Duty, Honor, Redemption

by Novelization by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Easier on me!” She took one step toward him. “You sent them away? Without even letting me say good-bye?” Rage and grief and loss concentrated inside her.

  The rage burst out and Gillian slapped Briggs as hard as she could. He staggered back.

  “You son of a bitch!” she cried. She did not even wait to see if she had hurt him. “You stupid, condescending son of a bitch!” She fled.

  In her car, she leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, sobbing uncontrollably. Her palm hurt. She had never punched anybody, but she wished she had struck Bob Briggs with her fist instead of her open hand.

  George and Gracie were free. That was what she wanted. But she wanted them safe, too.

  She raised her head. She reached the decision she had been approaching, roundabout and slowly, all night long, and she hoped she had not waited too long to make it. She started the Land Rover, threw it into gear, floored it, and peeled out of the parking lot.

  Sulu hoisted the battered helicopter into the air. It flew as if it were a bumblebee and believed the old theory that bumblebees should not be able to fly. It reached the end of the harness around the acrylic sheeting.

  The cable snapped tight, pitching the Huey forward with a jolt and a shudder. Adrenaline rushing, Sulu fought to keep the copter in the air. Gradually, it steadied.

  Sulu edged the power up and took the copter higher. The acrylic sheeting rose. A breeze, imperceptible on the ground, caught the flat of it and started it swinging. The oscillation transferred to the Huey. Loaded, the copter was far more difficult to fly.

  “How the hell did they ever keep these things in the air?” he muttered. He gave it a bit of forward momentum, which helped damp the swing. The sheeting turned edge on to the copter’s direction. More steadily now, the Huey clattered and chopped toward Golden Gate Park.

  The Land Rover screeched to a stop in the parking lot by the meadow. Gillian leaped out, dodged a clump of garbage cans, and ran across the grass. Mist swirled around her, glowing silver in the dawn.

  She stopped in the last place she had seen Kirk.

  “Kirk!” She could hardly hear her own voice over the clattery racket of an approaching helicopter. “Kirk!” she cried in fury. “Damn you! If you’re a fake—if you lied to me—!”

  Gillian turned in a complete circle, searching. But Kirk did not answer. There was nothing there, no Kirk, no strange friend, no invisible spaceship. Tears of anger burned her eyes. She did not even care that Kirk had made a fool of her. He had offered her safety for the humpbacks. She had wanted to believe him, she had made herself believe him, and he had lied.

  A downward blast of wind turned the tear tracks cold and whipped her hair around her face. The helicopter, closer now, hovered over a landscaped terrace. A huge pane of glass hung from its cargo harness. The copter lowered the glass slowly toward the blossoming rhododendrons. Beneath it, a man gestured instructions.

  Gillian gasped.

  The man hung unsupported in the air. But from the waist down, he did not even exist. It was as if he were standing within a structure that could not be seen and that could conceal him as well. An invisible structure…

  “Kirk!” Gillian cried. “Kirk, listen to me!”

  She ran up the bank to the terrace, crashing through the shiny dark green leaves and fluorescent pink and scarlet flowers of the rhododendrons. They flicked back at her, showering her with dew.

  Excited and amazed, she clambered headlong over the edge of the terrace. She ran smack into something. She fell, stunned, a metallic clang reverberating around her. Still dizzy, she reached out and encountered a strut, cold, hard, solid…and invisible. In wonder and joy, she clenched her hands around it and pulled herself to her feet.

  The half-visible man above her guided the acrylic sheet, letting it descend into invisibility. He waved off the helicopter. It rose, spun, and clattered away. The prop wash and the noise decreased precipitously.

  “Where’s Kirk?” Gillian shouted. “Kirk!” she shouted. “God, Kirk, I need you!”

  The partly invisible man stared down at her, blinked, bent down, and vanished.

  Gillian held the strut more tightly. Kirk won’t disappear on me now, she thought. I won’t let him!

  She waited a moment for the invisible man to become half-visible again, but he remained hidden and she saw no sign of Kirk. She reached up, feeling for handholds, wondering if she could climb the invisible framework supporting the invisible ship.

