Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hawkeye Pierce and BJ Hunnicutt perched side by side in the back of the jeep while Radar O’Reilly steered it over the rough and muddy ground, trying to make good time while avoiding the worst of the puddles and potholes that had sprung up with the season’s heavy rains. “You think they missed us?” Hawkeye mused.

“We’ve only been gone for six hours, Hawk.” Beej held onto the back of the seat as they slid to one side, then the other, jostling into each other with each turn the jeep took. He’d taken to scanning their surroundings, probably knowing that Radar had to keep his eyes on the road, and Hawkeye sometimes didn’t want to see anything beyond the stocking cap on Radar’s head in front of him and the curve of BJ’s ear beside him, pink with the cold. On second thought, he hoped Beej didn’t realize how comforting Hawkeye found it to stare at the side of his friend’s head.

Radar hit a pothole full of muddy water square on. The jeep bounced and fishtailed, Beej swore, and Radar planted a hand flat on the top of his head to keep his hat from dropping into his lap.

“I thought we were getting a ride home, not a carnival ride,” Hawkeye said.

Radar scrunched his shoulders. “Sorry, sirs, it’s not easy to tell which of those puddles have potholes underneath.” Hawkeye refrained from telling Radar again that he didn’t bite. Kid was going to work himself into a heart attack trying to defer to everyone all the time.

“I thought you were psychic or something,” BJ said. Radar flinched and didn’t answer.

“Don’t,” Hawkeye said to Beej, half under his breath for all the good it would do. “Don’t tease him about it.” Anything else, but not that. The crushed look on Radar’s face the few times Hawkeye had tried--he might have paid a million bucks to know why, but he would never ask. Hawkeye had enough demons of his own.

Radar pulled to a stop at a fork in the road. “I think we should take the long way round,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s rained enough to wash out the road since we left this morning,” Hawkeye protested.

“No, sir,” Radar agreed. He turned around to face Hawkeye. “I just think we should take the long way round this time.”

“How much later is that going to make us?” Beej asked, not quite petulantly.

Radar considered. “It’ll add about twenty minutes. Maybe a little more. I still think--”

Hawkeye finished the corporal’s sentence. “We should take the long way round. And so we shall. Step on it, Radar.”

Radar took the left fork. The road turned out to be awful, a wobbly slalom of ruts and churned up mud. They almost got stuck in it. Twice. The air was chilly, but at least the rain had stopped early that morning, to be replaced by a washed out blue sky and just enough wind to induce Hawkeye to button his jacket.

Radar slammed on the brakes. Hawkeye saw Beej pitch forward and threw an arm out in front of him on instinct to stop him from tumbling into the front passenger seat.

“Wait for it,” Radar said.

“Wait for what?” BJ asked.

Radar didn’t answer.

There was a flash of light, bright as a strobe. “Get down!” Hawkeye shouted. He grabbed Radar by the scruff of the neck and shoved him down across the front seat, waiting for the concussion, noise, and heat that never came.

After a few seconds they all sat up. There was a fallow field to their left. At the edge of it, about thirty yards away, three men stood who had not been there before. They were too far away to make out their features, but their shirts’ bright colors, one a warm gold, the other two a bright ocean blue, stood out in the sunshine, too easy a target for snipers. The field was in just the right place to be mined. Hawkeye stood up in the back of the truck to shout at them. “Don’t move!”

They turned to look at the sound and one of them took a step. The ground erupted around the three of them with a boom that sent Hawkeye’s hands flying to cover his ears. When he looked up, all three men were lying on the ground, barely visible above the swell of the grass.

Radar hopped out of the jeep to stand at the edge of the field as though he were going to run straight into it. Hawkeye grabbed him by the arm. “Not that way. We’ll walk around, come in from the side.”

He grabbed his kit out of the back of the truck. It was so muddy there was a good chance mines had slid from the field into the footpath alongside, so Hawkeye kept his eyes peeled while moving as fast as he could.

“They’re right at the edge.” BJ said. “I’ll take this one.” He bent over his patient and fished through his bag, a good sign. Meant the guy wasn’t dead already.

Hawkeye looked from one blue clad shape to the other. They were both splattered with mud and torn up leaves. One lay still, his leg covered in something green that had also splattered his face. The other man groaned and moved to curl up on his side. “Radar, see if you can get that one up on his feet. I’m going to check this guy out.”

Hawkeye bent over him. His color was very bad, a sort of sallow gray. Assuming he was probably dead, he still felt he had to check. No pulse at the wrist. He moved to the throat, where he could feel a faint, rapid flutter. He pulled open each eye. They reacted to light, so not quite dead yet, and at that moment the man breathed once, deeply. Hawkeye’s gaze tracked downward.

The scissors in his kit made short work of the remains of the man’s pants. His right leg wasn’t just full of shrapnel, most of the foot was gone and a large chunk of the calf was torn off so the bone showed. Something must be wrong with Hawkeye’s eyes. He blinked. Jewel green fluid, dark as blood, poured freely from the wound. Whatever the color, if it was blood, the man wouldn’t live long enough to make it to the jeep unless it could be stopped. He pulled a tourniquet out of his pocket and wrapped it tight around the man’s thigh until the flow of green liquid stopped, then gave it a couple of extra twists for good measure. Once he was satisfied, he pivoted the tall man over his shoulder and staggered toward the car. He was deceptively heavy--must be all muscle.

BJ had already settled his patient, a fair haired, good looking man with a nasty looking chest wound, into the jeep as well as he could. “Help me with this one, he’s heavy,” Hawkeye grunted.

BJ reached around to help Hawkeye gently lower his patient into the backseat next to his own. He looked up at Hawkeye, his eyes wide. “That blood is green. I mean, really green. And look at his ears.”

Hawkeye had been so occupied with the leg that he hadn’t noticed the ears. They were swept upward into elf-like points, following the angle of the man’s sharply upswept eyebrows. “So you’re seeing what I’m seeing,” Hawkeye said, feeling a little less like he was going crazy. “We’re not going to have any blood his type back at camp.”

“That’s an understatement,” Beej noted.

Hawkeye turned to Radar. “We’ve got to get these two back yesterday.”

“Yes, sir,” Radar said. He finished settling the third patient into the passenger seat and hopped over the hood to slide into the driver’s seat and put the jeep into gear.

BJ straddled his patient, there being no room to do much else in the back of the jeep. Hawkeye braced himself in the space between the front seats, trying not to jostle Radar or the patient in the front passenger seat. That one listed to the right, head resting in his hands.

