Fic: And the sky shrugged off her stars [Star Trek XI, 1/1]
cold_clarity is alive! To celebrate this: darkfic! Written straight into the post box! Completely unbetaed! In permanent beta! I give such classy gifts.
And the sky shrugged off her stars
R (though mostly for themes)
Major character death
2118 words.
All McCoy knows is, it happened before Kehli.
He remembers the Kehlians, with their long, translucent fingers, their strange softness, their flesh that looked like it could be peeled. He remembers the endless banks of monitors, screen after screen after screen, so many he thought it must be a mirror trick.
"You must understand," the Kehlian had said, "we had achieved warp speed - " (it smiled indulgently at the name, as if using a child's word, some ridiculous onomatopoeic tag) " - before your people had fire."
"You've been watching our people since before we had fire," Jim said, mulish.
"We've been watching everyone."
And there it was, an archive the size of a goddamn planet, everything everywhere ever. Starfleet might as well have been drawing maps in crayon.
"I'm going to suggest," Jim said on the shuttle flight back, "that nothing we saw here makes it into the official report." All six of them nodded quietly, still trying to wrap their heads around the size of what they'd just seen.
They wouldn't have done that, McCoy thinks, if they were still all there.
For a while after that, Scotty and Jim's conversations went something like this:
Jim stared into a murky glass of homebrew and asked, "You ever think it's weird they're watching us?"
Scotty laughed and said, "I think they're pointing and laughing, Captain. And then I think, if I was so far up my own arse as they are, I'd no fucking bother with Starfleet."
And then McCoy would fold, just to get them back to the topic at hand.
Word gets around. Monitors. Spies. Long-distance sensors. Elaborate traps, mind games, an intelligence that won't share. McCoy hands out sleeping pills and pshaws rumours and feels the long, slow itch of eyes on him, constantly.
Garrison, some kid from Security who had the bad luck to be on Kehli with them, comes into McCoy's office and cries for a solid hour. McCoy says, the only person watching you is me.
The computer thinks there are five people in Chekov's room at all times, that it's fifteen degrees colder than it should be and that the lights are never used. He tells the captain it’s a malfunction. McCoy tells the captain it’s a paranoid whiz kid who doesn't want every soft-handed alien with a holo feed to know his business. He comes off-shift one day to discover that his computer's gone crazy, too, and wonders if it was Pavel or Jim who rigged it.
Garrison tells McCoy, "You know, out here? They know more about where we are than the 'fleet."
"You tell anyone else that?" McCoy asks.
Garrison falls silent, but McCoy tries not to worry. Garrison doesn't seem like he trusts anyone enough to say much.
For a while, Scotty and Jim's conversations go like this:
Jim paces, cards left face-up on the table. "What'd we have to junk to run silent?"
Scotty taps on the table, smiles, rueful. "Ev'rythin' but this."
McCoy clears his throat, "You gonna play that hand, Jim?"
Sulu asks for stims because everyone else is so bugfuck insane he doesn't like leaving the comm. McCoy gives thanks that at least one of the bridge crew is still wedded to reason and relaxes for the first time in months, right up until he walks into stellar cartography and finds Sulu deliberately whiting out sections of maps. He has Sulu declared unfit for duty, and deflects any questions as to what he himself was doing in stellar cartography at four in the morning.
"Only the computer keeps time here," he says to Jim, later. "I'm either working or I'm not. I don't give a good goddamn when I do it, so long as it gets done."
And that word must get around, too, because the rest of the crew slowly seems to realise that time is arbitrary in space. Riley takes this as a cue to eat a full fried breakfast at midnight ship's time every night for a month; Devenue and Orcen decide that their shifts are interchangeable with one another's; they drift in and out of sickbay at will. As long as one of them's there, McCoy finds it difficult to mind.
Chapel finds him in the isolation room during gamma shift, slowly peeling open the shell of a regenerator, twisting its wires free from their bundles. "Doctor?" she says, slowly; soothing, like he's a difficult child or a violent drunk.
He can see himself knocking her down, then. Swinging until she stops. Instead he says, "We use it every day. Do you know how it works? You know what this does, Christine?"
She shakes her head and he could kill her for it.