  Fluid, insubstantial, the strut dissolved from beneath her hands. Her vision blurred and a tingly, excited feeling swept over her.

  The park faded away, to be replaced by a bright chamber lit by fixtures of odd, angular construction. The proportions of the room seemed strange to her, and the quality of the light, and the colors.

  Not strange, Gillian thought. Alien. Alien.

  She was standing on a small platform. The glow and hum of a beam of energy faded. In front of her, Kirk James reached up to the controls of a console built to be operated by someone much larger.

  “Hello, Alice,” Kirk said. “Welcome to Wonderland.”

  She pushed her tangled hair from her face.

  “It is true,” she whispered. “It’s all true. Everything you said…”

  “Yes. And I’m glad you’re here. Though I’ll admit, you picked a hell of a time to drop in.” He took her by the elbow. “Steady now. We need your help.”

  “Have I flipped out?” Gillian asked. She stepped down from the platform, staring around her in amazement. A script she had never seen labeled the controls of the console, but bits of plastic hand-lettered in English were stuck beside some of them. “Is any of this real?”

  “It’s all real,” Kirk said. He guided her around, led her through a corridor, and took her to an echoing enclosed space. Sunlight slanted through the hatch above. The half-invisible man, whole now, secured the large sheet of transparent plastic.

  “This is my engineer, Mister Scott,” Kirk said.

  Scott straightened up and stretched his back. “Aye, how d’ye do.” He spoke with a strong Scots burr. “ ’Tis finished, Admiral. An hour or so for the epoxy to cure, and it’ll hold slime devils, ne’er mind Doctor Taylor’s critters.”

  “It’s a tank for the whales,” Kirk said to Gillian. “Good work, Scotty.”

  “But, Kirk—” Gillian said.

  “We’ll bring them up just like we brought you. It’s called a transporter beam—”

  “Kirk, listen to me! They’re gone!”

  He stared at her. “Gone?” he said.

  “Briggs—my boss—sent them away last night. Without telling me. To ‘protect’ me, damn him! They’re in Alaska by now.”

  “Damn.” Kirk pressed his closed fist very firmly and very quietly against the transparent surface of the plastic.

  “But they’re tagged!” Gillian said. “I told you that. Can’t we go find them?”

  “At the moment,” Kirk said, “we can’t go anywhere.”

  Gillian scowled at him. “What kind of spaceship is this, anyway?”

  “A spaceship with a missing man,” Kirk said.

  Mister Spock entered the cargo bay. He still wore his white kimono, but he had taken off his headband. Gillian saw his ears and his eyebrows for the first time.

  “Admiral, full power is restored.”

  “Thank you, Spock,” Kirk said. “Gillian, you know Mister Spock.”

  Gillian stared at him agape.

  “Hello, Doctor Taylor,” Mister Spock said with perfect calm. “Welcome aboard.”

  A woman’s voice, tense with strain, came over the intercom. “Admiral—are you there?”

  Kirk answered. “Yes, Uhura. What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve found Chekov, sir. He’s been injured. He’s going into emergency surgery right now.”

  “Uhura, where?”

  “Mercy Hospital.”

  “That’s in the Mission District,” Gillian said.

  “Admiral, his condition�
�s critical. They said…he isn’t expected to survive.”

  Gillian reached out to Kirk, in sympathy with his distress. Spock, on the other hand, listened impassively to the report. Kirk squeezed Gillian’s hand gratefully. Another man hurried into the cargo bay.

  “You’ve got to let me go after him!” he exclaimed without preliminaries, without even noticing Gillian. “Don’t leave him in the hands of twentieth-century medicine.”

  “And this, Gillian, is Doctor McCoy,” Kirk said. “Bones—” He stopped and turned to Mister Spock instead. “What do you think, Spock?”

  He raised one eyebrow. Now Gillian understood why she had never met anyone like him. She had a sudden, irrational urge to laugh. She was standing face to face with a being from another planet. An alien.

  Probably, she thought, an illegal alien.

  “Spock?” Kirk said again.

