Star Trek: The Original Series: Miasma Page 6

  “No!” Saavik reached over and cut off the transmission before Kirk could finish. She no longer seemed confused or disoriented. Her eyes were alight with clarity. “Wait! It’s not me. It’s Spock.”

  Kirk didn’t understand. “Spock?”

  She took a deep breath to regain her composure. Her face was still pale, but it was also filling with a new intensity and sense of purpose. She looked him squarely in the eyes.

  “My apologies for interrupting, Captain, but I believe I understand now. The distress I was experiencing was not mine, but Spock’s.” Her voice was somber. “He is not well, sir. In fact, I fear he may be dying.”

  Kirk tried to grasp what he was hearing. “You can sense that, Vulcan to Vulcan?” A memory came back to him of that time, decades before, when Spock had telepathically sensed the sudden deaths of an entire crew of Vulcans on the U.S.S. Intrepid. “All the way from orbit?”

  She lowered her eyes, avoiding his gaze. She hesitated before speaking. “Spock and I share . . . a special bond . . . ever since our experiences on the Genesis Planet.”

  Kirk felt a pang at the mention of that unnatural world, where his son had died, but he pushed away his private pain to focus on Saavik. He recalled that Saavik and Spock had been stranded alone on the Genesis Planet for a time, not long after Spock’s miraculous resurrection. It was Saavik who had cared for the reborn Spock during that tumultuous time, before Spock regained his memories.

  But what kind of bond was Saavik talking about?

  “A mind-meld?” he asked. He didn’t remember anything about that in Saavik’s report on the Genesis affair, but Vulcans tended to be very private about such matters, and with good reason. A mind-meld was, by its very nature, a deeply personal matter.

  A hint of a blush added green to her cheeks. “Of a sort,” she said quietly, still avoiding his eyes.

  The proverbial lightbulb clicked on above Kirk’s head.

  Pon farr, he guessed, although he kept his supposition to himself to spare Saavik any further embarrassment. No wonder that particular detail hadn’t made it into the official accounts.

  It made sense, though. He was no expert on the topic, but he gathered that pon farr was as much a joining of the mind and spirit as of the body. It was an intimacy much deeper than even an ordinary mind-meld, binding two souls on a profound level. If Saavik and Spock had indeed shared such a union only a few years before, wasn’t it possible that she could tell when he was suffering greatly, perhaps even at risk of dying?

  I can believe it, Kirk thought. He’d seen stranger things in his voyages, and he had learned never to underestimate the power of the human—or Vulcan—mind. “And you think this . . . psychic connection,” he said delicately, “is allowing you to sense what Spock is going through down on the planet?”

  “Only because he is in great extremity,” Saavik explained, meeting his eyes once more. “That I can feel his weakness acutely, Captain, is not encouraging. It means that he is most likely on the edge of death.”

  “But it also means that he’s still alive,” Kirk said, choosing to look on the positive side. The dire implications of what Saavik was saying were not lost on him, but that only increased his determination to rescue Spock and the others before it was too late. “Which means that maybe the rest of the landing party has survived as well.”

  “A logical extrapolation,” she said. “So how does this affect our strategy, Captain?”

  Good question, Kirk thought, wondering if there was some way to turn this unexpected development to their advantage. “Can you communicate with Spock through your bond? Send him a message?”

  She shook her head. “It is not a matter of simple telepathy, sir. I cannot speak to him mind to mind across distances. I can only feel his life-force slipping away.”

  Although she spoke calmly and analytically, her dismay at the possibility of losing Spock again came through loud and clear. Kirk didn’t need a mind-meld to know how she felt—or share her fear that time was running out for their friend.

  “I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy,” he said as another possibility occurred to him. “Forget talking to him, then. Can you sense his location? Can you use this telepathic bond of yours to guide us to him and the others?”

  Saavik pondered the notion.

  “Perhaps,” she said uncertainly. “If we can get close enough to the correct vicinity, and if I can achieve the proper meditative state . . .”

