Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity (20 page)

“I’ll take this one first,” Deeshal said, referring to the more seriously injured
of the two Urpires. McCoy nodded and gestured to the first of the three
two-person gurney teams standing by ready to get the injured to sickbay. As they carefully
transferred the wounded alien onto the stretcher, McCoy heard Jim’s voice from the
transporter console, ordering the escape pod passengers to be beamed aboard. McCoy
signaled to Ensign Houlihan to open the comm channel, and called out, “Already way
ahead of you, Jim. We’ve got all three of them, and we’re on our way to surgery.”

“Surgery? How bad is it?”

“I wish I could tell you, Jim,” he answered as Deeshal headed out the doors with his
patient, and McCoy indicated for the second team to take the other Urpire, and the
third the Abesian. “But right now . . .” He trailed off, his lips suddenly gone dry.

“I know you’ll do your best, Bones,”
Kirk told him before signing off.

“Let’s hope that’s good enough,” McCoy muttered, then called out to his orderlies,
“All right, come on, time’s a-wastin’!” They all rushed together to sickbay, McCoy
continuing to scan both patients as he jogged alongside. The Abesian’s injuries were
minor—a broken femur, a possible concussion. The Urpire was much worse off, though
McCoy couldn’t say anything more specific than that.

When they reached sickbay, Deeshal was already in the surgical bay with his patient,
assisted by Jabilo M’Benga. Christine Chapel stood just outside the doorway, prepped
and ready to assist
McCoy with his procedure. McCoy directed her to take the second Urpire into surgery
as well, and then filled in med tech Gannon, who started working on the Abesian.

After quickly finishing his own pre-surgery prep, McCoy entered the surgical bay,
and stopped when he saw Deeshal, M’Benga, and Chapel all circled around the second
Urpire. The first one lay alone on the other table, covered head to foot with a sheet,
the surgical support frame over its midsection deactivated and silent. “Dammit,” McCoy
whispered, and then said, “Tell me what’s happening,” as he started moving again toward
the others.

“He was too far gone,” Chapel told him, looking up briefly from her close monitoring
of the still-living Urpire.

“And this one?” McCoy asked as he moved beside M’Benga. He was deftly manipulating
the surgical frame controls as Deeshal issued urgent instructions and anxiously observed
the effects.

“Extensive blunt-force trauma to the skull and thorax, with significant internal injuries
and hemorrhaging,” M’Benga answered without looking up or breaking his concentration.
“I think we’ve stanched the worst of the bleeding.”

“But we’re not out of the woods yet,” Deeshal added.

McCoy observed M’Benga as he continued working. Though nearly twenty years younger
than
McCoy, M’Benga had far more interspecies medical experience, having interned on Vulcan
and having served on a frontier starbase just prior to joining the
Enterprise
. If anyone was going to be able to treat such an unfamiliar patient, it would be
him.

Though right now, that appeared to be a very big “if.”

“Diastolic pressure dropping,” Chapel called out urgently, at the same time as warning
tones sounded from the diagnostic sensors.

“No,” Deeshal growled. “We’re missing something! What?” he demanded of no one in particular
as he jabbed at buttons and twisted dials, running every scan the frame was capable
of.

“We need to try something else,” M’Benga said. “Something to slow down his autonomic
systems until we can—”

“That won’t work with an Urpire,” Deeshal cut him off. “He’ll crash, just like the
other one.”

“Brainwave activity becoming erratic,” Chapel said.

Deeshal slammed the palms of his hands on top of the shell in frustration. Then he
lifted his head and said, “2-0-1-9.”

“What?” McCoy asked, silently biting back a caustic remark about the Goeg’s damned
obsession with numbers and codes.

“In the medical transfer case I brought over!” Deeshal shouted. “It’s labeled two-oh-one-nine!”

McCoy crossed the surgery to the corner where the transport case from the
814
had been set, and quickly found the clearly labeled vial, arranged sequentially with
all the rest.
Okay, the numbering system does come in handy sometimes,
he privately admitted as he grabbed a Domain-issue hypospray, inserted the drug cartridge,
and crossed back to slap it into Deeshal’s outstretched and waiting hand. The Goeg
doctor wedged the nozzle of the hypo into the seam in the patient’s carapace where
his head met the thorax, and released the drug with a low hiss.