  “As the admiral requested,” Spock said, “I am thinking.” He continued to think. His face showed no expression. “Commander Chekov is a perfectly normal human being of Earth stock. Only the most detailed autopsy imaginable might hint that he is not from this time. His death here would have only the slightest possible chance of affecting the present or the future.”

  “You think we should find the whales, return home…and leave Pavel to die.”

  “Now just a minute!” Doctor McCoy exclaimed.

  “No, Admiral,” Spock said. “I suggest that Doctor McCoy is correct. We must help Commander Chekov.”

  “Is that the logical thing to do, Spock?”

  “No, Admiral,” Spock said. “But I believe you would call it the human thing to do.”

  For a moment it seemed to Gillian that a gentler expression might soften his severe and ascetic face. This was practically the first thing Gillian had heard Mister Spock say that did not surprise her, yet Kirk looked surprised by his friend’s comment. He hesitated. Spock gazed at him, cool, collected.

  “Right,” Kirk said abruptly. He turned to Gillian. “Will you help us?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But how?”

  “For one thing,” Doctor McCoy said, “we’ll need to look like physicians.”

  This time Gillian paid attention to the transporter beam. The sensation of being lifted, stirred around, and placed somewhere else entirely filled her with astonishment and joy.

  Maybe it’s just an adrenaline reaction, she thought, but early trials suggest it as a sure cure for depression.

  When she had completely solidified, darkness surrounded her. She felt her way to the wall, the door, the light switch. She flipped it.

  Bingo! she thought. She had asked Mister Scott to try to place them within a small, deserted cubicle. He had done her proud: not only had they come down in a closet, they had come down in a storage closet of linens, lab coats, and scrub suits.

  “Damned Klingon transporter’s even worse than ours,” Doctor McCoy muttered.

  “What does he mean?” Gillian said. She flipped through a stack of scrubs. Did these things have sizes, or were they one size fits all? Stolen hospital scrubs had enjoyed a minor fashion popularity when she was in graduate school, but she had never had much interest in them. Nor had she ever had a medical student boyfriend to steal one for her. All she knew was that you could wear them inside out or outside in.

  “Oh—Doctor McCoy doesn’t like transporter beams.”

  “You don’t? God, I think they’re great. But I meant why isn’t it your transporter beam?”

  “Our ship—and our transporter—are from the Klingon empire,” Kirk said. “Not our…regular brand, you might say.”

  “How come you’re flying a foreign ship?” Gillian dug through the stack of scrubs. They only came in three sizes, so she did not have to worry much about the fit.

  “It’s a long story. The short version is, it was the only one available, so we stole it.”

  “We don’t even have time for short versions of stories!” Doctor McCoy snapped. “Let’s find Chekov and get out of here.” He reached for the doorknob.

  “Wait,” Gillian said. She handed McCoy the blue scrub suit. “Thought you wanted to look like a doctor.”

  “I thought you said I would, with my bag,” he said grumpily. He hefted his medical kit, a leather satchel hardly different externally from the sort of bag doctors carried in the twentieth century.

  “You do. But you won’t get into surgery in regular clothes.” She slipped the scrub on over her head. “Doctor Gillian Taylor, Ph.D., very recent M.D.,” she said.

  Suddenly the doorknob turned. Instantly Gillian grabbed both Kirk and McCoy. She drew them toward her, one hand at the back of each man’s neck. She kissed Kirk full on the lips. He put his arms around her. Startled, McCoy at first pulled back, then hid his face against her neck.

  The door swung open. Gillian pretended to be fully involved. She did not have to pretend too hard. Kirk smelled good. His breath tickled her cheek.

  “Preverts,” a voice said cheerfully, tsked twice, and chuckled. The door closed again.

  Gillian let Kirk and McCoy go.

  “Um,” she said. “Sorry.”

  McCoy cleared his throat.

  “No apologies necessary,” Kirk said, flustered.

  A moment later, all attired in surgeons’ garb, they opened the door cautiously and peered out into the corridor.

  “All clear,” Kirk said.

  On the way out of the storage closet, Gillian snagged a handful of surgical masks in sterile paper packages.