The jeep jerked back into motion. “I have a tension pneumo over here,” BJ said. He moved his stethoscope. “Still getting good breath sounds on the left. Not so much on the right.” Hawkeye moved the unconscious man’s hand out from under his knee. He noticed the wedding ring, a broad band of gold with an intricate engraved design. “Hey Beej.”

“Yeah?”

“This one’s got a wife back home. Let’s make sure she sees him again.” Hawkeye turned back to his own patient. He moved his stethoscope. “I can’t even find this guy’s heart. Pulse is really weak and running, hell, I don’t even know, two hundred beats a minute?” He moved the stethoscope again. “Found his heart! It’s over where his liver ought to be.”

“I wonder where that means his liver is.” Beej turned back to his own patient. “Come on, keep breathing…”

The jeep bounced. Hawkeye stuffed his jacket around his patient’s head to keep it from rolling around. “How long, Radar?”

“Ten minutes,” Radar said. “If I go any faster I’ll flip the jeep.”

Hawkeye turned from the patient he had no idea how to treat to the one in the front seat. “Look at me,” Hawkeye told the man, who blinked woozily and pressed his hand to his forehead. “Can you tell me your name?”

His patient mumbled into his hands. “McCoy, Leonard H.” He raised his head a little. “Jim, Spock, where are they?”

“Light brown hair, gold shirt and pointy ears, bleeds green?”

McCoy, Leonard H. sat bolt upright in his seat. “Bleeds green! What happened to him?”

Hawkeye pointed behind him. “They’re right here. We’re on the way to the hospital. Can you tell me where you are?”

McCoy, Leonard H. squinted at the landscape as they jounced past. “I give up. Last I remember, we were on the ship.”

“What ship?” They weren’t all that near the coast.

“Enterprise.”

“The aircraft carrier?”

McCoy stared. “Aircraft carrier?”

Must still be addled from the concussion. Hawkeye turned back to his sicker patient. Whatever those vitals meant, they hadn’t changed, which might be good. His features were sharply angular, odd looking but not completely beyond the scope of normal human, except for the eyebrows and ears. It hardly seemed real that he had his hands full of wounded alien, hoping he’d somehow be able to keep him alive with no blood to fall back on, no real idea of how his physiology worked, or even of how his anatomy was put together. He’d probably never get a chance to talk to him, ask him why he came to Earth or what he was doing with two other people who looked human.

He took a quick glance at Beej, bent low over his patient’s chest. “Need a hand?”

“Nothing more you can do. I’m doing everything I can.”

Hawkeye rubbed the alien’s sleeve between his fingers. Their clothes were light and made of a soft, almost fragile fabric, but the braid on the sleeves, different for each man, and the swooping insignia on the front said military of some kind.

He felt a tap on his shoulder. McCoy caught his eye. “Have you seen my bag?”

“What bag?”

“My medkit. I’m going to need it if I’m going to be any use to them.”

Hawkeye looked over at BJ, who shook his head. “We go back now, we lose him.”

Hawkeye turned back to McCoy. “We’re almost at the hospital. There will be plenty of supplies there.” He stuck out a hand for McCoy to shake. “Captain Hawkeye Pierce. That’s BJ Hunnicutt. We’re stationed up at the M.A.S.H. unit a couple miles from here. Four-oh-seven-seventh.”

“Chief medical officer on the Enterprise,” McCoy said. “Patched up these two more times than I can count.”

“You a surgeon?” At McCoy’s nod, Hawkeye said, “His chances just went up, then. I’m getting a fast, thready pulse, too fast to count.”

“Spock’s resting heart rate’s two hundred forty beats per minute, blood pressure is usually seventy over thirty-five.”

If McCoy could remember that, his concussion couldn’t be too bad. Hawkeye asked, “How’s your head?”

“Like a Romulan ale hangover. My ears are still ringing, but I was farther from the...what was that?”

“Land mine.”

“Hell.”

Hawkeye shrugged. “Welcome to Korea.”

Chapter Text

The road twisted through damp forest. Overhanging tree limbs occasionally showered them with droplets dislodged by the breeze. Leonard McCoy winced when they went over another bump. He reached up to press gently at the swelling on the back of his head, finding the margins of the injury with his fingers. “We’re in Korea?”

“That’s quite a bump on the head you’ve got, there,” the dark haired one, Captain Pierce, said. “Anything else wrong with you?”

“Ankle. Not sure whether it’s sprained or broken. Give me a rundown on Jim and Spock.”

“Your friend with the pointy ears had his lower leg about blown off.”

The other man, Hunnicutt, said, “Shrapnel to the chest cavity, maybe upper abdomen. Tension pneumothorax.”

“Why is there a minefield in Korea?” The concussion was slowing him down when he most needed to be focused. The last thing he remembered they were coming up on the Earth system for the treaty signing in Tokyo, but he didn’t remember beaming down anywhere. The knock to his head had robbed him of an indeterminate amount of time. Think it through, he told himself.

“How long was I out?”

“No more than a minute,” their driver said. “You were already moving around when I got to you.”

They hit yet another bump, and Leonard slid forward so his foot jammed into the front of the floorboards. He was rewarded with a stabbing pain that brought tears to his eyes. After a quick glance backward at the doctors trying to keep Jim and Spock alive, he reached down to pull off his boot. Palpation did not reveal any broken bones or foreign objects, though the ankle was swollen and tender on the lateral aspect. Fortunately, there was no blood on his hands when he pulled them back up. The vehicle continued through the mess of trees on a river of mud that didn’t deserve to be called a road, while Leonard tried to catch glimpses of Jim and Spock around the backs of the men working over them. What he could see of Spock’s color did not look good. He wasn’t in a good position to see Jim at all. No more than a minute meant it was likely he wasn’t missing much more than half an hour of memory, small blessings.

Their vehicle rolled to a stop in a mud paved clearing. It looked like mud was going to be a big part of his life for the short term. Olive drab and brown tents emblazoned with the Red Cross symbol dotted the space.

Their driver leaped out of the vehicle, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Wounded! We’ve got wounded!" He slammed the driver’s side door. Leonard’s head protested the noise. He took a second to puzzle out the door latch, opened it, and swung his feet gingerly over the side to dangle just above the ground. It would not do right now to fall--or faint.

“These two need to go straight to surgery,” the one who had introduced himself as Hawkeye Pierce shouted. He watched the flurry of activity as men and women clad in olive drab deftly slid Kirk and Spock onto stretchers. A blonde woman said, “What is this? Paint?”

