A Mighty Fine Man - Part 1/4

[zauzat]

Note: this story is based on the canon age difference between Pike and McCoy, not on the AOS actors. McCoy is 29 and Pike is 37 (see above for a beautifully imagined younger Pike).

Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

“Cadet, you can’t just go in, you don’t have an appointment, cadet, no……”

Pike could hear the wail of his assistant as his office door slammed open and a red-uniformed man strode in. “So you’re the bastard who’s running those fucktard combat training sessions, are you?”

Pike was a trifle taken aback. It wasn’t that he was very senior on a campus that included some of the brassiest of the brass, he was just a captain, and currently an instructor and Starfleet recruiter. But he was a captain with quite a reputation. He gazed levelly at the erring cadet and raised one eyebrow. That usually did the trick.

He might as well have raised an eyebrow at a raging bull.

“Do you have any fucking idea how many of your so-called trainees have ended up in my hospital with broken bones, torn ligaments and damaged joints?”

“Your hospital, cadet?” demanded Pike as he rose to his feet.

“My hospital,” snapped the cadet. “Do y’all instructors really think there’s a never-ending supply of naive youngsters panting to fill the shoes of those you’ve maimed with your ineptitude? I know just how desperate Starfleet is for recruits. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t!”

Pike considered the man in front of him. He was tall and dark-haired, with a face etched in a deep scowl and powerful arms crossed over a broad chest. He was clearly older than the average cadet, possibly by more than a decade. But that wasn’t the key difference. This man had the kind of tough confidence that only came with professional standing and years of experience.

Pike didn’t put on airs; he prided himself on being accessible to his crew and his trainees. Nevertheless his name carried weight, the highest scores in the Academy command track in a decade, a dramatic start to his captaincy, and then a decade long career in deep space, a career garnished with public commendations and covert rumours of strange happenings with alien races. The fact that he was the only son of a now-retired Starfleet Admiral didn’t hurt. Pike was accustomed to receiving a certain level of respect.

He wasn’t receiving anything of the sort from this man who was glaring at him scornfully, as if he were the officer and Pike an erring student. “And who might you be, cadet?”

“Doctor,” drawled the cadet. “Doctor Leonard H. McCoy, Captain. And a doctor sick to the fucking gills of patching up the disasters your maladroit instructors dump in our laps. Being injured in the line of duty is one thing, but getting fucked up in the damned classroom is a massive failure on behalf of your boneheaded staff.”

Pike took a deep breath to try and contain his rising anger. “Space is a dangerous place, cadet. If these trainees need their hands held, they shouldn’t have enlisted. They need to be able to look after themselves. Starfleet service is difficult and it’s hazardous. Life is not going to be easy in the future, and there is no reason for them to expect it to be easy now.”

“And that is classic command bullshit,” the doctor replied disdainfully. “A pathetic excuse for your own failures in leadership. Do you know that there are 19 bones in the human hand? We’ve treated fractures of every single one of them, primarily metatarsal and phalangeal fractures accompanied by joint dislocation. Do you know how much that fucking hurts? Do you even care? As for knees, if it’s not anterior cruciate ligament injury, it’s articular cartilage damage. Or in the back it’s acromioclavicular and sternoclavicular joint injuries, or iliolumbar ligament injury. Even with modern medicine, most of these need many hours of rehab. We don’t have the resources and the trainees can’t afford to lose the time from their courses. And don’t get me started on Maisonneuve's fracture or Achilles rupture, which should not be happening in people this young. Both require weeks of treatment.”

The doctor was striding across Pike’s office as he ranted, waving his arms with rising anger. Now he spun round to face the captain once again.

“Or let me try a real damned simple one, one that even you might be able to understand. Skull fracture! I’ve had two come in in the last week. Both were facing significant risk of brain damage. These cadets did not enlist to suffer chronic injury in a combat course run by bungling amateurs. Your fucking practices are unsafe, old-fashioned, inefficient and just plain pig-headed wrong!”

“Oh, now you’re a combat expert as well as a doctor,” Pike snapped sarcastically.

The doctor strode around the desk and was right up in his face now, toe to toe, eye to eye. Pike noticed that he was not a small man. He was much the same height as Pike but broader in the chest and the shoulders. His uniform fitted snugly across muscled biceps.

