star trex xi fic: name the stars (chapter two) [mccoy/chapel, r]
name the stars (chapter two). star trek xi, r, 2669 words.
She knows, now, hearing his voice, that she'd give anything to be gone from this place, anything to just be sitting beside him again.
{index.}
{previous.}
chapter two.
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
{litany in which certain things are crossed out; richard siken.}
The murmuring subsides.
Christine kneels, numb with horror, and sifts through the dust and delicate remnants of bone that was once Lieutenant Medina. She picks up a curving fragment of skull, and it breaks apart in her hand.
The others stare at her as she stands, and she clenches her hand into a fist. “Doctor Maji,” she says. “You’d better start from the beginning.”
“Yes,” Maji says. “Yes, all right.”
Christine backs away from the shadowed hallway into the brilliantly lit office, already feeling hot under the glaring lights. Outside, the night is velvet-dark, the deepest black she’s ever seen. Maji perches on the edge of her desk, and Christine stands between Kostya and Blake; there’s a stunned and broken look on Blake’s face as she clings to her phaser, and Kostya’s breathing is wild and uneven. She knows she might soon have to treat them for shock, but she isn’t entirely sure that someone else shouldn’t be doing the same for her.
Maji smoothes down the front of her uniform unsteadily. “We began our mission here, what, nearly a year ago now? More than that.” She shakes her head. “You lose track of time here, you see. We started on the surface, at what seemed like the most significant center of civilization on the planet - oh, they call it a city back home, but it’s hardly that - ”
“Little pockets of life in the hills,” Kostya says suddenly through still-white lips. “I read the reports your team’s been sending back.”
“Yes, exactly,” Maji says. “The population must have been so tiny - nearly nonexistent - but they were here, they were humanoid, and their culture was positively thriving, their artistic heritage was just fascinating, you really should see it, Doctor…?”
“Nurse,” Christine says. “Nurse Christine Chapel.”
It’s a bit odd to be doing introductions, after all this.
“Nurse Chapel,” Maji agrees. “They were clearly advancing further and further, doing crude work with metal, making huge technological strides - but then they disappeared. Apart from their homes and what’s left of their belongings, there’s no trace of what happened to them. No bodies, no evidence of any massive cull, and short of some outside race taking them all off-planet at once, they certainly didn’t leave, they hadn’t come close to developing that kind of technology.”
“So?” Christine says.
“So,” Maji says. “So here’s what we think - what we know happened.”
She twists around to grab a padd and pulls up a schematic on a half-shattered screen, a rendering of what looks like a cave or a shaft of some kind sunk deep into the side of a mountain.
“A month ago, we stumbled across this place. We thought it was just another hole in the rock, but it turns out to be incredibly, impossibly deep. W still hadn’t gotten near to mapping the bottom of it, before - ” She swallows, and flips to a new window, displaying meticulously recorded hieroglyphs. “Before. There were warnings painted on the mouth of the tunnel, here, and here - ”
Kostya leans in over her shoulder to examine the hieroglyphs more closely, eyes keen, like he might lose himself in research and forget the horror of what’s just happened. “Oh, that’s beautiful,” he breathes.
“Isn’t it?” Maji says. “We haven’t - hadn’t - quite managed to translate them entirely, but the thrust of it is fairly clear.”
“What, ‘not good, run away’?” Christine says, but she says it under her breath.
“In essence,” Maji says, shooting her a wry look. “We ignored the warnings, of course. We kept going and - we woke it up. Whatever it is. The same as they must have done. It took half of our team in that first few minutes, before we discovered its aversion to light.”
“‘It’,” Christine repeats, and wipes at the sweat at the back of her neck. “Not them, it? It sounded like a whole lot of something to me. Do you think it’s some kind of hive mind, or - ”
Maji shrugs tightly. “Your theory’s as good as mine,” she says, “but you saw what it did to that man. There’s thought there. There’s malevolence there. Which is why Kohl is so determined to keep us here, to keep anyone or any information from leaving. He’s just - just trying to stop it from spreading further. And I understand that, I do, but I also want to live, Nurse Chapel, you know?”
Her eyes are bright again, and Christine carefully avoids looking back over her shoulder at the dark hallway. Blake shifts uneasily beside her.
“Okay,” Christine says. “Right. Okay. To get off-planet, we need to shut down that electromagnetic field of Kohl’s. To do that, we need to leave this room. Which means we need lights. Doctor Maji?”
