Schmoop Bingo fill - pregnancy
Title: Baby...Maybe?
Author: fringedweller
Schmoop Bingo Fill: Pregnancy
Rating: PG, for a little swear word
Warnings: Right, well. This is for schmoop_bingo, so it's going to get sappy sooner or later. If that's not your thing, stay away. I also seemed to get a ridiculous number of prompts that had something to do with babies, so my aim to write a fic for every prompt on my card means that pregnancy and babies will abound.
The last time I mentioned a baby in fic, some people got offended. I have no doubt that despite this being schmoopy fic, I'm going to upset somebody this time around too. So, fair warning. If pregnancy or babies or any topic related is an issue for you, don't complain to me afterwards. I'm really not going to care.
Disclaimer: Seriously, not mine and no money is being made.
Summary: It was a few weeks later, with her head down the toilet as she threw up the meagre breakfast she had been able to stomach, that Christine was reminded of the fact that on the Enterprise, normal was an extremely relative term.
She came to with a groan, her head absolutely pounding. The sheer whiteness of the room she found herself in hurt her eyes, and it took her a minute or two to get her bearings. Christine pulled herself into a sitting position, yanking the silky white material covering her body up as it slid off. She was naked underneath it, but a quick check revealed no apparent injuries.
She had been laying on something that looked like a cross between a biobed and an altar. The room smelled a lot like sickbay, antiseptic with a hint of industrial cleanser, and apart from the altar bed it contained no furniture at all.
A frantic pounding on one of the walls startled her, and she hurriedly wrapped the silky sheet firmly around her breasts.
Dying unexpectedly in bizarre situations was a hazard of life in Starfleet, but she’d be damned if she was going to do it naked.
She made her way on unsteady feet towards the sound of the noise, and was relieved to hear a familiar, worried voice.
“Christine? Chris, are you in there?”
“I’m here,” she called thankfully. “Len, I’m behind the wall. I’m okay.”
“Hold on,” he replied, sounding a lot happier. “I’ve almost got it open.”
She took a few steps backwards and after a few minutes a part of the wall panel shifted towards her, groaning and scraping along the floor. She heard a determined grunt, and the wall panel shifted a little further, letting her catch a glimpse of McCoy’s face.
He had been smooth shaven when they beamed down to the planet’s surface as part of the diplomacy team; over the last few years, she had learned to judge the passage of time by the amount of stubble that erupted on his chin. By the length of the growth she saw now, they had been separated from their group for about two days.
“I can get through the gap,” she told him, and he backed off to give her room. She had to suck her stomach in, but she made it through. The room he was in was exactly the same as hers, and he had been forced to make his clothing out of his sheet as well. It was wrapped around his hips, displaying a broad chest and surprisingly well-defined hipbones.
She dragged her attention upwards; ogling your department head, even if he was a friend, and a friend that had been making less than subtle overtures recently, wasn’t considered good working practice.
Lord, her life was complicated.
It wasn’t as if they didn’t know about the attraction that flared between them; how could you ignore the tension, the raised heartbeats, and, because they were them, the inevitably raised voices?
It was just that they were cowards, basically.
He had a failed marriage and a child he barely saw other than on long-distance video calls. She hadn’t made it as far as the church before being abandoned for five years, then she discovered her fiancé was now a soulless android hell-bent on universal domination.
It was fair to say that they both had commitment issues.
And they worked now, in a weird, symbiotic sort of way. She ran Sickbay, and he was wise enough to let her do so. He performed medical miracles on a daily basis, and she made sure the patients survived post-op. He tweaked her metaphorical ponytails, making her drop the professional perfectionism act occasionally, making her remember that she was human and she had needs too. She reminded him that although she wasn’t technically qualified to remove his head from his ass surgically, she would be happy to try verbally.
They just worked. And despite a growing urge to rip his clothes from his body and ravish him on his big desk, Christine was just too scared to do so because of how it would affect every other part of her life.
What if they didn’t work out? How could she still work with him if they were having screaming rows back in their quarters? What if he hated her weird toes? What if he snored uncontrollably?
And so she kept away from the dangerous edges of their relationship, retreating when the teasing grew too heated, when their sexual subtext seemed in danger of becoming actual text. It hadn’t helped that Len had been pushing harder recently, advancing where she was retreating. It worried her and delighted her all at once. Clearly, he was betting that her toes were just fine and that she was a sound sleeper.