“I might know a thing or two about combat, Captain. Yes, we don’t train to take out enemy forces. But we do train to be able to restrain one of our own advanced combat specialists should he go fucking off his rocker and need to be taken down by his CMO. And we both know it happens.”

The doctor bared his teeth, his eyes lighting up with a contemptuous smile. They were a rather beautiful green-flecked hazel, Pike noted in the part of his mind that was clinically monitoring this altercation. And they were sparkling with the challenge of the confrontation. The doctor was enjoying this, he thought incredulously.

“Starfleet Medical Protocols, Regulation 121 Section A. The one man who can stand down the captain is the CMO, Captain.”

“You’re light years away from being CMO material, cadet,” Pike retorted.

“Right now I’m responsible medical officer material, Captain, and that’s all you need to know.” The doctor slapped down a dossier on the desk and stabbed at it with his finger as he ranted on. “These are the cadets who’ve been admitted with injuries. These are the injuries they’ve sustained. And these are the training exercises that caused the damage. I’ve written it all out in words of one syllable. I know y’all command types are so dumb, you could throw yourself on the ground and miss but even you should be able to follow.”

The doctor leant forward and pressed a finger into the centre of Pike’s chest. “I get any more of your fuck-ups in my hospital beds and I file a complaint.”

And with that he spun on his heel and stalked out. Pike stared after him, speechless, trembling with anger. His hand hovered over his comm. He wanted nothing more than to call up Starfleet Medical, get the Surgeon General herself on the phone and deliver a complaint so blistering that the woman’s comm would melt in her hand.

Taking a deep breath, he deliberately walked away from his desk, stopping in front of two holos that adorned his book shelves. Glowering at an adorable image of a young boy holding a model starship above his head, he continued to breathe slowly and evenly. Control. That was the thing. Never let anyone destroy your control. Never react until you are calm and clear headed about what you want to achieve. Never react until you have all the facts to hand.

He glared venomously back at the dossier that marred the pristine neatness of his desk. He’d see what drivel the doctor had filled it with while he waited to recover his equanimity. And then he’d file a complaint so precisely devastating that the doctor’s career would be over before the day was out. He picked up the file and scanned through it quickly, before reading it through a second time with more concentration.

By the time he was done he was angrier than ever. He hated incompetence. He also hated being in the wrong and he had a sinking feeling about this. Still, procrastination had never been one of his weaknesses. He sat down at his monitor and grimly began to cross-check the allegations with the files on the database.

Finally he sat back, massaging his aching temples. Unfortunately the cadet appeared to have a point, although not one that justified such abysmal behaviour. He stared at the file, fingers tapping restlessly on the desktop, considering what to do next. At last he gave in to his curiosity and entered the doctor’s name in the intranet search engine. The amount of material that came up took him some time to browse through… MD, PhD, ground-breaking research. He was young to have such an illustrious resume.

So the man was arrogant with reason. And yet medical specialists of his calibre usually chose to reign as king of their little domains in specialist hospitals. Pike wondered why the man had ever enlisted. If, as he suspected, McCoy got off on picking fights with superior officers he wasn’t going to last long in a service as hierarchical as Starfleet.

Pike was still itching to file a complaint but the trouble was that the doctor was right about the poor standard of the training sessions. A complaint just made Pike look like a sore loser. As his temper cooled, he found himself torn between anger and admiration. The attitude was appalling and the insubordination unforgivable, but the doctor’s unflinching defence of what he believed in was something Pike could admire. He knew a thing or two about standing up for what was right despite compelling pressure to keep quiet. He smiled to himself ruefully. That kind of confidence was really rather attractive.

McCoy was exactly the kind of man that Pike found the most compelling - capable, competent, confident. He let his mind wander a little as he contemplated the doctor. He’d always been attracted to men but mostly he chose not to act on it. He didn’t want a man he could dominate but he certainly wasn’t about to hand over his hard-won control to another male. Women were different, easier somehow. He loved being manhandled by a competent woman but he knew, deep in that place in his heart where he buried his flashes of ruthless self-honesty, that he didn’t feel challenged by women in the same way, no matter how capable they were. Now a man like McCoy…. He would never act on the impulse but he might let himself dream, just a little.