At first, the Urpire seemed to stabilize, but his life-sign readings remained uncomfortably
weak. “Come on,” Deeshal urged him in a low tone. “You know you don’t want to die
all the way out here, so far from Cravalco. Fight!”

Deeshal’s exhortations weren’t enough, though. “Brainwave readings faltering again,”
Chapel said, and the doctor’s entire body sagged. McCoy looked from him to M’Benga,
who wore a similar expression of defeat. The beeps and tones from the surgical arch
abated, and then fell quiet, as did the four healers.

After several seconds of silence, Deeshal lifted his head. “Where is the third one?”
he asked. “The Abesian?”

“Out in the main ward,” McCoy said. “Her injuries were relatively minor.”

Deeshal pushed himself away from the table and out the door of the surgical bay. McCoy
followed him across the ward to where the third survivor lay, still unconscious, on
her biobed. Deeshal considered the vital signs displayed on the overhead monitor,
then the patient herself. He lightly ran his fingers along her leg, feeling for the
fracture in the bone.

Then, when he found it, he pressed harder. Through her sedation, the woman began to
wince in pain, and Deeshal reacted by squeezing harder still. “What are you doing?”
McCoy asked, as the semiconscious woman’s cries grew louder.

“Who were they?” Deeshal asked in a preternaturally calm voice as he continued his
callous prodding. “What were they doing on that ship with you?”

McCoy had to physically grab the other man’s arm and yank him away from the biobed.
“What in the hell has gotten into you?” he demanded.

“There were Urpires on that vessel!” Deeshal said, still glowering at the patient
as Chapel gave her another painkiller and sedative. “The Urpires are politically neutral,
they take special pride in remaining above any kind of outside conflicts. There are
no Urpires in the Taarpi.”

“So?” McCoy asked. “What does that mean?”

Deeshal turned to face McCoy. “That means they weren’t on her ship by choice. And
that
their injuries—their deaths—were most likely her doing.”

*   *   *

As Kirk made his way to the
814
’s uppermost deck, back toward the airlock and his own ship, he passed a quartet of
Starfleet engineers, led by a Liruq officer describing the repairs needed to the structures
connecting the two ships in the wake of the recent battle. The captain put on a smile
for them as they moved by, hiding his private concerns from them.

A fair amount of foot traffic was flowing through the hard dock connection, in both
directions. In spite of everything, Kirk was proud of the way the two crews had managed
to work together to keep things running as smoothly as they had. He also knew that
many had formed friendships along the way. And he hated now having to worry about
how trustworthy any of the Domain crew were.

After waiting for a pair of Domain crewmen—a Liruq and a Rokean—queued up ahead of
him to log out with the guard and move through the airlock, Kirk climbed up after
them to the
Enterprise
. As he stepped onto the deck of his own ship again, he found his chief engineer waiting
for him. “Welcome back aboard, sir.”

“It looks like we’ve got some more repair work under way,” Kirk said, gesturing to
the other crew
members transferring between the two ships. “How bad is it?”

“Minimal, sir,” Scotty answered, walking alongside the captain as he made his way
to the nearest turbolift. “Our shields held up better than I hoped after the beating
they took at Nystrom. The worst of it was from all the evasive maneuvering the
814
put us through. We’re lucky we didn’t end up ripping a chunk of our hull off.”

Kirk’s brow furrowed at hearing that. “Perhaps we should have a procedure in place
for emergency separation,” he said.

Scotty nodded. “Aye, that’s something N’Mi and I had discussed from the get-go. Coordinating
it would take quite a bit of doing—”

Kirk interrupted him. “I was thinking more along the lines of something that wouldn’t
necessarily require coordination with the
814
,” he said, his voice lowered.

“Oh.” Scotty’s eyes widened as he realized what Kirk was talking about, and he dropped
his voice as well. “Are we anticipating a genuine emergency situation?”

Kirk’s lips pressed into a tight line of concern. “I just want to have options open
to us,” he said, as they reached the open and waiting turbolift.

“Well, I’ll do what I can . . .” Scotty stated, shaking his head. “But without warp
capacity of our own, we won’t get very far.”