Christine wished she was that brave. She needed some kind of push before she could fall into his arms, though it was nice to see that he was ready to catch her.
“You’re ok?” he asked, sounding concerned.
“Fine,” she reassured him, rubbing her arms. “A little cold, but other than that I’m not harmed.”
“They took everything,” he told her, manfully staring her right in the face and not at her nipples, which were protesting the chill. “Uniforms, communicators, everything.”
“Why?” said Christine, puzzled. “Why did the Aldebarans invite us to a big feast and appear to be friendly, then knock us out and drag us down here?”
He shrugged, and the motion did interesting things to play of muscles across his chest. Christine hoped that he’d do it again soon, then caught herself. Really, Christine? Now?
They decided to bang on the rest of the walls, for the lack of anything else productive to do. Three of the five hexagonal walls just resounded with a dull thud, but McCoy found Janice Rand on the other side of one wall, and Christine roused Spock on another. Both were attired similarly, and when they all exchanged stories, there was a common theme. They had been part of the feast held by the insectoid Aldebarans, they had all retired to their respective chambers in the hive-like living structure and then they had woken here. Spock was sporting stubble to rival McCoy’s, and his sense of time was acute enough to verify Christine’s estimation of the length of their unconsciousness.
Using Spock’s strength, they were able to pull the wall panels aside with slightly more ease; they found Uhura leading the majority of the landing party, the science and security teams, and behind another set of walls were Kirk, Gaila and Scotty.
Nobody was injured; a few had a headache similar to Christine’s, but there was no evidence of harm on behalf of the Aldebarans. When one of the wall panels peeled away to reveal a corridor, they followed it to a large antechamber containing their clothes and communications equipment. Five minutes later they were in contact with one of the many search teams that a frantic Sulu had scouring the planet; seven minutes later they were back on board the ship.
Thorough scans in sickbay revealed no sickness or injury. A sedative had been administered to them through the air filtration system, and they had been kept unconscious for nearly two days. Spock and McCoy ran every test they could think of, but apart from a slightly elevated hormone rate in the females affected, nothing was out of the ordinary. Even that was explainable, McCoy concluded, with the contraceptives that all of the women on the landing party had chosen to take. They basically fooled the body into thinking that it was already pregnant, so no eggs were released to fertilise. Women were fond of the shot because it also eliminated bleeding and menstrual cramps. In fact many, Christine included, chose to take the medication just for that very purpose. The elevated hormone levels, both he and Spock concluded, were entirely within the parameters of normal.
It was a few weeks later, with her head down the toilet as she threw up the meagre breakfast she had been able to stomach, that Christine was reminded of the fact that on the Enterprise, normal was an extremely relative term.
The Enterprise had remained in orbit around the planet for two weeks. All hails sent to the planet were unanswered; an extremely well-armed planetary defence system came on-line and a planet-wide transport blocking shield went up. Scans of the surface showed no trace of the insectoid Aldebaran people. It was of they had never been there. The vast, hive-like cities that the Enterprise crew had visited simply disappeared without a trace. Scotty thought that they could have been very sophisticated holographic projections, a very advanced form of the fledgling holodeck technology they were trialling onboard ship. However, given that any attempt to launch probes towards the planet ended with the probe being destroyed by the automated defence system, the Admiralty thought that discretion was the better form of valour. The Enterprise was ordered out of the system, and onto other missions.
At first, everything had seemed normal. Nobody who had been sedated showed any ill-effects at all. Everyone went back to work. A few people reported nightmares about waking up in the white room again, but the ship’s psychiatrist assured them that this was to be expected and that with time and the regaining of their usual routines, all would be well.
Then, after a few weeks, some of the female crew members that had been on the Aldebaran mission came to sickbay complaining of nausea and dizziness. Gaila had collapsed while on duty and had been rushed to sickbay by her devoted team of computer core engineers. They had remained in an anxious huddle around her bedside until an exasperated M’Benga had shooed them away. He had then stayed at her bedside until Lisa Lawton, the deputy head nurse, had been forced to demand his attention on a lieutenant that had just been brought in screaming in agony with a broken leg.