He turned his attention back to the doctor’s dossier. To get this far in a command career you had to know which fights to follow through on and which to walk away from. Maybe he’d have a word with some of the instructors taking the course, review a few practices. Not that he’d be telling that to McCoy any time soon.

*

The next time that Pike saw the doctor was about a week later as he was crossing the lawn outside the administration building. The man called across to Pike to stop and then jogged over to where he was waiting.

“You didn’t report me!” The doctor sounded accusing.

Pike stared back at him bemused. “Why? Did you want me to?”

McCoy glared at him, his arms crossed defensively. Once again Pike idly noted the breadth of his shoulders, the power of his arms. “Dammit man! I’ve spent the last week in a state, waiting for your formal complaint to surface!”

“I can still file one, if it makes you feel better.”

“Don’t be idiotic, of course it damned well wouldn’t.” The doctor stopped abruptly, as if hearing himself for the first time. He ran a hand agitatedly through his hair. Deep brown, nice and thick, looked rather silky, Pike thought.

“Sorry, dammit, I need to start this again. This is meant to be an apology.”

Pike raised an eyebrow. “In that case it’s an astoundingly bad one.”

McCoy snorted. “Yes, well, not my strong point, apologies.” He stared at the grass, looking uncomfortable. “Look, I’m sorry for going off half-cocked at you. I know I said some pretty rough things. I’ve heard that changes have been made in the combat classes. Thank you for that. And for not reporting me. I’m already on one written warning for insubordination and I really don’t need another.”

“Colour me surprised,” Pike remarked dryly. “So who had the courage to call you on your bullshit?”

McCoy looked vaguely embarrassed. “I tried a temper tantrum on a CMO instructor on the medical track and ended up in front of the Starfleet Surgeon General before I could blink. My god, that woman is frightening. Tritanium wrapped up in ruffled velvet.”

He gave Pike a lopsided grin. “Sorry Captain, but you’ve some way to go in the sheer intimidation stakes.”

Pike considered him for a moment. “You know doctor, you’re not going to last in Starfleet if you can’t control your temper. Whatever you may be thinking, you can’t just let it spew out like that.”

“Don’t I know it,” he replied with a hopeless shrug. “As stubborn as a mule, a temper like a wildfire and a massive chip on my shoulder about authority figures.” He laughed at Pike’s look of surprise. “I do have a doctorate in psychology, Captain. I’m capable of some self-analysis even if I don’t do too well at acting on my own advice.”

After a moment of silence he continued. “It’s hard here, harder than I expected. Where I was before, in Atlanta, I could just tell myself that the vast majority of my superiors were fools. Here at Starfleet there’s no such hiding place. There are some extraordinary medics here, people of galactic renown.”

“They may be fools down in Atlanta, although you sound a trifle biased to my ear, but I’m amazed that even there they put up with you,” Pike commented.

“Yes, well, having your father-in-law as chief administrator of the hospital helps,” McCoy replied wryly. “I may have been granted more leeway than I realized at the time.

The crowds around them were thinning as cadets disappeared inside for their next class.

“Look, I’ve got to go, but I really am sorry. And thank you for not filing a complaint. I owe you one. You’re a good man.” McCoy stopped a few feet away from the captain and gave him one last lingering look, a leisurely perusal from head to toe and back up again. His handsome face lit up with that reluctant half-smile of his. “Actually, you’re a mighty fine man, Captain. No wonder you’re more used to people worshipping at your feet than yelling in your face.” And with that the doctor was gone.

Pike stared after him, trying to decide if he’d just been chatted up or insulted. Given the temperament of the doctor, it had probably been both. He found himself more intrigued with the man than ever. He shook his head abruptly to clear it of his idle fantasies. Men like that did not fit in with Pike’s tightly controlled professional plan. They could ruin a career in the time it took to say ‘fuck you’ to an Admiral. Still, he couldn’t help his mind returning to the conundrum of the doctor as he walked away. Whatever was said of the man, you certainly couldn’t call him boring.