“It’s blood,” Pierce shouted back. “Just get him to the surgical tent, we’ll talk when we get inside.” They were still arguing as they skimmed over the mud with the stretcher toward the corrugated metal building labeled “surgery.”

The driver stopped in front of him. “I can show you to the surgical tent, sir.” He was deferential to the point of timidity, enough so that it caused him a twinge of concern. Did they beat their noncommissioned officers in Korea?

“Help me up,” he said. “I’m not sure I can bear weight on this ankle.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said. "My name's O'Reilly, sir. Corporal O'Reilly." Despite his nervousness and small size, he efficiently helped Leonard to his feet, settling his weight partly onto one shoulder and firmly holding him so he could step-touch his way forward. Kid was stronger than he looked. A few steps in, a short woman in pigtails rushed back to tuck herself under his other arm. He used the short walk to try to organize his thoughts. This was clearly not present day Korea. He was sure he could narrow the time period down to the twentieth or twenty-first century, not before World War II, since the woman helping him along was not wearing a dress, and definitely not after 2065, given that after that any reasonably educated person would have known, and presumably remarked upon, Spock’s species. As for how and why they had ended up here, he’d leave those questions for Spock to answer. He was a doctor, not a temporal physicist.

They entered through swinging double doors into a tiny room in which the two doctors who had found them were already scrubbing their hands at primitive sinks. He narrowed his estimate to the twentieth century. He knew the drill even though generally he used sonics and a disinfectant rad box to clean his hands before surgery--when he wasn’t working out of his bag sewing up arrow wounds in a cave on some godforsaken hunk of rock somewhere.

“Sit,” the woman told him, and he dropped into a metal folding chair. She grabbed a bandage. “I’m going to splint that ankle, nothing fancy but you’ll be able to stand.”

“Thank you kindly,” Leonard said. The woman, doctor or nurse, he wasn’t sure, handled his ankle gently but firmly. He scanned the room while she worked, looking for a calendar or some additional hint of which war they had just been dropped into. “What’s the date?”

“April 18th,” Dr. Pierce supplied, not turning around.

“What year?” Leonard bit off the words.

“1951.” Dr. Hunnicutt backed through the curtain leading out of the room they were in, his hands held up in front of him.

“Damn.” He had been nearly certain they’d traveled in time again, but confirmation landed in his stomach like a rock. Could be worse though. Medicine had at least begun to resemble an effective endeavor by the mid-twentieth century, and they had managed not to land in the clusterfuck that was the mid-twenty-first.

“Why, were you hoping for a better one?” Pierce finished one arm and started scrubbing the other. “Kellye, help him get on a gown and gloves and then get him into the OR. Dr. McCoy, can I give--what was his name--ether?”

“His name is Spock. Commander Spock,” Leonard supplied. “I have no idea. We haven’t used ether in--just don’t. He’s got an incredible pain tolerance.”

Pierce frowned, clearly disliking the idea of operating on a potentially conscious patient. “How about plasma?”

Human plasma? Normally, he’d have said yes, but the plasma they made on the Enterprise was immunologically neutralized. “No. Stick with saline.”

Kellye, who he surmised was a nurse, disappeared for a moment behind a curtain. While she was gone, a commotion erupted beyond the doors to the OR. “What is the meaning of this! I’ve told you two I don’t want you wasting time with your shenanigans.”

He thought it was Hunnicutt’s voice that answered. “No shenanigans, sir. This guy’s in bad shape, I could use a second pair of hands.”

“Which one of you put Radar up to running into my office yelling that there’s an alien in my OR…” He trailed off. “There’s an alien in my OR.”

“That’s my cue.” Captain Pierce backed through the double doors into the OR.

Kellye returned with a set of buff colored scrubs. Leonard managed the short sleeved top on his own but allowed the nurse to help him get his pants off over his splinted ankle. “Did you come from a spaceship?” she asked, then thought better of it. “I’m sorry sir, that was out of line.”

Leonard dismissed her apology with a wave. “How are they, as surgeons I mean,” he asked, knowing that nurses were experts at watching and judging doctors.

“Hawkeye and BJ? They’re the best.” Once he was dressed, she helped him over to the sink and expertly scrubbed his hands, one at a time. “I’m not just saying that. They’re the reason 97% of the boys who make it through our doors make it out alive.”

He nodded acknowledgement. “Thanks for helping out,” he said, a little embarrassed with the attention, but not wanting to risk a mismatch between their supplies and his technique. She knew what she was doing. “1951. God help me,” he muttered.

The voice that had been shouting in the OR said, not quite as loudly but more decisively, “I’m scrubbing in. Don’t even try to save that leg, Pierce. We’re going to have a hard time keeping him from bleeding out as it is.”

“You don’t think we have his type back there somewhere?” Pierce quipped.

“I highly doubt it. Where’s that surgeon that came with them?”

Leonard backed through the door, gloved and gowned. An older fellow with glasses caught his eye. “You work with Captain Pierce here on our foreign visitor. I’m guessing green blood isn’t going to be the biggest surprise on the table.” He slipped through the curtain to the scrub room.

Pierce squinted into Leonard’s face one more time. “Are you up to doing surgery?”

His head ached and he was dizzy, but he’d operated under worse conditions than this. He perused the surgical instruments on their tray. “I’m…not familiar with these instruments,” he said. “And I’m still shaky. I’ll just assist.”

Pierce nodded. “All right, doctor. Nurse Kellye, we’re not using anesthesia. Watch his respirations and let us know if he starts to wake up. What’s normal for him?” He turned to address the last to Leonard.

“Eight to ten breaths a minute. Spock’s lungs are more efficient than ours.” He frowned. “I’ll go up top and talk to him if he starts to come around. Kellye, try not to touch his face.”

Kellye shook her head. “No anesthesia. Seems awfully cruel. Poor thing, so far from wherever his home is. Were you two taking him back to his home planet?”

“Not if we can help it. He doesn’t visit more than he has to. Family stuff.”

“Temp’s eighty-eight,” Kellye reported.

"Eighty-eight whats?” Leonard asked. “Normal for him’s thirty-three.”

The old surgeon returned, scrubbed and gowned. “Anybody here know how to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade?” He joined Hunnicutt to work on Kirk.

A pretty blonde nurse looked up from where she sat holding the mask over Kirk’s face at the head of the table next to Spock’s. “Thirty-three Celsius is ninety-one point four Fahrenheit. He's cold. I can’t believe you men can’t do such a simple calculation.”

