Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  “It’s not all of a sudden,” McCoy said. “I’ve been thinking about this night for weeks.”

  “For weeks,” Lynn repeated. “Since Atlanta?” McCoy looked down, feeling as though he’d been caught in a lie, despite that not being the case. “Is this—” She held up the wrist around which she now wore the bracelet. “—because I could’ve been killed in Atlanta?”

  He lifted his head and peered back over at her. “It’s because I love you,” he said truthfully. “I have loved you for a long time.” He just hadn’t wanted to risk becoming involved with Lynn before now. When the relationship failed—and they always did—he would’ve had to move out of Hayden, start his life all over again. He hadn’t been prepared to do that until…Until I came so close to losing her.

  “If you loved me for so long,” she said, “then why didn’t you want to marry me?”

  “Lynn,” McCoy said, starting across the room.

  “No,” Lynn said, holding up the flat of her hand to him. “This is a real question. You know how I feel about you, Leonard. You know I want this, that I’ve dreamed about it, but I want to be your wife only because you love me, not because you’re scared of losing me.”

  “I was scared when everything happened in Atlanta,” McCoy admitted. “But that’s because I love you.” How could he make her understand? “Didn’t you fall in love with me because you lost Phil?”

  Lynn stared at him for a moment without saying anything. Then: “Is that what you think? That I needed somebody to replace Phil and you happened to be convenient?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” McCoy said. “I meant—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you meant,” Lynn said. “I’ve loved you for a long time. I think…I think it started before Phil left, but I loved him and I never would’ve done anything about my feelings for you. After he was killed, though, it was okay to care about you. There’s something special between us.”

  “Then marry me,” McCoy told her.

  “I want to,” Lynn said. “You know how much I want to. But only out of love, not out of fear.”

  McCoy felt lost. Of all the ways he’d imagined this night unfolding, he’d never considered anything like this. “We live in frightening times,” he told Lynn, not really sure what else to say. “There’s always going to be fear.”

  “In life, sure,” she said. “But there shouldn’t be any fear in a marriage. We shouldn’t decide to have a wedding just because you’re worried about losing me.”

  McCoy shook his head. Why had he done this? “I guess I should be used to losing people by now,” he muttered, more to himself than to Lynn.

  “What?” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” McCoy said, turning away from her.

  “No,” she said, striding across the floor. She took him by the arms and turned him back toward her. “What do you mean you should be used to losing people?”

  “I mean—” What could he tell her? That his entire life up to the age of forty had been lived in the twenty-third century, that everybody he’d ever cared about before then, everybody he’d ever known, had then been lost to him? Joanna, Jim and Spock, even Tonia. “I mean that before I arrived in Hayden, I’d lost everybody I ever cared about.” He didn’t want to explain further, but Lynn wouldn’t let it go.

  “Everybody?” she said. She seemed to consider this for a few seconds, and then, misunderstanding, asked, “Women you’ve loved?”

  But of course he’d lost them too, well before he’d been thrown back through time. Jocelyn, Nancy, and really Tonia would have joined that list as well if he’d made it back to the Enterprise. “Yes,” McCoy told Lynn.

  Very quietly, her voice filled with sympathy and disbelief, Lynn said, “They all died?”

  “What?” McCoy said. “No, but I lost them just the same.”

  Lynn’s brow wrinkled. She dropped her hands from his arms and walked back across the room. “They left you,” she said.

  “They…well, it ended with each of them,” he said.

  “You left them?” she asked.

  McCoy couldn’t believe that the conversation had gone in the direction it had. “Does it matter?” he asked, all at once feeling very weary.

  “Leonard, I love you, but that doesn’t make me blind or stupid,” Lynn said. “When you first came to Hayden all those years ago, you were running from something. Ever since I let you know how I feel about you, and maybe even since before that, you’ve been running from me. Now you’re telling me that you’ve run from the other important women in your life. What am I supposed to think?”

  “I don’t know,” McCoy said. “I’m not sure I know what to think anymore.”

