Big Bang 2010 - If Wishes Were Horses 5/18
Title: If Wishes Were Horses
Author: fringedweller
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Primarily Kirk/Rand, with background McCoy/Chapel and Pike/One and others, het and slash
Warnings: None
Length: 3553
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything recognisable in this fic and I’m not making any money from it.
Notes: Beta by seren_ccd
Summary: All her life Janice Rand had wanted one thing - to figure out just what she was supposed to do with herself. She drifted into Starfleet on a whim, and to her surprise, found a niche to fill. But being assigned to the Enterprise brings with it a challenge to her neat and ordered way of life, and Janice is unsure as to how much she's willing to let James T. Kirk affect her. But since when has love ever been easy? And will Janice let her heart stand in the way of her career?
The first time Janice met Jim Kirk, he was beaten up, hungover and without any of the credentials that Starfleet Academy expected cadets to have - picture ID, exam qualification certificates, proof of residency on a Federation planet, the usual paperwork that people picked up during their lifetime. Pike had walked into the office and introduced Kirk to Rand with “Yeoman, I need Kirk legal to sign up in an hour.” Then he strode off into his inner sanctum and locked the door, thereby ending all potential conversation.
Janice looked the new cadet up and down and wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he apologised. “Somebody vomited on me on the shuttle.”
Stale bloodstains and awful smell to one side, and despite the heavy bruising that was forming, he was still the most attractive man Janice had ever come across. Good God, how hard-up was she?
“Give me your name, birth details and any other information that will help track down your application to the Academy,” she said, handing him a PADD.
“Ah, yeah, about that,” Kirk said, pulling a face. “I didn’t so much apply as...” He trailed off, looking charmingly guilty.
“As?” Janice asked.
“As turn up at the shuttle this morning and get on,” Kirk admitted, with a grin that did something awful to Janice’s stomach for as long as the smile lingered across his face. She hoped he’d grin again as soon as possible.
“Right,” sighed Janice. “Look, give me all the details you can about your life, and I’ll get an application form filed for you.”
“Well,” said Kirk, leaning forward, deliberately invading Janice’s personal space. “I lost my virginity to a cute, perky blonde when I was fourteen, and I’ve had a fascination for them ever since. How about that?”
Janice leant back to put some distance between them.
“Well, that’s a detail,” she allowed. “But one that would be more...effective if you weren’t covered in at least two bodily fluids right now. One of them somebody else’s.”
“Oh yeah,” Kirk said, pulling back himself. “Sorry.”
Against her better judgement, Janice smiled.
“Look, write down what you think would be helpful then I’ll show you where you can get cleaned up, ok?”
“Thanks,” the man said, giving her the stomach-revolving smile before accepting the PADD and retreating to a more appropriate distance for Janice’s sense of smell.
As he pored over the PADD, Janice eyed him carefully, making a guess about his clothes sizes. She ordered a set of cadet reds to be synthesised in her own quarters. Praying that her roommate hadn’t switched shifts suddenly, she escorted the not-quite cadet Kirk to her own quarters over in the enlisted personnel housing block. Without his voice print and retinal scan in the computer system, he wouldn’t be able to access any of the facilities of the Academy alone.
He was the cause of quite a few stares as they made their way across the Academy grounds, and he returned them openly. He seemed to have absolutely no sense of shame whatsoever, and draped an arm casually across Janice’s shoulders as they entered the housing block. She quickly stepped to the side and his arm fell.
“Girlfriend?” he asked in the turbolift.
“No,” she replied, wondering why it felt like the usually quick lift was being dragged up the shaft.
“Boyfriend?” he asked as they finally exited the lift and walked down the corridor to Janice’s room.
“No,” she said again, entering the unlock code.
“Do you want one?” he asked, smirking at her. She turned her back on him and entered her living quarters.
She hovered around the entryway as Kirk strolled in behind her and immediately started investigating the shelves and cupboards of the small living area she and her roommate shared.
“The bathroom is through that door,” Janice pointed. “And I’ve ordered a cadet uniform from the synthesiser.” She nodded at a hatch in the wall. “I had to guess at sizes, so if you need to change anything, just re-order it. There’s a basic first aid kit with a regen unit in the bathroom cabinet. I‘m going back to the office to start the paperwork. Can you find your way back?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, picking up one of Janice’s reading PADDs and flicking through the titles. “Thanks.”
