A Mighty Fine Man - Part 2/4

[zauzat]

Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

“Of course I’m damned well meant to be here, I’m the supervising medic. Look at your confounded briefing notes if you don’t believe me. No, I’ve no idea why Hudson was replaced, ask him your damned self. Now where’s Pike? Of course I mean Captain Pike, how many Pikes do you know? Running an aquarium are you?”

Pike stuck his head out of the observation room. He’d suspected that he recognised that voice.

“In here, doctor, and stop browbeating my staff. Now what in hell are you doing here?”

“I’m the supervising medic,” McCoy replied looking smug. “Check your brief!”

Pike looked down at his padd where Hudson’s name had indeed disappeared and McCoy’s had mysteriously replaced it.

“Very well doctor, let’s agree that I won’t ask and you won’t tell. But why would you want to supervise a sim? It is long, slow stuff, especially this one, and in all likelihood you won’t be needed.”

McCoy looked through the observation window to the floor below where cadets were busy taking their places on the bridge and the associated units. “Maybe I wanted to see you.” He flicked a quick sideways glance at Pike. Before the captain could work out if he was serious he continued. “Actually it’s Jim’s first major sim. He knows you’re supervising and he’s desperate to impress you. I’m here to pick up the pieces as and when he does something appallingly stupid.”

“Me? Kirk?” Pike stared at him in surprise. “Kirk never does anything except see how cheeky he can be with me.”

McCoy gave him that scathingly raised eyebrow that suggested so effortlessly that the recipient was a complete idiot. “He worships the ground you walk on. He’s always damned well talking about you, it gets really old, I have to say. If I had a credit for every time he’s retold the story of how you recruited him, I’d be drinking a much finer brand of bourbon.” The doctor patted the hip flask concealed in the pocket of his pants.

Pike rolled his eyes. Alcohol was of course banned on the premises but he figured he’d best save his energies to call McCoy on his more important infractions.

“All that stuff about challenging him to do better than his dad? My god, how clichéd can you get? He rips the piss out of you every time he retells the story but deep down he believes every god-damned word and he’s desperate to prove to you that he can do it.”

Pike winced inwardly at that little reminder. Considering how he’d come to feel about living in the shadow of his own father he’d had some balls to challenge Kirk like that. It had been a spur of the moment utterance, a final shout of frustration at the waste of talent and intelligence he’d seen lying in that filthy bar. Still, if it worked, it worked.

“Ready to go, sir,” called an aide. Pike gave the nod. He was serving a dual purpose here, both as overall supervisor of the sim but also as assessor of the instructors who were doing the hands-on management. It meant that he had little to do besides stand back and watch, noting any problems. This set of instructors was particularly good and he expected little to go wrong.

That at least was his justification for bringing the doctor into his private observation room. It was going to be a long afternoon and McCoy certainly made for entertaining company, as long as his invective was directed at someone other than Pike. And surrounded as they were by instructors, McCoy could hardly do anything too inappropriate.

Below them the cadets were in position, beginning the launch procedures of the ship. It was a mixed year test with third-year students in the command positions and second-years as the ensigns. It was the first major full event sim that the second-years would have taken part in. Up to now they had just done short simulations based around a single event. This sim was programmed to last for up to five hours and the students had no idea what they could expect to happen.

“What’s all the fuss with this particular sim, anyway?” McCoy asked. “Some people were saying that it’s really easy, others that it’s a monster.”

“It’s both,” Pike replied, watching as the cadets powered up the ship, somewhat awkwardly but with no major errors. “And that’s why it’s so challenging. There is no major event, no clash with Klingons or sudden catastrophic systems failure. Nothing will go wrong at all for the first 30 minutes by which time you’ll see various cadets getting bored and beginning to fool around.” He glanced at McCoy. “Particularly the likes of Kirk, young, cocky and stuck as an ensign in engineering with nothing to do.

“And then things start to go wrong, small things. A glitch in the communications system, and then confusing orders from HQ that can’t be verified. A bug in the navigation system that can’t easily be fixed. That’s assuming they notice it. Some crews just fly round in circles for hours quite unaware. Then some random inexplicable power outages in engineering. And so it goes. Each problem minor but they pile one on top of another. And each of the various possible solutions is programmed to set off another cascade of errors.

“The pressure mounts hour by hour as they are trapped in an ever more suffocating maze of failures. Some cadets find it extremely stressful. A few have walked out mid sim and dropped out of the command programme. Personally I think it’s too tough for the first sim, but this is what the brass want, so here we are.”

“Well shut my mouth! So you are capable of criticizing the brass. I thought you worshipped at the feet of authority,” said McCoy sardonically. “You seem so fucking proper all the time.”

“Proper gets me places, McCoy. It keeps my career on track. It gets me the authority that then lets me make a difference. There is a lot to be said for going with the flow rather than fighting your way upstream all the time, as you seem to do.”

McCoy ignored him ostentatiously. “So is there a solution to this sim?”

“Yes, there is but you’d be surprised how few crews manage to find it. They need to solve each problem patiently and thoroughly as it arises and revisit their solutions when they appear to cause more problems. The programme is designed to offer several seductive ways out that appear to offer one grand gesture that will solve everything. Those will of course lead to disaster. But so few cadets can resist the drama of it. We’ll see how these ones do.”