Maji gets up from her desk and moving to the control panel mounted on the wall beside her door. “I can hack the system from here ,” she says, “and I should be able to override Kohl’s work long enough to give you emergency lighting, but as far as the inducer goes… I don’t know. It takes a massive amount of power to maintain it, so if I can interrupt it - I’ll try, at least. ”
Kostya grimaces. “Do you have any idea where he would be?”
Doctor Maji shrugs helplessly. “You brought a floorplan with you,” she says. “That’s as much help as I’d be. I’m staying here. I suppose - I’d guess that he’d be down in the northern wing, that’s where he kept his lab. But I haven’t seen him for days. And I’m perfectly happy to keep it like that.”
“We could go,” Kostya tells Christine. “You and I. Take a few of Doctor Maji’s spare lights along with us, track down Kohl’s field inducer, kill it, kill him if we have to, I really don’t care, get the hell off of this rock. Nyeplokha.”
Christine nods slowly. “You’re good with a phaser? In case he does give us trouble?”
“Well,” Kostya says, looking embarrassed, hand playing over the phaser strapped at his hip. “I might be an academic but I am Russian too, you know, Nurse.”
Christine turns to Blake, who’s been silent since Medina - well. Since Medina. “Will you be all right to stay here with Doctor Maji?” she asks, looking her over. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” Blake says, “Honestly, I am.”
Christine checks her pupils and her pulse, as quick a diagnosis than anything her scanner will give her. “If you aren’t, it’s okay, you know, I can give you a shot of - ”
Blake shakes her head; some of the colour is finally coming back to her face, and when she hoists her phaser Christine can see that her narrow dark fingers are no longer trembling. “Medina was - he was - ” Blake sighs, and her eyes flutter closed briefly, and she shakes her head again. “Anyway. It’s not the first time I’ve lost a colleague, and I’m certain it won’t be the last. It’s the job, Nurse. Let’s just get it done.”
Kostya and Christine go about unhooking some of Doctor Maji’s more portable lights while she goes to work on the control pad, both tucking large industrial-strength worksite lights under their arms. Christine takes a deep breath, and Maji lets out a triumphant ah-ha and the lights in the hallway come back up again to half-strength. “I’ll keep working at rerouting his power source from here,” Maji says, “but don’t hold your breath. And I don’t know how long I can keep the lights up, so you’d better be ready.”
“We’ll be back soon,” Kostya promises. “We’ll get rid of it if you can’t.”
“We’ll be here,” Doctor Maji says, and Blake nods firmly.
“Right,” Christine says, and they step back into the dimly-lit hallway.
They walk fast.
It’s slow going, though. The place is a veritable maze of labs and sleeping quarters, and they check every room as they head northward through the complex; Christine has ample time to curse labyrinthine Starfleet architecture as they walk.
She does her best not to look up or out, into the darkness, but after an hour or so she has to ask:
“How long do the nights last here, from what you’ve read?”
Kostya looks upward thoughtfully. “Hmm,” he says. “For this time of year? Thirty-six hours, if my calculations are correct. And they usually are, you know.”
“Oh, hell,” Christine says, and she hitches the light she’s carrying more securely up under her arm.
“Exactly,” Kostya says.
“It’s weird that we haven’t heard anything at from Kohl,” Christine says after a pause, and remembers what McCoy said about crappy pulp horror movies. “Assuming he’s still alive, anyway. I’m expecting some bad villain with a moustache. And a cat. And a tank filled with sharks. Oh, wait.”
Kostya grins, and the lights above suddenly flare into full strength and the communicator Christine is wearing at her hip suddenly chatters with noise.
“Nurse Chapel?” Scotty says, and Christine’s knees go weak with relief.
“Oh thank God,” she says, scrabbling it open. Kostya sets the lights down and leans in close to hear. “Yes. Hello. Hi. We’re here.”
“Lovely to hear you, Nurse,” Scotty says, and his voice is level and cheerful and her hands tremble just a little. “We’d lost you all for a touch there, we were starting to get quite worried up here. Could you tell us what’s going on down there?”
Because she might lose her mind if she says evil shadow piranhas from the deep, she instead decides to elaborate on the more sane-sounding of her problems: “Someone’s set up an electromagnetic field inducer,” she says. “Can you beam us all out now?”
When Scotty answers his voice is grim -
“There’s still too much bloody interference,” he says. “We’re just barely getting a signal from your communicators and your locators now, I wouldn’t want to risk beaming you up here like this. It’d be - ah. Well, messy, to say the least, if my readings are right. We’re going to send someone down in a shuttle to pull you out.”
