux’s cabin was as good a place as any to begin looking for them. And him.
Could this be a planned assault? she wondered. Was Braithewaite right? All the security people taken on and eliminated, silently, one by one, in an attempt to free Mordreaux? In logistical terms it made no sense to assault a starship instead of the negligible security of Aleph Prime. Here, an attack force would have to get undetected through the ship’s sensors; the force would have to board the Enterprise through warning systems that included several layers of redundancy, and it would have had to do its work too swiftly, too perfectly, for anyone to be left to set off an alarm.
Mandala stumbled and fell to her knees, but felt nothing. Her legs were numb almost all the way to the hips. She looked stupidly down. That was no help. Somehow she managed to get back to her feet.
An assault made no sense in human terms; in human terms, it was impossible. But she had learned—one of the first lessons she had learned in her life—that the human consciousness was in the minority, and that limiting oneself to thinking in human terms was the quickest way to prove oneself a fool.
Still she had seen no one. She could call them on her communicator, but she was too angry to speak to any of her people any way but face to face. And, truth to tell, she did not think she could lift her left hand. All the strength and feeling had vanished from that arm.
She turned the corer.
There, in front of Mordreaux’s cabin, several security people gathered, milling in confusion.