“Understood, Scotty,” Kirk said, clapping the engineer on the shoulder before boarding
the turbolift. “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

Kirk ordered the lift to sickbay. As soon as he arrived and the doors opened, the
captain heard a commotion coming from down the corridor. Bones’s voice cut through
the two others he heard. “I don’t care who you are! This is my sickbay, and unless
you’re a lot less healthy than you look, you’re not setting foot in here.” Kirk picked
up his pace, and saw the same Liruq and Rokean pairing who had come aboard ahead of
him standing just outside the entry to main sickbay, being held at bay by Leonard
McCoy.

“You are impeding the official business of the Goeg Domain,” the larger Rokean said.

“And you’re impeding my treatment of a patient!” McCoy snarled back. “Would you care
to guess which I give more of a damn about?”

Before matters could escalate beyond mere words, Kirk wedged his way into the center
of the group. “What is going on here?”

“What’s going on, Captain Kirk,” McCoy said, putting a stress on his name and rank
for the benefit of the two soldiers, “is that these . . . gentlemen want to pull a
seriously injured patient out of her bed and drag her off to some interrogation chamber.”

“That patient is a dangerous terrorist,” the
Rokean said, not seeming too impressed by the human captain. “She must be turned over
to us.”

“Oh, must she?” Kirk asked, not hiding his annoyance at having orders issued to him
by interlopers on his ship.

“The Taarpi are the Goeg Domain’s most inexorable threat. They have been responsible
for—”

“I know what the Taarpi are responsible for,” Kirk thundered at the guards. “They
launched an unprovoked attack on the United Federation of Planets, nearly destroying
my ship at the Nystrom system, and then tried to finish the job just minutes ago.”
Kirk stepped right up to the large Rokean soldier, nearly pressing his nose into his
bovine face. “
We’re
the ones who captured this woman, so
we’re
the ones who will get first crack at questioning her. Then, once we reach Wezonvu
and
I’m
through with her, maybe then we can discuss extradition to the Goeg Domain.” Kirk
took a step back then, and asked, “Do either of you have any problems with that?”

The Domain soldiers appeared to have been caught completely off guard. After McCoy’s
humanitarian appeals, they didn’t expect the hard-line tack Kirk had taken. After
a momentary show of uncertainty, the Rokean answered, “I will have to bring this to
my superiors.”

“Fine. You do that,” Kirk said, pointing the pair toward the nearest turbolift. After
another moment
of awkward indecision, the Rokean cocked his head to his partner, and the two headed
back the way they had come.

“Bravo, Jim,” McCoy said once the duo were out of earshot.

“Never mind the accolades,” Kirk said as he let his belligerent front slip away. “What’s
going on here, Bones? You said ‘patient.’ I thought there were three people in that
escape pod.”

The doctor’s smile quickly evaporated. “There were. We couldn’t save the other two.”

Kirk took a moment, then asked, “And the one who made it, what kind of shape is she
in? Will she be able to talk?”

“Give her a day or two to recover and yeah, she’ll be fine. At least,” he added, shooting
a sidewise glare at Doctor Deeshal, “she will for as long as I have anything to say
about it.”

Kirk looked over at the Goeg physician as well, and it struck him that he had been
standing there the entire time, oddly disengaged from the confrontation with the two
soldiers and from the current discussion as well. As he noticed Kirk’s look, he dropped
his eyes to the deck, pointedly avoiding eye contact with anyone else in the sickbay.

The captain turned his back to the Goeg doctor, and whispered to McCoy, “Problem?”

“I’m not sure,” McCoy answered, also trying to keep Deeshal from overhearing. “I hope
not.”

“All right,” Kirk said, leaving it at that. “Keep me posted.”

As he turned to go, McCoy stepped out into the corridor with him. “Jim . . . that
was a pretty convincing show of anger you gave for those two guards. You all right?”

Kirk gave him a tight, humorless smile. “Nothing you need to worry about, Bones.”

But McCoy caught him by the arm. “No one leaves my sickbay unless I say they’re fit
to leave.” Kirk put up a token protest, but allowed the doctor to lead him into his
private office, and then to plant him into one of the chairs in front of his workstation.
“All right, Jim, let it out.”

“Let what out, Bones?” Kirk asked.

McCoy took the seat opposite him. “We’re getting a hell of a lot more than we bargained
for when we first agreed to let these people ‘help’ us, aren’t we?”