They happen across some backward nation who've barely reached their own moon, and Garrison tells the entire delegation that the Federation is the only thing that can protect them from the aliens that are watching them, right now. Monitoring them, he says, "like rats. You have rats? Or any dumb thing that gets locked up and dies?"
It's after that episode that Spock suggests they double back, head for the last space station, back on the edge of known space, and let the crew recuperate in a familiar environment. Unchartered space, he suggests, has put a greater strain on the crew than one could have predicted.
And it's not long after that that Yeoman Tracey stabs Spock through the temple with a screwdriver. "He was listening to me," Tracey tells McCoy when he goes down to the brig. "He wouldn't stop listening to me."
Jim decides that Spock and Tracey do need to be sent back to the last starbase; Uhura refuses to go, citing any number of regulations McCoy doesn't care to remember. Instead, he offers up the names of everyone who hasn't come to see him since Kehli as suitable escorts.
He breathes easier once they're off the ship.
Jim and Scotty say:
"So, we can't do silent running."
"Not a hope, Sir."
"From the 'fleet."
"The fleet monitors a lot."
"But?"
Scotty looks thoughtful. "We could disappear a wee while. Couldn't do much else, but we could go."
Jim keeps Starfleet command fooled for three weeks after they change course; the crew buy it for slightly longer.
The day before the mutiny, Uhura says: "I know what you're trying to do. You know that I don't care. Let me take the people who want to go. You can go crazy just as easy without me. Captain."
Jim blinks at her slowly, as if it hasn't quite registered that she's there. "Sure," he says, "whatever."
Uhura stares. "That's it?"
"I could refuse and have you jettisoned for insurrection, but I think we're both above pretending that I give a shit." His voice is flat, he doesn't move and McCoy thinks, I should want to go. I should not trust him.
He stays.
163 others do, too. Jim looks round at them, eyes bleary, and tells them that there are places that aren't mapped, places where no-one's looking. They can get to them, he knows it. "I trust you," he says. "You understand that this is what Starfleet would ask us to do, if they knew. I am proud to have served with each and every one of you."
They junk everything that the fleet monitors, leave a trail of shining debris like breadcrumbs toward freedom. McCoy watches from the observation deck while Jim hovers at his shoulder, ecstatic.
They proceed on impulse, in the half-dark and on what fast become starvation rations. Jim is gaunt and sleepless and overjoyed; Garrison shoots the three remaining communications staff and then walks out of an airlock. McCoy is greyly unsurprised. He feels the slow, inexorable pull of out there almost as strongly as the desperate need to be somewhere safer, somewhere smaller.
At some point, Scotty stops being a face an turns into a voice, his muttering the comms' equivalent of white noise. He's trying to make the shell of the ship move like half its engine wasn't fired into unknown space weeks back, and McCoy isn't surprised when he shows up in sickbay one day, burns over his face and hands, too fucked to even scream properly.
He does what he can with what they have left. Neither amount to very much; Scotty goes from 20/20 to almost nothing overnight.
McCoy stops reporting for duty after that. He supposes it wasn't really duty anymore, anyway, what with them being wanted for desertion and all. He spends his time - not that there's any time, or at least no time that measurably moves - lying in his nearly-dark room, looking at the space in the wall where he ripped out the replicator. Sometimes he thinks if he reached inside the remains of the dispenser, he could stretch his hand down and down and down and never reach the inside of the ship, never reach anything but emptiness, like the tube leads down to another world entirely.
That's mad talk. He quashes it.
Christine stayed because she was scared but evidently becomes less so, because she comes to McCoy's quarters to bitch him out for not showing up, not doing what he should.
He takes her head in his hands and bounces it off the floor until it comes apart.
It doesn't occur to him to move her until Jim shows up in his quarters, some unmoving time later, draw in by the smell. "We could eat her," he suggests, nudging her shoulder with his boot. "Pavel might be into it. He's given up on ration packs."
Jim nods, and then very suddenly crumples. "Bones," he says, "I don't really know. I don't know where we're going, I don't - . I thought I could remember where their records ended, I was so sure we'd be able to get out of range, but we don't, I don't know. I thought we'd be there by now." His eyes are wet, red, sunken. McCoy waits while Jim turns his back, gathers himself. "We'll know," he says, more evenly. "It'll feel different. It'll." His hands twitch in some aborted, scraping gesture, and McCoy is relieved that he's not the only one who sometimes feels like he wants to peel his own skin off.