Below them the cadet captain seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly, issuing all sorts of orders in a deep voice that he presumably thought suited his importance. Several of the cadets in security were starting a surreptitious card game, while in engineering various boys were clearly trying to chat up two pretty girls. Jim meanwhile was toggling restlessly between views to look at different readouts and systems.

“Nothing will happen for another 10 minutes. So, amuse me, doctor. That’s the only reason I allowed you in here.”

McCoy snorted with laughter. “Well, that’s a sure way to kill the conversation. What do you want to know?”

“And that’s a dangerous question.” Pike looked levelly at him. Oh hell, why not? The doctor was hardly given to being tactful himself. “I want to know why, with your medical resume, you went down in flames at Emory and washed up here, as it was memorably described to me, on a spring tide of alcohol.”

“Christ, you don’t pull your punches, do you?” McCoy turned away from him and stared down at the engineering unit, where Jim had called up a 360 degree holo projection of the lithium matrix and was slowly rotating it with a puzzled frown on his face.

Then he looked back at Pike, the challenge of confrontation once again in his eyes.

“My father-in-law, who was chief administrator at Emory, found me in a supply cupboard, fooling around.”

“Not with your wife, I take it.”

“No, not with his daughter. With his son.”

Pike burst out laughing. McCoy cast him a venomous look. “It wasn’t funny.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t, not at the time, but it damned well is now. Come on McCoy, you have to admit that it is.”

McCoy managed a sardonic smile. “One day it will probably be hilarious, about a century from now.”

Below them Jim was trying to get his superior officer interested in an anomaly that he had detected, trying to persuade him that the read-out for the micron alignment was not accurately reflecting what could be seen on the system holo. “That’s impressive,” Pike commented. “I’ve never seen the first engineering error picked up so fast. On the bridge both comms and navigation are showing errors but no one’s noticed yet.”

They watched Jim argue vigorously with his boss, who was clearly sceptical. McCoy had expected him to simply try and out-shout the man, but instead he set about patiently persuading the others one by one that his analysis had merit. Some clearly followed his arguments, others apparently just gave in to his charm. Within five minutes he had them all working together to test possible solutions.

“Impressive,” Pike murmured to himself. “That boy will go far.”

On the bridge someone had finally noticed that they were flying around in circles. Unlike Jim’s engineering department, there was a whirl of contradictory orders and energetic disagreements. A sudden malfunction of the stabilizers had the entire bridge shaking. The glitch vanished almost as soon as it had manifested but left a notably panicked senior crew in its wake.

Pike glanced across at the doctor. “You’re not off the hook, McCoy. I’ve not forgotten your little bombshell. Why did you marry the daughter if you wanted the son?”

McCoy glared down at the escalating chaos below them. “It’s a long story.”

“We have a long time, doctor. There are hours more of things to go wrong down there. Feel free to tell me at your leisure.”

McCoy was silent for so long that Pike had assumed that he was refusing to take the bait, but at last he spoke.

“The Darnells, my wife’s family, are old family friends of the McCoys. Both families have been providing some of Georgia’s top doctors for generations. I grew up with Jocelyn, friends in the playground, rivals in the classroom. And both of us hero-worshipped her older brother, Andrew. He was extremely intelligent, athletic too, and kind to two younger kids who trailed after him endlessly.

“My father was a doctor and a very good one, a brilliant researcher but always happy to devote time to the most trivial ailments of his patients. A man who was really good with people. Quite unlike me.” McCoy sighed.

Below them order had been restored on the bridge by the captain who had called up the vertical holo display and was justifying an overarching solution to several acolytes. Those officers that he had shouted down had slunk back to their stations and were whispering among themselves about the inconsistent readouts they were seeing. “And so begins the slide into hell,” Pike remarked.

“Indeed, and so began the slide into hell,” McCoy said softly, his mind clearly somewhere else entirely. “My father contracted pyrrhoneuritis. The media write about it as if it flares up suddenly and kills within months. But in fact patients battle with the symptoms for years, fatigue, memory loss, irrational anger, withdrawal. It may be in the system for a decade, even two, before it finally overwhelms the immune system and enters the death spiral. Daddy almost certainly had it by the time I entered my teens. He knew there was something wrong with him, we all knew it, but no amount of tests could uncover what it was.

“He so wanted me to be a doctor. And it was what I wanted too; he didn’t force me into it. I spent most of my teenage years dreaming about how I would discover what was wrong with him and then find the cure for it. Save his life, win all sorts of prizes, marry Jocelyn, live happily ever after.

“And he wanted me to marry Jocelyn, both families did. They’d been encouraging it ever since we were knee high to a bullfrog. They thought we were perfect together and so did I - until I turned sixteen. Andrew had been away for a summer vacation. He was at medical school by then. When he came back, taller, broader in the shoulder, hair bleached blond by a summer of surfing in Mexico, my stomach flipped in quite a different way. Jocelyn was my friend. But he was my fantasy.”

Below them the sim chamber was abruptly plunged into darkness, the shocked silence broken by the slowly rising wail of one warming alarm after another flipping on. The emergency lighting flickered on to reveal that the fixes that had been found in both engineering and on the bridge with navigation and comms had all malfunctioned, throwing up a new round of even more perplexing errors. Jim was now effectively running engineering and his crew began patiently, systematically retesting each solution and observing how and where the errors were being produced.

