Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  “Can’t we just—” Kirk started, but then didn’t finish the question. He’d been about to ask about using the Enterprise’s deflectors to alter the course of the asteroid-ship, but they’d already investigated the possibility. In addition to such a process being unable to make more than gross adjustments to the flight path of Yonada, which might then send it into other dangers, the effect of a tightly focused, high-powered deflector beam on the asteroid-ship remained unclear. Power systems and life support might be disrupted, its engines impacted. “Can’t we just tell them?” Kirk finally said, though he already knew the answer to that question too: no. Since the people of Yonada didn’t know that they lived on a ship, informing them of a need for a course correction would be a violation of the Prime Directive.

  Spock didn’t respond to the obviously rhetorical question. If no way could be found to safely alter the path of the asteroid-ship, then Starfleet would doubtless order the people of Yonada told the facts and transplanted to another world. Though technically a violation of the noninterference principles, it would provide a justifiable and acceptable alternative to allowing Yonada to collide with Daran V and its nearly four billion inhabitants. Just before leaving Yonada with Spock, Kirk had told McCoy that if necessary, Starfleet would blast Yonada out of the sky, a valid claim, though one he’d exaggerated for effect in order to convince the doctor to return to the Enterprise.

  Bones, Kirk thought. He still couldn’t believe that his friend had chosen to remain on Yonada with its high priestess, let alone that he had only a year left to live. He supposed it made sense that McCoy wanted to spend that time in an atmosphere of romantic love, but the speed with which he and Natira had married—

  The up-and-down communications whistle sounded. “Bridge to Captain Kirk,” came Uhura’s voice.

  Kirk moved to his desk and activated the intercom there. “Kirk here,” he said.

  “Captain, I have Admiral Komack on a boosted signal from Starbase Thirteen,” Uhura said. Though far from any command bases, Kirk had decided to take the unusual step of trying to contact the flag officer in charge of this sector.

  “Pipe it down here, Lieutenant,” Kirk said. As he took a seat at his desk and activated the monitor, Spock walked over to stand behind him. The white-haired image of Admiral Westervliet Komack appeared on the screen, the silver-starburst insignia of his command adorning his gold uniform shirt.

  “Captain Kirk,” Komack said.

  “Admiral,” Kirk acknowledged the greeting.

  “Captain, I received your report about the medical condition of Doctor McCoy,” the admiral said. “I’m terribly sorry about the prognosis.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” Kirk said. He hadn’t yet informed Starfleet of McCoy’s resignation from the service. “I’m contacting you because my orders have the Enterprise scheduled for a patrol along the Klingon border less than a week from now. Because of the situation here, I’m requesting that our itinerary be changed.”

  “I have your reports on the asteroid-ship, captain,” the admiral said. “It’s unclear to me what more you think you can do there right now.”

  Kirk glanced over his shoulder at Spock, but the first officer evidently had nothing to add. Peering again at the monitor, Kirk said, “I’m not sure either, but Yonada is still on a collision course with Daran Five.”

  “I understand that, of course,” Komack said. “I’ve already taken steps to form a task force to study and resolve the situation. We have a year, and we’ll make sure we safeguard the people of Daran Five and the people of Yonada.”

  “I appreciate that, sir,” Kirk said, “but since both populations are still at risk, and since the Enterprise is here now…”

  “Captain Kirk, I sympathize with your wish to stay,” the admiral said. “But I hope you recognize the necessity that you continue your mission at once.”

  “That is the problem, sir,” Kirk said.

  “Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear,” Komack said, his voice lowering in volume, and at the same time becoming more commanding. “Let me restate it: you have been relieved of all responsibility for the asteroid-ship Yonada. Starfleet Command will take care of the situation.” Without another word, Komack reached forward, obviously to an unseen control, and the image on the screen winked off.

  Kirk deactivated the monitor on his own desk, then turned in his chair and looked up at Spock. The captain hadn’t wanted to hear what he had from the admiral, and now his mind raced to find a way around the unambiguous orders. He didn’t want to leave Yonada with the matter of its impending collision with Daran V unsettled.