"It'll feel different," Jim repeats.
"I know, Jim."
"Good. That's good." He steps over Christine, makes for the door. "I'll, um. I'll send somebody to move that."
Nobody comes.
Scotty stands on the observation deck, staring out at nothing and moving with the anguished momentum of a bear in a zoo.
They stop feeding him.
When there are 97 crew left, everyone complains about the cold. By 89, no-one says much of anything. Don't do much, either. It would be farcical to pretend they're doing more than drifting.
McCoy doesn't care. Jim doesn't seem to. He sits in his chair, view screen on and unshuttered, staring at space as if he's looking for a shifting current. The consoles around him are silent and dark.
Just before they hit the seventies, they cross paths with some backwater tugboat of a spacecraft and gut it for supplies. Jim comms and says the crew are like nothing he's ever seen, but even that's not enough to draw McCoy out of his quarters.
Even dust and mulch, Christine manages to look admonishing.
They spend the better part of two days docked with the alien vessel, slowly transferring food and fuel and medical supplies that McCoy can't bring himself to take an interest in. He lies on his bed, comms around him set to different channels, and listens to people say many things which do not matter.
They are not going to survive.
Just because it'll take them a little longer now, doesn't mean there's any call for enthusiasm.
Just as the salvage comes to an end, Jim shows up at McCoy's door. He's haggard and hollow-eyed and smells like he's dying, and McCoy doesn't know how long it's been since they've spoken but it suddenly feels too long by far.
"We have to go," Jim says, voice stronger than he looks. "We'll never make it like this, it's. It's all of them, they attract too much attention. But we could make it, Bones. We could take the other ship, the two of us, we could -." He tugs at his hair, ducks his chin to his chest but doesn't turn away. "We're going the wrong way."
It makes as much sense as anything, and Jim's been watching for long enough that he'd know.
McCoy feels the itch of eyes upon him and doesn't know whether it's the fucking aliens or the fucking 'fleet or the fucking crew. "Okay," he says. "Okay, let's go."
And the sky shrugged off her stars
R (though mostly for themes)
Major character death
2118 words.
All McCoy knows is, it happened before Kehli.
He remembers the Kehlians, with their long, translucent fingers, their strange softness, their flesh that looked like it could be peeled. He remembers the endless banks of monitors, screen after screen after screen, so many he thought it must be a mirror trick.
"You must understand," the Kehlian had said, "we had achieved warp speed - " (it smiled indulgently at the name, as if using a child's word, some ridiculous onomatopoeic tag) " - before your people had fire."
"You've been watching our people since before we had fire," Jim said, mulish.
"We've been watching everyone."
And there it was, an archive the size of a goddamn planet, everything everywhere ever. Starfleet might as well have been drawing maps in crayon.
"I'm going to suggest," Jim said on the shuttle flight back, "that nothing we saw here makes it into the official report." All six of them nodded quietly, still trying to wrap their heads around the size of what they'd just seen.
They wouldn't have done that, McCoy thinks, if they were still all there.
For a while after that, Scotty and Jim's conversations went something like this:
Jim stared into a murky glass of homebrew and asked, "You ever think it's weird they're watching us?"
Scotty laughed and said, "I think they're pointing and laughing, Captain. And then I think, if I was so far up my own arse as they are, I'd no fucking bother with Starfleet."
And then McCoy would fold, just to get them back to the topic at hand.
Word gets around. Monitors. Spies. Long-distance sensors. Elaborate traps, mind games, an intelligence that won't share. McCoy hands out sleeping pills and pshaws rumours and feels the long, slow itch of eyes on him, constantly.
Garrison, some kid from Security who had the bad luck to be on Kehli with them, comes into McCoy's office and cries for a solid hour. McCoy says, the only person watching you is me.
The computer thinks there are five people in Chekov's room at all times, that it's fifteen degrees colder than it should be and that the lights are never used. He tells the captain it’s a malfunction. McCoy tells the captain it’s a paranoid whiz kid who doesn't want every soft-handed alien with a holo feed to know his business. He comes off-shift one day to discover that his computer's gone crazy, too, and wonders if it was Pavel or Jim who rigged it.