“Don’t take too long,” she warned. “Captain Pike doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
She left then, and hurried back to her desk. With the information Kirk had given her she was able to find proof of his birth and his mandatory examination qualifications. They were the same age, she noted, actually born within a few days of each other although several million light years away. It surprised her that somebody who was clearly so intelligent hadn’t bothered with university. Most Academy cadets had at least one degree, and many had more. She called up an Academy application form and inputted the data, leaving blank spaces where Kirk had to attach an essay about his reasons for applying to the Academy and other personal information he hadn’t written on the PADD.
A quick glance at the clock told her she had twenty five minutes before Pike’s hour was up; she couldn’t do any more until the application form was registered as accepted. Kirk showed up five minutes later, looking freshly scrubbed and downright edible in his cadet reds.
“Janice!” he called in greeting. Janice sighed. No doubt he had rifled through her belongings until he discovered her first name.
“That’s Yeoman Rand to you, cadet,” she told him archly, desperate to keep a little dignity when all she truly wanted to do was a Pike-style desk vault straight into his arms. “You need to fill in the blank spaces on this form before I can process you any further.”
He pulled off an impressive salute, winked one of those gorgeous blue eyes at her, took the PADD and retreated to the same sofa he had sat on before. “Why I want to be a space cadet, by James T. Kirk,” he said aloud, the stylus scribbling manically over the PADD.
Janice ducked her head to hide her smile, but she was sure that he noticed.
Ten minutes later he passed the PADD back with a flourish. Janice didn’t bother to read it as she entered it into the system. Ten seconds later the computer flashed up Kirk’s acceptance code and his cadet identification number. With these, she could now get on with finding him somewhere to live and get him registered for classes.
“Fill out your preferred classes from the list on here,” she told him, downloading the information and passing it to him on another PADD. “I’ll get your housing sorted out.”
“I want to room with Cadet McCoy,” he told her as he accepted the PADD. “He’s the one that threw up on me.”
“And you still want to live with him?” she asked, confused.
“Payback’s a bitch,” he grinned. Against her better judgement, she laughed and located Cadet McCoy.
“Well, you’re lucky, cadet,” she told him, fingers flying across the control panel. “Cadet McCoy was going to enjoy the facilities of a double room all to himself. Now he’s got a roommate.”
“You’re an angel, Yeoman Rand,” he told her sincerely. “Can I take you out for a drink sometime?”
“Fraternisation between enlisted personnel and cadets is against regulations, Cadet Kirk,” Pike said firmly, coming out of his office. “And more than that, Janice is too good for you. Bother her again and I’ll have you scrubbing floors with your toothbrush. Understood?”
Kirk snapped off a salute.
“Understood, with great regrets, sir!” he announced.
“Cadet Kirk has been registered with the academy, sir,” Janice said, hoping that she wasn’t blushing. The hot feeling in her cheeks told her otherwise, though. “He has accommodation, meal and laundry credits and a class timetable, but security still needs his voice and retinal scans.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Pike told her. “Well done Yeoman, you can take your lunch break now. Kirk, my office.”
He turned and left. Kirk shrugged, winked at her again and followed him in. Janice escaped to the mess and tried not to spend the rest of the day thinking about blue eyes and broad shoulders.
She didn’t succeed.
Although she saw Kirk around campus a few times in the next three years, there was never time for more than the briefest of innuendo-laden greetings. His exploits were legendary, and Janice had no need to actually speak to him to learn about how he was doing, or, indeed, who. The only person who seemed safe from his amorous encounters was his roommate, McCoy, who had been heard on more than one occasion to threaten Kirk with chemical castration if he brought another conquest back to their shared quarters while he was trying to study.
Nevertheless, it didn’t stop them from applying for shared residency for the next two years. Janice had felt guilty about bureaucratically spying on them, but she mollified herself with the knowledge that if she hadn’t, nobody would have noticed the careful computer hack that tried to get Kirk moved to the shared quarters of Gaila, one of the Orion cadets. Janice moved Kirk back and slapped Pike’s code on the housing application, blocking anyone under his rank from changing it.
Foiling somebody’s prank made her feel good about herself, and she allowed herself some of the chocolate bars from the latest care package from Maggie and Tara, who had recently expanded their cafe into the empty store next door, and were begging her to come home on her next leave and expand the mural.
Janice spent a lot of time with Captain Pike, shuttling between San Francisco and the Iowa dockyard where the Enterprise was going through its final stages of building. Although it wasn’t completely finished, Janice could tell that it was going to be a beauty of a ship. Two more, the Excalibur and the Excelsior were in various stages of their builds, but the Enterprise would be the first to take to the stars.