  Once more, she went to him, this time taking his hand. “Tell me,” she said, “why did you leave them?”

  “Because,” McCoy said, anger driving his voice louder. He pulled his hand from Lynn’s grasp and moved away from her. “It just didn’t work out,” he said, no longer looking at her. “Sometimes that happens.”

  From behind him, she said evenly, “You’re upset, you’re lonely, you’re bitter. It doesn’t sound like it ‘just didn’t work out.’” McCoy didn’t know how to respond, and he thought that he should probably leave. “Did they hurt you, Leonard?” Lynn persisted. “Did you leave them before they could leave you? Did you think they were going to abandon you?”

  “Why not? They all do,” McCoy said without thinking.

  “They all do?” Lynn asked. “All who?”

  “Just…I didn’t mean to say that,” McCoy told her.

  He heard her walking across the floor and then felt her hand on his back. “All who?” Lynn asked again. “Leonard, do you mean your mother?” She could not have wounded him more deeply if she’d driven a sword through his heart. “You talked about her once, a long time ago,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about her?”

  McCoy wanted to run. He wanted to leave—wanted to race out of Lynn’s house, out of her life, out of Hayden. He wanted to go far away and start a new life for himself somewhere else.

  But he didn’t.

  He didn’t know why he stayed—was it her hand on his back, or his guilt for having destroyed history, or something else altogether?—but he did stay. He turned around to face her. “All I know is that she died giving birth to me,” he said softly.

  “Surely you must know more,” Lynn said. “Your father must have told you about her.”

  McCoy laughed, a throaty “Ha!” that contained absolutely no humor. “He never even showed me a picture,” he said, not looking at Lynn now, but past her, into the middle distance, into his own past. “I had to find that on my own. And when he discovered that I had, he…” Lynn waited without speaking, and he peered down at her limpid blue eyes. “He hated me for it,” he finished.

  “No,” Lynn said. “That can’t be true. Your father wouldn’t hate you for that.”

  “He did,” McCoy said, admitting aloud something he had barely acknowledged to himself. “But really he hated me because I killed my mother. Because I killed the love of his life.”

  “No,” Lynn said again, but this time her voice lacked conviction, replaced instead by a terrible sorrow. “That’s not true. You didn’t do anything. Sometimes things just happen.”

  “He blamed me,” McCoy said. “I don’t know if he meant to, but I know that he did. Up until those last few weeks, when he needed me…really needed me.”

  “In the end, he realized the error of his ways,” Lynn said, as though willing that to be true.

  “In the end,” McCoy said, “he needed me, and so he put aside his blame.”

  “How did he need you?” Lynn asked tentatively.

  “He was in so much pain,” McCoy said, visualizing the scene in the hospital room: the rain spilling down the windows, the artificial sounds of the monitors and the life-sustaining devices, the frightful whiteness of the place. “The doctors…” Even buried within his awful memories, McCoy knew that he cou
ld not mention life-support machinery to Lynn. “The doctors kept giving him medicine to keep him alive, but he hurt so much. He begged me to help him…begged me to release him.”

  “And you did,” Lynn said, her voice barely a whisper now. “You stopped the medicine.”

  McCoy focused his gaze on her again. “I did,” he said. “I killed my father. I killed my mother, and then I killed my father.”

  “No, Leonard, no,” Lynn beseeched him. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I did,” he said.

  “No,” Lynn said again, and she wrapped her arms around him. McCoy closed his eyes, but when he did, he saw the sterile hospital room once more, so he opened them. They stood like that for a long while, their only movement the little circle Lynn made with one hand on his back.

  Finally, Lynn asked, “Is that why you left those other women? Because you didn’t want to hurt them too? Or—” Something seemed to occur to her, and she stepped back and looked up at him. “Or was it because you wanted to leave them before they left you, just as your parents left you?”

  “My parents didn’t leave me,” he said.