“So why stick with Jocelyn then?” Pike asked. “Even if Andrew didn’t want you, you can’t have been the only gay man in Georgia.”

“You have to understand. My people didn’t do that. Oh, we weren’t intolerant or bigoted, we certainly weren’t homophobic.” McCoy pronounced the word with bitter emphasis. “We understood that homosexuality was biological. But we were good Christian people. Not bible-thumping fundamentalists. We knew that the bible was a metaphor. And we certainly weren’t evangelicals. Nothing so tacky.

“When I first got an inkling of my tastes, I tried asking my Grammy, my father’s mother, what we thought of gays. She was very much the matriarch, the arbiter of what we all believed in. She explained to me, while standing at the stove baking cookies for me and all the cousins, that we distinguished between being attracted to the same sex which was a state of being and acting on that attraction which was a choice. To declare a state of being to be morally abhorrent is clearly ludicrous. But we are all responsible for the choices we make.”

McCoy stared morosely at the chaos below them. A full-on shouting match had broken out between the captain and the first officer. The comms officer was frantically trying a random selection of solutions without keeping track of the effects and the navigator was in tears.

“So acting on homosexual attraction is morally abhorrent,” Pike said softly.

“Exactly. Andrew left shortly afterwards. There was some kind of row with his father and he took himself to Paris to continue his medical studies. It was a terrible scandal. That was another thing that we didn’t do. Go out of state to study. With some of the best hospitals in the world in Atlanta, why would we? Everyone around me was so fucking sure that they had all the answers.

“And then my mother was killed just as I finished high school. The entire family was devastated. I was in pieces although I couldn’t show it. Men didn’t do that. I’d been trying to pluck up the courage to talk to her; I thought she was the one person who might understand. But she was gone and my father was so distant, trapped in his grief and his illness. My Grammy came to live with us to look after him. Who was I to put my selfish, evil longings ahead of the good of the family?”

In the observation next to theirs the instructors were frantically tapping away on their padds. The navigator had stormed off the bridge and the pilot was calling in security to break up the fight between the captain and the first.

“A real bunch of drama queens, this crew,” said Pike.” They are going to fail spectacularly.” He glanced sideways at the doctor who was fiddling obsessively with the catch on his hip flask. Pike wasn’t even sure that he was aware that he was doing it. “You don’t actually have to tell me all this, you know. Not if you don’t want to.”

McCoy shrugged. “In some ways it’s easier to talk to someone I barely know than to tell this to a friend. I’ve never told anyone the entire story.”

“Not even Jim?” Pike asked, curious.

“God no. Jim and I have a very happy understanding, I don’t ask about his past and he doesn’t ask about mine. We both pretend that we emerged from a chrysalis, fully formed, on that shuttle to Starfleet and we get on with moving forward with our lives.”

McCoy hesitated and then fixed Pike with that curiously calculating stare of his that the captain didn’t quite understand. “Besides, I may have ulterior motives for sharing my sordid past with you.”

“Alright then, what happened next?”

McCoy sighed. “I buckled down to my studies. I set out to find a solution to my father’s ever-worsening symptoms. I set out to be the man that Daddy, that Jocelyn, that my Grammy could be proud of.

“With that in mind, I asked Jocelyn to marry me on her nineteenth birthday. Both families were delighted! We settled into a long engagement not seeing that much of each other. I was away at Ole Miss, trying to cram a four year bachelor's degree into three. Joss was just as intelligent as I was but her parents persuaded her to study pharmacology instead. The Darnells own a small, specialized pharma company. And her mother said it would leave her more time to spend with the children.”

“You have children?” Pike asked with surprise.

“No, thank fuck. That was the only disaster that we missed out in the whole sorry affair.” McCoy paused for a moment, as if thinking it over. “I think she liked the long engagement. She had all the romance and the respectability of being a fiancée but saw so little of me that she was free to party as she liked, with whomever she liked. I didn’t care. I was glad of anything that kept her from trying to distract me from my studies.”

Below them the navigator had found her way to the engineering unit where she was dumping her frustration on the head of the unit who was presumably her boyfriend, sharing the tale of the chaos on the bridge. Jim was bouncing with energy, clearly dying to try and sort it out. The head of the engineering finally gave him the nod to accompany the navigator back to her post.

McCoy stared down at the cadets, unseeing. “Anyway, to cut a long story short, we married when I returned to Atlanta to do my MD at Emory. I’d rather have waited. I’d probably have waited for ever, frankly, but Daddy was getting worse and Joss’s mother was after us to start on having kids as soon as possible.

“The marriage was rough from the beginning. We were barely in our twenties and we were turning into her parents! And I never got a break from her. She wanted a man like her father but then she also wanted me around to escort her to all the social events. When her father missed family events right through her childhood it was because he was a terribly important man. When I did it, it was because I was a selfish bastard. I wasn’t above playing the ‘my father’s dying and you want me to go a party’ line in retaliation.”

McCoy ran a hand impatiently through his hair. “Christ, I’m beginning to whine. So whatever, it was bad. She took up with an old boyfriend from school, I was finding stress release,” his fingers made crooked quote marks, “in alleys behind certain kinds of clubs. And I was working my butt off. I had free reign to pursue my research and I was obsessed with it. I was the heir apparent at Emory. People may claim it’s all based on ability and results, but it’s bullshit. The place is feudal. With the administrator’s son out of the way, the son-in-law got the fast track.”