Of course, nobody expected it to be in such horrific circumstances.
The distress call from Vulcan came in as Janice was in the middle of getting Pike to catch up with his correspondence he had been resolutely dodging for the last week and a half in order to obsess over Enterprise schematics. His face paled for the briefest of seconds before he snapped, “Rand, with me,” and started jogging for the turbolift. She followed obediently, still unsure as to what was going on as he started snapping out a list of orders for her to complete.
They were on the first shuttle to the Enterprise, and Janice lost track of Pike as soon as his feet hit the deck of the shuttle bay. She headed for the main Administration Control Room and selected a duty station then started working on the list of orders that Pike had barked at her. Soon the room around her filled up with grim-faced admin workers, all old hands. A lot of the graduating class from the Academy had been assigned to fill spaces in the crew that had been allocated to officers that were still en-route to take up their positions. The Enterprise was several weeks early in launching, and not everyone was available for duty. Still, most of the enlisted crew were long past qualified and they were the ones that got the necessary support systems in order ready for launch as panicked cadets rushed around the ship.
The last order that Pike had given her was to send a coded message to the Farragut, one that had been pre-recorded for long time, if the date stamp on the file name was any indication. Janice flagged it as Priority One and used her knowledge of Pike’s access codes to leap-frog it ahead of the main communications queue.
It wasn’t strictly regulation procedure, but then, Janice reasoned, this wasn’t exactly a regulation event. She was pleased to notice that the Farragut sent a confirmation of the transmission, and broadcast a similar one back to the Enterprise. She contacted Pike to let him know that his orders had been filled and that there was a Priority One coded message waiting for him. He responded with, “Thank you Yeoman Rand, stay in the control room and wait for further orders. Pike out.” That was the last thing Janice heard him say clearly until Doctor McCoy’s anaesthesia wore off and the first of Captain Pike’s many gruelling surgeries was over.
The entire time that Pike had been off-ship it felt as if Janice had been holding her breath. When it was announced that Pike had been rescued from the Narada, alive, she actually started to cry. She hastily scrubbed the tears away from her cheeks and signalled for another crewman to take over her duty station. The Senior Chief in charge of the room nodded to her and she went, passing through smoke-filled corridors and climbing over structural debris to get to Sickbay as quickly as she could.
She arrived as McCoy’s surgical team was preparing for an operation. She was separated by a transparent screen from Pike, who waved weakly at her and made shooing motions with a hand. Then a nurse arrived and injected him with the anaesthesia, rendering him unconscious. The transparent screen became opaque, and Janice lost sight of Pike.
“Can I stay?” asked Janice of one of the nurses. “I did First Aid as one of my secondary training fields. I can help with triage.”
“Are you kidding? We’ll take everyone we can get,” the harassed nurse replied. “Here. Sterilise your hands and put on a sterile gown, then get working on the crew through there. All minor injuries, call us if you’re unsure of what to do.”
Then one of the biobeds started to wail uncontrollably and medical staff from all over the room dived towards the noise. Janice wrapped the sterile gown around her uniform, sanitised her hands and started to deal with a steady stream of cuts, scrapes and bruises. She kept an eye on the operating theatre window and as soon as it became transparent again she made her way there.
Pike’s biobed was attached to many monitors and machines, but they all appeared to be steady, not screaming and squealing for attention. One of the surgical team took off their sterile coverings and stretched, obviously sore from bending over Pike’s body. When she emerged from the room, Janice hurried over.
“How is he?” she asked. “How is the captain?”
“Stable,” the blonde woman told her, her voice betraying how tired she was. “Doctor McCoy was able to find the Centaurian slug and extract it from his spinal cord.”
Janice gasped, and threw her hand over her mouth. She began to feel dizzy, and the nurse took one look at her before guiding her to the nearest chair and forcing her head down to her knees.
“Breathe,” the woman ordered calmly.
“I’m not going to faint,” Janice said in a small voice.
“Damn straight you’re not, we haven’t got a bed to put you on,” the nurse replied in a matter of fact tone.
Despite herself, Janice laughed.
“There we go,” the nurse said, rubbing a soothing hand on Janice’s back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that.”
“I’m his yeoman,” Janice said, addressing both the nurse and the floor. “That’s why I got upset.”
“Ah,” the nurse said. “That explains it. I’m Christine, by the way. Christine Chapel.”
“Janice Rand,” Janice said, sitting up. “How badly is he hurt?”
Christine’s face spoke volumes.
“I see,” said Janice quietly. “Can I see him?”