  “They did, Leonard,” Lynn said. “They didn’t want to, but they did. They died and abandoned you. I know. My parents did the same thing to me. But just because they left me didn’t mean I should’ve stayed away from Phil because he would leave me too.”

  “But he did,” McCoy said, regretting the harshness of his words as soon as he’d spoken them. But Lynn did not seem stung by what he’d said.

  “We all die,” she said. “You’re a doctor, so you probably know that better than anybody. But we all go to Heaven for a better life.”

  “Do you know that I don’t believe in Heaven?” McCoy asked.

  “I’m not surprised to find out,” Lynn said. “But even if there is no Heaven, doesn’t that make this life even more precious? If you choose to live it without love because you’re scared of being abandoned, you’re missing out on the most that life has to offer.” She reached up and took his face between her hands. “Leonard, your parents left you and mine left me. Phil left me too. But I love you, and you and I are here right now. I’m not going to worry that you won’t be here tomorrow.” She stood on her toes and pressed her lips gently, sweetly against his, a brief, perfect taste of love. “And you don’t need to worry that I won’t be here tomorrow either.”

  McCoy swept her into his arms and swung her around. “I love you,” he said, and he kissed her, the dreadful weight of his longtime burden easing as he shared it.

  Fifty-One

  2293

  The massive whipcord of energy twisted through the void like some spaceborne tornado. Jags of lightninglike bolts writhed around it, and dust and debris trailed from it in cloud-gray sheets. Already the strange phenomenon that filled the main viewscreen had claimed two Federation transport vessels, and with them, three hundred sixty-eight lives. Scotty had managed to transport forty-seven survivors from the second vessel, the S.S. Lakul, before its hull had collapsed, the ship exploding violently.

  Now, the Enterprise—the upgraded Excelsior-class NCC-1701-B—lurched to starboard, then back the other way. Kirk caught himself on the railing, then pulled himself up onto the outer, upper ring of the bridge. Behind him, he heard an explosion, and he looked in time to see a hail of spark’s flying from the navigator’s station. Smoke, shouts, and an alert claxon filled the bridge as the great ship trembled.

  Kirk reached for the outer bulkhead and pulled himself forward, toward the sciences station. “Report!” he called as he passed behind the freestanding tactical console. He took hold of the bulkhead again beside the science officer.

  “We’re caught in a gravimetric field emanating from the trailing edge of the ribbon,” she called over the chaotic sounds around them.

  In the center of the bridge, the ship’s captain, Harriman, cried, “All engines, full reverse!”

  The right order, Kirk thought. The shaking of the ship eased as the power of its drive strained against the pull of the energy ribbon. He pushed away from the bulkhead and stepped down to the lower portion of the bridge, over to Harriman. Scotty, he saw, had already taken over at the forward station for the downed navigator.

  “The Enterprise’s engines are far more powerful than those of the transport ships,” Harriman told Kirk. “We might be able to pull free.”

  It sounded more like wishful thinking than a plan of action, but Kirk knew that it was the proper course to attempt. He’d never before met this new captain of this new Enterprise, but he’d known his father, the redoubtable—and difficult—Admiral “Blackjack” Harriman. This younger man seemed far different than his take-no-prisoners parent. Where the elder Harriman took bold, often rash, action, this younger man seemed more thoughtful, his approach more reasoned and cautious. Kirk understood the value of both approaches, though he knew that a truly successful starship command required a combination of the two.

  “We’re making some headway,” Scotty said from the navigator’s station. “I’m reading a fluctuation in the gravimetric field that’s holding us.” Kirk peered up at the main viewer, at the coruscating field of pink and orange light, brilliant white veins of energy pulsing through it. Despite the obvious danger it posed, he found it strikingly beautiful. He walked forward, around Demora Sulu at the helm, to stand in front of the viewscreen.

