Star Trek: The Original Series: The More Things Change

by Scott Pearson

  Chapel shook her head. “I really don’t like dividing my attention, but I don’t see that I have much choice. Let’s do it.”

  He gave her a crisp nod. “If all goes well, you will not have to do anything. But if any subsystems start red-lining, please make sure I am aware of the situation.”

  “Of course.” Chapel realized that while she was serving as Spock’s backup, she had no backup herself. With a sigh, she turned toward the aft cabin, but Spock called her back.

  “I could use your help pulling up this deck plate.”

  They lifted up an access panel that stretched from between the cockpit seats back to the door into the aft cabin. Chapel took a moment to peek into the tight crawlspace as Spock gathered the necessary tools and materials for the repair work. She could see charred conduits and areas covered in emergency self-sealing foam. He had his work cut out for him.

  “Good luck,” she said as he lay down on the deck and started wriggling into the crawlspace.

  He craned his neck to look back up at her. “As reluctant as I am to admit it, that may be what we both need right now.”

  With a nod, the doctor stepped into the aft cabin and went to Dax’s side. The monitor above the bed was now a split screen, displaying key energy readouts and subsystem relays on one half and Dax’s vital signs on the other. This was no way to treat a patient, but, as Dax had said, It is what it is.

  Once again, Chapel rolled down the covers and lifted Dax’s shirt. “Well, here we go,” she said, and she placed both palms on Dax’s stomach. She applied some pressure and slowly moved her hands around. The symbiont didn’t respond as quickly as the first time. Beginner’s luck, I guess, Chapel thought. She continued, moving her hands in small circles, then looked up at Spock’s progress on the monitor. As she watched, she saw subsystems going off-line then coming back on again, sometimes repeatedly. He was obviously taking slow, careful steps and testing his repairs as he went. Erratic energy signatures smoothed out, and some flat-lined systems began powering up for the first time since the attack.

  “At least one of us is making progress.” Even as she said that, Chapel felt the stirrings of the symbiont. Her downward pressure met with resistance as the symbiont arched its wormlike body. The sensation didn’t surprise her as much this time, and she made an effort to replace her original thoughts of parasites with the idea of a fetus moving within its mother’s womb. She continued her gentle massage and was soon rewarded with the strange electricity of the undulating being tickling her palms.

  She was certain this was the mental energy of the symbiont. Chapel didn’t expect any actual communication with it; the creature was so alien to her that she suspected a deeper bonding would be necessary for that. But communication wasn’t the goal, only the facilitation of the link between symbiont and host. Still feeling the static bursts on her hands, Chapel lifted one hand slowly from Dax’s abdomen. Chapel concentrated on her palms, envisioning the path between them, up the nerves of one arm, into the spinal cord, and back down to the palm she was moving toward Dax’s forehead.

  She hesitated, her left hand hovering over Dax’s face, a subtle tingling still playing across the palm, an echo of the strong sensation in her right hand resting above the squirming symbiont. Chapel glanced at the monitor. Dax’s vital signs were stable. The various feeds from Spock’s repair work also appeared under control. Everything’s fine, she told herself. Chapel looked back down at her patient—patients—and placed her left hand firmly upon Dax’s forehead.

  Instantly there was a burst of static along her left palm. Chapel felt as if there were a magnetic pull between her hand and Dax’s forehead. Dax twitched once, her body jerking slightly as if startled, then relaxed. Chapel felt an odd sensation moving up one arm and down the other, similar to getting IV fluids and feeling the cool liquid move through your bloodstream. But this was the neural energy of Trill and symbiont linking through her own nervous system, their natural reaching toward each other facilitated along an external pathway.