“He’s under some pretty heavy anaesthesia,” Christine said gently. “He won’t come around for hours. Come back then.”
“I feel useless,” Janice admitted. “What does the captain’s yeoman do when the captain is unconscious?”
“Find the acting captain?” Christine suggested. “See if he needs any help?”
“Who’s the acting captain?” Janice asked. “Communications has been down on deck fifteen, we haven’t had much clue about what was going on.”
Christine pulled a face. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but Jim Kirk is our acting captain. McCoy was bitching about what the fact would do to the size of his ego all the way through surgery. All the way through.”
Janice blinked. “Kirk? As in Cadet Kirk?”
“That’s the one,” sighed Christine. “God help us, although he seems to be doing a pretty good job so far.”
“Right,” Janice said slowly. “Well, I’ll go and find Captain...Kirk, and see if he needs any assistance. Will you comm me when Captain Pike wakes up?”
“Of course,” Christine assured her.
Janice pulled off her sterile covering and put it in the recycling unit, then found a working turbolift shaft. Captains were usually to be found on the bridge, she reasoned. It was as good a place as any to start looking for him.
She found him on the bridge, but she walked into what looked like a mutiny of the senior staff.
“I am fine,” Kirk protested, sitting firmly in the captain’s chair.
“Captain, in the last eight hours you have survived a heavy impact onto the transporter room floor, gotten into at least two physical fights with members of your own crew and engaged several Romulans in hand-to-hand combat, involving several heavy blows as you were thrown off a high surface. Not to mention, you have suffered extreme emotional trauma and stress, as well as being chased by an example of the fauna of Delta Vega. Now that the immediate danger from the Narada has passed and we are on a course for Earth, I recommend that you use this time to recuperate.”
Commander Spock looked particularly objurgate for a Vulcan, but he wasn’t the only officer to encourage Kirk off the bridge.
“Captain, my ribs are still complaining after that sky dive, and I didn’t take any of the pounding you did afterwards,” the helmsman pointed out.
“I don’t know how you survived it all,” a beautiful lieutenant at the back of the bridge said pointedly. “But I’d prefer you didn’t drop dead on the way back to Earth.”
“We could ask Doctor McCoy to relieve you of duty,” Spock pointed out. “I am sure that he would see the logic of our arguments.”
Kirk, who had set his lips in a firm line against the opinion of his crew, exhaled loudly.
“Fine,” he grumbled, not able to hide a wince as he pulled himself from the captain’s chair. “But only for a few hours, I want to be awake when Pike comes around.”
Spock nodded, and Kirk reluctantly turned control of the ship over to him. Kirk was almost to the turbolift before he paused. Janice stepped close to him and spoke quietly.
“I can find you quarters, captain, if you’ll follow me.”
Kirk did follow her into the lift.
“I’m not using Pike’s quarters,” he told her, leaning against the wall and closing his eyes. “I’m just not.”
“I understand,” Janice said, thinking quickly and coming up with one viable solution she could, given the state of the ship. “You won’t have to.”
She programmed the lift for the deck with the quarters that were assigned to her, a single room that she hadn’t had time to visit yet. A perk of her posting meant that she didn’t have to share with anybody. She and Kirk walked in silence to the room and Janice opened it with the standard code that all crew quarters used until they selected a personal code.
Kirk stumbled into the bathroom while Janice turned down the covers and used the synthesiser to make a cup of soup and a sandwich. Kirk tried to protest his lack of hunger, but Janice stared him into submission. She dealt with Christopher Pike’s aversion to filing on a daily basis. One bruised man half Pike’s age held no fear for her.
He pulled off his boots and lay back in the bed. Janice pulled up the covers and dimmed the lights.
“Just four hours,” Kirk yawned. “Wake me in four hours.”
“Aye, sir,” Janice told him, and Kirk was asleep before the doors had closed behind her.
Janice picked up a PADD on the way out, and sent an update of Kirk’s condition down to Medical. A message was returned two minutes later, from Acting CMO McCoy, informing Janice that Kirk was to have at least eight hours uninterrupted sleep and as former roommate of the Acting Captain, the Acting CMO knew for a fact that James T. Kirk could (and had) sleep through a red alert siren when tired enough. In short, Yeoman Rand was to see Kirk was fully rested before he went back on duty, even if it required a hand phaser to do so.
Well, Janice reflected, it was always good to have clear, concise orders. She put a privacy lock on the door to her quarters, engaged the soundproofing and started to compile a list of information that both Pike and Kirk would want when they woke up. Sitting herself down in a small, deserted rec room a few doors down from her cabin, she got on with her job.