Garrison tells McCoy, "You know, out here? They know more about where we are than the 'fleet."
"You tell anyone else that?" McCoy asks.
Garrison falls silent, but McCoy tries not to worry. Garrison doesn't seem like he trusts anyone enough to say much.
For a while, Scotty and Jim's conversations go like this:
Jim paces, cards left face-up on the table. "What'd we have to junk to run silent?"
Scotty taps on the table, smiles, rueful. "Ev'rythin' but this."
McCoy clears his throat, "You gonna play that hand, Jim?"
Sulu asks for stims because everyone else is so bugfuck insane he doesn't like leaving the comm. McCoy gives thanks that at least one of the bridge crew is still wedded to reason and relaxes for the first time in months, right up until he walks into stellar cartography and finds Sulu deliberately whiting out sections of maps. He has Sulu declared unfit for duty, and deflects any questions as to what he himself was doing in stellar cartography at four in the morning.
"Only the computer keeps time here," he says to Jim, later. "I'm either working or I'm not. I don't give a good goddamn when I do it, so long as it gets done."
And that word must get around, too, because the rest of the crew slowly seems to realise that time is arbitrary in space. Riley takes this as a cue to eat a full fried breakfast at midnight ship's time every night for a month; Devenue and Orcen decide that their shifts are interchangeable with one another's; they drift in and out of sickbay at will. As long as one of them's there, McCoy finds it difficult to mind.
Chapel finds him in the isolation room during gamma shift, slowly peeling open the shell of a regenerator, twisting its wires free from their bundles. "Doctor?" she says, slowly; soothing, like he's a difficult child or a violent drunk.
He can see himself knocking her down, then. Swinging until she stops. Instead he says, "We use it every day. Do you know how it works? You know what this does, Christine?"
She shakes her head and he could kill her for it.
They happen across some backward nation who've barely reached their own moon, and Garrison tells the entire delegation that the Federation is the only thing that can protect them from the aliens that are watching them, right now. Monitoring them, he says, "like rats. You have rats? Or any dumb thing that gets locked up and dies?"
It's after that episode that Spock suggests they double back, head for the last space station, back on the edge of known space, and let the crew recuperate in a familiar environment. Unchartered space, he suggests, has put a greater strain on the crew than one could have predicted.
And it's not long after that that Yeoman Tracey stabs Spock through the temple with a screwdriver. "He was listening to me," Tracey tells McCoy when he goes down to the brig. "He wouldn't stop listening to me."
Jim decides that Spock and Tracey do need to be sent back to the last starbase; Uhura refuses to go, citing any number of regulations McCoy doesn't care to remember. Instead, he offers up the names of everyone who hasn't come to see him since Kehli as suitable escorts.
He breathes easier once they're off the ship.
Jim and Scotty say:
"So, we can't do silent running."
"Not a hope, Sir."
"From the 'fleet."
"The fleet monitors a lot."
"But?"
Scotty looks thoughtful. "We could disappear a wee while. Couldn't do much else, but we could go."
Jim keeps Starfleet command fooled for three weeks after they change course; the crew buy it for slightly longer.
The day before the mutiny, Uhura says: "I know what you're trying to do. You know that I don't care. Let me take the people who want to go. You can go crazy just as easy without me. Captain."
Jim blinks at her slowly, as if it hasn't quite registered that she's there. "Sure," he says, "whatever."
Uhura stares. "That's it?"
"I could refuse and have you jettisoned for insurrection, but I think we're both above pretending that I give a shit." His voice is flat, he doesn't move and McCoy thinks, I should want to go. I should not trust him.
He stays.
163 others do, too. Jim looks round at them, eyes bleary, and tells them that there are places that aren't mapped, places where no-one's looking. They can get to them, he knows it. "I trust you," he says. "You understand that this is what Starfleet would ask us to do, if they knew. I am proud to have served with each and every one of you."
They junk everything that the fleet monitors, leave a trail of shining debris like breadcrumbs toward freedom. McCoy watches from the observation deck while Jim hovers at his shoulder, ecstatic.