  Kirk seized on the strategy. Maybe he was grasping at straws, but they had to try something. If what Saavik sensed about Spock’s condition was true, every minute counted. And in the absence of sensor data, they needed any edge they could get—even if that meant relying on something as imprecise and unquantifiable as a psychic bond between two souls. Certainly, it wouldn’t be the first time that the singular mysteries of the Vulcan mind had saved the day. Indeed, Spock owed his second life, at least in part, to the strange mental abilities of his people.

  “I’ll get us closer,” he promised. “You do what you need to do.”

  She nodded. “I will do my best, Captain.”

  Kirk didn’t doubt it. He suspected that he was asking far more of her than he could truly comprehend, but if she was willing to reach out to Spock in this way—and possibly lead them to the lost landing party—he wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass by.

  “Find them, Lieutenant. However you can.”

  Ten

  “You want another dose?” Chekov said defiantly. “Be my guest!”

  The landing party was under siege, beset by leeches. Chekov swept his hypospray before him, holding off a pair of creatures (which had been attacking in tandem) with a fresh green burst of repellent. Her back to him, Darwa released a tight, controlled burst from her own hypo at yet another leech, which had just lunged from the fog. Spitting furiously, the creature turned tail and fled back into the swamp . . . at least for the moment. A coppery aroma hung in the air before dissipating into the pervasive mist.

  “Hey!” McCoy protested. “Go easy on that stuff! It’s coming straight from Spock’s veins, you know!”

  While the security team fought a losing battle against the relentless predators, McCoy tended to Spock, who was stretched out on the ground, his head and shoulders resting against a hollow, fungi-encrusted log. The landing party was making what felt like its last stand in an open clearing atop a boggy spit of land about the size of the transporter room back on the Enterprise. The animal attacks were coming ever faster and more frequently, as though every leech in the vicinity had been drawn by the lure of the exotic new prey. All hope of making further progress through the swamp—and reaching the source of the distress signal—had been abandoned as a lost cause. It was all about survival now, and probably for not much longer.

  “Don’t tell me, Doctor,” Chekov replied. “Tell our persistent new friends.”

  Darwa checked her own weapon, which was the only other hypospray they had managed to scrounge up, leaving Spock and McCoy essentially unarmed. She frowned as she squinted at the device. “I’m almost out.”

  “Again?” McCoy exclaimed. “Already?”

  She shot him a pained expression. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I’m trying to conserve it, but . . . ”

  “I know, I know.” McCoy didn’t want to take out his frustration on Darwa and Chekov, who were doing their best to keep the party alive against ridiculous odds. It wasn’t their fault that they were all stuck in this hellish fix, with Spock’s blood being the only thing keeping them from going the way of Fisher and Yost, but he had already refilled the hypos more times than he cared to count, and a couple of extra vials to boot. “It’s just that . . . we’re killing him, damn it!”

  Spock was in bad shape. McCoy didn’t need a medical scanner or tricorder to know that his patient badly needed a transfusion, as opposed to donating even more of his blood to the cause. Spock’s gaun
t face was ashen and his pulse was disturbingly thready, especially for a Vulcan. Severely weakened by his ordeal, he kept sliding in and out of consciousness. Ordinarily, McCoy recalled, injured Vulcans could use a unique form of self-hypnosis to increase blood flow to their most vital organs in order to stave off death and promote healing, but that did little good when McCoy kept stealing that very same blood for a radically different use. Apparently there were limits to even Spock’s superhuman stamina. McCoy could have lived without discovering that.

  “Do your duty, Doctor,” Spock whispered hoarsely, rousing himself for the moment. None of them had eaten or drank anything for who knew how long, adding to the stress on Spock’s body—which had to be severely dehydrated by this point. His eyes were bloodshot, streaked with green. His voice was as raspy as an iron file. He tried to sit up. “The needs of the one—”

  “Save your breath.” McCoy pressed his hand against Spock’s chest to keep him lying down. “I’ve heard it all before and I sure as heck don’t need to hear it again. You listen to me, Spock. You are not playing martyr again, not on my watch. And don’t expect me to carry your blasted katra this time around, you got that? No more heroic death scenes for you.”