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Author: fringedweller
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Primarily Kirk/Rand, with background McCoy/Chapel and Pike/One and others, het and slash
Warnings: None
Length: 3553
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything recognisable in this fic and I’m not making any money from it.
Notes: Beta by seren_ccd
Summary: All her life Janice Rand had wanted one thing - to figure out just what she was supposed to do with herself. She drifted into Starfleet on a whim, and to her surprise, found a niche to fill. But being assigned to the Enterprise brings with it a challenge to her neat and ordered way of life, and Janice is unsure as to how much she's willing to let James T. Kirk affect her. But since when has love ever been easy? And will Janice let her heart stand in the way of her career?
The first time Janice met Jim Kirk, he was beaten up, hungover and without any of the credentials that Starfleet Academy expected cadets to have - picture ID, exam qualification certificates, proof of residency on a Federation planet, the usual paperwork that people picked up during their lifetime. Pike had walked into the office and introduced Kirk to Rand with “Yeoman, I need Kirk legal to sign up in an hour.” Then he strode off into his inner sanctum and locked the door, thereby ending all potential conversation.
Janice looked the new cadet up and down and wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he apologised. “Somebody vomited on me on the shuttle.”
Stale bloodstains and awful smell to one side, and despite the heavy bruising that was forming, he was still the most attractive man Janice had ever come across. Good God, how hard-up was she?
“Give me your name, birth details and any other information that will help track down your application to the Academy,” she said, handing him a PADD.
“Ah, yeah, about that,” Kirk said, pulling a face. “I didn’t so much apply as...” He trailed off, looking charmingly guilty.
“As?” Janice asked.
“As turn up at the shuttle this morning and get on,” Kirk admitted, with a grin that did something awful to Janice’s stomach for as long as the smile lingered across his face. She hoped he’d grin again as soon as possible.
“Right,” sighed Janice. “Look, give me all the details you can about your life, and I’ll get an application form filed for you.”
“Well,” said Kirk, leaning forward, deliberately invading Janice’s personal space. “I lost my virginity to a cute, perky blonde when I was fourteen, and I’ve had a fascination for them ever since. How about that?”
Janice leant back to put some distance between them.
“Well, that’s a detail,” she allowed. “But one that would be more...effective if you weren’t covered in at least two bodily fluids right now. One of them somebody else’s.”
“Oh yeah,” Kirk said, pulling back himself. “Sorry.”
Against her better judgement, Janice smiled.
“Look, write down what you think would be helpful then I’ll show you where you can get cleaned up, ok?”
“Thanks,” the man said, giving her the stomach-revolving smile before accepting the PADD and retreating to a more appropriate distance for Janice’s sense of smell.
As he pored over the PADD, Janice eyed him carefully, making a guess about his clothes sizes. She ordered a set of cadet reds to be synthesised in her own quarters. Praying that her roommate hadn’t switched shifts suddenly, she escorted the not-quite cadet Kirk to her own quarters over in the enlisted personnel housing block. Without his voice print and retinal scan in the computer system, he wouldn’t be able to access any of the facilities of the Academy alone.
He was the cause of quite a few stares as they made their way across the Academy grounds, and he returned them openly. He seemed to have absolutely no sense of shame whatsoever, and draped an arm casually across Janice’s shoulders as they entered the housing block. She quickly stepped to the side and his arm fell.
“Girlfriend?” he asked in the turbolift.
“No,” she replied, wondering why it felt like the usually quick lift was being dragged up the shaft.
“Boyfriend?” he asked as they finally exited the lift and walked down the corridor to Janice’s room.
“No,” she said again, entering the unlock code.
“Do you want one?” he asked, smirking at her. She turned her back on him and entered her living quarters.
She hovered around the entryway as Kirk strolled in behind her and immediately started investigating the shelves and cupboards of the small living area she and her roommate shared.
“The bathroom is through that door,” Janice pointed. “And I’ve ordered a cadet uniform from the synthesiser.” She nodded at a hatch in the wall. “I had to guess at sizes, so if you need to change anything, just re-order it. There’s a basic first aid kit with a regen unit in the bathroom cabinet. I‘m going back to the office to start the paperwork. Can you find your way back?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, picking up one of Janice’s reading PADDs and flicking through the titles. “Thanks.”