Christine had just chalked it up to Gaila’s buoyant charm and her usual affect on human men. She had meant to go over and cheer Gaila up herself, but she had developed an awful headache at that point and had been forced to go away and medicate herself.
Janice Rand had been escorted to Sickbay by a very concerned Kirk, despite her protestations that she was fine and not ill. She looked horrendously embarrassed and was blushing a very becoming pink as Kirk explained to Christine that he had brought her a cup of coffee, her usual blend, and she had taken one sip before vomiting spectacularly over the floor of his ready room.
“I have no idea why I did that,” Janice confided to Christine as she escorted her to a private, curtained area. “I love coffee. It’s just that suddenly the taste and the smell were different. Vile. Disgusting.”
The basic scans that Christine ran showed no viral or bacteriological infection. Janice was desperate to get back to work, or at least find a cupboard to hide in until she stopped blushing. Christine sent the longer scan to the computer to run, and cleared Janice for light duty pending the outcome of the tests.
Two hours later, Uhura reported feeling extremely tired and light-headed, despite sleeping more than she usually did. Three hours after that was the first time Christine lost control of her stomach.
By this point, alarm bells were ringing in the CMO’s head. The computer had flagged the visiting logs for his attention; given that nobody knew what had happened to the people on the ill-fated away team, he had programmed a sub-routine in the medical computers to collate and compare any additional information about the crew members in the months following their return from captivity.
His face paled as he scanned the list of complaints. Taken separately, he could see why nobody on his team had run the one test that could confirm or deny his suspicions about any of the women but he couldn’t believe that none of the women themselves would suspect what was happening to their bodies. Although, he allowed, drumming his fingers on the table, given that they were all using the supposedly one hundred percent effective, Starfleet Medical-approved contraceptive medication, there would be no reason for any of them to think that they were pregnant. Certainly, not all of them would be in sexual relationships.
His head snapped up as a wan-looking blonde woman exited the staff lavatory and walked slowly past his office window.
Christine, he thought in horror. She had been on the landing party and she had been the female representative of the Medical division that the Aldebarans had requested. He knew there had been something odd about the request for an evenly-split gendered landing party. Cultural tolerance lectures be damned, it had just seemed off to him. Jim had shrugged his shoulders in a “what can you do?” gesture and got Spock to adjust the party to fit the Aldebaran requirements. Hence Gaila, Christine and Janice Rand’s inclusion, as well as some of the male scientists that were more used to lab work than diplomatic functions.
He sighed. Clearly, this was a matter that needed to be handled with extreme sensitivity.
“Chapel!” he bellowed.
She appeared at the doorway a minute later, looking irritated.
“There’s a comm. system for a reason, you know,” she sniped.
“I prefer the old fashioned approach.” He grinned as he gestured to the chair opposite his desk. “Sit down, Chris, I need to run some tests.”
“On me?” she asked, sighing as she settled into the chair. “I don’t remember ‘guinea pig’ being part of my job description.”
“Oh shut up,” he said kindly, and began running his tricorder over her. The results made him sigh. It wasn’t conclusive, not without a blood test, but if you knew what you were looking for…
“Tell me Chris,” he asked kindly as he prepared to draw a vial of blood to send to the lab. “Have you been getting tired a lot recently? Throwing up?”
“Tell me a time when we’re not tired,” she snorted, wincing slightly as the blood was drawn. She motioned him away and ran the dermal regenerator unit over the puncture wound herself.
He looked at her knowingly and she sighed.
“I’ve had trouble in the mornings for a few days,” she told him unwillingly. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Maybe I’m just reacting to the synthesised food. They’ve changed the programs again.”
“I don’t want to unduly alarm you,” he said slowly. “But if I’m right, there may be more to it than just food sensitivity.”
She looked at him through narrowed eyes.
“Shit,” she breathed.
“Exactly,” he concluded.
“But the shot…” she argued, and then trailed off. “If they can make whole cities disappear, they could probably fiddle with body chemistry.”
“Let’s not put the cart before the horse,” he soothed, standing up. “I’ll get the lab to run this sample. I may be wrong.”
She looked at him bleakly. They both knew how many times his diagnoses were wrong.
“Get them to run it quickly,” she stressed.
“Top priority,” he agreed. “Call in every person on the away team, men and women, and get samples of their blood to test.”