He gave Pike a sad smile. “I wasn’t a total bastard. Or rather I was, but I kept telling myself that once I’d managed to save my father, then I’d sort the rest of it out. Take a break, spend some time with Joss, have enough sex with her to give her a fair shot at getting pregnant. By then we were pretty sure that it was pyrrhoneuritis, although it still wasn’t confirmed. My neural grafting research was coming together and it really seemed to offer possibilities.

“And then it all went to hell. Pyrrhoneuritis in the advanced stage was confirmed, which gave us a terminal deadline to work against. My research worked perfectly, it was hailed as a breakthrough in its field, but it didn’t do what I had hoped for in terms of the pyrrhoneuritis. Everyone was calling me a genius and I was devastated.

“And in the middle of all of that Andrew came home. He’d been working in Singapore but something went wrong, I don’t know what. He was greeted like the prodigal son. I was just so glad to see an old friend. He wasn’t happy to be back, I sensed it immediately. We looked each other over and we just knew.

“I’ve no excuse, other than that I was so exhausted by then, so stressed and disheartened. So sick of anonymous back-alley encounters or my wife’s nagging. He and I embarked on a tempestuous affair, mostly conducted in corners of the hospital. The risk was part of the excitement. It lasted all of five weeks before his father found us. Clearly he wasn’t pleased to find that his son-in-law was light in the loafers but to find that out about his only son…. He was apoplectic. The Darnells closed ranks, my wife believed what her Daddy told her. And it was true, I had deceived her about myself all along, I had no grounds to call on her loyalty.”

McCoy pulled out his hip flask and took a long swallow. Pike, staring down at the sim chamber, chose not to notice. Jim had slipped discreetly under the console of the navigator where he had pried off several panels and was elbows deep in the wiring, trying to dodge small showers of sparks. She was whispering down to him the results she saw on her monitor as he tried various alterations. Between them they were slowly coaxing the ship back onto its designated course. The captain and the first remained in a bitter stand-off and the rest of the bridge were milling about aimlessly, in various stages of panic.

“As soon as the divorce was through and my Daddy had died, I left the state, plunged headfirst into a sea of alcohol and emerged in time to take the last option that seemed to remain to me, enlisting in Starfleet.”

Pike suspected that this rather abrupt end to the doctor’s sorry tale was hiding rather more than it revealed. Still, he felt that he’d pried enough for one day. “Nice to know that you think so highly of us!” he teased.

“You accepted me. What can I say? The evidence speaks for itself,” snapped McCoy, clearly still tense from his excursion into his past. “A half-assed doctor, an adulterous husband, a failed son, a self-hating gay, a borderline alcoholic. Starfleet must be desperate.”

He defiantly took a long swig from his hip flask and stared challengingly at Pike.

Although Pike often felt out of his depth with the doctor, at this moment he thought he knew what was going on. “Don’t try and play me, McCoy. If you want a disapproving authority figure to hurl yourself against in a storm of self-loathing, pick someone else. I’ve had enough of a messy home life of my own as well as past command decisions that I regret that I will not act as your judge and jury.

“And stop pinning me to the wall as some kind of stereotypical stuffed-shirt commander. I’ve made my share of tough calls. I took my first command by standing down my captain and seizing control of his ship. Got court-martialled for it too.”

“Do go on! You took over a ship?” McCoy looked impressed. Pike thought that it might be the first time that he had ever managed to impress the man.

“I did, sometimes it’s what needs to be done. Look at what’s happening below us. It’s what Jim should do right now.” With the ship now back on course, Jim had emerged from the depths of the navigator’s console to explain to the captain that the same approach should be tried with the other anomalies. The captain appeared unimpressed.

“He’s worked out the right procedure,” continued Pike, “but the captain won’t listen to him. The bridge crew seem divided. So will Jim back down or will he try and relieve the captain of duty?”

“Will it be a pass or a fail if he does?” McCoy asked.

“As long as he can justify it, he can do it. In my case, I was first officer of the USS Aldrin and I forcibly relieved Captain Kamnach of duty when he launched an unprovoked attack on a Vestian ship. Vestian rebels were attacking Federation ships, apparently hoping to get us involved in their civil war. Kamnach lost his perspective completely and wanted to fire on an official military vessel. We’d taken losses that he wanted to revenge but the result would have been an interstellar war. That was something that I just couldn’t allow. I was charged with mutiny, but I stood my ground and all charges were dismissed following the court-martial. And I was promoted to captain and given command of the USS York.”

Below them Jim was arguing vociferously that the captain’s latest orders were likely to cause the failure of the life-support systems on the vessel and so kill the entire crew. He was trying to persuade the first officer to stand the captain down.

As Pike watched the drama play out he thought back to those long lonely days as he had waited for his court-martial. He had been sustained by his absolute conviction that he had done the right thing, that his actions had saved innocent lives. He wondered what it had been like for McCoy at Emory, with little belief in himself to fall back on, with death at the end of the road rather than life. Really, it was a wonder that the doctor wasn’t even more fucked up than he appeared to be.

In the sim a hesitant first had taken over and a very nervous security detail were standing guard over the erstwhile captain. Jim was running a systematic analysis of all errors uncovered, all solutions applied and all results obtained.