  Is it Yonada? Kirk asked himself, or is it Bones?

  “I believe it is time to move on,” Spock said quietly, understanding in his voice, as well as a gentleness he no doubt would deny if pressed.

  “Yes, those are the orders,” Kirk agreed, unable to find any justification not to order the Enterprise to the Klingon border. As he started to rise, though, intending to head with Spock to the bridge, the communications signal called out once again.

  “Captain Kirk,” Uhura said. “Bridge to Captain Kirk.” An undercurrent of exigency now colored her tone.

  Kirk opened the intercom channel. “Kirk here.”

  “An urgent call from Doctor McCoy, sir,” Uhura said.

  McCoy, Kirk thought. Had he changed his mind about staying on Yonada? Did he want to return to the Enterprise before it departed? “Put him on,” Kirk said.

  “Jim,” McCoy said excitedly.

  “Yes, Bones?” Kirk said. Whatever the reason Bones had contacted the ship, it didn’t sound like he’d regretted his decision and now wanted to come back to the Enterprise.

  “We may be able to get these people back on course,” McCoy said.

  “You’ve located the controls?” Kirk asked.

  “No, but I’ve seen the book that contains all the knowledge of the ‘creators,’” McCoy said, referring to those that the people of Yonada thought of as gods, and who had unquestionably built the asteroid-ship. Spock had recognized carvings on Yonada as the language of the Fabrini, a race whose sun had long ago gone nova. “And if you—” McCoy stopped, and for a moment Kirk thought that the transmission had been severed. But then McCoy continued, though his words seemed strained. “If you can get to it…Spock can…” McCoy groaned. “…take out the information…”

  “Where is it?” the captain asked, but then McCoy yelled in pain. Kirk stood up abruptly at his desk. “Bones, are you all right? Bones, answer me.” Kirk listened and heard nothing but labored breathing. “Bones, what is it? Bones, what is it?” He peered at Spock, who despite his stoic demeanor, appeared concerned. “McCoy, what’s happening?” Kirk tried again. “What’s happening, McCoy?”

  But he knew what was happening. When McCoy had decided to stay on Yonada, he’d also agreed to abide by the laws of its people, which included the implantation of a subcutaneous device called the instrument of obedience. Through it, the Oracle could monitor words and possibly even thoughts, and it could administer punishment for anything it considered sacrilege. During their time on Yonada, Kirk and Spock had seen the device kill an old man who had dared to talk to them about his people’s hollow world.

  Kirk reached over to the monitor and activated it. “Kirk to bridge,” he said, and then without waiting for a response said, “Uhura, is the channel to McCoy still open?”

  “Aye, sir,” she reported.

  “Lock on to his communicator signal and feed the coordinates to the transporter room,” Kirk said. “Mister Spock and I are beaming back over.”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” Uhura said.

  “Kirk out.” He deactivated the monitor, crossed his quarters, and headed out into the corridor. Spock followed. As they walked, Kirk said, “The control room may be shielded from our sensors, but if McCoy could get a communicator signal through, we should be able to lock in on it and beam directly to him.”

  “Logical,” Spock said. “Captain, if Doctor McCoy has been equi
pped with an instrument of obedience and subsequently injured by it, it might be beneficial for him if we remove it.”

  “Can you do that safely?” Kirk asked.

  “I believe so,” Spock said. “There is a medical apparatus in sickbay called a subdermal extractor, typically employed to remove items embedded within or under the skin, such as splinters, warts, melanoma.”

  Kirk stopped at the next intercom he saw and contacted sickbay to have the handheld device brought to the transporter room. There, he and Spock armed themselves, while the first officer also outfitted himself with a tricorder. When they beamed over to Yonada, they found themselves in quarters similar to those they’d been provided when they’d first been there. McCoy lay on the floor, on his back, his eyes closed. Natira sat beside him, her hands holding one of his.