“Don’t take too long,” she warned. “Captain Pike doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
She left then, and hurried back to her desk. With the information Kirk had given her she was able to find proof of his birth and his mandatory examination qualifications. They were the same age, she noted, actually born within a few days of each other although several million light years away. It surprised her that somebody who was clearly so intelligent hadn’t bothered with university. Most Academy cadets had at least one degree, and many had more. She called up an Academy application form and inputted the data, leaving blank spaces where Kirk had to attach an essay about his reasons for applying to the Academy and other personal information he hadn’t written on the PADD.
A quick glance at the clock told her she had twenty five minutes before Pike’s hour was up; she couldn’t do any more until the application form was registered as accepted. Kirk showed up five minutes later, looking freshly scrubbed and downright edible in his cadet reds.
“Janice!” he called in greeting. Janice sighed. No doubt he had rifled through her belongings until he discovered her first name.
“That’s Yeoman Rand to you, cadet,” she told him archly, desperate to keep a little dignity when all she truly wanted to do was a Pike-style desk vault straight into his arms. “You need to fill in the blank spaces on this form before I can process you any further.”
He pulled off an impressive salute, winked one of those gorgeous blue eyes at her, took the PADD and retreated to the same sofa he had sat on before. “Why I want to be a space cadet, by James T. Kirk,” he said aloud, the stylus scribbling manically over the PADD.
Janice ducked her head to hide her smile, but she was sure that he noticed.
Ten minutes later he passed the PADD back with a flourish. Janice didn’t bother to read it as she entered it into the system. Ten seconds later the computer flashed up Kirk’s acceptance code and his cadet identification number. With these, she could now get on with finding him somewhere to live and get him registered for classes.
“Fill out your preferred classes from the list on here,” she told him, downloading the information and passing it to him on another PADD. “I’ll get your housing sorted out.”
“I want to room with Cadet McCoy,” he told her as he accepted the PADD. “He’s the one that threw up on me.”
“And you still want to live with him?” she asked, confused.
“Payback’s a bitch,” he grinned. Against her better judgement, she laughed and located Cadet McCoy.
“Well, you’re lucky, cadet,” she told him, fingers flying across the control panel. “Cadet McCoy was going to enjoy the facilities of a double room all to himself. Now he’s got a roommate.”
“You’re an angel, Yeoman Rand,” he told her sincerely. “Can I take you out for a drink sometime?”
“Fraternisation between enlisted personnel and cadets is against regulations, Cadet Kirk,” Pike said firmly, coming out of his office. “And more than that, Janice is too good for you. Bother her again and I’ll have you scrubbing floors with your toothbrush. Understood?”
Kirk snapped off a salute.
“Understood, with great regrets, sir!” he announced.
“Cadet Kirk has been registered with the academy, sir,” Janice said, hoping that she wasn’t blushing. The hot feeling in her cheeks told her otherwise, though. “He has accommodation, meal and laundry credits and a class timetable, but security still needs his voice and retinal scans.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Pike told her. “Well done Yeoman, you can take your lunch break now. Kirk, my office.”
He turned and left. Kirk shrugged, winked at her again and followed him in. Janice escaped to the mess and tried not to spend the rest of the day thinking about blue eyes and broad shoulders.
She didn’t succeed.
Although she saw Kirk around campus a few times in the next three years, there was never time for more than the briefest of innuendo-laden greetings. His exploits were legendary, and Janice had no need to actually speak to him to learn about how he was doing, or, indeed, who. The only person who seemed safe from his amorous encounters was his roommate, McCoy, who had been heard on more than one occasion to threaten Kirk with chemical castration if he brought another conquest back to their shared quarters while he was trying to study.
Nevertheless, it didn’t stop them from applying for shared residency for the next two years. Janice had felt guilty about bureaucratically spying on them, but she mollified herself with the knowledge that if she hadn’t, nobody would have noticed the careful computer hack that tried to get Kirk moved to the shared quarters of Gaila, one of the Orion cadets. Janice moved Kirk back and slapped Pike’s code on the housing application, blocking anyone under his rank from changing it.
Foiling somebody’s prank made her feel good about herself, and she allowed herself some of the chocolate bars from the latest care package from Maggie and Tara, who had recently expanded their cafe into the empty store next door, and were begging her to come home on her next leave and expand the mural.
Janice spent a lot of time with Captain Pike, shuttling between San Francisco and the Iowa dockyard where the Enterprise was going through its final stages of building. Although it wasn’t completely finished, Janice could tell that it was going to be a beauty of a ship. Two more, the Excalibur and the Excelsior were in various stages of their builds, but the Enterprise would be the first to take to the stars.
Of course, nobody expected it to be in such horrific circumstances.