  “It is not a matter of heroism, Doctor. Merely logic.”

  “Logic alone is not going to keep any of us alive, Spock. Not this time.”

  Spock grimaced. “You may be correct, Doctor, as much as I am loath to admit it, and yet . . .”

  His voice trailed off as his eyelids drooped. His head sagged forward onto his chest. For a heart-stopping moment, McCoy feared that they had lost him, but closer observation revealed that he was still breathing shallowly, his chest slowly rising and falling. McCoy placed his fingers against Spock’s carotid artery, checking his pulse the old-fashioned way. To his dismay, it was down to 112 beats per minute: high for a human but dangerously low for a Vulcan. And his blood pressure, which was practically nonexistent at the best of times, had to be sinking as well. The smell of copper offended McCoy’s nostrils. A wet green stain, seeping through the shoulder of Spock’s filthy tunic, was an unpleasant reminder that Spock’s wound was still bleeding intermittently, making his periodic blood donations even more insane.

  We’re draining him alive, McCoy thought, just to buy us a few more hours at most.

  He glanced up at the sky—or what he could see of it. The open glade meant that at least there were no worrisome branches overhead, offering camouflage and extra avenues of attack to the leeches, but the unearthly fog offered little to no visibility. For all he could see, the fog extended entirely up into the explosive storm clouds that had brought Galileo down in the first place. The phantasmal mist covered the landing party like a shroud, only slightly prematurely. We’re dead, unless Jim comes through for us in time.

  As if anyone could find us in this infernal morass.

  Eleven

  The cockpit of a shuttlecraft in flight was hardly conducive to meditation. Electronic chirps and the constant background thrum of the impulse engine intruded on Saavik’s awareness—as did the presence of Captain Kirk, who was seated less than a meter away at the helm of Copernicus. Still, she attempted to tune out her surroundings as she sought to achieve a greater degree of communion with Spock, despite the unknown gulf between them. Strapped into the copilot’s seat, her hands resting stiffly in her lap, she began with some basic breathing exercises and mental routines to prepare her mind. Varba II loomed before her, its obstructive atmosphere clearly visible through the viewport, but Saavik chose to ignore the approaching planet, looking inward instead.

  Spock, she thought. Where are you, Spock?

  Achieving a proper meditative state was difficult, despite—or possibly because of—the desperate need to locate the missing landing party as expediently as possible. An unwelcome degree of trepidation troubled her thoughts; by nurturing her present connection to Spock, she ran the risk of sharing his final moments, experiencing his death. That intimidating prospect filled her with an inescapable sense of dread that was unworthy of her Vulcan heritage and training, but it existed nonetheless. Denying it would be both illogical and counterproductive.

  Accept the fear, she told herself. Acknowledge it, recognize it for what it is, and move past it. Do not fight it. Just let it be.

  Her search proceeded. The dread was still there, lingering at the back of her mind like an unattractive view or overcast sky, but she would not let it control her or dissuade her from her course. Fear was just an emotion, and emotions could always be overcome by discipline and logic.

  Although sometimes that was more difficult than usual.

  In truth, the possibility of sharing Spock’s demise was not the only thing she found daunting. To deepen her link to Spock, she would have to lower her own stringent mental barriers and tap into her powerful, occasionally unruly emotions where Spock was concerned, as well as call upon her memories of the Genesis Planet and all they had shared there. She could not wall off her feelings and keep them securely contained. There could be no privacy, no secrets, no safe place to hide.

  I will be exposed . . . to myself.

  Any Vulcan would consider such a vulnerable state disturbing, but Saavik knew she had more reason than most to be wary of her own suppressed emotions. Like Spock, she was only half-Vulcan, having spent her early years leading a near-feral existence on the failed Romulan colony known as Hellguard, deprived of the advanced mental training that Vulcan children received from infancy. She had come late to the teachings of Surak, and, though she would never admit it, the Vulcan way did not always come easily to her.

