star trex xi fic: name the stars (chapter three) [mccoy/chapel, r]
name the stars (chapter three). star trek xi, 2204 words.
Christine pushes her hair away from her face and her neck; it sticks, sweaty and bloody, to her skin. Reflectively, she thinks, I was sure I’d be better than this.
{index.}
{previous.}
chapter three.
Hold onto your voice. Hold onto your breath. Don’t make a noise, don’t leave the room until I come back from the dead for you. I will come back from the dead for you. This could be a city. This could be a graveyard. This could be the basket of a big balloon. Leave the lights on. Leave a trail of letters like those little knots of bread we used to dream about. We used to do a lot of things. Put your hand to the knob, your mouth to the hand, pick up the bread and devour it. I’m in the hallway again, I’m in the hallway. The radio’s playing my favorite song. Leave the lights on. Keep talking. I’ll keep walking toward the sound of your voice.
{you are jeff; richard siken.}
Christine puts her head between her knees.
“Right,” she says, and breathes deeply, lifting her head, staring into one of the lights until her eyes sting. “Okay. You can do this.”
She can’t, though; that’s the thing. She’s too afraid to move, still half-dazed with sleep, her heart still pounding from her nightmares. She’s too frightened to even stand up, and even if she could gets her frozen limbs moving, well - where exactly would she be going? She can’t just pick up her lights and walk down the hall and go on her merry way, the logistics of it are just impossible, she’s stuck unless Blake and Doctor Maji miraculously manage everything from Maji’s office, and the odds of that are so slim they’re practically nonexistent. She can’t do anything.
Christine pushes her hair away from her face and her neck; it sticks, sweaty and bloody, to her skin. Reflectively, she thinks, I was sure I’d be better than this. The sims at the Academy were nothing like this; those were giggly, giddy affairs that everyone went through with their classmates, their friends. The klaxons, the smoke, the shuddering walls and flashing lights - they were just props. Window dressing. They taught you nothing of the real thing, of how to handle yourself when you’re thrown to the sharks. And her time on the Enterprise, it’s done nothing to prepare her for being so utterly alone and helpless.
She blinks the spots from her eyes and clasps her trembling hands around her knees.
Something chitters at her from the shadows, and she shudders with horror. I’m not ready, she thinks, wanting to curl back into sleep and pretend it’s not happening, but it’s enough to push her out of immobility. Feeling sick to her stomach with fear she slowly stretches her legs out before her and braces her hands on the slick tiled floor. It takes several minutes before she’s able to stand, but the thing is, she does stand up, and she’s more proud of herself than she’d care to articulate.
“Okay,” Christine says again, and takes stock of her situation.
She is alone; she is in the dark. She has three working lights left; a scattered array of medical supplies; and her communicator, which is remaining stubbornly silent. It’s been - oh, say six hours since she lost Kostya, which means that dawn is still a long way off. She also has an army of bloodthirsty goddamned shadow piranhas nipping at her heels, just waiting for her to step a toe out of her circle of light.
She looks past the lights and into the dark again. She can’t see anything, can’t distinguish one thing from the next in the utter blackness, but that’s okay; she figures she’s probably better off that way.
Her hands tied, at least for now, Christine bends again and begins to gather up her abandoned hypos and vials. Most of them are crusted and smeared with dried blood, and one or two are smashed irreparably; she does her best to pick the blood off with her fingers but abandons it as a bad job after a few minutes, and when that’s done and they’re all tucked away in their proper spots she stands again and swings her bag back over the shoulder and looks around uncertainly, her hands playing over the thick strap.
Northeast, Scotty had said, but since falling asleep she’s become utterly disoriented. She entertains the notion, briefly, of picking up her lights and moving them foot-by-foot down the hall without breaking her circle of light, but she doesn’t have any clue which way she should be moving anyway. She has no internal compass; she used to get lost in the library as a child, for God’s sake, and there are no giveaways or signposts to point her in the right direction.
“Fuck,” Christine says softly, tiredly, and she’s ready to give up when a staticky humming noise fills the air above the usual murmuring of the shadows and her heart leaps and she drops into a defensive crouch, hand reaching at her waist for a phaser that isn’t there. Christ, she thinks, and curses herself for not taking Kostya’s phaser off his body, and then she wonders what good, exactly, a phaser would do her anyway.
But she doesn’t have time to do more than that because the emergency lights flicker slowly to life above her. Not the full lights - which would mean that the EM field inducer was shut down, which of course would be far too much luck, more luck than the universe is willing to slide Christine’s way - but enough that the shadows are dispersed and she can do something.
She gets back to her feet and is starting down the hall at full speed before she hears a half-weary, half-amused voice at her back.
“I think you’ll find that you’re headed the wrong way,” a man says, and Christine stumbles to a halt and turns, wishing harder than ever that she had some kind of weapon, and speculates momentarily about the efficacy of a bootheel to the head.
The man is tall and lanky, and his Starfleet uniform is dishevelled. Ironically enough, he does have a goatee. I’ll have to tell Kostya, she thinks, and then her throat closes up. “Kohl,” she manages to say, and he nods.
“I’m afraid so,” Kohl says. “Won’t you come with me?”
Christine notices the phaser in his hand, swallows, and nods, and he laughs and peers at her face in the wavering half-light.
“Sorry!” he says, and tucks the phaser into the small of his back. “Sorry. I’m not trying to threaten you, I swear. But let’s not linger, yes?”