The distress call from Vulcan came in as Janice was in the middle of getting Pike to catch up with his correspondence he had been resolutely dodging for the last week and a half in order to obsess over Enterprise schematics. His face paled for the briefest of seconds before he snapped, “Rand, with me,” and started jogging for the turbolift. She followed obediently, still unsure as to what was going on as he started snapping out a list of orders for her to complete.
They were on the first shuttle to the Enterprise, and Janice lost track of Pike as soon as his feet hit the deck of the shuttle bay. She headed for the main Administration Control Room and selected a duty station then started working on the list of orders that Pike had barked at her. Soon the room around her filled up with grim-faced admin workers, all old hands. A lot of the graduating class from the Academy had been assigned to fill spaces in the crew that had been allocated to officers that were still en-route to take up their positions. The Enterprise was several weeks early in launching, and not everyone was available for duty. Still, most of the enlisted crew were long past qualified and they were the ones that got the necessary support systems in order ready for launch as panicked cadets rushed around the ship.
The last order that Pike had given her was to send a coded message to the Farragut, one that had been pre-recorded for long time, if the date stamp on the file name was any indication. Janice flagged it as Priority One and used her knowledge of Pike’s access codes to leap-frog it ahead of the main communications queue.
It wasn’t strictly regulation procedure, but then, Janice reasoned, this wasn’t exactly a regulation event. She was pleased to notice that the Farragut sent a confirmation of the transmission, and broadcast a similar one back to the Enterprise. She contacted Pike to let him know that his orders had been filled and that there was a Priority One coded message waiting for him. He responded with, “Thank you Yeoman Rand, stay in the control room and wait for further orders. Pike out.” That was the last thing Janice heard him say clearly until Doctor McCoy’s anaesthesia wore off and the first of Captain Pike’s many gruelling surgeries was over.
The entire time that Pike had been off-ship it felt as if Janice had been holding her breath. When it was announced that Pike had been rescued from the Narada, alive, she actually started to cry. She hastily scrubbed the tears away from her cheeks and signalled for another crewman to take over her duty station. The Senior Chief in charge of the room nodded to her and she went, passing through smoke-filled corridors and climbing over structural debris to get to Sickbay as quickly as she could.
She arrived as McCoy’s surgical team was preparing for an operation. She was separated by a transparent screen from Pike, who waved weakly at her and made shooing motions with a hand. Then a nurse arrived and injected him with the anaesthesia, rendering him unconscious. The transparent screen became opaque, and Janice lost sight of Pike.
“Can I stay?” asked Janice of one of the nurses. “I did First Aid as one of my secondary training fields. I can help with triage.”
“Are you kidding? We’ll take everyone we can get,” the harassed nurse replied. “Here. Sterilise your hands and put on a sterile gown, then get working on the crew through there. All minor injuries, call us if you’re unsure of what to do.”
Then one of the biobeds started to wail uncontrollably and medical staff from all over the room dived towards the noise. Janice wrapped the sterile gown around her uniform, sanitised her hands and started to deal with a steady stream of cuts, scrapes and bruises. She kept an eye on the operating theatre window and as soon as it became transparent again she made her way there.
Pike’s biobed was attached to many monitors and machines, but they all appeared to be steady, not screaming and squealing for attention. One of the surgical team took off their sterile coverings and stretched, obviously sore from bending over Pike’s body. When she emerged from the room, Janice hurried over.
“How is he?” she asked. “How is the captain?”
“Stable,” the blonde woman told her, her voice betraying how tired she was. “Doctor McCoy was able to find the Centaurian slug and extract it from his spinal cord.”
Janice gasped, and threw her hand over her mouth. She began to feel dizzy, and the nurse took one look at her before guiding her to the nearest chair and forcing her head down to her knees.
“Breathe,” the woman ordered calmly.
“I’m not going to faint,” Janice said in a small voice.
“Damn straight you’re not, we haven’t got a bed to put you on,” the nurse replied in a matter of fact tone.
Despite herself, Janice laughed.
“There we go,” the nurse said, rubbing a soothing hand on Janice’s back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that.”
“I’m his yeoman,” Janice said, addressing both the nurse and the floor. “That’s why I got upset.”
“Ah,” the nurse said. “That explains it. I’m Christine, by the way. Christine Chapel.”
“Janice Rand,” Janice said, sitting up. “How badly is he hurt?”
Christine’s face spoke volumes.
“I see,” said Janice quietly. “Can I see him?”
“He’s under some pretty heavy anaesthesia,” Christine said gently. “He won’t come around for hours. Come back then.”
