Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  Loved?

  Yes. Yes, he loved Lynn, just as he’d loved Phil, just as he’d loved Edith Keeler and Jim Kirk and, so help him, Spock. Except—

  Tonight, she’d touched his hand, and he’d perceived it as more than a gesture of simple friendship. They’d known each other all this time—more than sixteen years now—and had become very close friends, but nothing more. Of course, she’d been happily married for most of that spell. Now, though—

  Now what?

  McCoy knew he’d be lying to himself if he denied the deep connection he felt with Lynn. Besides being drawn to her goodness and her inner strength, he found her physically attractive as well—even more so now than when he’d first walked down Tindal’s Lane and she’d waved to him. Age had refined her features and granted her a measure of elegance despite her rural life.

  And tonight, when she’d touched his hand, he’d felt more than friendship between them. There had been fire, and he thought she’d experienced it too. He also didn’t think he’d misread her intentions. Under other circumstances—

  What circumstances? he asked himself. He’d last been involved with a woman more than eighteen years ago, with Tonia Barrows, back in his old life aboard the Enterprise. He’d stayed away from romantic relationships in order to avoid altering the timeline—or so he told himself. Really, while he’d steered clear of such entanglements when he’d initially arrived in Earth’s past, he’d long since given up trying to determine how his actions would impact history, especially given how dramatically the course of World War II had already changed. Living in the small town of Hayden, there had been only limited opportunities for courtship, and he’d shunned all of those.

  Through the windshield, McCoy saw the turnoff onto Tindal’s Lane and he took it. As he drove toward Lynn’s house, he admitted to himself that his resistance to romance had a long pedigree. Although he’d never had the chance to end his relationship with Tonia, he knew that he’d been heading in that direction prior to his cordrazine overdose. He’d known that he and Tonia would never make it together, just as he’d known with Nancy before her and Jocelyn before that.

  And he supposed he knew that with Lynn as well.

  A few minutes later, he pulled off the road and onto the dirt drive beside Lynn’s house. After shutting off the engine, he quietly opened his own door, then walked around the car and opened the passenger side. Leaning in, he touched Lynn’s arm and gently roused her. Her eyelids quivered open and she peered up at him with a slightly confused, almost childlike, expression. “Lynn,” he said, “you’re home. We just got back from the movies.”

  Awareness and recollection appeared on her face. “I must’ve fell asleep,” she said.

  “You must have,” McCoy said with a smile. He reached down and took her hand, helping her out of the car, then escorted her up the steps to the front door.

  Before going inside, Lynn turned to him. “I had a wonderful time,” she said, and she moved forward ever so slightly.

  “So did I,” McCoy said. “Good night.” He headed quickly back down the steps and over to his car. Without looking back, he got in and started the engine, then pulled back out onto the road and headed for home.

  As he drove down Tindal’s Lane, he glanced in the rearview mirror and watched as the light from Lynn’s house faded into the night.

  Forty-Five

  2285

  Kirk dragged the manual release down, but the doors didn’t open. In the dim, red emergency lighting of the canting Klingon bridge, he dropped himself against the heavy, metal hatches, reaching for the place where they separated one from the other. With all his might, he pushed, until they parted a few centimeters, and then finally all the way open. A thick cloud of white steam rose from within, and he staggered through its hot, moist embrace and down the sloping corridor.

  They hadn’t come this far for him to allow Scotty and Gillian to drown as the bird of prey—aptly renamed HMS Bounty by Bones—sank into San Francisco Bay. He trusted Spock to evacuate the rest of the crew—Bones, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov—as he raced toward the engineering section and the cargo bays in the aft section of the vessel. There, Scotty had held the Klingon drive together, overseen the recrystallization of the dilithium matrix, and cobbled together an enormous tank to hold a pair of humpback whales. Gillian—Dr. Gillian Taylor, a marine biologist who’d come back to the future with them—had watched over the whales.