  As Kirk and Spock rushed to the unconscious McCoy, the high priestess accused them. “You are killers of your friend,” she said. “I will have you put to death.”

  Kirk quickly dropped to his knees and leaned over McCoy, examining his features, his complexion, the rise and fall of his chest. Almost beneath his breath, he said, “We’re here to help him.”

  Natira reached over McCoy with one hand and then the other, trying to push Kirk away from him. “Until you are dead, he will think of you and disobey,” she cried. “I will see you die!”

  Realizing that she would not allow them to treat McCoy, Kirk stood back up and reached for Natira. “Spock, take care of McCoy,” he said as he pulled her away. He held her tightly by the shoulders, the trails of her tears shining in narrow streaks down her face. She watched with evident sadness as Spock operated the subdermal extractor on the right side of McCoy’s head. In just ten seconds, the first officer held up the appliance and peered at its tip, the removal of the instrument of obedience obviously complete.

  Natira seemed to deflate, moaning in obvious despair. Spock secured the extractor in a compartment in his tricorder, retrieved McCoy’s communicator, and then examined the doctor, using the tricorder to scan him. “He is not part of our people,” Natira lamented. “You have released him from his vow of obedience.”

  Pained at the sight of his injured friend, and despite the high priestess’s tears, Kirk could not tolerate her acceptance of the implantation of such a device in McCoy. “We have freed him,” he pronounced, “from the cruelty of your Oracle.”

  McCoy suddenly groaned, and Natira gasped and hurried to him. “Bones,” Kirk said as she cradled McCoy’s head in her hands. Kirk lowered himself to his knees and once again leaned over his friend. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to correct the course of Yonada and leave this place…preferably with McCoy. Kirk would not stand in his way if he still chose to remain here, but he would make sure as best he could that Bones’s health would not again be put at risk.

  And then Kirk thought of the diagnosis of xenopolycythemia. He pushed it out of his head. “Bones, you said something about a book,” he said. “Where is it?”

  “They must not know,” Natira said quietly as McCoy lifted his head from the floor.

  “The…Oracle room,” McCoy said, his voice rasping, his words low.

  “You will never see the book,” Natira said angrily. “It is sacrilege.” She stood and sped toward the door, and Kirk raced after her, his adrenaline flowing, his own anger rising. “Guard! Guard! Guard!”

  He caught her just before she could leave the room, grabbing her by the arm and covering her mouth. “Now listen to me,” he told her. “You must listen to what I have to say.” He walked her back into the room, to an area separated from Spock and McCoy’s location by a latticework divider. “Give me one moment to speak to you.”

  She glared at him with searing animus, and Kirk’s rage seemed to melt away. Natira could not help the perspective she held. By all appearances, her culture maintained a single worldview, living in an illusion created for their benefit, with no dissent permitted. How could she possibly know anything beyond that? And perhaps of more value, the silvery tracks of her tears demonstrated her love for Bones. Kirk could not be angry with that.

  “One moment,” Kirk pleaded, taking his hand from her mouth, but still holding her arm. “Natira, if you don’t believe what I’m about to tell you, you can call the guards. We’ll accept any punishment you decree.” He released her arm and waited to see whether or not she would run.

  She didn’t. Breathing heavily from her sprint to the door and her struggles to free herself from his grasp, she said, “What do you wish to say?”

  And Kirk told her the truth of her world that was not a world.

  Natira shifted on the floor, shaking her head as though trying to clear it, and then turned toward him. Seated on the pentagonal platform in the center of the chamber, McCoy saw her look past him, to where Jim and Spock had found access behind the Oracle to Yonada’s control room. She gave him a quick smile, and that quickly, he knew that it would soon be over. All of it.

  He cursed himself.

  “The Oracle can no longer punish us,” he said. After Jim had revealed Yonada as a ship to Natira, a ship that had gone off course, she’d fled, apparently to confront the Oracle. McCoy and Jim and Spock had found her passed out before it, and McCoy had used Spock’s subdermal extractor to remove the instrument of obedience from beneath her skin. Jim and Spock had then retrieved the Book of the People and consulted it to locate Yonada’s control room. Now they worked to bring the asteroid-ship back on course.