“I think he may yet solve this,” Pike said thoughtfully. “The situation is bad but not yet irredeemable. It’s an impressive display on his part.”

“Don’t tell me that,” McCoy snapped. “Tell him. He really is good, Pike, despite all his acting out. But he needs people who believe in him, not just in the ghost of his father. Tell him about how you took command. Tell him about what it’s really like to lead. His academic supervisor is well-meaning but Jim is running circles around the man. Jim respects real experience. Share yours with him.”

“You really care about him, don’t you?” Pike said, staring speculatively at the doctor. “Are you in love with him?”

“Fuck off, I’ve told you quite enough embarrassing stuff for one day. But no, I’m not. He’s an irritating younger brother whom I’m always bailing out of trouble.”

“Younger brother, is he? Is he in love with you?”

“No he’s not, I’ve got too many bits below the waist and too few above it for his tastes. And you fucking owe me some time with him, for having put up with your bullshit all afternoon!”

Below them Jim was now effectively running the bridge, rapidly and systematically implementing solutions. The sim was drawing to a successful close.

“I owe you nothing. You imposed yourself on me. But you’re right about this at least. Jim Kirk is worth extra effort.” Pike considered the doctor for a moment and then reached over and grabbed his hip flask. “And so are you. You’ve got this far, for god’s sake don’t fuck it up now. Keep off the alcohol.”

Pike laughed at the expression on McCoy’s face. “And don’t pout at me, man. You are at least 20 years too old for that look.”

McCoy glared mutinously at his confiscated hip flask. “You confuse me Pike. Every time I think I have you all worked out you do something unexpected.”

As the doctor moved past him to go and join Kirk who was now exiting the sim, he brushed his fingers over the hand that held his hip flask. “That’s my baby you’ve got there, Captain. I expect you to look after her well.”

And when it comes to being confused, that makes two of us, Pike thought as he watched McCoy walk away. As he went to join the assessors for the instructor debriefing he felt the weight of the hip flask in his pocket with every step. Despite the trauma of McCoy’s story, it had been an oddly enjoyable afternoon.




*

Pike strode restlessly across his office and stopped to peer out of his window at the immaculate Academy lawns, watching the flocks of cadets crossing the courtyard in swirls and eddies, on their way from one class to another. So young and carefree. So naïve and so cocky. So little idea of what it would really be like to serve on a ship, to live your life trapped on a vessel in the black, no sun, no fresh air, yet a universe of infinite possibilities stretching out ahead of you.

Chris shook his head as if he could shake loose the melancholy and turned back to his desk. Everything of immediate urgency was done. There were dozens of things of importance that he could commence but he felt unmoved by all of them. He wandered across his office, wondering if he could conceivably justify abandoning his work day and going running instead. He felt as if ants were crawling under his skin. He knew the feeling and disliked it. Intense exercise would reduce it, although even that would not stop his mind wandering. What he really needed was a crisis. Hardly the sort of request he could dial through to his assistant.

What he really needed was to be back at the helm of a ship, moving at warp speed through deep space, headed for destinations unknown. Not that being on a ship was not just as bedevilled with paperwork as being a trainer and recruiter at the Academy. And it many ways it was far more boring. Long weeks of travelling where nothing happened. Restricted recreational facilities, a limited pool of people, and no way to get a complete change of scene until the next shore leave. Much of the work was surprisingly mundane, even in deep space exploration: mapping, cataloguing, routine diplomacy, uneventful neutral zone patrols.

But there was always a sense of possibility to it. The knowledge that the next planet, the next day, the next encounter might produce something extraordinary. As one day stretched after another, as months stretched into years before his new ship would be ready, he felt as if he was being slowly buried alive by Academy routine.

As he often did when he was restless, he turned to stare at the two holos stood on a shelf. One showed two teenage boys on skis on the slopes of Mount Shasta. He picked up the other and gazed sombrely at a young blond boy whose eyes were alight with wonder as he raised a model starship over his head. People often commented on it, the boy an adorable younger version of himself, already in love with the idea of space travel. The ship was a model of his father’s vessel, given to him during a brief shore leave. He’d always been determined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Every heart-warming Starfleet cliché summed up in a single image.

Pike had worshipped the father that he so rarely saw. Long lonely months had been spent rereading the last comm, rewatching the last vid, acting out what he knew of his father’s adventures, telling everyone he met that he was the son of Captain Josh Pike. The shore leaves had been intense, joyous periods, always too short, spent trailing his father everywhere, on his absolute best behaviour, trying to impress him, lapping up his occasional praise, wishing he would stay for longer. And then one day he did.

Pike hated the holo. His mother had sent it to him when he’d returned to earth to await the building of the Enterprise, as subtle a bit of blackmail as he’d ever seen from her. Remember the good times, forgive and forget… He’d finally put up the image to remind himself that it was all in the past. He’d forget nothing and forgive who he chose to. His life was under his own control.

Pike’s messaging system beeped urgently. He glanced at his monitor, where a message had flashed up: mad doctor alert!!!!! Clearly Pike’s assistant had given up on trying to stop the doctor bursting in without an appointment. Since that afternoon in the sim, they’d had the occasional cup of coffee together when Pike had reason to visit the medical school and every so often McCoy would stick a head around his office door to regale him with tales of the latest idiocy that had landed cadets (or officers) in the hospital. They weren’t quite friends and they weren’t quite flirting. But then again they weren’t quite not flirting either.