“Thank you, Nurse Houlihan,” the old fellow said pointedly. Kellye had cut away the rest of Spock’s clothes. Pierce inspected his lower half for wounds, then gestured McCoy over. “Is that..?”

McCoy palpated the region carefully, just in case anything was ruptured where he couldn’t see. “Nothing’s missing. It’s all tucked inside. Normal anatomy for his species.”

“Well,” Pierce said and swallowed. “I’m amputating the leg.”

It took less than a second for McCoy to nod. “That sounds like our best chance to save his life. We’re not going to find T-Negative out here and there’s not a whole lot of leg left to save.” With any luck, they’d be home and regenerating a new one for him in a few hours or days.

The old surgeon looked up from Kirk. “What’s this one’s blood type?”

“A positive.”

“Small favors. Radar, grab two units of A positive.”

“Yes, sir.”

Pierce made the first superficial cuts around Spock’s thigh. “How similar is his vascular system to ours?”

“Major arteries and veins in the leg are in nearly the same places as you’d expect. Femoral artery runs a little closer to the femur on the medial aspect.” He kept his eye on Pierce's movements. Keeping his mind on the technical details kept it off the rest of their situation, which for the moment he couldn't do anything about.

Nurse Kellye added, “Whatever you’re going to do, do it quick, his BP’s 60 over 40.”

“That’s not that bad, for him,” Leonard clarified. “And his resting heart rate’s 240, listen low and on the right. Don’t panic until it's lower than 180 or higher than 300.”

Kellye protested, “I can’t count 240.”

“Try.” When Leonard didn’t have the scanner to do it for him, he’d learned to do it by rhythm.

“Retractor,” Pierce said. Leonard took hold of the device and pulled backward.

“Got it.”

“Bone saw.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out which instrument that was. He passed it to Pierce. Given that the man was using pointy sticks and cutlery to do surgery, he made efficient work of the amputation. His hands were precise and certain in their movements. “You do this a lot,” he said.

“That’s war for you. The wounded come in, we patch them up, get them stable and send them on to Seoul or Tokyo. Try not to send too many home in a box.”

Leonard nodded. He’d been stationed at Starbase 4 for part of the Klingon war. “I’ve done both. The patching and the picking up the pieces after. Neither one’s pretty.”

“War is never pretty,” Pierce agreed. “Dr. McCoy, I’d like you to do a last check for bleeders. We can’t afford not to get them all.”

Leonard bent over the wound visualizing each artery and vein that needed to be closed. His fingers itched to have his medscanner. “You’re good. You can close.” He slid around the head of the table, wincing when he stepped with the bad foot, but the splint held and he could bear weight on it even though it hurt. Kellye stepped away from Spock just long enough to replace Leonard’s gloves.

He step-hopped over to check on Kirk. They had him open from collar bone to pubic bone, every organ on display. The older surgeon said, “Colonel Sherman Potter. I’m in charge of this outfit. Captain BJ Hunnicutt, over here. We’d shake your hand, but,” Potter shrugged, “we’re kind of busy here. Who’s our friend?”

“James T. Kirk, Captain of the Enterprise. My CO. We’re not exactly Navy, but close enough.”

Potter frowned. “Enterprise has been in mothballs since ‘47.”

“We’re not from the aircraft carrier.”

Potter huffed, bemused. “I figured as much, with that getup. And what do I call you?”

Leonard collected himself. “Doctor Leonard McCoy. Some folks call me Bones.” He wasn't sure why he offered Jim's nickname for him. Maybe hearing it would make him feel a little less cast adrift.

“Good to meet you, Bones,” Potter said. “Your captain’s in good hands. And the other one, Spock you called him. He’s wearing the same kind of uniform as you are. He a doctor?”

“Science department also wears blue. He’s our XO.”

O'Reilly had returned as well and was haunting the corner of the ER, hands clasped anxiously in front of him. Leonard turned to him. “All right. Radar, right? Why Radar?”

Radar shrugged, hands finding their way into his pockets. “Sometimes I know stuff before it happens.”

Pierce confirmed, “It’s how we managed to find you right away. If he hadn’t decided to take the long way round, your friends would have bled out in that field by now.”

Leonard glanced back at Spock’s unnaturally pallid skin. “I owe you one, then, Radar. So. I need you to find some kind of acid drink, orange or tomato juice would be best.”

He nodded. “I have a whole case of tomato juice, sir.”

“And you’re welcome to it,” Potter declared from the next table over.

“Good. That’s great. Then I need you to find a spool of the finest gauge copper wire you can find, wash it with rubbing alcohol to get the germs and any oil off it, unwind it, scrunch it into a loose ball, and drop it into a glass of tomato juice. ”

“Sir, Copper wire. Wash it with alcohol. Crumple it up. Put it in tomato juice,” Radar repeated back. On Leonard’s confirmatory nod, he hurried away.

“Copper wire in tomato juice?” Pierce looked down at the green smeared wound. “Copper based blood.”

Leonard nodded. “He takes supplements back home. So unless you’ve got copper chloride lying around we’ll have to improvise.”

Pierce indicated the stump while he sewed. “Mines make dirty wounds. I’d like to give him a shot of penicillin.”

Definitely not. “If you want to kill him. No penicillin for Jim either. He’s allergic.”

“Chloramphenicol?”

“Yes for Jim, no for Spock.” McCoy considered. “Do you have any sulfa? You can give up to double the dose for a human.”

Pierce addressed Nurse Kellye. “Prep a double dose of sulfanilamide.”

There was a groan from the head of the bed. Leonard squeezed between Potter and Pierce to reach Spock. His eyes opened, roved without focusing for a moment, then met Leonard’s. “You’re in surgery. We’re almost done. Just hang on a few more minutes.”

“Where is Jim?”

That would be the first thing he’d ask. “Also in surgery. I’m going to have another look at him as soon as I’m sure you’re settled.” Leonard turned to see Radar with the glass of tomato juice. “Copper isn’t in little pieces is it?”

“No sir. One loosely crumpled ball, like a pot scrubber. Just like you said, sir.”

“Can we sit him up a little? Enough to get this down him?”

Pierce nodded. “I’m closed. I’ll help you sit him up.” He moved the curtain out of the way and lifted Spock’s head and shoulders slightly.