  “Your friends have prevented it?” Natira asked, referring to the Oracle’s power over her.

  “Yes,” McCoy told her, and he felt a sinking sensation in his gut. The Oracle could no longer hurt Natira, but McCoy himself still could. And as much as he tried to tell himself that he wouldn’t do that to this very special woman, he knew that he would.

  “And will they send this…this ship,” Natira asked, still clearly attempting to become accustomed to the idea, “again to the land the creators intended?”

  “Yes,” McCoy told her, grateful for whatever positive news he could provide her.

  “That is good,” she said, and he could see that she already sensed what would come next. He’d known her such a short time, and yet he really did find her exceptional in so many ways.

  “Natira, your world, your people, are safe now,” he said, playing his role, knowing how the conversation would develop, and hating himself for it. “But I’m not.”

  “I know, McCoy,” she said, her eyes downcast. “It grieves me each moment, bearable only because of the love I feel for you.”

  And I love you, Natira, he thought, but he did not give voice to the emotion. “I thought I could accept my fate,” he said. “I thought I could live out my last year without raging against what lay before me, without fighting to preserve my life in the face of my disease.”

  “Is there…is there some way McCoy can fight what is to come?” Natira asked. She seemed suddenly expectant.

  “I don’t know if I can win, Natira,” said McCoy, all too aware of the improbability of battling a disease categorized for more than a century as incurable. “But I’m a physician, and a researcher, and an explorer, and because of all that, yes, I can fight.” The argument and offer he would make to Natira had already formed in his mind, and he came to them now. “Yonada has one destination, which it will reach a year from now. In that time—in the time I have left—the Enterprise will travel to many, many more places. There, at least, I’ll have the opportunity to look for a cure, or even short of that, a treatment that will prolong my life.” McCoy resisted his next statement, shamed by the calculation in it, and by the lie. “I want you to come with me.”

  “You want me to leave Yonada?” Natira asked, her eyes widening in surprise.

  “Yes,” McCoy said, smiling at her through the contempt he felt for himself. He loved Natira, but he had only just learned of his illness and only just met her. How could he have decided so quickly how and where to spend the last, too-short time remaining in his life? He as
ked her to come with him, knowing that she would not, but believing he would hurt her less by doing so. “Come with me aboard the Enterprise.”

  “It would be…interesting…to see and live beyond Yonada,” she said, though the level tone of her voice indicated that she felt less then certain of the sentiment. “And I would stay with McCoy.”

  “Then come,” he said, forcing a smile onto his face. He stood up from the Oracle platform and helped Natira get to her feet.

  “No,” she said, facing him.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said, though he felt sure that few things could scare this woman.

  “I do not fear the punishment of disobedience,” she said.

  “Well, then come,” he said, pushing her in one direction so that she would go in the other. “We must hurry to join my—”

  “No,” Natira said definitively. “I cannot go with you. It is not fear. I understand the great purpose of the creators. I shall honor it.”

  “You intend to stay here,” McCoy asked, “on Yonada?”

  “I shall stay willingly,” she said. “And because that is what I must do.” She had led the people of Yonada for fifteen years, McCoy knew, since the death of her mother, who had led them before her. How could Natira do anything but continue as high priestess?

  “Well then I won’t leave you,” McCoy said, his voice so flat, his words so unconvincing, that he thought she must surely strike him for his misguided attempt to spare her feelings. Instead, she trusted in what he said and displayed the unconditional love she had professed for him.

  “Will McCoy stay here to die?” she asked, sadness imbuing her features as she looked down. When she peered back up at him, though, she managed to smile. “No,” she said. “McCoy will not let go of life in the fullness of years.”

  “Now more than ever,” he told her, taking hold of her upper arms, “I wish to search through the universe, to find a cure for myself and all others like me.” He hesitated, not wanting to oversell his lie. “And I want you to be with me.”