  Up ahead, sparks sizzled at the end of a cable whipping wildly through the air as it dangled from the overhead. Kirk didn’t hesitate, but as he reached the area, he threw himself along the inclined deck, feet first, and slid beneath and past the dangerous looking obstacle. Regaining his feet, he continued on, battling past downed equipment and ruptured bulkheads. By the time he neared the closed doors leading to the aft compartments, water had begun to rise in the corridor, the ship’s hull obviously breached when it had crashed into the bay.

  As Kirk waded forward, he saw the doors partially submerged. From the tilt of the vessel, he feared that the compartments beyond had already been flooded. All about him, the ship’s structure groaned as, wounded, it fought stresses different than those for which it had been constructed.

  And then he heard a voice, tones only, the words it uttered indistinguishable. And then another voice rang out, pitched higher than the first. Scotty and Gillian!

  Kirk called out: “Scotty! Scotty!”

  At once, a pounding began against the doors and the engineer answered. “Admiral! Help!”

  Kirk let himself fall against the bulkhead beside the doors. “I’m here, Scotty!”

  “Help!”

  “I’m here!” Kirk cried again. He reached for the right-hand door, into which a manual release had been set. He twisted it, then pulled along the groove where the two panels met. It gave, though not easily, but then he saw two other hands, and felt the efforts of Scotty and Gillian as they too struggled to haul the doors open. When they’d parted enough, Kirk reached for Gillian, taking hold of her hand and pulling her forward. “You’re gonna be all right,” he tried to assure her.

  As Gillian dragged herself up, she said, “The whales are trapped. They’ll drown.”

  “There’s no power to the bay doors,” Scotty said as he positioned himself to evacuate the compartment.

  “Explosive override?” Kirk asked.

  “That’s underwater,” Scotty said, hefting himself up into the corridor. “There’s no way to reach it.”

  No, Kirk thought, unwilling to accept defeat. They had come too far. “You go on ahead,” he told Scotty, knowing what he must do. “And close the hatch.” While doing so would likely make it impossible for Kirk to return this way, it might also slow the bird of prey’s descent into the bay.

  As Kirk pulled off his jacket, Scotty said as much: “Admiral, you’ll be trapped.”

  Kirk glanced back at the engineer for just a second. “Go on!” he ordered. He tossed away his jacket and headed down into the aft compartment. Almost immediately, the water level reached up to his chest. How long had it been since his underwater training at Starfleet Academy? Three decades? As he bobbed upward in preparation to send himself in the opposite direction, he recalled the incident on the planet Argo twenty-five years ago when he and Spock had been transformed into water-breathers. Right now, that would have proven a handy ability.

  After breathing in deeply, Kirk dove downward and began swimming toward the cargo hold. In his mind, he pictured the area and figured that the explosive overrides would be found at one end of the compartment or the other, possibly even at both ends. Waving his arms and kicking his feet, he propelled himself toward the nearer end. He found his way impeded by floating equipment, dislodged conduits, and other structures.

  So much at stake, Kirk told himself as he fought his way through. Could they have come all this way only to fail now, so near to their goal? He and his crew—his friends—had spent a self-imposed three-month exile on Vulcan after Spock’s mind had been re-fused with his b
ody, and then they had headed back to Starfleet to face the consequences of the criminal and mutinous behavior they’d conducted in order to save him. But as they’d neared Earth, they’d found it under attack by an intelligence apparently seeking contact with humpback whales, a species extinct for two centuries. With few alternatives, Kirk and the others had chosen to travel back in time in order to bring some of those whales back to the present to communicate with the powerful alien presence. Now back in their own time, all of their efforts would go for nothing if Kirk could not free the whales from the Klingon vessel’s hold.

  Desperate to breath again, Kirk pushed himself onward. Before him, he saw the great masses of the two whales through the transparent aluminum that Scotty and Sulu had utilized to wall in the cargo bay. The admiral swam to his left and saw set into the near bulkhead a circular panel. He reached for it and saw a narrow set of controls on it. He tapped at the keys in sequence and a red light immediately flashed on beside them. An instant later, the panel divided in two, revealing a lever behind it.