  Or at least not as readily as it came to others.

  It was a peculiar thing, she reflected, and not for the first time. Humans and other non-Vulcan races tended to believe that all Vulcans were equally devoid of emotion, ignoring the wide range of temperaments and personalities found in virtually every other humanoid species known to the Federation. This was an erroneous assumption. In reality, even Vulcan personalities ranged along a spectrum, with some better able to control their primal instincts than others. Only the revered masters of Kolinahr could be said to have completely conquered their emotions; every other Vulcan achieved their own level of emotional control, to varying degrees.

  Granted, by human standards, all Vulcans no doubt seemed universally cool and detached. To Kirk and the rest of the Enterprise crew, she surely appeared properly Vulcan. But in fact Saavik knew herself to be slightly more emotive than the average Vulcan, which was but one reason that she had chosen to follow Spock into Starfleet, where her occasional lapses might go less noticed than they would on Vulcan. Like Spock, she was more comfortable out in the galaxy, among other peoples, than she was among her own kind.

  Like Spock . . .

  Saavik realized that she was stalling, thinking about what needed to be done rather than doing it. Her personal issues and struggles did not matter now, not when the landing party was in mortal danger. Pushing past her apprehensions, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and reached deep inside herself, beyond her reservations and barriers, for the ineffable bond that stretched between her and Spock.

  My mind to yours, she thought. Your mind to mine.

  She felt only weakness at first. Weakness of the body, pushed beyond endurance. As before, Spock’s physical anguish washed over her like a wave of sickness. Her head swam, so that the cockpit seemed to spin around her, its inertial dampers and artificial gravity malfunctioning. Her mouth felt as dry and parched as Vulcan’s Forge, as though she had not quenched her thirst in far too long. Her stomach cried out for sustenance. Her limbs felt heavy as neutronium, weighing her down so that she could barely move. A dull ache throbbed in her right shoulder. She felt cold and wet and exhausted, pushed nearly to her limits. Her heartbeat slowed. She couldn’t go on much longer.

  No! This is not my pain! Let me go!

  Her first instinct was to withdraw from the c
ontact, spare herself this suffering. Self-preservation warred with duty as she fought the urge to break off their communion. Ironically, it was the very severity of Spock’s symptoms that gave her the strength to keep going. It was all too obvious that Spock needed her help, and grievously so. She could not abandon him.

  She would not abandon him.

  She kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut, willing herself to go ever deeper, past the superficial traumas of the flesh to the elusive mind and spirit beyond. Spock’s suffering was hers as well, but there was far more to their bond than mere physical empathy, if she dared to open up her heart and soul to a perilous degree. She raised her right hand, holding up two joined fingers before her, as though to touch his fingers as she had on the Genesis Planet, when she had first asked him to trust her and had initiated their joining. It was a gesture—a touch—whose profound significance only another Vulcan could truly appreciate.

  My heart to your heart. Parted from me and never parted, never and always touching and touched.

  The last barriers crumbled. A tidal wave of raw emotions threatened to swamp her: fear, worry, respect, admiration, affection, and more. Potent memories, laden with feeling, crashed against her consciousness, surging up from the depths:

  Spock, rescuing her from Hellguard when she was just a child. Taking her into his family’s home, introducing her to a new way of life, giving her hope and a future . . .

  Spock, welcoming her to Starfleet Academy after sponsoring her application, mentoring her and encouraging her progress, taking obvious pride in her accomplishments . . .

  Spock, sealed away in a flag-draped torpedo tube at his funeral, as Mister Scott played an oddly affecting Terran air on his bagpipes. A solitary tear betraying her sorrow as Spock’s remains were expelled into the void . . .

  Spock, reborn upon the Genesis Planet, growing at an accelerated rate from infant to maturity, lacking his memories and intellect but still undeniably Spock, returned to her against all odds, as she guided him through the pitiless throes of pon farr, forging a link that could never truly be broken, save by death . . .