*

Pike lay in the bio bed, fuming. He disliked hospitals, mostly because he disliked being at the mercy of technology he didn’t understand. He knew enough about engineering and communications and navigation and flying to assess the information being given to him by his crew, and in certain cases he could do their job better than they did it themselves. He learnt early on that taking over and finishing a job faster, more efficiently and more effectively was a rapid shortcut to respect with deep space specialists.

However, medical was the one field where he couldn’t easily judge the competence of the staff. He’d trusted his own CMO but only through years of enforced contact. That and the fact that Boyce wouldn’t put up with his bullshit anyway. But this, this was making him edgy. His head was still spinning from the accident and the pain was making it difficult to think clearly.

The nurse seemed just a bit too interested in flirting. He wished she’d spend a little less time staring into his eyes and cooing about how brave he’d been and a little more looking at where she was jabbing the needle of the drip she was supposed to be inserting in his arm. And worse than that, the doctor appeared to be about 12 and so nervous that the sweat was dripping onto his tricorder. Pike glared at him malevolently.

“Well, are you going to do your job or not?” he demanded with all the authority of a decade as a captain in deep space. The tricorder slipped out of the sweaty hands of the beleaguered intern and hit the floor hard. They both stared down at the starburst across the shattered screen, winced at the protesting wail of beeps from the damaged unit.

“And what in the name of all that is holy is going on here?”

After that first encounter Pike had not expected to ever be relieved to see the abrasive doctor, but at least he looked like an adult and acted like a professional. “You!” McCoy pointed at the quivering intern. “Pick up that extremely expensive piece of equipment you’ve just ruined and go and explain yourself to supplies. You!” He turned on the nurse. “If you want the man’s damned comm number, ask. Otherwise get the hell out so that the few of us who actually work around here can get on with it.”

He rounded on Pike. “And you, stop intimidating my staff. Now, what damned fool stunt have you pulled to land yourself in my tender care?” He was rapidly pulling up information on his padd as he spoke. Pike explained briefly that he had received severe burns on his chest and arms while pulling cadets out of the line of fire of an explosion caused by a malfunctioning warp coil during an Enterprise site visit.

“Bless your heart, Captain, but you can be as dumb as a box of rocks. You’re meant to run away from exploding objects, you know, not towards them,” lectured McCoy as he began a fast visual scan of the tissue damage. “I thought cadets and red-shirts were there to take the hits while the brass headed for the hills.”

“This will take time, Captain. A warp coil probably means verterium cortenide contamination in the wound. Once I’ve established the severity, we neutralize it with a localised bioregenerative field. Only then can we start on dermal repair.” McCoy began a detailed scan with the tricorder. He worked with rapid and brutal efficiency and Pike felt himself relaxing. He recognized and appreciated competence when he saw it. The doctor seemed to realise that Pike was reassured by having the procedures described. He intermingled the explanation of what he was doing with a steady stream of invective insulting Pike’s intelligence, ability and survival skills.

The argument was surprisingly effective in distracting Pike from the discomfort of the treatment. Even so, he eventually gave up on defending himself, too tired for the cut and thrust of the debate, too traumatized by the accident, although he wasn’t admitting that any time soon. “Yes, doctor,” he said meekly, in response to a sally by McCoy about colossal egos that had to be the hero of every damn fool occasion.

McCoy peered at his suspiciously. “Say that again. I like the sound of that!”

Pike gave him big eyes in a solemn face. “Yes doctor, whatever you say doctor.”

That earned him a sharp laugh and a raised eyebrow. The doctor was exceedingly attractive when he allowed one of those rare smiles to show. “Now that’s the way I like it,” he replied in a soft southern drawl. “Maybe you aren’t irredeemably stupid after all. Because I have to tell you, some people really are.” He cancelled the bioregenerative field and reached for the vascular regenerator. “Now we let this run for a time to rebuild muscle and blood vessels in the full thickness burns. So while this does its thing let me tell you about a case from the early hours of this morning that proves my point.”

The doctor leaned against the side of the bed, where he could keep an eye on the readings on the bedside monitor. “A patient was brought in around 0300, a ninety-something woman who had suddenly become unresponsive. She was having sex with her husband he noticed that she was no longer conscious. Unable to revive her, he called us.