“Oh my God,” Christine said in horror. “Len, there were so many of us.”
“Don’t panic,” he said firmly. “This could all be nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. It was definitely something. In fact, there were a total of fifteen somethings that were going to be somebodies in about forty weeks, give or take a few weeks for the vagaries of cross-species breeding.
Naturally, given the situation, everyone was shocked. Some of the female crew were extremely angry, and McCoy understood that completely. Choosing to bring a life into the universe was a very personal decision, and not one that should be forced on unwilling people. And not one woman who had beamed down to Aldebar had been willing or expecting to get pregnant. Some women were sobbing uncontrollably. Some were pacing, deep in thought. Some merely sat, rubbing their abdomens, staring at nothing as they processed the information.
To a man, the male contingent of the landing team were in a state of complete and total panic
“You mean we…and they…” Kirk said intelligently.
“It’s incredibly likely,” McCoy said. “It’s probably why they specified an equal gender split.”
“But…who?” spluttered Scotty, waving a hand in the general direction of the women. “I mean…which?”
“There’s no way to tell,” McCoy sighed. “Not right now. Not until twelve weeks. That’s if you decide to continue the pregnancies, of course.”
Silence fell in the room. Even the sobs became muffled. Eventually Kirk spoke again.
“This news has come as a shock to everybody,” he said gravely. “Obviously, we’re all going to need time to process what has happened.”
“What will happen to us?” one of the security women urgently. “Can we have our babies here? I don’t want to leave the Enterprise.”
There were nods from around the room.
“We all know Starfleet policy is changing,” Kirk replied. “There’s definitely been a shift towards the idea of allowing children of serving officers to live on starships. But there’s been no ruling yet on the issue.”
He faced fifteen formidable female stares.
“Although, I get the feeling that one may come fairly quickly,” he allowed. “Everybody is now relieved of duty for twenty four hours, and I’m ordering mandatory sessions with Dr Noel, ship’s psychiatrist, to be taken sometime in the next two days.”
“It would be illogical to remove both the captain and the first officer from duty,” Spock pointed out.
“Overruled,” snapped McCoy.
There was a brief exchange of eyebrows, and, unusually, Spock relented.
“I’m going to tell Sulu to find an empty piece of space and sit in it while I get in touch with Command,” Kirk told McCoy and Spock as the rest of the ill-fated landing party started to leave the meeting room.
“You’re alright, Jim?” McCoy asked, catching his friend’s wrist.
“I’m going to be a father, Bones, I’m twenty different types of alright,” Kirk grinned, but McCoy saw the tension in his muscles and the bead of sweat on his forehead.
Spock waited until Kirk had left the room before turning to McCoy.
“It is my belief that the captain is lying,” he said in a tone that sounded almost conversational.
McCoy rolled his eyes.
“No shit, Sherlock. He’s terrified. We’re all terrified.”
Spock looked at him solemnly.
“Well, apart from you,” McCoy corrected himself. “I’m sure that impending parenthood will have no affect on your Vulcan sang froid.”
“Indeed not,” Spock replied. “Lieutenant Uhura and I have discussed the possibility of reproducing, and we are both in favour of the concept. The child will arrive earlier than scheduled, but it will be no less welcomed, I am sure.”
Spock’s infuriating sense of calm superiority was guaranteed to rile McCoy on the best of days, and nobody could ever say that this classed as one of the good days.
“That’s assuming that Lieutenant Uhura is the pregnant with your child, Spock,” McCoy said nastily. “There’s no way of knowing how the Aldebarans worked that out. Any man could be the father of her child. Hendricks, Scotty…hell, it could be me!”
He beamed widely as he smacked Spock companionably on the shoulder. You had to be an expert at reading Spock’s body language to tell, but McCoy had served long enough with the man to see that Spock was having the Vulcan equivalent of a temper tantrum.
“All possibilities must be considered, doctor, no matter how disturbing,” Spock said stiffly. “After all, the thought of Lieutenant Chapel being the mother of a human/Vulcan hybrid must be an unsettling one for you.”
He nodded stiffly to McCoy and left. McCoy gaped like a goldfish for a good ten seconds, then the urge to see Christine became stronger than he could bear. He knew exactly where she would be. He ordered up a flask of peppermint tea and some ginger biscuits from the synthesisers, and headed off to find her.