  “We’ll check this way, Bones,” Kirk said. “You try down there.”

  McCoy strode down the hallway, doing his best to pretend he knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing. He nodded to the people he passed as if he knew them. They all nodded back as if they knew him.

  A frail and elderly patient lay on a gurney just outside a room full of esoteric equipment that looked, to McCoy, like medieval instruments of torture. McCoy stopped beside the gurney, hoping to get his bearings.

  “Doctor…” the frail patient said. She had poor color and her hands trembled. A large black bruise had spread around a vein cut-down on the back of her left hand.

  “What’s the matter with you?” McCoy asked.

  “Kidney,” she said. She stared with resignation into the room beyond. “Dialysis…”

  “Dialysis? What is this,” McCoy said without thinking, “the dark ages?” He shook his head. To hell with not leaving traces of anachronistic technology. He took a lozenge from his bag and slipped it into the patient’s mouth. “Here. Swallow one of these.” He strolled away. “And call me if you have any problems,” he said over his shoulder.

  McCoy looked for a comm terminal—surely the twentieth century must have comm terminals?—to query about the location of surgery. Instead he saw Jim gesturing to him from down the hall. McCoy hurried to join him and Gillian.

  “They’re holding Chekov in a security corridor one flight up,” Jim said. “His condition’s still critical. Skull fracture—they’re about to operate.”

  “Good Lord. Why don’t they just bore a hole in his head and let the evil spirits out?” A gurney stood empty nearby. McCoy grabbed it. “Come on.”

  He pushed the gurney into a vacant room and threw back the sheet.

  “Give us a couple of those masks,” he said to Gillian, “and jump up here.”

  She handed him the masks, “Wait a minute,” she said. “How come I have to be the patient and you guys get to be the doctors?”

  “What?” McCoy said, baffled.

  “Good lord, Gillian, what difference does it make?” Jim said.

  Gillian saw that he honestly did not understand why his suggestion might irritate her, and that gave her a view of his future that attracted her far more than all his descriptions of wonders and marvels. She jumped onto the gurney and covered herself with the sheet.

  A moment later, McCoy and Kirk rolled the gurney onto the elevator. Gillian lay still. The two people already on the elevator, paying them no
t the least bit of attention, continued their discussion of a patient’s course of chemotherapy and the attending side effects.

  Twentieth-century technology was so close to the breakthroughs that would spare people this sort of torture, and yet this world continued to expend its resources on weapons. “Unbelievable,” McCoy muttered.

  Both the other elevator passengers turned toward him. “Do you have a different view, Doctor?” one asked.

  The elevator doors opened. McCoy scowled. “Sounds like the goddamn Spanish Inquisition,” he said. He plunged out of the elevator, leaving startled silence behind him. He had to get Pavel Chekov out of here before these people did too much damage for even the twenty-third century to repair.

  Jim followed, pushing the gurney.

  Two police officers guarded the operating wing’s double doors.

  “Out of the way,” McCoy said in a peremptory tone.

  Neither officer moved. McCoy saw Gillian’s eyelids flicker. Suddenly she began to moan.

  “Sorry, Doctor—” the police officer said.

  Gillian moaned again.

  “—we have strict orders—” The officer had to raise his voice to be heard above Gillian’s groaning. He glanced down at her, distressed.

  “Dammit!” McCoy said. “This patient has immediate postprandial upper abdominal distension! Do you want an acute case on your hands?”

  The two officers looked at each other uncertainly.

  Gillian wailed loudly.

  “Orderly!” McCoy nodded curtly to Jim, who pushed the gurney between the two officers.

  The doors opened. Safe on the other side, Jim blew out his breath with relief.

  “What did you say she was getting?” he asked McCoy.

  “Cramps,” McCoy said.

  Gillian sat up and threw off the sheet. “I beg your pardon!”

  Jim tossed her a surgical mask. He pulled his own mask over his face and led his intrepid group into the operating room. Chekov lay unconscious on the operating table.

  A young doctor looked up from examining him. He frowned. “Who are you? Doctor Adams is supposed to assist me.”

  “We’re just—observing,” McCoy said.