McCoy strode in, slammed the door behind him and leaned heavily against it.

“Fuck Starfleet! Fuck the hospital! Fuck the fucking rules! Fuck individual’s rights! Fuck sanctimonious, superstitious, irrational, gullible idiots! I hate this place! And fuck IDIC. Fuck it to everlasting fucking hell.”

The doctor was dressed in surgical scrubs although they seemed unused. His hair was a riotous mess as if he had dragged his hands through it several times too many. He was now pacing furiously back and forth across the room, waving his clenched fists about.

“I’m a doctor, a trauma surgeon, with a decade’s worth of the best training money can buy but does that matter, oh does it hell! They’ve got a book written for goat-herders so they know better. I’m a doctor. I took a fucking oath. To give aid. To do no harm!” He turned abruptly on Pike, his face mottled red with anger, almost yelling now. “How do I fulfil that fucking oath if they won’t even let me do anything?”

Pike typed a quick message to his assistant to block all callers and then locked his office door. He had dealt with plenty of traumatized crew in his time and he recognized the messy aftermath of some disaster.

He took the doctor firmly by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. “What happened?”

McCoy glared back at him, arms now crossed defensively over his chest. “She died. She fucking died! That’s what fucking happened. She was only twelve, pretty as a speckled pup, all freckles and wild red curls. All she needed was a god-damned blood transfusion, nothing complicated, nothing fancy. I’d have had her right as rain in a few hours and I wasn’t allowed to do it. I stood there and watched her die.”

Pike stared at him in horror. “Why were you stopped?”

“Fucking Jehovah’s Witnesses. That beautiful girl lay there and looked me in the eye and told me that a transfusion would make her,” Bones curled his fingers in derisive quote marks, “unclean and unworthy. And her parents stood at her side and quoted fucking biblical texts at me: Genesis, Leviticus, Acts. Some shit about how the flesh is the life and the blood thereof you shall not eat. And what the hell has that to do with blood transfusions and saving the life of your own daughter!”

“People are entitled to their beliefs, doctor, you know that,” ventured Pike.

“Stone-age superstitions, more like,” ranted McCoy. “The father told me that loving God means obeying commandments. What kind of god commands you to let your child die? Why would you follow such a god? And the fucking rights of these lunatic fanatics are protected in law. They knew their law, of course they did, they knew their rights!

“The father quoted all the precedents at me. A child who supposedly understands the consequences of the decision to refuse medical treatment is a ‘mature minor’ and can make their own decision. And the state may not compel a legally competent individual to submit to medical treatment which would violate their religious beliefs. It doesn’t matter how fucking foolish, or ridiculous those beliefs may be!”

“It is the basis of individual dignity in our society,” Pike said gently.

“Dignity! That girl is lying in a body bag. Where’s the dignity in that?” McCoy was pacing around the office once more.

“Besides, that’s not the point, Pike, and you know it. She was a child. Everyone she’d ever loved and respected had taught her that this crap was true, this unclean and unworthy bullshit. It’s not a choice. What is the girl going to say? I love my life more than each and every one of you? She’s too young to manage that. Hell, many adults can’t pull it off. So she’s going to choose to die rather than disappoint those she loves.”

Pike glanced back at the holo of himself as a boy. He knew what it was like to be told what to think, year after year, and how hard it was to break free of that. He knew that McCoy knew it too. He wondered what he could do to help the man. The doctor was leaning against the wall, his hands clenched at his side. Pike noticed that the fists were trembling slightly.

“I’m guessing this didn’t play out well at the hospital?”

McCoy grimaced. “Not really. I had to be physically restrained from assaulting the asshole of a father. I’ve been taken off duty until I calm down.” The doctor spat out the last words as if they disgusted him.

Pike thought it best to keep him talking but try and get him off the topic of the death while hopefully he would indeed begin to calm down.

“Right, so why am I the one who gets the honour of your company in this situation?”

The doctor looked vaguely sheepish. “Well, Jim’s away on a survival course.”

“And that’s it? I come second in your selection of useful acquaintances? You’re not exactly awash with friends, are you?”

McCoy shrugged defensively. “I do okay. I’ve been busy. Besides, most of them wilt in the face of my….” He seemed to be searching for a word.

“Your appalling temper tantrums? Your raging petulance? Your galactic-sized hissy fits?”

McCoy reluctantly began to laugh.

“Right, yeah. Sorry for bursting in on you like this. It just makes me feel so fucking helpless. I know I’m a disaster in so many ways, but being a doctor? That’s the one thing I can do, and do it damned well. The one fucking thing that I can actually do and I’m not allowed to do it.” McCoy glared at him mutinously. “Besides, you’re the one who took my hip flask away. You don’t want me to drink, then you get to deal with my shit instead.”

“You need to find a way to burn off some of that angry energy of yours, preferably a way that does not involve insulting your superiors or getting stinking drunk. I would advocate going for a run.”

“Exercise? What an appalling idea,” scoffed McCoy. He hesitated, and then looked at Pike challengingly. “Of course if Jim was here he’d tell me that the best form of stress release is sex.”