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Author: fringedweller
Schmoop Bingo Fill: Pregnancy
Rating: PG, for a little swear word
Warnings: Right, well. This is for schmoop_bingo, so it's going to get sappy sooner or later. If that's not your thing, stay away. I also seemed to get a ridiculous number of prompts that had something to do with babies, so my aim to write a fic for every prompt on my card means that pregnancy and babies will abound.
The last time I mentioned a baby in fic, some people got offended. I have no doubt that despite this being schmoopy fic, I'm going to upset somebody this time around too. So, fair warning. If pregnancy or babies or any topic related is an issue for you, don't complain to me afterwards. I'm really not going to care.
Disclaimer: Seriously, not mine and no money is being made.
Summary: It was a few weeks later, with her head down the toilet as she threw up the meagre breakfast she had been able to stomach, that Christine was reminded of the fact that on the Enterprise, normal was an extremely relative term.
She came to with a groan, her head absolutely pounding. The sheer whiteness of the room she found herself in hurt her eyes, and it took her a minute or two to get her bearings. Christine pulled herself into a sitting position, yanking the silky white material covering her body up as it slid off. She was naked underneath it, but a quick check revealed no apparent injuries.
She had been laying on something that looked like a cross between a biobed and an altar. The room smelled a lot like sickbay, antiseptic with a hint of industrial cleanser, and apart from the altar bed it contained no furniture at all.
A frantic pounding on one of the walls startled her, and she hurriedly wrapped the silky sheet firmly around her breasts.
Dying unexpectedly in bizarre situations was a hazard of life in Starfleet, but she’d be damned if she was going to do it naked.
She made her way on unsteady feet towards the sound of the noise, and was relieved to hear a familiar, worried voice.
“Christine? Chris, are you in there?”
“I’m here,” she called thankfully. “Len, I’m behind the wall. I’m okay.”
“Hold on,” he replied, sounding a lot happier. “I’ve almost got it open.”
She took a few steps backwards and after a few minutes a part of the wall panel shifted towards her, groaning and scraping along the floor. She heard a determined grunt, and the wall panel shifted a little further, letting her catch a glimpse of McCoy’s face.
He had been smooth shaven when they beamed down to the planet’s surface as part of the diplomacy team; over the last few years, she had learned to judge the passage of time by the amount of stubble that erupted on his chin. By the length of the growth she saw now, they had been separated from their group for about two days.
“I can get through the gap,” she told him, and he backed off to give her room. She had to suck her stomach in, but she made it through. The room he was in was exactly the same as hers, and he had been forced to make his clothing out of his sheet as well. It was wrapped around his hips, displaying a broad chest and surprisingly well-defined hipbones.
She dragged her attention upwards; ogling your department head, even if he was a friend, and a friend that had been making less than subtle overtures recently, wasn’t considered good working practice.
Lord, her life was complicated.
It wasn’t as if they didn’t know about the attraction that flared between them; how could you ignore the tension, the raised heartbeats, and, because they were them, the inevitably raised voices?
It was just that they were cowards, basically.
He had a failed marriage and a child he barely saw other than on long-distance video calls. She hadn’t made it as far as the church before being abandoned for five years, then she discovered her fiancé was now a soulless android hell-bent on universal domination.
It was fair to say that they both had commitment issues.
And they worked now, in a weird, symbiotic sort of way. She ran Sickbay, and he was wise enough to let her do so. He performed medical miracles on a daily basis, and she made sure the patients survived post-op. He tweaked her metaphorical ponytails, making her drop the professional perfectionism act occasionally, making her remember that she was human and she had needs too. She reminded him that although she wasn’t technically qualified to remove his head from his ass surgically, she would be happy to try verbally.
They just worked. And despite a growing urge to rip his clothes from his body and ravish him on his big desk, Christine was just too scared to do so because of how it would affect every other part of her life.
What if they didn’t work out? How could she still work with him if they were having screaming rows back in their quarters? What if he hated her weird toes? What if he snored uncontrollably?
And so she kept away from the dangerous edges of their relationship, retreating when the teasing grew too heated, when their sexual subtext seemed in danger of becoming actual text. It hadn’t helped that Len had been pushing harder recently, advancing where she was retreating. It worried her and delighted her all at once. Clearly, he was betting that her toes were just fine and that she was a sound sleeper.
