Born to be a Hammer: Epilogue
Masterpost here. Please read all warnings.
Epilogue
In addition to funding the colony’s schools and law enforcement, the Enterprise Hotel and Casino contributed a significant amount of its profits to the Iankt Prime’s various hospitals and clinics. The medical facilities were state of the art, staffed with certified medical professionals who knew what they were doing. It was nothing like the early days of the colony, when Pike had been forced to learn to do old-fashioned stitches on the back of Gretchen’s calf after all their dermal regenerators had died.
Pike had known, logically, that any hospital in the colony would probably have been adequately equipped to handle the cavalcade of injuries he was suddenly faced with, standing in the door of Scotty’s, gun still smoking in his hand.
He had known it. Logically.
But then he was kneeling, trying to rearrange the insides of some skinny kid who looked like he was still in high school, blood slicking up the sleeves of his once-white shirt and soaking the knees of his pants, too much blood, while he tried to keep an eye on Hikaru Sulu who remained immobile, staring unblinking at the ceiling, covered in gore, and tried to tell if Scotty was unconscious or dead ,and yelled at Jim Kirk to keep pressure on that eye and Jesus fucking Christ, what were Kirk and Sulu even doing there?
So yeah, he had known logically that Cochrane Memorial had newly retrofitted ambulance shuttles, but Pike called Uhura on his hands-free comm, ordered her to get them beamed up to the spacedock’s medical center as quickly as possible. It was one of their contingency plans, quicker than any shuttle in case of a certain type of emergency. If anything qualified as an emergency, Pike thought bitterly, it was this.
They arrived in a swirling clouds of atoms on the transporter room pad, and Pike barely had time to take a breath before a pack of medics in white garb descended upon them, pulled him away from the eviscerated kid, shuffled him to the side after discerning that he was uninjured.
Pike stayed out of the way after that. He sat in the waiting room for a long time, packed in-between a Lieutenant with bad food poisoning and a couple of traders who were still bleeding sluggishly from where they had sliced at each other with broken bottles but had since become enamored with showing each other pictures of their children. Pike sat, and he looked at the blood on his sleeves and the scratches on the linoleum and the thick metal door that separated the waiting area from the emergency room itself.
He must have sat there for over an hour, but the only person he saw go through those doors was an extremely harried looking man with a hell of a Southern accent. Pike had watched, torn between amusement and sympathy, as the man had burst into the waiting room, claimed to be a doctor, and had somehow managed to persuade the old battleaxe of a nurse at the intake desk that he, and only he had the full list of allergies of one of the current patients.
Pike figured that he probably could have gotten behind those doors with a few comm calls, but he didn’t try. As much as he wanted to know the status of the others and whether or not they were going to make it, he couldn’t bring himself to move. The sounds and the images of the room coursed passed him too quickly to be fully registered or understood, the rushing waters that parted around the boulder in the middle of the stream.
He sat like that until Uhura arrived. Somehow, Pike wasn’t surprised when she walked out of the secure medical area instead of in through the sliding doors that connected the hospital to the rest of the spacedock. He hadn’t seen her go in, but that meant absolutely nothing. The woman had her ways.
Pike stood when he saw her, a motion that seemed to set off another fit of vomiting from the Lieutenant next to him. Uhura stared at him for a moment, face inscrutable, and Pike waited awkwardly, his arms held uncomfortably by his sides, until Uhura nodded and turned. She waited for him to catch up before she led him through the entryway and into the organized chaos of the emergency room, past a nurse’s station and in between automated carts of supplies, until they reached a room marked 107b in glowing red letters.
Pike faltered at the door of the biobay, unnoticed as he silently observed the room’s occupants. Four of six biobeds in the heptagonal room were occupied, and the room seemed to be a hub of purposeful activity. There was nothing that he could do or say, not really, and his initial impulse to try and be supportive was overruled by the irrefutable knowledge that he was responsible, personally responsible for everything that had happened to the injured. His presence would probably be less appriciated than Nero's. Uhura waited for a moment before she guided him gently to the side, out of the flow of medical traffic, and filled him in.
Sulu, Scotty and Spock had all been incapacitated by the same Romulan shock weapon. When Pike asked her how the doctors had been able to tell, Uhura said something about patterned disruption of bioelectric impulses that went about a mile over Pike’s head. The point was that, for the most part, they were going to be okay..