  For a disturbing moment, Chapel lost all sensation in her arms. The numbness began spreading down her spine, but Chapel reasserted herself by moving her arms—without breaking contact with Dax’s body—and again envisioning the pathway from palm to palm, as if emphasizing the course of the detour to her patients. Feeling returned to her arms, and the tingling sensation of the Trill neural energy stayed confined to the appropriate route—at least mostly. Although she kept picturing the route as moving straight from one arm to the other through her spinal cord, wisps of neural energy strayed upward toward her brain, causing a sensation of whispers she couldn’t quite hear. She forgot to blink, almost forgot to breathe. Her perception of time stretched, melted, evaporated. Chapel knew she should check on Spock. Spock needed her. She was his backup. He was counting on her, as she had counted on him innumerable times over the years. But these thoughts were hazy, glimpsed through a fog, and insubstantial themselves, ghosts she couldn’t grasp, stirred into chaotic patterns as her fingers passed through them, she was lost in a desert, trying to scoop up the water of a mirage, her hands coming up dry, sand spilling from her palms . . .

  Chapel wrenched herself away from Dax and staggered away from the bed. She inhaled deeply, gasping, as if surfacing after having held her breath far too long. The monitor displayed Dax’s brainwaves largely resynchronized, at least for now. Chapel stared at the waves arcing up and down across the screen, drawn to them, but slowly her senses expanded. Shifting her gaze to the engineering feeds on the other half of the monitor, Chapel saw graphs, various colored lines zigzagging, numbers flashing, red and green bars. Nothing made sense; her mind was unfocused, like it was elsewhere, like she was a reflection in a mirror with no substance of her own. Somewhere deep in this fog of jumbled sensations, there was something else, something solid, insistent, grounding. Her impression of this coalesced into a single word, a plea for help from out of the darkness: Christine . . .

  Reality rushed into hard-edged focus around her. She staggered as if dropped onto the deck from meters in the air. Alarms jangled, slicing through the cabin, setting her teeth on edge.

  “Spock!” She rushed to the cockpit door, which didn’t open. Chapel banged on the manual controls mindlessly, then stopped to actually look at the display. Cabin pressure was decreasing slowly in the forward compartment. Luckily it wasn’t serious enough to block the override command she entered.

  She dashed into the cockpit. Spock was facedown deep in the crawlspace—she could only see his legs, which lay there limp, lifeless. No, this is not happening! Chapel grabbed him by the ankles and pulled. He’s only unconscious. I know he’s still alive. I’d feel it if . . . if he were gone. His body slid out until she could see the small of his back, then came to a sudden halt. Another tug brought no progress. She crawled over him, lying on top of his body, so she could peer into the dark crawlspace beneath the deck. As her eyes adjusted, she could see that the left sleeve of his uniform was caught on a ruptured conduit. Chapel reached up alongside him and got her hand on his sleeve. She could feel a bunch of fabric gathered along the tip of the conduit, the threads of a hole torn through the uniform, the damp warmth of blood where her efforts to pull him out had caused the conduit to slice into his triceps.

  “Dammit!” She focused her anger into one ferocious tug on the sleeve, which tore away from the conduit. After pushing his arm closer to his body, she moved down to his feet again and pulled him the rest of the way out more slowly. It was an accomplishment, but there was no time for celebrating yet. Grabbing Spock under his arms, she half lifted, half rolled him up onto the deck. She had made a mess of his neatly arranged supplies beside the access panel, but she found a couple of emergency sealing packets and tossed them into the crawlspace. She dragged him farther out of the way, near the starboard hatch, then wrestled the access panel back into place by herself.

  Her body trembling from effort and adrenaline, Chapel hurried into
the aft cabin to grab a medkit. She spared a quick glance at Dax’s vitals, which were still stable, then she went back to Spock. Chapel dropped down to sit on the deck beside him. She pulled Spock up across her lap so that she could cradle his head in her left arm while she scanned him. Dull green blood ran from his upper lip—probably another injury she’d caused while yanking his unconscious body from the crawlspace—and the scan showed his oxygen levels were low. His left arm was still bleeding from the laceration, but no major blood vessels had been cut. She gave Spock a shot of tri-ox with the hypospray from the medkit and kept him cradled in her arms.