They proceed on impulse, in the half-dark and on what fast become starvation rations. Jim is gaunt and sleepless and overjoyed; Garrison shoots the three remaining communications staff and then walks out of an airlock. McCoy is greyly unsurprised. He feels the slow, inexorable pull of out there almost as strongly as the desperate need to be somewhere safer, somewhere smaller.
At some point, Scotty stops being a face an turns into a voice, his muttering the comms' equivalent of white noise. He's trying to make the shell of the ship move like half its engine wasn't fired into unknown space weeks back, and McCoy isn't surprised when he shows up in sickbay one day, burns over his face and hands, too fucked to even scream properly.
He does what he can with what they have left. Neither amount to very much; Scotty goes from 20/20 to almost nothing overnight.
McCoy stops reporting for duty after that. He supposes it wasn't really duty anymore, anyway, what with them being wanted for desertion and all. He spends his time - not that there's any time, or at least no time that measurably moves - lying in his nearly-dark room, looking at the space in the wall where he ripped out the replicator. Sometimes he thinks if he reached inside the remains of the dispenser, he could stretch his hand down and down and down and never reach the inside of the ship, never reach anything but emptiness, like the tube leads down to another world entirely.
That's mad talk. He quashes it.
Christine stayed because she was scared but evidently becomes less so, because she comes to McCoy's quarters to bitch him out for not showing up, not doing what he should.
He takes her head in his hands and bounces it off the floor until it comes apart.
It doesn't occur to him to move her until Jim shows up in his quarters, some unmoving time later, draw in by the smell. "We could eat her," he suggests, nudging her shoulder with his boot. "Pavel might be into it. He's given up on ration packs."
Jim nods, and then very suddenly crumples. "Bones," he says, "I don't really know. I don't know where we're going, I don't - . I thought I could remember where their records ended, I was so sure we'd be able to get out of range, but we don't, I don't know. I thought we'd be there by now." His eyes are wet, red, sunken. McCoy waits while Jim turns his back, gathers himself. "We'll know," he says, more evenly. "It'll feel different. It'll." His hands twitch in some aborted, scraping gesture, and McCoy is relieved that he's not the only one who sometimes feels like he wants to peel his own skin off.
"It'll feel different," Jim repeats.
"I know, Jim."
"Good. That's good." He steps over Christine, makes for the door. "I'll, um. I'll send somebody to move that."
Nobody comes.
Scotty stands on the observation deck, staring out at nothing and moving with the anguished momentum of a bear in a zoo.
They stop feeding him.
When there are 97 crew left, everyone complains about the cold. By 89, no-one says much of anything. Don't do much, either. It would be farcical to pretend they're doing more than drifting.
McCoy doesn't care. Jim doesn't seem to. He sits in his chair, view screen on and unshuttered, staring at space as if he's looking for a shifting current. The consoles around him are silent and dark.
Just before they hit the seventies, they cross paths with some backwater tugboat of a spacecraft and gut it for supplies. Jim comms and says the crew are like nothing he's ever seen, but even that's not enough to draw McCoy out of his quarters.
Even dust and mulch, Christine manages to look admonishing.
They spend the better part of two days docked with the alien vessel, slowly transferring food and fuel and medical supplies that McCoy can't bring himself to take an interest in. He lies on his bed, comms around him set to different channels, and listens to people say many things which do not matter.
They are not going to survive.
Just because it'll take them a little longer now, doesn't mean there's any call for enthusiasm.
Just as the salvage comes to an end, Jim shows up at McCoy's door. He's haggard and hollow-eyed and smells like he's dying, and McCoy doesn't know how long it's been since they've spoken but it suddenly feels too long by far.
"We have to go," Jim says, voice stronger than he looks. "We'll never make it like this, it's. It's all of them, they attract too much attention. But we could make it, Bones. We could take the other ship, the two of us, we could -." He tugs at his hair, ducks his chin to his chest but doesn't turn away. "We're going the wrong way."
It makes as much sense as anything, and Jim's been watching for long enough that he'd know.
McCoy feels the itch of eyes upon him and doesn't know whether it's the fucking aliens or the fucking 'fleet or the fucking crew. "Okay," he says. "Okay, let's go."