Christine wished she was that brave. She needed some kind of push before she could fall into his arms, though it was nice to see that he was ready to catch her.
“You’re ok?” he asked, sounding concerned.
“Fine,” she reassured him, rubbing her arms. “A little cold, but other than that I’m not harmed.”
“They took everything,” he told her, manfully staring her right in the face and not at her nipples, which were protesting the chill. “Uniforms, communicators, everything.”
“Why?” said Christine, puzzled. “Why did the Aldebarans invite us to a big feast and appear to be friendly, then knock us out and drag us down here?”
He shrugged, and the motion did interesting things to play of muscles across his chest. Christine hoped that he’d do it again soon, then caught herself. Really, Christine? Now?
They decided to bang on the rest of the walls, for the lack of anything else productive to do. Three of the five hexagonal walls just resounded with a dull thud, but McCoy found Janice Rand on the other side of one wall, and Christine roused Spock on another. Both were attired similarly, and when they all exchanged stories, there was a common theme. They had been part of the feast held by the insectoid Aldebarans, they had all retired to their respective chambers in the hive-like living structure and then they had woken here. Spock was sporting stubble to rival McCoy’s, and his sense of time was acute enough to verify Christine’s estimation of the length of their unconsciousness.
Using Spock’s strength, they were able to pull the wall panels aside with slightly more ease; they found Uhura leading the majority of the landing party, the science and security teams, and behind another set of walls were Kirk, Gaila and Scotty.
Nobody was injured; a few had a headache similar to Christine’s, but there was no evidence of harm on behalf of the Aldebarans. When one of the wall panels peeled away to reveal a corridor, they followed it to a large antechamber containing their clothes and communications equipment. Five minutes later they were in contact with one of the many search teams that a frantic Sulu had scouring the planet; seven minutes later they were back on board the ship.
Thorough scans in sickbay revealed no sickness or injury. A sedative had been administered to them through the air filtration system, and they had been kept unconscious for nearly two days. Spock and McCoy ran every test they could think of, but apart from a slightly elevated hormone rate in the females affected, nothing was out of the ordinary. Even that was explainable, McCoy concluded, with the contraceptives that all of the women on the landing party had chosen to take. They basically fooled the body into thinking that it was already pregnant, so no eggs were released to fertilise. Women were fond of the shot because it also eliminated bleeding and menstrual cramps. In fact many, Christine included, chose to take the medication just for that very purpose. The elevated hormone levels, both he and Spock concluded, were entirely within the parameters of normal.
It was a few weeks later, with her head down the toilet as she threw up the meagre breakfast she had been able to stomach, that Christine was reminded of the fact that on the Enterprise, normal was an extremely relative term.
The Enterprise had remained in orbit around the planet for two weeks. All hails sent to the planet were unanswered; an extremely well-armed planetary defence system came on-line and a planet-wide transport blocking shield went up. Scans of the surface showed no trace of the insectoid Aldebaran people. It was of they had never been there. The vast, hive-like cities that the Enterprise crew had visited simply disappeared without a trace. Scotty thought that they could have been very sophisticated holographic projections, a very advanced form of the fledgling holodeck technology they were trialling onboard ship. However, given that any attempt to launch probes towards the planet ended with the probe being destroyed by the automated defence system, the Admiralty thought that discretion was the better form of valour. The Enterprise was ordered out of the system, and onto other missions.
At first, everything had seemed normal. Nobody who had been sedated showed any ill-effects at all. Everyone went back to work. A few people reported nightmares about waking up in the white room again, but the ship’s psychiatrist assured them that this was to be expected and that with time and the regaining of their usual routines, all would be well.
Then, after a few weeks, some of the female crew members that had been on the Aldebaran mission came to sickbay complaining of nausea and dizziness. Gaila had collapsed while on duty and had been rushed to sickbay by her devoted team of computer core engineers. They had remained in an anxious huddle around her bedside until an exasperated M’Benga had shooed them away. He had then stayed at her bedside until Lisa Lawton, the deputy head nurse, had been forced to demand his attention on a lieutenant that had just been brought in screaming in agony with a broken leg.