Leonard held the glass out to Spock. “I’d like to let this sit longer, but the sooner you’re in your trance the better.” He held the juice to Spock’s lips and didn’t set it down until the copper ball sat at the bottom of an empty glass. Radar took it. Spock lay back and closed his eyes to take one slow steadying breath, settling into his healing trance.

He turned to Pierce. “All right, he’ll probably be nonresponsive for several hours. Maybe up to a day, but I doubt he’ll be willing to stay down not knowing how Jim is doing. Get me if you hear a peep out of him.” He limped around the table to stand behind Hunnicutt. “How’s it going?”

Potter answered for the other surgeon. “It’s going, don’t hover. Pick out a bed in recovery and lie down. Don’t think I don’t know you’re hurt.”

“Don’t you die on me,” Leonard admonished Jim. “handsaws and fishing line,” he added, shaking his head.

Hunnicutt grinned, but his smile faded when he saw the look on Leonard’s face. “Don’t worry, I do this kind of surgery every day, with these instruments. I’ve gotten very good at it.”

Leonard nodded. “I’ve done this kind of surgery on him. Several times. With instruments that would bug your eyes out of your head. And he’s still damn near died on me more than once.”

Hunnicutt whistled. “Several times?”

“He has a habit of rushing in where angels fear to tread.”

Hawkeye touched Leonard’s shoulder on his way past. “I’m going to Post Op to keep an eye on Spock. Kellye, get Bones to x-ray. Right ankle and skull.” Radar and Pierce pushed Spock through the doors to their recovery room.

He looked down to see the dark haired nurse at his elbow. “Don’t argue,” she told him.

He followed the nurse meekly, lay down on the bed, and allowed her to bombard his body with high energy radiation, but at least he got to look at the vintage blurry images of his foot and skull afterward. He wondered if he could have them framed. “I told you nothing was broken,” he said.

With the nurse’s help, Leonard hobbled into the ward and lowered himself into a seat by Spock’s bed. Pierce stood at the foot of the bed. “Nurse Kellye, Doctor McCoy is going to be responsible for Commander Spock here. Follow his instructions.”

Leonard turned to the nurse. “Could you bring some extra blankets? I don’t want him expending energy keeping warm.”

“Of course.” Kellye bustled away.

He carefully pulled the short sleeved shirt as far down Spock’s arm as possible, then felt for an axillary pulse, using the fabric as a buffer. It was still faster than he liked, but the Vulcan kept a fair amount of his blood volume stored in that oversized liver of his, so he had a good shot at pulling through.

Pierce watched him as though he were taking mental notes. “Not a word of this on the radio, Radar,” Hawkeye said. “Take Klinger and see if you can find the doctor’s kit. Be careful of the mines.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m going to go check on your captain. You sit tight.” Pierce squeezed his shoulder and left for the OR.

They were a clean, well run outfit, he had to give them that. His eyes trailed down the bed, the body underneath the blanket too narrow at the bottom. Don’t you die on me either, he thought. He pulled on the chain around Spock’s neck to make sure his ring wasn’t trapped underneath him, then tucked it under his sheet. Nurse Kellye returned to tuck a couple more blankets around Spock and handed a third to Leonard.

“If the shock hasn’t hit you yet, it will,” she said. “Stay warm.” There was no flirtation in her tone, just kindness.

“I’ll manage. Could you do me a favor?”

“Yes, sir.”

The biometrics encoded in their uniform patches might make it easier for Scotty to find them. “The shirts we were wearing. It’s important to me and my friends to have our patches. Could you see if you can find all our shirts so I can nip them off before you toss them?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“All anyone can ask.”

She left him then, along with the adrenaline that had kept him going for the last hour or so. God, his head hurt. 1951. Scotty had better hurry up and figure out where they were because he sure didn’t want to stay here any longer than he had to. He changed his mind about sitting up. The bed next to Spock’s had been reserved for him. He slid into it, pulled the blanket Kellye had given him across his shoulders and closed his eyes.

Chapter Text

“So what is it we’re looking for?”

“Little black bag, about yea big.” Radar mimed the dimensions Dr. McCoy had given him.

Klinger pulled his shawl closer about his shoulders. “In a minefield?”

“It’s an important bag.”

He and Klinger stood at the edge of the field where they had found the time travelers that afternoon. They only had another hour of useful light, but he figured they’d find it right away. “Step where I step,” he told Klinger.

He didn’t mention that he already knew where the mines were buried, but he was pretty sure Klinger understood even if the officers thought he was just reckless. Klinger tucked his shawl close about him. He was wearing about his most practical dress, a form fitting hunter green sheath that ought to blend in better with the surroundings than the bright yellow chiffon he’d been wearing around camp.

They reached the spot where the three men had fallen. It was marked with a hole blown in the ground, crushed vegetation where the bodies had fallen, and drying streaks and patches, some the color of rust, others a sort of spruce needle blue. The bag lay about eight feet into the danger zone, upside down and splattered with mud, a mine sticking up almost directly between them and it. He could see the tarnished metal edge of the mine glinting in the late afternoon sun.

Klinger saw the bag almost as soon as Radar did, but Radar stopped him from moving forward with a hand planted on Klinger’s chest, gesturing at the barely visible mine with his chin. He didn’t like the way it was angled in the soft ground. A tilted mine that hadn’t gone off was unpredictable; it could go off for any reason or no reason at all. He could see a number of moments when it could explode, and he was certain he wasn’t imagining those possible futures. “Step back. I’m gonna go around it,” he said.

“Yeah, you just do that. You want me to pick up all your body parts when you blow up or just bring back your head?”

“Don’t be gross, Klinger.”

He picked his way over to the bag, holding his breath for all the good it would do. “So these guys we picked up are aliens?” Klinger said. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

“Only one of them’s an alien and I don’t think he’s faking. He was bleeding honest to God green all over the OR. I think they’re from the future.” He lifted the bag as slowly and carefully as he could. It was awfully close to that mine.

“Wish I’d thought of that, too. So, you think that’s full of future stuff?”

“We were just told to pick it up, not to look inside.” He picked his way directly away from the mine and then sideways out of the field. Relief flooded through his body, hot and cold at the same time, when he set foot back on the path with the bag tucked under his arm. He handed it to Klinger and bent over, hands on his knees, until his breathing steadied. He straightened to follow Klinger back to the Jeep.

“You’re no fun at all,” Klinger shouted over his shoulder.

“I didn’t say we weren’t going to look inside it anyway,” he said. Klinger perched in the back of the Jeep and pulled out a handkerchief to rub the worst of the mud off. Radar hopped up beside him. “Just a peek, though, I’d hate it if we broke anything.”