“I thought his idea of stress release was picking a fight with three big brutes in a bar,” Pike retorted to cover his surprise. This conversation was definitely taking a turn for the ill-advised, and he should put a stop to it immediately. Flirting during office hours was seldom a good idea, and flirting with a cadet a decade younger than him who was currently traumatized and frankly less than stable at the best of times was asking for disaster. But damn, he was tired of being careful.

Sometimes the Academy drove him up the wall. It was a political minefield, too many people with too much seniority but too little real responsibility, forever taking offence at nothing. The fact that he could navigate such a minefield with skill did not mean that he enjoyed having to do so. Some days he longed for the black, where the captain’s word was law, where the unanticipated event called for the creative solution, where the ability to take a risk was an asset, not a liability.

He knew it was a bad idea even as he opened his mouth but still he did not stop himself. “So, if you chose sex as your solution right now, what would you choose?”

McCoy was leaning against the wall, his hands now crossed behind his coccyx in a way that thrust his groin forward less than subtly. He stared straight at Pike, a hard, level look. “I’d choose you, right here, right now. On your knees in front of me, your hands behind your back, and my cock in your mouth.”

The two men stared at one another. Pike should throw him out, he knew he should. He suspected McCoy was in fact picking his own version of the Jim Kirk bar brawl solution, once again trying to engineer a confrontation.

Despite his attraction to men, his actual experience wasn’t all that extensive. He’d licked a cock or two over the years, getting a partner warmed up, but he’d never let a man come in his mouth, and he had never gone down on his knees for anyone. It had always felt too submissive for his comfort.

His eyes unconsciously strayed back to the holo. At nine years of age young Chris had had his life-long wish fulfilled. His father, newly promoted to Admiral, had come home for extended leave, to recover from unspecified injury. Chris had been delirious with happiness, although somewhat puzzled when his father didn’t show much sign of being injured.

Josh Pike, bereft of a crew to lead, took to ordering his wife and son around instead. He soon decided that his wife had been far too soft on the boy and that he needed to make up the slack, teach the boy the facts of life. Chris would come to hear a lot about what a dangerous, treacherous place the universe was, about how he needed to toughen up if he was to survive.

He would hear all about it as Pike senior sent his son to fetch the belt that he ritually used when the boy had yet again disappointed him with some unexplained show of weakness. He would hear all about it as he was bent over a table, held down with a hand on the small of his back, his failings listed for him in between each lash of the belt. The first few times he had cried, he had begged for his father to stop. It had made no difference. The first few times he had called for his mother, the woman who had cared for him for all these years and had seen her shrink away from both of them. He had learnt the lesson alright, the lesson that he was on his own now, that he had to look about for himself, that hoping for help just made it worse. He learnt many things at his father’s hand but primarily that to love someone was not enough to stop you learning to despise them.

No explanation was ever offered for Pike senior’s invisible ‘injuries’ or for the reason that despite being an Admiral he spent long periods at home, making his son the target of his unpredictable anger. Chris listened with growing disdain to his stories from the black, stories where no one could be trusted, not from Starfleet, not from their allies, not from the enemies. Always, you were on your own.

Chris escaped whenever he could, roaming through the desert of the Mojave on horseback, disappearing into the backcountry on skis and training relentlessly in the local gym. He was days short of his fifteenth birthday when Josh Pike last picked up the belt. Chris slammed him against the wall with one hand squeezed tight around his father’s throat. With the other he pushed his fist hard into the other man’s solar plexus. He explained in curt, cold tones that his father was never, ever to touch him again. Both men were surprised to realize that Chris was now taller than his father.

The beatings stopped but the daily admonitions didn’t. Less than best in class was never good enough, less than full marks was never smart enough, less than an Admiral in Starfleet was not ambitious enough. And anything less than rough, tough and utterly self-reliant was not manly enough. Chris studied with relentless intensity, finished school a year early and entered the Starfleet Academy immediately, just as his father expected. And there he took his revenge, coldly and deliberately, cutting his father out of his life completely, never speaking to Admiral Pike again except in formal Starfleet situations.

He had deliberately antagonized all his father’s allies in the brass, determined to make his own way. Fortunately for him Josh Pike had made more than enough enemies to provide Chris with a whole new circle of friends and he had found a sympathetic and liberal mentor in Richard Barnett. He finished the command track at the top of his class and headed straight into deep space without a backward glance.

Pike followed orders within Starfleet because that was the cause to which he had chosen to give his life. But outside of that he bent his knee for no man, and certainly not for mouthy cadet doctors a decade younger than him.

He waited for the doctor to open that big mouth of his, say something cheeky or angry or provocative, something to break this spell, something to let Pike find his way back to his persona of authority. McCoy didn’t. He simply leant against the wall, in silence, pinning Pike with that stare of challenge.

Accepting a dare had always been a weakness of his. There had been a reason that he’d thought that a dare might get through to Kirk. He’d had to learn to control that impulse during his Academy years, had it pointed out to him as the biggest flaw in his psychological command profile. He’d learnt to take his dares in the form of his official orders from Starfleet.

Pike felt a familiar tightening in his stomach, a clenching in his core that he knew and loved. It was the feeling that came just as he was about to rematerialise onto a new planet, the feeling that came at the start of a dog-fight with enemy ships, the feeling that came as everything went fubar around him and only his ingenuity stood between him and catastrophe.