  “You came out of retirement for this,” a voice said quietly at his right shoulder. He looked at Harriman and was surprised to see a hint of a smile lifting one side of his mouth. The statement, the expression, both spoke volumes to Kirk, revealing a confidence in the young captain that he hadn’t seen before now. Of course, Harriman had been hamstrung by some admiral in Starfleet Command eager to generate some positive media coverage. After the recent complicity of several Fleet officers in the conspiracy to disrupt the peace initiative between the Federation and the Klingon Empire—a conspiracy that had effected the assassination of the Klingon chancellor, Gorkon—Kirk couldn’t argue that the image of the space service had suffered. Still, even if nobody had anticipated the Enterprise having to mount an emergency rescue mission during this public relations jaunt, you didn’t send a starship out of space dock without a tractor beam, without a medical staff; you didn’t send a newly promoted captain out with a bridge filled with members of the media and a “group of living legends,” as Harriman had earlier referred to Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov. The circumstances could have daunted even a seasoned captain.

  “I’m still retired,” Kirk said. “A one-day activation is not going to pull me back into Starfleet permanently.”

  “We could still use officers of your caliber and character, sir,” Harriman said sincerely.

  “Thank you, but it’s gotten a little too political for me these days,” Kirk said. He glanced around at the media reporters still on the bridge.

  “Don’t I know it,” Harriman said under his breath, something of a faraway look crossing his visage. All at once, Kirk realized that Blackjack must’ve been the one who’d pushed for this publicity outing for the Enterprise and its new captain, as much a self-serving promotion for the admiral as for Starfleet or his son.

  Kirk turned toward Harriman. “Don’t let anybody else define you,” he said quietly to him. “This ship is yours, and this crew needs you, the man, not some image you or anybody else wants you to live up to.”

  Harriman tilted his head slightly to the side, apparently considering Kirk’s words. Before he could respond, though, the ship heaved once more. Kirk staggered to his right and started to go down, but righted himself beside the navigation console.

  “There’s just no way to disrupt a gravimetric field of this magnitude,” Scotty said. Kirk knew that if the engineer could not figure out a means of freeing the Enterprise, then it likely couldn’t be done.

  “Hull integrity at eighty-two percent,” reported the tactical officer from his station.

  “But,” Scotty said, “I do have a theory.”

  �
��I thought you might,” Kirk said. Secure in his own abilities, he also knew that he’d succeeded as much as he had in his role as starship captain because of the senior staff that had for so long served with him. Certainly Scotty had been an instrumental element of that team.

  “An antimatter discharge directly ahead might disrupt the field long enough for us to break away,” Scotty theorized.

  An antimatter discharge, Kirk thought. “Photon torpedoes,” he said.

  “Aye,” Scotty agreed.

  “We’re losing main power,” the science officer said as Kirk moved back around the navigation and helm consoles. As he passed Demora, he tapped the weapons readout at the corner of her display.

  “Load torpedo bays,” he ordered. “Prepare to fire at my command.”

  As he stopped in front of the command chair, Sulu said, “Captain, we don’t have any torpedoes.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Kirk said, peering over at Harriman, who still stood in front of the viewscreen. “Tuesday.” That’s when the young captain had said that the tractor beam and medical staff would arrive on the Enterprise, so why not the torpedoes as well. Harriman opened his mouth as though to respond, but then he closed it and looked away. Kirk saw a flash of anger there and knew that it had been meant for Blackjack or whichever admiral had placed Harriman and his crew in such a predicament.

  “Hull integrity at forty percent,” said the tactical officer.

  “Captain,” Scotty said, “it may be possible to simulate a torpedo blast using a resonance burst from the main deflector dish.”

  A resonance burst, Kirk thought. Deflector systems were constituted in such a way as to avoid resonance, since sympathetic vibrations could disrupt both the deflector generators, other equipment, and even the hull itself. Right now, though, that seemed a small risk to take.

  The ship pitched again, sending Kirk flying backward, toward the command chair. Grabbing onto the arm of the chair, he peered back at Sulu. “Where are the deflector relays?” he asked, knowing that they would have to be reconfigured.