  He grabbed the handle with both hands and pulled. His right hand came free and he quickly reset it. As he exerted himself, air escaped his lungs, bubbling up from between his lips.

  And still the handle wouldn’t move.

  With all the strength he could muster, he jerked at the lever, trying to dislodge it from its position. It moved back and forth slightly, and then it finally loosened. Kirk hauled it downward and heard the sound of small detonations through the water.

  He turned and saw the long hatches of the hold parting. For a few worrisome seconds, the whales didn’t move, but then he saw the one farthest from him fade from sight, its massive, dark body disappearing into the murky depths. The second whale followed, and then so did Kirk himself, kicking off of the bulkhead and swimming as quickly as he could toward the open hatch. He headed through it as the last air fled from his lungs.

  Chasing the path of his bubbles, he swam upward, his lungs aching. Just as he thought he could no longer stop himself from inhaling, he broke the surface of the water. He gulped in lungfuls of air, but bobbed wildly in the choppy bay. He choked on drops of water and flailed about for purchase, knowing that the hull of the Klingon ship must be near. In the air, the high-pitched calls of the alien presence seeking contact with the whales shrieked loudly. And then he felt strong hands grab his arm and keep him afloat.

  “Do you see them?” he heard Uhura call from above him, obviously perched somewhere on the bird of prey. He looked up and saw not only Spock but Gillian reaching for him as well. Past them—and past Bones, Scotty, Chekov, Uhura, and Sulu, also balanced on the edge of the Klingon hull—the angry sky rained down, the weather modified dramatically from space by the alien presence. Around the globe, Kirk knew, the cloud cover had become almost complete, causing rapid decreases in air temperature all over the world.

  As Kirk settled himself against the Klingon hull and alongside Spock, Gillian cried out excitedly. She and Bones both pointed, and Kirk peered out and saw a dorsal fin glide past on the surface, and then the whale’s flukes came clear of the water and slapped back down, a majestic—and at this moment important—sight. He looked for the second creature and spotted it off to the left. “There,” he called, pointing.

  Still, the alien presence called.

  “Why don’t they answer?” Kirk asked nobody in particular. “Why don’t they sing?” When the crew had been back in the past and had found the two whales at the Maritime Cetacean Institute, Spock had mind-melded with one of the creatures. He believed that he had successfully communicated the situation and the crew’s intentions.

  Around them, the piercing whine of the alien presence continued. There seemed to be no response. Would we know if the male whale, the one who vocalized, did respond? Kirk suddenly wondered. He’d just assumed that they would—

  And then he heard it. Not externally, through his ears, but internally, through his body: a wavering, almost haunting keening. Somewhere near, the male whale had begun singing. It lasted for a few seconds and then stopped, leaving behind only the sounds of the wind and the rain and water. The alien presence had ceased its calls.

  Soon, the whale song began again, and this time when it stopped, the alien calls came again. For minutes, then, the two alternated, as though in conversation. By the time they both quieted, the sky overhead had already begun to clear.

  One of the whales swam by, breaking the surface, and the crew pointed and called and waved, obviously ecstatic that their efforts—and those of the whales themselves—had apparently succeeded. Whatever mysterious forms of energy the alien had utilized to influence Earth’s weather patterns had clearly been reversed. The clouds parted and withdrew, and the sun shined through once more.

  Cold and wet, and still facing criminal charges and the consequences of his violations of direct orders, Jim Kirk smiled. He pointed as one of the whales breached, and then he slapped at the surface of the water in his joy at the sight. Right now, he would gladly accept whatever punishment the Federation Council handed down to him, as well as whatever actions Starfleet Command decided to take. None of it mattered.

  Spock had been saved, and now, so too had the population of Earth.