Sulu was fine, the least physically injured of the group, already up and sitting by the bed of the kid whose blood was all over Pike’s shirt. Uhura told him that the kid's name was Pavel, and that he was going to pull through fine now that he’d had about two and a half liters of blood pumped back into him. The knife wound had been relatively shallow. Not meant to kill instantaneously, easy enough to heal with a few rounds of tissue regeneration if medical attention could be gotten in time. Pike knew that Nero hadn’t intended for anybody in that restaurant to survive to get medical treatment.
Scotty’s shoulder and elbow joints were in the process of being rebuilt from the marrow out, but he was going to be almost as good as new once he woke up.
Spock was in significantly worse shape. Stable, but comatose. Uhura told Pike that that the shock weapon had affected Spock differently due to his Vulcan physiology. He was breathing, and scanners were picking up brain activity, but they were going to have to bring in a telepathic healer.
Uhura looked a little wild around the eyes when she said that, and Pike - who had no idea who Spock was - tried to nod supportively.
Jim Kirk had lost his eye. The doctors were waiting until Jim woke up to discuss cybernetic replacement options - Kirk had required sedation after a particularly nasty allergic reaction to a painkiller had caused him to hallucinate violently. It turned out that the irate Southern doctor had been right about that list of allergies, although that didn’t quite explain why he was hovering over Kirk’s bed and glowering at anyone who made the mistake of walking past.
Pike nodded after Uhura finished, and the moment of silence that stretched between them was punctuated only by the beeping of machines and an indecipherable announcement on the hospital intercom. Pike realized belatedly that he was probably wanted planetside. The police were going to need a statement. But when he mentioned it to Uhura, she shook her head.
“It’s already been taken care of.” she said, before pressing a bag of clothes into his hands and telling him to go change.
“Former Governor Pike, hero of the people” Uhura continued, flashing him a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “The news station wants an interview. It’ll probably get picked up by one of the major Federation networks, so be convincing.”
Pike opened his mouth to ask what the hell she meant ‘hero of the people,’ but Uhura didn’t let him get a word in edgewise.
“There’s a shuttle waiting for you in Bay 3 when you’re ready to head back to the surface. You can read all about what happened to you on the way down. This is probably going to get big, so I suggest you study your statement carefully and try to look decent.” She gave him another tightlipped smile before disappearing back into the biobay.
Gripping the bag that Uhura had handed to him, Pike left the hospital and headed in the opposite direction of the shuttle bays. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but it became apparent almost immediately that he was going to have to change out of his bloodsoaked clothes if he planned to keep walking around the spackdock in polite company. If the looks he was getting were anything to go by, Pike was only a few minutes away from being cuffed and thrown out an airlock for disturbing the peace.
He ducked into a small bathroom, and while Pike had been expecting a large bathroom with multiple stalls, he found himself in a small, single-person type of deal that was surprisingly clean. Hell, there was even a little porthole that looked out into space, although it could have easily been an image projection. It was also clearly not designed for humans - instead of a toilet, there was a foot long tube that jutted out of the wall at shoulder height.
Pike tried not to think about it. At least it made a convenient place to hang the bag of clothes.
The door locked automatically behind him, and Pike before stripping off his soiled clothes with grim efficiency, piling them in a corner before he attempted to shove his forearms under the sonic sink. The result was far from perfect - when Pike withdrew his tingling arms he could still see where the brown of the drying blood had discolored his skin. He knew realistically that no one would be able to see it beneath his sleeves, but Pike knew that he would be able to feel it long after he had washed it off.
When he looked up to retrieve the fresh clothes Uhura had given him, Pike’s eyes were drawn to the small porthole. He wondered what it was that had caught his attention at first, but as he watched, the image flickered briefly. Definitely a hologram.
The image showed Iankt Prime, its black continents and blue ocean. Pike could see, faintly, the sprawling colony that really was visible from the spackdock’s actual windows at all times, as the station maintained its geosynchronous orbit. Hand resting on the wall, Pike watched for a long time as the flickering of the hologram intensified. He could hear his own heart beating loudly, the blood throbbing in his ears, and felt the gooseflesh prickle on his arms.
He needed to put clothes on. He needed to go to Bay 3 and get on the shuttle. He needed to return to the colony and reassume his responsibilities, to deal with the press and the police and whoever among his ranks had turned traitor. But Pike found that he could do none of those things, as he was entranced by the fading image in the false window.
Pike had done the right thing. He had tried to do the right thing for the colony,the future of the planet. His planet. That flickered and dissolved into a snow of static nothingness while he watched, standing alone in his underwear in the spacedock bathroom, helpless to look away.
Part One :: Interlude - Chekov :: Part Two :: Interlude - Nero :: Part Three :: Epilogue