  He looked a little pale, and she placed her hand upon his forehead. As soon as her palm touched his skin, she felt a burst of jumbled thoughts. She couldn’t tell if they were hers or his. Maybe her perceptions were still turned outward by the experience of channeling the symbiont bond; maybe that and her familiarity with Spock, the time she’d held him in her mind, combined to jump-start a link. She blinked rapidly, disoriented, as bursts of his confused emotions filled her mind. The singular friendship he felt for Kirk, the tangled camaraderie shared by him and McCoy, his loyalty toward the crew . . . And then Chapel, the place she had in his life, his lack of context for understanding the depth of those feelings, complicated by their past, her love for him and how it had changed and matured.

  Chapel tried to pull away, embarrassed that she had felt his most private thoughts, but she seemed too weak to move her arms. Another part of her worried about the status of the shuttlecraft. How much of his repairs had Spock completed? Were they on course? She hadn’t even noticed if they were still at warp, and now she sat with her back toward the bow, unable to see out the port. Were they simply drifting, helpless and exposed, in open space? She had to get up. Had to check on Dax and the Copernicus. Chapel grabbed the hypospray to give herself a stimulant but felt it slip from her fingers and clatter to the deck as her eyes closed.

  Chapter 6

  Chapel forced her eyes to open. Spock’s face was just inches from her own; she still had him cradled across her lap, and she had slumped forward as she lost consciousness, overwhelmed by the mental links she had experienced. She blinked her eyes to help them focus and looked at Spock. His color had returned to normal, and his breathing was deep and regular. His injured lip was slightly swollen, but the bleeding had slowed. Chapel sat up straight and tried to stretch her stiff back as much as she could without waking him. She turned his left arm slightly to get a peek at the laceration. It was shallow, with just a trickle of fresh blood. That wound required care soon, but she needed to give some thought to the shuttle. She glanced around, trying to get a sense of their status. There were no alarms going off, either from the cockpit or from the diagnostic unit aft, and the normal lighting had come back on. The thrumming she felt through the deck seemed like the usual warp speed sensation. Before performing repairs, Spock obviously would have programmed their course into the computer, along with several emergency subroutines, so perhaps they’d come through this just fine. At least what could be called “fine” under their current circumstances.

  Before Chapel could dwell upon those circumstances, she felt Spock stirring. She looked down in time to see his eyes snap open. He glanced around in confusion and raised an eyebrow. “Are we on the deck?” She nodded, smiling at him. He looked back up at her. “Are you holding me in your lap?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  His eyebrow lowered and he said, “Interesting.” He shifted a little, but he didn’t try to get up. “I remember being in the crawlspace and discovering some unsealed microbreaches in the outer hull. I had to keep the area clear of sealant to facilitate making the necessary repairs. My intention was to finish the work quickly, before the thinning air would affect my Vulcan physiology, which is adapted to lower oxygen levels. When I realized I had overestimated my tolerance, I called for your assistance, but clearly you did not hear me. Nevertheless, I assumed you would soon notice the developing situation on your monitor. I am curious . . . why did you respond so slowly?”

  Somehow he asked that without any sense of incrimination, with only a tone of scholarly interest. Chapel smiled sadly while she formulated a reply. She couldn’t tell him she’d been facilitating a link between Audrid and her symbiont and had lost all sense of time or her surroundings. She didn’t know if she should admit she had heard him call her name in her mind, and she wanted to avoid explaining how her heightened neural state had allowed her to unintentionally eavesdrop on his thoughts.

  “I’m sorry, I was at a critical point in my treatment of Commissioner Dax. I was so focused I just didn’t realize the danger you were in. When I did . . . it was quite a scare. For a split second I thought I might lose you.”

  “It appears you were successful in averting that outcome.”

  Chapel laughed. As a smile so wide it almost hurt spread across her face, she felt tears gather in her eyes. She wiped at them quickly before they fell onto Spock, still gazing up at her.

  “I . . .” He hesitated, appearing confused. He reached up with his left hand to the side of her face. He wiped a tear away with his thumb and let her lean into his hand. She placed her right hand over his left. “Do you recall when I awoke in sickbay after mind-melding with V’ger?”

  “How could I forget? I treated you. I was trying so hard to maintain my professional composure.”