Christine had just chalked it up to Gaila’s buoyant charm and her usual affect on human men. She had meant to go over and cheer Gaila up herself, but she had developed an awful headache at that point and had been forced to go away and medicate herself.
Janice Rand had been escorted to Sickbay by a very concerned Kirk, despite her protestations that she was fine and not ill. She looked horrendously embarrassed and was blushing a very becoming pink as Kirk explained to Christine that he had brought her a cup of coffee, her usual blend, and she had taken one sip before vomiting spectacularly over the floor of his ready room.
“I have no idea why I did that,” Janice confided to Christine as she escorted her to a private, curtained area. “I love coffee. It’s just that suddenly the taste and the smell were different. Vile. Disgusting.”
The basic scans that Christine ran showed no viral or bacteriological infection. Janice was desperate to get back to work, or at least find a cupboard to hide in until she stopped blushing. Christine sent the longer scan to the computer to run, and cleared Janice for light duty pending the outcome of the tests.
Two hours later, Uhura reported feeling extremely tired and light-headed, despite sleeping more than she usually did. Three hours after that was the first time Christine lost control of her stomach.
By this point, alarm bells were ringing in the CMO’s head. The computer had flagged the visiting logs for his attention; given that nobody knew what had happened to the people on the ill-fated away team, he had programmed a sub-routine in the medical computers to collate and compare any additional information about the crew members in the months following their return from captivity.
His face paled as he scanned the list of complaints. Taken separately, he could see why nobody on his team had run the one test that could confirm or deny his suspicions about any of the women but he couldn’t believe that none of the women themselves would suspect what was happening to their bodies. Although, he allowed, drumming his fingers on the table, given that they were all using the supposedly one hundred percent effective, Starfleet Medical-approved contraceptive medication, there would be no reason for any of them to think that they were pregnant. Certainly, not all of them would be in sexual relationships.
His head snapped up as a wan-looking blonde woman exited the staff lavatory and walked slowly past his office window.
Christine, he thought in horror. She had been on the landing party and she had been the female representative of the Medical division that the Aldebarans had requested. He knew there had been something odd about the request for an evenly-split gendered landing party. Cultural tolerance lectures be damned, it had just seemed off to him. Jim had shrugged his shoulders in a “what can you do?” gesture and got Spock to adjust the party to fit the Aldebaran requirements. Hence Gaila, Christine and Janice Rand’s inclusion, as well as some of the male scientists that were more used to lab work than diplomatic functions.
He sighed. Clearly, this was a matter that needed to be handled with extreme sensitivity.
“Chapel!” he bellowed.
She appeared at the doorway a minute later, looking irritated.
“There’s a comm. system for a reason, you know,” she sniped.
“I prefer the old fashioned approach.” He grinned as he gestured to the chair opposite his desk. “Sit down, Chris, I need to run some tests.”
“On me?” she asked, sighing as she settled into the chair. “I don’t remember ‘guinea pig’ being part of my job description.”
“Oh shut up,” he said kindly, and began running his tricorder over her. The results made him sigh. It wasn’t conclusive, not without a blood test, but if you knew what you were looking for…
“Tell me Chris,” he asked kindly as he prepared to draw a vial of blood to send to the lab. “Have you been getting tired a lot recently? Throwing up?”
“Tell me a time when we’re not tired,” she snorted, wincing slightly as the blood was drawn. She motioned him away and ran the dermal regenerator unit over the puncture wound herself.
He looked at her knowingly and she sighed.
“I’ve had trouble in the mornings for a few days,” she told him unwillingly. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Maybe I’m just reacting to the synthesised food. They’ve changed the programs again.”
“I don’t want to unduly alarm you,” he said slowly. “But if I’m right, there may be more to it than just food sensitivity.”
She looked at him through narrowed eyes.
“Shit,” she breathed.
“Exactly,” he concluded.
“But the shot…” she argued, and then trailed off. “If they can make whole cities disappear, they could probably fiddle with body chemistry.”
“Let’s not put the cart before the horse,” he soothed, standing up. “I’ll get the lab to run this sample. I may be wrong.”
She looked at him bleakly. They both knew how many times his diagnoses were wrong.
“Get them to run it quickly,” she stressed.
“Top priority,” he agreed. “Call in every person on the away team, men and women, and get samples of their blood to test.”
“Oh my God,” Christine said in horror. “Len, there were so many of us.”