Klinger opened the bag up. It could be opened up partway like an ordinary bag, or if you pulled just right it would open out flat, the instruments inside each tucked into its own pocket or loop. There were a fair number of shiny metal things with lights on them, none of which he could make heads or tails of just by looking at them in their places. There were also ordinary looking scissors, a bright orange tourniquet, several sealed packs of what was labeled hemostatic gauze, and foil packets of disinfectant gel along with flat packs of pills and glass ampules of liquid. A shiny rectangle the size of a shaving mirror fit into the largest pocket. “We need to get back,” Radar said.

Klinger, who was as clever with bags and wraps as he was with scarves and bows, closed up the bag as though he’d been doing it all his life. He slid into the passenger seat and Radar took the wheel. There was something wrong back at camp, and he needed to get the bag back as fast as he could.

He hated driving in emergencies, especially emergencies that were still in that nebulous ‘something bad is about to happen’ stage. He kept wanting to follow the threads to see what was going to happen, and he couldn’t do that and keep his eyes on the road. It was hard enough to pay attention to here and now when then and there were vying for his attention, but once his fickle brain latched onto a potential crisis it wouldn’t let go, and if he wasn’t careful he’d drive them right into a ditch.

They pulled into camp. Radar grabbed the bag and ran it into the building, looking for Dr. McCoy. He nearly threw it at him in his haste. “Problem, Radar?” the doctor said from his seat next to the still sleeping alien.

Whatever the emergency was, it wasn’t an emergency yet. “I just wanted to make sure you got it back as soon as possible,” he lied.

“Because I’m going to need it?” McCoy asked, missing nothing. “Help me up, I’m going to see how Jim’s getting on.”

Radar helped him hobble into the OR. Potter and BJ were still picking through Kirk’s ruined chest. BJ swore under his breath. “There’s a lot of tissue damage in here, Colonel. I’m just not sure we’re going to be able to put him back together after we take out all the bone fragments.”

“Pressure’s dropping,” Houlihan noted.

“I can’t help it, these vessels aren’t holding the sutures. Radar, bring another unit of A positive.” He leaned in, squinting through his glasses. “Better make that two units.”

“Can you help me scrub in?” McCoy asked Radar.

“Of course, sir.”

“Radar found my kit,” McCoy told the other two surgeons. “I’ve got a few things in here that will help.”

“We could sure use the help, son,” Potter said. “Major, could you set up a table for Dr. McCoy’s instruments?”

“Certainly, sir.”

Radar gave McCoy a shoulder to lean on. They limped into the scrub room. McCoy insisted on washing up on his own. “I’m going to give you a word of advice, Radar,” he said as he held his hands up for gloves. “Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t be cagey.”

“I don’t always know what I mean, sir.” He carried the bag for him and laid it open on the table Houlihan had set up, only having a little trouble with the latches. “I’m not really very smart.” A part of him kicked himself. It was true, he wasn’t smart. He couldn’t put words together the way he wanted, his grades at school ranged from mediocre to abysmal, and he had the attention span of gnat in the words of his grandmother. But the truth was he didn’t say what he meant not because he wasn’t smart, but because he wasn’t brave.

He ran to get the blood and hand it off to Major Houlihan, then returned to the scrub room for McCoy, who leaned heavily on him for the hop back to the table. “I’m going to pay for this tomorrow,” McCoy noted. He plucked a couple of silver devices out of their slots and turned to face the operating table. Radar stepped back to be out of the way but listened. “Colonel, Captain, this is a portable medscanner. It will send detailed information to my datapad on Jim’s condition. Radar, hold this up, shiny side toward me.” He pointed at the mirror thing.

McCoy waved the little cylinder over the patient. It made a whistling noise. “Tap the pad once, right in the middle. No, the middle of the shiny side.” The mirror made a little blip noise, then glowed with lit letters, numbers and graphs like a tiny television, but in color. McCoy made a grumpy sort of hmphing noise, then set down the little cylinder and picked up the larger tool. It started to hum.

“Tissue regenerator,” he told the surgeons. Radar concentrated on holding up the doctor’s tiny television. “It encourages cell division and creates an acellular lattice to hold the tissue together until the cells finish growing in. Jim’s got some cellular damage from, well, from weapons you should be glad you’re never going to see.”

“I’d like not to have to see damage from the weapons we have now,” Hunnicutt agreed.

McCoy hopped over next to Hunnicutt and held the device out over the incision. “You’ve been picking Spock’s leg out of Jim’s chest all afternoon,” he said.

“Bone fragments from the foot, we think,” Potter confirmed. Radar tried not to think about somebody’s foot being blown into pieces small enough and moving fast enough to hit somebody else’s chest like shrapnel. He thought about it anyway and swallowed hard.

McCoy sucked in a breath. “That’s...don’t tell Spock, okay? So, you hold it about three centimeters from the tissue you want to reconstruct. The amount of pressure on the button determines how fast the acellular lattice is produced. There’s an art to it; it’s not just point and shoot.”

“We could use something like that around here,” Potter noted.

McCoy might have sighed. “I should probably tell you that I’m not supposed to be using it at all under these circumstances.”

“Where are you from, really?” Potter asked.

“Near Atlanta. I really can’t tell you more than that, at least until Jim wakes up.”

Radar shifted from foot to foot, still holding up the medscanner. “I thought you said not to be cagey,” he mumbled more petulantly than he had intended.

“I wasn’t being cagey,” McCoy said in that soft, distracted voice the surgeons used when they were talking while completing some delicate task. “I told him I’m not going to say more than I have to until my commanding officers are awake. I’ve said too much already.” He straightened. “I’m going to be in here for a while. I need you to sit with Spock until Captain Pierce gets back.”

“Yes, sir,” Radar said, set the little television down on the tray and turned to go.

McCoy held up a hand. “Now wait. Instructions.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Radar waited.

“First, don’t touch him unless you have to. Second, if he looks like he’s starting to wake up, fetch me right away.”

“Third,” Potter interrupted. “Don’t let Burns anywhere near him.”

“Too late,” Radar said too soon. He ran out the door just as the shouting got really loud.

“If you’re hiding some little green man in there I have a right to see it!” Major Burns shoved past Pierce and through the door. “Hah! Right there! He looks Chinese.”

Radar ran forward to stand between Burns and Spock. “You stay away from him, sir. He’s never done anything to you and he doesn’t either look Chinese.”