It was the feeling of stepping into the unknown, having to believe that his own abilities would be enough to carry him through whatever lay ahead. It was not a feeling that he had felt since returning to earth. Now it caught his breath like the ghostly hand of a long-missed friend. He swallowed hard. The door was locked. His assistant was under orders not to disturb them.

There was a moment at the start of every mission when the time came to stop planning, to stop thinking, to stop second-guessing. It was the moment at the top of a sweep of untracked powder when you finally let go of all the calculations of angle and aspect and snow stability and committed yourself to dropping over the edge, letting your skis carry you into your future for good or for ill.

Pike walked right up to McCoy, looking him dead-straight in the eye for a moment. Then he dropped gracefully down to his knees and pulled down the elasticised waist of the pants. The man stared at him in open shock and the resulting rush of satisfaction that he had called McCoy’s bluff gave him the courage to push down the navy-blue boxers and fish out the cock that lay within them. He was not a procrastinator and he let the momentum of his action carry the half-hard penis up to his mouth and between his lips.

It occurred to him in a moment of doubt that he himself took quite some time to come from just a blow-job and McCoy wasn’t even fully hard yet and he wasn’t exactly experienced and there really wasn’t a graceful way out of this and he might be on his knees for a long while yet.

Still his move had hardened the doctor up nice and quickly and the texture and heft of the cock were quite interesting in his mouth. He ignored the instruction to keep his hands behind his back. This situation was awkward enough without overbalancing with a man’s cock between his teeth. He had his hands steady on the doctor’s thighs and the combat instructor at the back of his mind noted that the man was in good condition.

McCoy was eerily silent above him and Pike had a surge of panic that he was doing this really badly. He had never liked being a beginner at anything. In his experience intensive study and repeated practise solved the problem but he wasn’t sure how that applied in this context.

He went for what worked on him and tongued the sensitive spot just below the head. That earned him a heartfelt groan and fingers pushed into his hair. The weight of that large heavy hand on the back of his head was both erotic and unnerving.

“Oh yes, darlin’, that’s so good.” McCoy’s accent was showing through, all soft and honey-sweet and it was surprisingly sexy. Pike was hardening himself and it began to feel good. The velvet texture rubbed sensuously against his tongue and the combination of soft skin and hard core was intriguing. McCoy moaned softly above him. He felt a glimpse of the power of the giver that he’d always thought men talked about just to make women feel better about getting on their knees.

“So pretty, Captain, down on your knees.” McCoy tightened the hand in his hair and began to actively fuck his mouth. Pike’s gag reflex kicked in as the glans hit hard against the back of his throat. Struggling not to retch he became tangled in the problem of the saliva flooding his mouth that he didn’t seem to have the space to swallow down. His lips were rubbing dry around the doctor’s cock and he couldn’t get his tongue out to lick them. And his jaw was beginning to ache. McCoy was not small and Pike really wanted to give his mouth a rest.

The doctor seemed lost in a world of his own, fucking his mouth aggressively, or so it felt to him, keeping up a growling litany of soft moans and muttered curses. Pike’s erection had long since wilted and he really wanted to end this. Pride would not let him back down though. He hung on grimly, wondering why on earth women ever agreed to do this for men, wondering how long one man could possibly take.

“Gonna come!” Pike was too surprised by the sudden growl above him to immediately process what it was supposed to mean. As he realised and thought to pull away, he found his head being held rigid with that damned cock rammed against the back of his throat and his mouth was being swamped with salty, slimy fluid that was spilling out over his open lips. Shocked and surprised, Pike pulled back violently and spat onto the office floor. God, the stuff was disgusting.

“Hey, I wasn’t done yet,” came from above him.

Pike rose to his feet, turning his back on McCoy, scrubbing hard at his mouth with the back of hand. He’d caught a glimpse of the damp semi-flaccid flesh hanging over the elastic of the cadet’s pants. It looked both pathetic and sleazy. What in hell had he been thinking?

“Get out!”

“That’s not very friendly.” McCoy’s hand came down on his shoulder. He swung around, brushing it violently away.

“You’ve had your temper tantrum. You’ve had your fun. Now fuck off!”

McCoy stared at him incredulously. “For fuck’s sake, if you didn’t want to do it, why didn’t you just say so? You’re worse than my ex-wife. I mean, you knew what you were letting yourself in for, right?”

Pike’s eyes skated away from McCoy’s.

“Wait, what? But then why did you… Don’t tell me you hadn’t ever done….”

Pike’s humiliation overflowed. “I’m not telling you anything except to get the hell out, cadet. I have better things to do than listen to the whining of men who can’t cope with the demands of their own job. Maybe you should’ve just stayed at the bottom of the hip flask of yours!”

“Fine. Just fine. Well fuck you too, sir!”

McCoy slammed the door hard on the way out. Pike stormed after him a few minutes later, telling his bemused assistant that he was done for the day. Once he had brushed his teeth and swilled his mouth out repeatedly he pulled on his running clothes and grabbed his bike. He headed for the Ohlone Wilderness to run the punishing 10 mile 3400 foot ascent of Rose Peak. It was one of the highest points in the Bay Area and offered a breathtaking panorama over the entire bay to the west, and the Sierras to the east.

Pike saw none of it. What the hell had he been thinking, trying to assuage his unhappiness with some spectacularly ill-advised sex? With every step words his father’s voice echoed through his mind: rule or be ruled, boy. There is no other way. You’re on your own.

Part 3