“I feel useless,” Janice admitted. “What does the captain’s yeoman do when the captain is unconscious?”
“Find the acting captain?” Christine suggested. “See if he needs any help?”
“Who’s the acting captain?” Janice asked. “Communications has been down on deck fifteen, we haven’t had much clue about what was going on.”
Christine pulled a face. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but Jim Kirk is our acting captain. McCoy was bitching about what the fact would do to the size of his ego all the way through surgery. All the way through.”
Janice blinked. “Kirk? As in Cadet Kirk?”
“That’s the one,” sighed Christine. “God help us, although he seems to be doing a pretty good job so far.”
“Right,” Janice said slowly. “Well, I’ll go and find Captain...Kirk, and see if he needs any assistance. Will you comm me when Captain Pike wakes up?”
“Of course,” Christine assured her.
Janice pulled off her sterile covering and put it in the recycling unit, then found a working turbolift shaft. Captains were usually to be found on the bridge, she reasoned. It was as good a place as any to start looking for him.
She found him on the bridge, but she walked into what looked like a mutiny of the senior staff.
“I am fine,” Kirk protested, sitting firmly in the captain’s chair.
“Captain, in the last eight hours you have survived a heavy impact onto the transporter room floor, gotten into at least two physical fights with members of your own crew and engaged several Romulans in hand-to-hand combat, involving several heavy blows as you were thrown off a high surface. Not to mention, you have suffered extreme emotional trauma and stress, as well as being chased by an example of the fauna of Delta Vega. Now that the immediate danger from the Narada has passed and we are on a course for Earth, I recommend that you use this time to recuperate.”
Commander Spock looked particularly objurgate for a Vulcan, but he wasn’t the only officer to encourage Kirk off the bridge.
“Captain, my ribs are still complaining after that sky dive, and I didn’t take any of the pounding you did afterwards,” the helmsman pointed out.
“I don’t know how you survived it all,” a beautiful lieutenant at the back of the bridge said pointedly. “But I’d prefer you didn’t drop dead on the way back to Earth.”
“We could ask Doctor McCoy to relieve you of duty,” Spock pointed out. “I am sure that he would see the logic of our arguments.”
Kirk, who had set his lips in a firm line against the opinion of his crew, exhaled loudly.
“Fine,” he grumbled, not able to hide a wince as he pulled himself from the captain’s chair. “But only for a few hours, I want to be awake when Pike comes around.”
Spock nodded, and Kirk reluctantly turned control of the ship over to him. Kirk was almost to the turbolift before he paused. Janice stepped close to him and spoke quietly.
“I can find you quarters, captain, if you’ll follow me.”
Kirk did follow her into the lift.
“I’m not using Pike’s quarters,” he told her, leaning against the wall and closing his eyes. “I’m just not.”
“I understand,” Janice said, thinking quickly and coming up with one viable solution she could, given the state of the ship. “You won’t have to.”
She programmed the lift for the deck with the quarters that were assigned to her, a single room that she hadn’t had time to visit yet. A perk of her posting meant that she didn’t have to share with anybody. She and Kirk walked in silence to the room and Janice opened it with the standard code that all crew quarters used until they selected a personal code.
Kirk stumbled into the bathroom while Janice turned down the covers and used the synthesiser to make a cup of soup and a sandwich. Kirk tried to protest his lack of hunger, but Janice stared him into submission. She dealt with Christopher Pike’s aversion to filing on a daily basis. One bruised man half Pike’s age held no fear for her.
He pulled off his boots and lay back in the bed. Janice pulled up the covers and dimmed the lights.
“Just four hours,” Kirk yawned. “Wake me in four hours.”
“Aye, sir,” Janice told him, and Kirk was asleep before the doors had closed behind her.
Janice picked up a PADD on the way out, and sent an update of Kirk’s condition down to Medical. A message was returned two minutes later, from Acting CMO McCoy, informing Janice that Kirk was to have at least eight hours uninterrupted sleep and as former roommate of the Acting Captain, the Acting CMO knew for a fact that James T. Kirk could (and had) sleep through a red alert siren when tired enough. In short, Yeoman Rand was to see Kirk was fully rested before he went back on duty, even if it required a hand phaser to do so.
Well, Janice reflected, it was always good to have clear, concise orders. She put a privacy lock on the door to her quarters, engaged the soundproofing and started to compile a list of information that both Pike and Kirk would want when they woke up. Sitting herself down in a small, deserted rec room a few doors down from her cabin, she got on with her job.
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