Burns peered around him with a sneer. “You’re right. Chinese are better looking. Pierce, whose idea was it to bring that thing in here?”

“Mine,” Pierce replied. “I thought it was a better idea than leaving him to bleed out in a farmer’s field.”

“That’s not even a person!” Frank argued. “And whatever it is, it’s probably working for the Chinese.” He grabbed Radar to shove him aside. Radar stumbled and fell across the bed, catching himself on the bed frame with his arms held straight out so he didn’t land on Spock’s fresh leg wound.

Pierce hauled him upright. “Get out, Frank!” Pierce shouted. Spock’s body twitched slightly, then was still.

“You can’t talk to me like that, I outrank you, Captain Pierce. Where’s Potter?”

“Operating on the other one,” Radar said. “I mean, he’s not a space alien like this one, but they were all together, and….”

Frank stalked toward the surgery, Pierce close behind him. Radar stood in front of Spock’s bed at his best approximation of parade rest, but he ended up bringing his arms around front to cross them over his chest. He caught himself rocking, heel to toe, and made himself stop.

The yelling continued into the operating room. “I’m calling Flagg. Whatever that thing out in the recovery room is, it’s not American.”

“Frank, if you call my patient ‘it’ again, I’ll shove my fist so far up your ass…”

“Oh yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you…” Burns replied.

Radar stifled an uncomfortable smirk. Pierce returned the salvo, “I’d sooner kiss a snake.”

Potter interrupted decisively. “Major Burns, they’re staying at least until they’re stable. Now get out of my OR; we’re busy here.”

Burns reappeared, Pierce dragging him along by the upper arm. “Out!” Pierce shouted, shoving him forward out the door. He returned to the bed. “He all right?”

“Yes, sir,” Radar said. “I mean, so far as I can tell, sir.”

Frank poked his head back in. “Corporal, you’re with me. I need you to get Colonel Flagg on the radio.”

Radar looked to Pierce for rescue, but the Captain shook his head. “Can’t stop him from calling. We’ll work something out.”

Radar followed Burns to the radio, dragging his feet as much as he could. Burns kept up a steady stream of vile commentary on their patients. “I mean, something like that, who knows what kind of diseases it carries. Maybe it will wake up and put us all in some kind of mind control.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Radar said.

“Wouldn’t he?” Burns grabbed him by the jacket to hurry him along. “What makes you such an expert? He your new best friend?”

“No, he hasn’t even been awake for more than a second, I swear.” They reached the door to Radar’s office. “Maybe,” Radar tried, “maybe they’re Flagg’s people. Spies for our side or something.”

“Not likely. Decent Americans never associate with Koreans and Chinese and space aliens. Now get Flagg on the line, you little freak.”

Kids at school used to call Radar that. Not as often as they called him dummy or fumblefingers, but still. He couldn’t stop his shoulders from sagging toward his knees. He fell into his seat, pulled out the radio, and rang up HQ.

“Hey, yeah, Radar O’Reilly, 4077th. Can you tell me where Colonel Flagg is stationed? I got Major Frank Burns looking for him. Colonel Sam Flagg.”

He waited on the line for what wasn’t really that many minutes while Frank paced and spewed vitriol and Radar pretended he couldn’t hear what he was saying. The main effect was to cause Radar to grow more fond of the alien and his surgeon friend by the minute. The more Frank hated somebody, the more Radar liked them.

HQ got back on the line. Flagg was stateside for four days, meeting with the brass in DC. “He’s stateside, sir. It’s oh six hundred there. They won’t call him until oh eight hundred unless it’s an emergency.”

“And this isn’t an emergency? Tell him there are alien invaders on our soil!”

“Yes sir, are you sure you want me to say it that way, sir?”

“Oh, give me the microphone.” Burns grabbed it out of Radar’s hands. “You get me Flagg on the line. We’ve got real aliens here. Green ones. If that’s not a threat to national security…” Burns set the microphone down. “He hung up on me.”

“Gee, sir, I can’t imagine why.”

Chapter Text

If you didn’t count the couple of hours of sleep he had stolen in the morning, Hawkeye had now been awake for twenty four hours. Thirty-six? Some horrifying number. He took a swig from the mug of cold coffee next to him, then stood and stretched, leaning over almost far enough to touch his toes before crossing the room to where the time travelers lay in their beds. Bones McCoy had suggested that the patient with the chest wound, Jim Kirk, be placed next to Spock, then had taken the bed on the other side, so that Kirk ended up between them.

“So we can keep an eye on him,” Bones had said. The two of them took turns sitting at Kirk’s bedside, watching him breathe too fast and too shallow, then stop entirely until he or Bones pinched the sensitive skin on the inside of his elbow. If his heart faltered, there wouldn’t be anything they could do. The shattered chest would simply shred apart under the stress of resuscitation.

Ginger perched on a folding chair next to Spock’s bed, reading a battered novel and occasionally reaching across to take a pulse under her patient’s arm, over the shirt, just like Bones had shown her. Hawkeye suspected the argument that Spock was “extremely ticklish” was not quite true. It was likely some alien thing that would take too long to explain, he supposed.

Spock had not awakened, and Kirk would be drugged to keep him from moving around for some time. Bones kept vigil stretched out on his own bed with the little screen in his hands. “How’s he doing?” Hawkeye asked.

“He’s been better.”

“Problem?” Hawkeye said.

Bones started to turn the screen toward Hawkeye, then hesitated. “You probably wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me. I promise I won’t purge him to ‘balance the humours.’”

“All right.” Bones patted the bed next to him. Hawkeye sat, taking a moment to regard the man who stubbornly straddled the line between patient and colleague. He looked like hell. “Look here. These are pretty low res, for neuroscans, but there’s just too much of the wrong kind of activity here. This number correlates roughly to pain. It’s too high for efficient healing, and he’s showing a lot of other signs of stress.” Hawkeye, looking at the screen, saw EEG like squiggles and a list of numbers with abbreviations beside them. “You’re right, I have no idea how to read that.”

He stood to listen to Kirk’s heart and lungs with his stethoscope, a technology he was much more comfortable interpreting. “Lungs are clear, but he is a bit tachy. I don’t want to up his morphine.” He realized Bones might not be familiar with morphine. “We don’t want him to forget to breathe.” He checked Kirk’s IV and examined his lips and fingers for signs of hypoxia, fortunately absent.

Figuring Bones had his hands full with Kirk, he walked around to Spock’s bed, flipping up the sheet and blanket to expose the bandaged stump.

“How’s he been, Ginger?”