“I don’t trust you,” she says stoutly, but she joins him anyway and his mouth sobers behind the dark goatee.
“Fair enough,” he says, and touches her arm lightly and ushers her down the hall in the opposite direction. “My lab’s this way. I came as soon as I knew you were out here, Rucha just managed to get a message through to me. She’s not terribly pleased with me.”
“And you wonder why?” Christine asks. He’s leading her effortlessly through the maze of halls and it’s very odd: for all that he’s caused her so much trouble, he’s completely disarming. “You’re doing your best to keep us in this godforsaken planet. It’s bound to leave a girl resentful. I know the feeling.”
His black eyes are inscrutable. “Weren’t there supposed to be two of you?”
Christine tries to talk, and finds that she can’t. She nods.
“I’m sorry,” Kohl says gently. “This place…” He trails off and Christine realizes that he’s indicating a door to her right.
“Well,” she says. “Exactly. This place.”
“Please,” he says, and she goes in.
It’s a lab, that much is clear, the counters and benches littered with scraps of machines and metal. Some kind of hastily strung-together rig dominates the back wall, wires spilling out of a soot-streaked casing, and she breathes in unsteadily. That’s the field inducer, she’s sure of it, and when she glances at Kohl’s face it’s clear that he’s aware that she knows.
She perches on a stool, and he says abruptly, leaning into a steel counter, “How much do you know about this planet?”
“Not much at all,” she admits. “Kostya was the only one who knew anything about it, and he’s... I lost him. He’s dead,” she bites out.
“I’m going to sound awful here,” Kohl says, “and I’m sure you already think I am, but - it’s probably better that way. The fewer people who know anything about this place..."
Christine opens and closes her mouth. There’s no way she can respond to that without hurting him. “Doctor Maji said she thought there was a hive mind to them,” she says finally, cautiously. “It. You think it has sentience?”
Kohl laughs, sounding slightly unhinged, and he rubs a hand over his chin as if realizing it. “Not just sentience, but ill purpose,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s clever. Oh, God, it’s clever, as any devil from the old Earth traditions. You must have seen that,” he adds, and Christine thinks: did that light really go out on its own, before it took Kostya? Starfleet tech doesn’t just fail like that -
“Being here, it gets in your head, as you can see,” he goes on somewhat more wryly. “But you see it, don’t you? No one should know about this place. And if, my God, if it escaped with one of us - ”
“But don’t you understand that if none of us come back, Starfleet will only send more people out here?” she says. “It won’t just vanish into the ether. They won’t understand, they won’t just forget about it. Come back. Or let us go. Let us explain what we know, what happened here, and no one else needs to ever set foot on this place again.”
His hands are knotted together, his knuckles white. “I can’t,” he says.
Christine touches the back of his hand. “You can,” she says gently. “You can’t hole up in this room forever - you don’t want to die. You don’t want to be responsible for more people dying.”
“Don’t put that on me,” he says, his voice sharp. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t - this was only my third assignment out the Academy,” he says plaintively, and Christine takes his hand.
“I know,” she says. “God, do I know. But don’t let all those deaths be for nothing. Don’t let it start all over again.”
She watches the rise and fall of his chest, wants to say more but knows it would be pushing it. At last, he raises his head and gives her a weak sort of half-smile, lips pale behind the goatee. “Fine,” he says. “You’re right. Fine.”
“Really?” she says, startled.
Kohl gets up, crosses the room and starts to rip apart the inducer, unwiring it from the main power center. “You go,” he says over his shoulder, and Christine has a brief moment to think surely this was too easy before a massive bang startles her out of her seat and smoke starts billowing out from the casing.
Christine presses a hand to her lips. “Tell me,” she says, fingers clenching white-knuckled on her communicator, “tell me that didn’t just happen.”
Kohl steps back, the tips of his fingers black, and when he looks back at her his face is horrified. “I’m sorry,” he says as the lights waver and flicker. “I’m so sorry, that - that wasn’t me.”
“Chapel to Enterprise,” she says into the communicator, doing her best to keep her voice level, hoping to God that he managed to take disable the inducer before they - it - got to the power. “Get us the hell out of here now.”
Not like this, she thinks. Not like this.
There’s a loud crashing noise outside the room. Nothing’s coming out of her communicator but garbled nonsense; someone’s trying to speak to her, Scotty, she thinks, hearing snatches of “can’t get a lock” and a muffled “fucking hell” as the sound cuts in and out.
The signal clarifies and holds. “Christine,” she hears, and it’s McCoy, voice calm and firm. “We’ve beamed out Blake and Maji, but there’s still too much interference in your direction. You hold on, honey. We’re getting you - ”
The communicator cuts out again, and she nearly screams in frustration.
Kohl goes to the door. “Hallway’s lost lights,” he says, and steps hurriedly away into the center of the room. Christine wraps her arms around her stomach and stands as still as she can, like that might help or something, oh God. She turns her face upwards to the transparisteel ceiling, staring up at the black sky; there’s no way to see the Enterprise from down here, but she thinks, I don’t want to die, and not without seeing him again, and she reaches out and seizes Kohl’s forearm. He stares at her, pulling away automatically.
“Shut up,” she says, “and let me save your life.”
The words aren’t out of her mouth before she can feel the weird energy of the transporter start to tingle through her bones, and her knees go weak with relief, but the lights give out with a violent bang and darkness swallows her up and Kohl is shouting beside her and she screams because the shadow is upon her -
{next.}