“It was bizarre. She was semi-coherent, but with no asymmetry to her neurologic exam. Just profoundly hypotensive. I had her bed inverted and was pumping her full of IV fluids but was barely able to bring her blood pressure to acceptable levels. In desperation I put her on inotropes to support her circulatory status.

“But there was no clue as to why - no chest pain, no fever, no bleeding. Just unexplained, severe, persistent hypotension. And then the husband showed up, a frisky 105-year-old. And he sheepishly admits to erectile dysfunction, but he can’t take one of the sildenafil citrate products because he has heart trouble and is on nitroglycerin. So he does some research on the ‘net and decides to try wrapping one of his nitroglycerin patches around the shaft of his penis. And up it pops and he and wife are at it like rabbits once again. They’ve been doing it like this for months apparently.

“You should have seen my face while he was telling me this. Anyway, so he is tidying himself up after the paramedics left and realises that the nitroglycerin patch is missing. Of course you can guess where it had gotten to."

“You are kidding, right?”

“God’s own truth, I swear. I put on my most consoling face and thanked him for this very important information and went and fished it out of her vagina. She started recovering almost immediately.”

“Don’t make me laugh, McCoy, the pain is bad enough already. At least our cadets aren’t that bad.”

“Not that bad? They’re worse. I don’t know how so-called geniuses can be so pig-ass dumb. They’ve got the technical know-how to come up with some ludicrous schemes and none of the common sense that might tell them it’s a god-awful idea.”

As McCoy layered biosynthetic plastiskin over the recovering burns and ran the dermal regenerator over it, he told Pike some of the stories about idiotic accidents that landed cadets in hospital. By the end of the treatment, Pike had quite some sympathy for his attitude.

“You’re done,” declared McCoy. “I’ll give you a sedative that will let you sleep through most of the next 24 hours. Then there will be another round with the regenerator to promote the final surface healing and you’ll be discharged. All fine and fit to rush off for another fool stunt.”

“Yes doctor. Thank you doctor.” Pike gave him his meekest look. McCoy snorted. Once again those full lips curled up just at the edges.

“You know, Captain, I think I like you like this. Following doctor’s orders… all sweet and obedient, all yes doctor, whatever you say doctor. I could get used to this!”

Pike had to blame the drugs and the trauma for the fact that he appeared to be flirting with a cadet, and a hopelessly insubordinate cadet at that. Still, Starfleet Medical was in fact a separate institution from the Academy, for all the cadets wore the same uniforms. This didn’t break the letter of the fraternization rules. What it did for his own personal determination to avoid sexual entanglements with powerful men was a matter he was ignoring just at the moment.

He raised an eyebrow. “You think you’ve got what it takes to dominate me, McCoy?”

McCoy stared back at him steadily. “Yes, I do. I think you’d like being dominated, Captain. Take a break from all your own importance and authority.”

The easy camaraderie between them had vanished. In its place was an edgy electricity. Pike felt a prickle of nervous excitement in his gut, a feeling he usually associated with deep space missions. “And why would I do what you wanted, doctor?”

“Because it’s what you want. Just let go for once, let someone else look after you. You’re so fucking controlled all the time, you’re rigid with it. Trust someone else to be good to you for once.”

Pike’s mouth was dry, his palms sweating. He’d long since learnt to truly only trust in himself. This conversation was making him shiveringly uncomfortable and yet somehow he could not let it go.

“And what do you know about being good to someone?”

McCoy suddenly looked unaccountably sad. “I could be, if I was ever given the chance.”

They were abruptly interrupted by a page on McCoy’s comm. Yet another emergency. The doctor quickly administered the final hypo. He stood for a long moment watching Pike as the haziness of the sedative slowly overtook him. As he was sinking into unconsciousness McCoy gently stroked the back of a single finger across his cheek.

“I’d like to be given a chance,” he said very softly.

Pike lay trapped in a fitful sleep plagued by the voice of his father. You’ve got to do it on your own, boy. There is no one that you can trust out there. Only yourself…. always alone…

*

“You officers certainly do live well here,” Boyce teased as he and Pike settled down to lunch in the officers’ club. Pike’s erstwhile CMO was briefly back on earth to attend a conference being held at the medical school.

“Oh yes, god forbid that the admirals should be in any way uncomfortable,” Pike replied laconically.