  In a desperate attempt to make contact with the intelligence behind the gargantuan spacecraft before it reached Earth, Spock had stolen a thruster suit and gone into the alien ship alone. Chapel learned that he’d encountered images spanning the universe, representing the craft’s travels. When he found an image of the robotic probe that V’ger had put aboard the Enterprise in the form of their lost navigator Ilia, he had initiated a mind-meld through the glowing sensor on her neck. He’d been overwhelmed by the information that gushed into his mind, learning that the V’ger spacecraft was sentient. There were no organic life-forms aboard it. He’d also sensed the profound emptiness that drove V’ger. When he had come to in sickbay, he’d been rather demonstrative when explaining that despite V’ger’s logical perfection and vast knowledge, it was isolated and aimless. Standing beside her patient, Chapel had watched Spock grasp Kirk’s hand while saying that such a simple feeling was beyond V’ger’s comprehension. She knew that she was witnessing an epiphany, but she had maintained her professional distance with great effort when all she’d wanted to do was grab his other hand and be a part of the moment that had changed Spock’s life.

  Spock nodded. “Yes, I felt . . . liberated. I mentioned simple feelings.” He moved his fingers slightly against her cheek, and she squeezed his hand in return. “But they are not so simple, are they? Your feelings for me . . . they seem to have deepened, even though we did not progress into a romantic relationship. That confuses me.”

  She shook her head. “But we did progress—just in a different direction. I grew past those feelings, but I didn’t forget them or disown them. You’ll always hold a special place in my heart.” It felt good to tell him.

  “That result seems contraindicated by the circumstances.”

  Chapel pulled her face away as she started laughing. “You’ve still got a lot to learn about emotions.”

  “I concur with that assessment.” With her help he sat up beside her on the deck. He stretched a little, then stopped with a slight wince. “I seem to have injured my arm.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” Chapel got an anabolic protoplaser and dermal regenerator from the medkit and explained what had happened while she treated his arm and his bloodied lip.

  “A logical, if unfortunate, trade-off. In the future I will avoid losing consciousness in such hazardous confines.”

  “Maybe Scotty could give you some pointers.”

  “Indeed.”

  Spock got up and returned to the pilot’s seat. While he started doing systems checks, Chapel looked in on Dax. The Trill was
still resting comfortably in a deep sleep. Her brainwaves showed a slight asynchronous trend since Chapel last checked, but the amount of deterioration was small. At this rate, there should be no problem keeping Audrid and Dax stable until the rendezvous. Chapel hoped this would allow her to spend more time assisting Spock; he would probably need the extra hands to keep the Copernicus flying.

  She moved back into the cockpit and eased into the copilot’s seat. Spock looked up from his controls with a frustrated expression.

  “I was not completely successful in my repairs. Our shields are nominal, but we have only short-range sensors. While this will suffice to assist with our course changes within Rose’s Folly, they will not give us much advanced warning of the hostile ship’s return. The comm system is functioning erratically, but—with a modicum of quantifiable luck—I should be able to send the Troyval new rendezvous coordinates.”

  “What’s next, and how can I help?”

  “We are nearing Rose’s Folly. I’m programming an asymmetrical directional collapse of our warp field.”

  Chapel raised her eyebrows. “Pretend I’m not Scotty and explain that to me.”

  “I do not have to pretend that, as you are most obviously not Mister Scott.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Chapel immediately kicked herself for her offhand response as Spock blinked his eyes a few times while parsing its possible implications. Although Spock was an expert in repartee with McCoy, he was still too confused about her friendship to process the same kind of playful banter from her. She had to be more careful about what she said. “Please, continue.”

  Spock grabbed on to that request like a lifeline. “When a ship drops out of warp, the standard dissolution of the warp field imparts forward momentum along the ship’s course into normal space. By altering the warp field shutdown, I hope to adjust our course, quickly directing us toward RF III while creating a false trail along our previous course. This may fool the hostile ship’s sensors and force them to backtrack to find us. Even a gain of a minute could be the difference between getting to the Troyval or being caught.”