“Don’t panic,” he said firmly. “This could all be nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. It was definitely something. In fact, there were a total of fifteen somethings that were going to be somebodies in about forty weeks, give or take a few weeks for the vagaries of cross-species breeding.
Naturally, given the situation, everyone was shocked. Some of the female crew were extremely angry, and McCoy understood that completely. Choosing to bring a life into the universe was a very personal decision, and not one that should be forced on unwilling people. And not one woman who had beamed down to Aldebar had been willing or expecting to get pregnant. Some women were sobbing uncontrollably. Some were pacing, deep in thought. Some merely sat, rubbing their abdomens, staring at nothing as they processed the information.
To a man, the male contingent of the landing team were in a state of complete and total panic
“You mean we…and they…” Kirk said intelligently.
“It’s incredibly likely,” McCoy said. “It’s probably why they specified an equal gender split.”
“But…who?” spluttered Scotty, waving a hand in the general direction of the women. “I mean…which?”
“There’s no way to tell,” McCoy sighed. “Not right now. Not until twelve weeks. That’s if you decide to continue the pregnancies, of course.”
Silence fell in the room. Even the sobs became muffled. Eventually Kirk spoke again.
“This news has come as a shock to everybody,” he said gravely. “Obviously, we’re all going to need time to process what has happened.”
“What will happen to us?” one of the security women urgently. “Can we have our babies here? I don’t want to leave the Enterprise.”
There were nods from around the room.
“We all know Starfleet policy is changing,” Kirk replied. “There’s definitely been a shift towards the idea of allowing children of serving officers to live on starships. But there’s been no ruling yet on the issue.”
He faced fifteen formidable female stares.
“Although, I get the feeling that one may come fairly quickly,” he allowed. “Everybody is now relieved of duty for twenty four hours, and I’m ordering mandatory sessions with Dr Noel, ship’s psychiatrist, to be taken sometime in the next two days.”
“It would be illogical to remove both the captain and the first officer from duty,” Spock pointed out.
“Overruled,” snapped McCoy.
There was a brief exchange of eyebrows, and, unusually, Spock relented.
“I’m going to tell Sulu to find an empty piece of space and sit in it while I get in touch with Command,” Kirk told McCoy and Spock as the rest of the ill-fated landing party started to leave the meeting room.
“You’re alright, Jim?” McCoy asked, catching his friend’s wrist.
“I’m going to be a father, Bones, I’m twenty different types of alright,” Kirk grinned, but McCoy saw the tension in his muscles and the bead of sweat on his forehead.
Spock waited until Kirk had left the room before turning to McCoy.
“It is my belief that the captain is lying,” he said in a tone that sounded almost conversational.
McCoy rolled his eyes.
“No shit, Sherlock. He’s terrified. We’re all terrified.”
Spock looked at him solemnly.
“Well, apart from you,” McCoy corrected himself. “I’m sure that impending parenthood will have no affect on your Vulcan sang froid.”
“Indeed not,” Spock replied. “Lieutenant Uhura and I have discussed the possibility of reproducing, and we are both in favour of the concept. The child will arrive earlier than scheduled, but it will be no less welcomed, I am sure.”
Spock’s infuriating sense of calm superiority was guaranteed to rile McCoy on the best of days, and nobody could ever say that this classed as one of the good days.
“That’s assuming that Lieutenant Uhura is the pregnant with your child, Spock,” McCoy said nastily. “There’s no way of knowing how the Aldebarans worked that out. Any man could be the father of her child. Hendricks, Scotty…hell, it could be me!”
He beamed widely as he smacked Spock companionably on the shoulder. You had to be an expert at reading Spock’s body language to tell, but McCoy had served long enough with the man to see that Spock was having the Vulcan equivalent of a temper tantrum.
“All possibilities must be considered, doctor, no matter how disturbing,” Spock said stiffly. “After all, the thought of Lieutenant Chapel being the mother of a human/Vulcan hybrid must be an unsettling one for you.”
He nodded stiffly to McCoy and left. McCoy gaped like a goldfish for a good ten seconds, then the urge to see Christine became stronger than he could bear. He knew exactly where she would be. He ordered up a flask of peppermint tea and some ginger biscuits from the synthesisers, and headed off to find her.
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