Christine laughs, a frantic edge to her voice. “No. Don’t. Please don’t send anyone else down here, for the love of God. It’s just - well, can you find the source of the field inducer for us, then?” she asks, mind spinning about desperately. “We have no idea where the hell we’re going, can you at least point us in the right direction?”
There’s a moment of silence. Kostya pulls out the holographic floor plan of the outpost, manipulates it to find where they’re standing now. “That, we can do. It’s to your northeast,” Scotty says, “start walking down the hall to your right,” and then he cuts out and the lights overhead begin to waver and weaken.
“Fuck,” Christine says, dropping the communicator as they scramble to get their portable lights set up in a ring around them before Maji loses the power for good. Kostya flicks them on, and they twist around, desperately trying to find any breaks in their circle of light.
“Christine,” someone else says over the communicator, voice rough and alarmed, and her heart stops - it’s McCoy. “How’re you people holding up down there?”
She suddenly feels very much like crying, for the first time since this whole disaster began. “I’m fine,” she says, kneeling, picking the communicator back up. “We’re fine. We’re alive. Most of us, anyway. Medina - Medina’s dead.”
The lights flicker again.
“I have to go now,” Christine says, and in her rising panic there’s a drawl to her vowels, a faint trace of the Cajun accent she thought she’d purged herself of long ago. She takes in a deep breath, and enunciates more clearly. “We have to keep moving. I meant it, McCoy. Make sure they don’t send anyone else down here. It’s not safe.”
His voice is garbled. “Listen, Chapel,” he says, and then there is a great deal of noisy static before one final “goddamnit” comes through loud and clear.
She smiles shakily. She knows, now, hearing his voice, that she'd give anything to be gone from this place, anything to just be sitting beside him again. “Goodbye,” she says.
“Chapel,” McCoy says again, and then the overhead lights go out with a bang and her communicator goes dead in her hand.
Kostya, still standing, swears violently. The terrible noise rises around them again, chattering and buzzing in the darkness, and what happens next happens very slowly:
There is a loud clunking noise; one of their lights tumbles over and goes out, and while Christine is sitting squarely between the other lights Kostya isn’t; he lets out a hoarse shout of something Russian and incomprehensible; and he is wrenched forward into the shadows.
Christine screams.
She throws herself forward and seizes Kostya around the chest just before he’s yanked away into the blackness, and she pulls back with all her strength. It’s not nearly enough, she braces her feet, screams again, and pulls, and there is a sickening crunch and she falls back against the floor but Kostya come with her -
Or most of him does, anyway. Her stomach heaves; his legs are missing from the knees down, nothing bare bloody tendons and muscle and ripped-away bone, and his stomach and chest are completely mauled apart, leaving guts and organs exposed.
“Oh, my God,” she says, and he’s breathing, he’s still alive, and how is that even possible? She sends a brief prayer of thanks to whoever made Russians so goddamned hardy, but there isn’t time to think - she rips off her satchel and empties its contents, sending vials and hypos and her tricorder clattering across the floor and she fumbles through them desperately, trying to find something to stop him, but he is lying half in her lap, bleeding to death, his intestines spilling out onto the floor and there is nothing she can do.
“Nurse,” Kostya says, lips gray, “Nurse, stop,” and he grabs her hands and holds them tight.
“No,” she says, wrenching away, hands flying as she tries to stop up as many bleeds as she can, “I’m not going to let you die. I won’t. This is too crazy for you to die like this.”
“I know, primum non nocere, but Nurse - Christine - ” Kostya clutches convulsively at her hip, hard enough to bruise. His eyes are dull; he is already slipping away. “I can promise you, trying to keep me alive like this is doing far more harm than good. Let them have me. It’ll be quick.”
“I’m sorry,” Christine says. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“I know you are,” he says, and he breathes in with a wet gurgle and touches her chin, his hands slick with blood. “But it’s not your fault. Just… just tell my mother for me, would you? I’d rather she hear it from you.”
Christine dashes a hand across her eyes. “Of course, you know I will, I’ll - ” She smoothes his hair back and loads a hypospray with shaking fingers. “Let me do this much for you, at least,” she says.
“Thank you,” Kostya manages to choke out, “da svedanya,” and she presses the hypo into his throat and watches as his eyes go dim and then blank and feels as his heartbeat trails off into nothing, and then she tips his body out of the light, into the darkness, and tucks her knees up against her chest and covers her ears as they - as it tears him apart.
Her hands are cold and numb. She folds herself up even closer and curls her bloody fingers into her elbows and stares into the still-seething shadows, resting her wet cheek on her knee.
{next.}