  McCoy sat in the elegantly appointed anteroom outside Admiral Cartwright’s office. Sofas and chairs ringed three sides of the room, and a pair of assistants sat at large, semicircular desks on either side of the door that led into the Starfleet commander’s sanctum. Artwork adorned the wood-paneled walls, presenting in a wide variety of styles different spacecraft, many of them not of terrestrial origin.

  McCoy’s friends—and coconspirators, he thought wryly—waited along with him. Sulu and Chekov stood talking quietly together in front of one of the paintings, an oil of a ship with a long, tapering hull, connected by a ventral strut to a ring that circled the main structure. Scotty and Uhura chatted in low tones on a sofa at the rear of the room, while Spock and McCoy sat silently beside each other in a couple of rounded, padded chairs. They had all been called in here a week after they had brought a pair of humpback whales with them from Earth’s past, and three days after they had stood charges before the Federation Council and representatives of Starfleet Command. All but one of the specifications directed against them, and to which they’d all pled guilty—conspiracy, assault, theft, sabotage, willful destruction of property, and disobeying orders of the Starfleet commander—had been summarily dismissed, owing to, as the Federation president had said, mitigating circumstances. Nobody had yet detailed what those circumstances had been, but McCoy assumed that the crew’s saving of Earth’s population had likely had something to do with it—although the success of their restoration of Spock, the purpose for which they had committed those offenses in the first place, might also have played a role.

  The single remaining charge, disobeying the orders of a superior, had been leveled exclusively at Jim. He had been found guilty, but for once, the authorities had shown exceptional judgment. The penalty for Jim’s actions had been a reduction in rank to captain and a return to the command of a starship.

  Now, the rest of their circle waited to learn their fates within Starfleet. He assumed that Jim hadn’t been called in because his reassignment had already been decided. Although the rest of them had escaped the formal accusations of wrongdoing, McCoy doubted that their deeds would have no consequences. Prior to the events that had begun when they’d all decided to retrieve Spock’s body from the Genesis Planet, Sulu had been on the verge of his own command, and Chekov hadn’t been far behind him. Scotty had been assigned as captain of engineering to the transwarp test bed, the Excelsior, which he’d subsequently incapacitated, and Uhura had taken a position with Starfleet Intelligence. Somehow, McCoy doubted that any of them would now find themselves on the same career paths.

  For his own part, McCoy had worked with Starfleet Medical cadets under Spock’s training command, and he assumed that both of their positions would also be at risk. McCoy didn’t know that he cared all th
at much about his individual situation. After what they’d all been through over the past few months, details like postings seemed only minimally important. Perhaps now would be a good time for him to return to research. Considering that he and the others had just traveled backward and forward in time again, maybe fresh chronometric-particle readings would prove useful if he resumed the work he’d abandoned not all that long ago.

  McCoy heard a click, and he looked over between the two assistants’ desks to see Jim stepping through the door leading out of Cartwright’s office. Surprised because he hadn’t known that Jim would be here, McCoy stood up, as did Spock, Scotty, and Uhura. As a group, they all gathered around the captain.

  Jim peered around at them, looking from face to face. “I’ve just had a rather lengthy conversation with Admiral Cartwright,” he said. “As you all already know, I’ve been assigned the captaincy of a starship.”

  “Do you know which ship, Admiral?” Sulu asked, and then he corrected himself. “I mean, Captain.” Jim smiled at the mistake. He’d been an admiral for fifteen years, McCoy knew, and so it had been an easy error to make.

  “Not yet,” Jim said. He brought his hands together and rubbed them slowly against each other, clearly uncomfortable. “I know that all of you have your own callings, your own goals.” He gazed at Sulu and Chekov in turn. “Hikaru, I know you wanted a ship of your own, and you too, Pavel. And you each deserve that opportunity.” Jim peered around at all of them again. “Each of you deserves the positions you sought. But after what happened…” He didn’t finish the statement, but McCoy didn’t think he needed to.

  “I didn’t really think Starfleet Command would be that anxious to give me a ship right now,” Sulu said.