Boyce looked at him curiously. “And how are you doing, Chris?”

“Just fine. The work’s interesting, I keep busy.” Pike’s face was carefully buried in the wine list.

Boyce gently pushed the list to one side. “Maybe I should order us both martinis instead. Chris, this is me you’re talking to, remember? I’ve been your doctor. I’ve been your bartender. And you know that I will always be your friend. Tell me honestly, how are you?”

Pike looked across at the older man who had supported him through some of his worst experiences in the black, who had continued to believe in him when he had been battling to believe in himself. Maybe this was the one man that he could talk to about this. “It’s bad Phil,” he said carefully. “I thought I’d adjust once I got over the initial shock of being grounded. I’ve always been good at just getting on with it. But it’s getting worse. I’d bored, and I’m going to end up doing something stupid.”

Pike was carefully not thinking about that bizarre conversation with the doctor at the hospital.

“Chris, you haven’t been grounded, you know that.”

“What do you call a four-year earth assignment in the middle of my career?” Pike demanded.

“You needed a break,” Boyce replied patiently. “And it wasn’t just about Rigel VII and Talos IV. You’d served continuously in deep space from ’46 through to ’54. It was too long, it doesn’t matter how good you are. There is a reason why there is supposed to be a 12 month home leave after every five year rotation. And if I had my way, the rotations would be even shorter than that.”

The two men were interrupted as a waiter came to take their order. Once he had departed, Boyce continued.

“At the end of this you get command of the brand new flagship and a five-year deep space assignment. That is hardly a demotion, Chris.”

Pike stared glumly at his hands and quietly confessed to one of his greatest fears. “I know. I just don’t always believe it. Sometimes I wonder if they aren’t just moving me sideways in stages.” He grimaced at Boyce’s look of incredulity.

“You know that it happens, Phil. It’s how you get rid of someone too powerful or too unstable to challenge directly. Move them sideways, promise them something else and then let that promise fade away with time.”

“You’re being ridiculous. You’re a highly decorated captain, with more experience than many at deep space exploration. You have talent par excellence for getting mixed up with bizarre alien races.”

“So why am I trapped down here teaching snotty cadets how to wipe their noses? Dammit Phil, they think I’m potentially mentally unstable. I’ve had not one but two run-ins with alien mind control, with the Talosians and with the Ngultor. And then there was my quasi-breakdown after Rigel.”

“You didn’t break down, Chris,” Boyce replied steadily. “You considered resigning your command. It was a perfectly reasonable reaction. You’d been ambushed and had three dead and seven injured. I always thought the real damage was the way the Talosians made you relive it all when you hadn’t yet had the chance to process it the first time round.”

Boyce leaned across the table to gently touch the back of Pike’s hand.

“Chris, you are an extraordinary commander. Your achievements are already legendary in several sectors. Keeping peace with the Vestians at the risk of a court martial, acting as bait for the Ngultor and destroying their mothership, saving Starbase 13, defeating Kaaj despite your ship being nearly crippled. And I know we’re not supposed to ever talk about that place but the strength of mind that let you resist on Talos and engineer an escape with no lives lost, that alone is a career-defining achievement.”

Chris was glaring mutinously at his chilli prawn linguine. “Then why am I finding it so hard to adjust here? Maybe I genuinely am mentally compromised.”

“No, you damned well aren’t. I’ve seen your psych profiles. You’re exhausted and you’re suffering from low grade PTSD. All the medics expected a far higher level of mental trauma given both your experiences and your lack of recovery time. You are tough as old boot leather, mentally and physically.

“Listen to me Chris. And stop stabbing at that poor linguine. I assure you that it is dead already. It is like rehab for certain types of injuries. It just takes time. Your depression is probably due to your mind working through so much stress and exhaustion. You can’t control your recovery by plotting it out on a spreadsheet or some such. You have to let it take its own time. I bet you’re working obsessively as usual. For god’s sake, take a break, make a friend, do something different. Just relax once in a while.”

The image of the mouthy doctor floated into his head, the odd quirk of those full lips as he’d looked Pike up and down, the brush of his finger on Pike’s cheek. He took a deep breath. Maybe Boyce was the one person that he could approach this topic with.

“I think maybe the hardest lesson from that run in space was the vulnerability of it. My father was always whipping the idea of control into me, often literally. And command training does the same. Lives depend on your decisions. And then I got out there and lives were lost because I made mistakes.”

“Chris, you didn’t….”

“I did, Phil. It does no good to pretend otherwise. I should have seen that fortress on Rigel for the trap that it was. But the mind control was the worst. To discover, not once but twice, that I couldn’t even protect my innermost being. That was hard.”

“I can see that it must have been awful, Chris. But both times you overcame. With the Ngultor you managed to use the mental connection against them and then break it when you were done. And with the Talosians you were able to analyze what they were doing to you and resist it right to the end.

“I know it must be a shock to discover that you’re only human,” Boyce said gently, “but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t an exceptional human. It’s alright to fail occasionally or even just to choose not to lead once in a while. Control is not just about being able to exclude others, Chris, whatever your experiences with your old man may have drilled into you. It is also about letting others in when appropriate, about recognising your own vulnerability while trusting in your ability to cope with that.”

And that idea was getting a little too close to things that Pike was currently choosing not think about. It was time to change the subject.

“Enough about me. Tell me what it’s like to run the medical facilities on a starbase.”

Boyce accepted the new topic with grace. They discussed his present work and then began a general reminiscence of past assignments, successes, failures, who was now serving where. Pike found it a relief to talk to someone who really knew what it was like to live up there in the black.

He was explaining to Boyce that he was increasingly concerned about how theoretical much of the Academy teaching seemed to be and how little off-planet exploratory experience the instructors seemed to have when a petite blonde woman stopped by their table and kissed Boyce on both cheeks. Boyce introduced her to Pike as Branch Admiral Dr Victoria Turnbull, the Starfleet Surgeon General. As she greeted him with a sunny smile and a clipped English accent, he had to wonder what McCoy of all people had been so cowed by.

Pike, now mellow from the wine and the pleasure of Boyce’s company, let his mischievous side loose. “A pleasure to meet you, ma’am. I’ve heard of you. You are exceedingly intimidating, according to an acquaintance of mine. Tritanium wrapped in velvet, I think he said.”

“And who the hell did you hear that from?” Turnbull asked, amused.

“A certain Dr McCoy. I believe you were engaged in slapping his wrists.”

Turnbull shook her head. “I swear that man will put me in the grave before my time. He’s potentially brilliant, but only if he manages to bloody well graduate. He’s either going to get a dishonourable discharge for insubordination or someone is simply going to punch his lights out.”

“McCoy. Why does that sound familiar?” Boyce wondered.

“He developed that nifty procedure for grafting neural tissue to the cerebral cortex,” Turnbull replied.

“My god, yes, that was ground-breaking stuff,” Boyce said, “figuring out how to create an axonal pathway between the tissue graft and the basal ganglia. Remarkable. How on earth did you lure him to Starfleet? Wasn’t he based at Emory in Atlanta?”

“It was more like he washed up here,” Turnbull replied. “Washed up on a spring tide of alcohol actually. Something went badly wrong at Emory. Not surprising, they’re a bunch of sharks down there. And on top of whatever it was, there was a bitter divorce and the death of his father from pyrrhoneuritis. A death that happened just weeks before the cure was finally found.”

“That’s awful. Maybe he needed a new start,” Boyce suggested.

“Maybe he was running away,” Turnbull retorted. “Either way we’re glad to have him but I’ve warned him to keep his bloody temper in check. I’ve made it crystal clear that his past achievements are acknowledged but they now simply set the baseline for what we expect in the future. And we expect him to achieve with grace, with consistency and with respect for his superior officers!”

Pike had to laugh at that. “And you of course are a shining example of grace and respect, Victoria,” teased Boyce.

“Too bloody right. Do as I say, not as I do - official motto of the Admiralty,” Turnbull replied with a grin. “I know it’s a tall order, but I really hope he can. Medical is as confoundedly stodgy as every other department in these hopelessly moribund headquarters. Starfleet needs men of his calibre. The entire Federation does.”

As the conversation turned to medical matters, Pike continued to ponder the mystery of the mouthy doctor. He rather hoped the man would stay the course at Starfleet. He certainly made life on campus more colourful.

Part 2