The nurse shook her head. “He hasn’t moved much, but he flinches when I check his IV and he looks anxious.”

“You need to avoid skin to skin contact.” Bones hauled himself to his feet and hobbled after Hawkeye, using the pipe frames at the ends of the beds to pull himself along. He hovered at Hawkeye’s shoulder like an attending observing the work of a first year resident. Hawkeye gave him a stink eye for it while he gloved. He checked Spock’s bandage for signs of bleeding or infection, then moved on to the catheter bag holding a couple of tablespoons of too dark urine. “I don’t like the look of that,” he said.

Bones supplied, “Desert adapted. Doesn’t make much. Given the blood loss I’d give him six more hours before I’d worry.”

Hawkeye nodded acknowledgement and moved on to check the IVs running saline into Spock’s arms, checked the fluttering heartbeat in his side, then rested his stethoscope on his chest to check his breathing. Something was in the way, dog tags, perhaps. He pulled on the chain around Spock’s neck. On the chain was a wedding band, wide and gold and marked with the same pattern as the ring on Kirk’s finger. He stripped the gloves and tossed them in the general direction of a bin, not checking to see where they landed.

“They’re both married?" He regarded the ring with its complex design of interlocking rings and spirals. "Similar designs."

"They're married to each other," Bones clarified.

The air left Hawkeye’s lungs in a rush and his eyes burned. He collapsed onto the bed next to Spock’s. The bed squeaked as a weight settled next to him, shoulder to shoulder. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Bones said.

Ginger shook her head, though it wasn’t clear to Hawkeye whether her reaction was to the revelation that the two men were a couple or to Hawkeye’s response. “To each his own,” she said, her tone dubious but not hostile. “I was not put on this Earth to be judge and jury.”

The older doctor paused just long enough that he might have been gauging Hawkeye’s reaction. Deciding whether to lie again? In the end, he shrugged. “By human standards, they’ve been married for about three months. By Vulcan standards closer to three years. You should have seen the wedding. The human one I mean. You would not have wanted to be at the other one.”

So that’s what the alien was called. Vulcan. Hawkeye waved one inarticulate hand in the alien’s...the Vulcan’s direction. “I just,” he said in a strangled voice. “I just never thought I’d see the day…”

Bones snorted softly. “My sentiments exactly. Those idiots tiptoed around each other for two years. Longest damn two years of my life.” He stretched the bad foot out in front of him, and fussed at the splint. “At least, if we’re stranded here permanently they’ll have each other.”

Hawkeye turned to Bones. “And who will you have?”

The doctor shrugged. “I’ll have them. Like I always have. Somebody’s got to keep those two alive with all the crazy stunts they pull.”

“So you’re the third wheel.”

“Guess you could say that,” Bones allowed. Hawkeye wondered if he could handle being Beej and Peg’s third wheel. His infatuation with Hunnicutt hadn’t yet moved beyond cautious innuendo and, on very bad nights, barely platonic clinging he knew for a fact Beej needed at least as much as he did, but Peg and Beej’s letters to each other, read out loud in the Swamp whenever Frank wasn’t present to make snide remarks, had Hawkeye starting to fall in love with Peg, too. A part of him imagined himself orbiting them like an emotionally damaged satellite, living on second hand warmth.

Hawkeye gestured toward Spock’s ring. “Do your superiors know?” Wearing matching rings seemed incredibly risky, but he couldn’t imagine…

“Course they do. Part of why they got legally married in the first place was to make sure they’d be assigned together after the mission ends. That and Spock wanted a Jewish wedding for his mom’s sake, and Kirk, well, any excuse for a party.” He turned serious. “You know, if we lose one, the other won’t last an hour.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Hawkeye did doubt it a little, though they were both in bad enough shape that if they didn’t want to keep living, they wouldn’t.

‘A Jewish wedding, for his Mom’s sake.’ Oh take me with you, he thought, even though the thought gave him a pang of longing to take Beej too, and maybe Peg and baby Erin into an unknown future that had to be better than today. Spock’s brow wrinkled slightly. McCoy hobbled to the head of the bed to wave the little cylinder over him, peered down at his screen, and frowned. “Spock’s not doing any better than Jim. He shouldn’t be in pain in a healing trance, but those numbers don’t lie and there are stress signatures all over the place. I’m not sure that neuroscan is consistent with a healing trance at all. Without it I’m not sure he can rebuild his blood volume fast enough to keep his organs from failing.”

Hawkeye looked from one patient to the other. “Push their beds together.”

McCoy didn’t even have to voice his agreement. He just said, “Spock is stronger. Let’s move him.”

“Not you if you want that ankle to heal right. Ginger, could you help me scoot the bed?”

“Yes, sir.” Ginger and Hawkeye shoved the beds together until they touched. Hawkeye took a few moments to arrange the IV’s where the lines were pinched between the bedframes.

“Join their hands,” McCoy instructed. “They’re…” he paused, probably editing his words again. “Even unconscious people often can sense the presence of someone they love.”

Hawkeye rested Spock’s hand on Kirk’s, belatedly remembering the prohibition against unnecessary touching. The alien’s skin felt subtly odd, almost electrically charged. The sensation wasn't entirely unfamiliar, but he found he couldn't place it. He rubbed his hand absently down his coat.

Kirk’s rapid breathing began to slow and deepen into a more healthy rhythm. Spock’s pinched lips and eyebrows relaxed. McCoy ran the scanner over both of them. “That’s worlds better. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

“Might be the concussion.” Hawkeye's brain caught up with him. “Wait. How is Spock Jewish?”

“He’s half human on his mom’s side.”

*

Hawkeye awoke to the unmistakable sound of someone being slapped, hard. He raised his head from the desktop on which it lay and pushed himself up out of the chair so fast it flew backwards and tipped on its side. Adrenaline forced the grogginess from his head. He half ran, half skidded into the ward, expecting to find Frank or Houlihan getting into it with McCoy, or possibly with each other.

Someone was slapping his patient. Vigorously. He grabbed the offending arm and hauled the offender to his feet to spin him around, his own free arm drawing back to take a swing. He found himself looking into McCoy’s face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said, arresting his swing at the last moment.

McCoy swore, tears springing to his eyes as he hopped on his newly retwisted ankle. He jerked his wrist free of Hawkeye’s grasp. “Would you please let me treat my patient!” he snapped.

Hawkeye glanced down at the alien on the bed, who was twitching and mumbling like a man in the grip of a nightmare. “You’re both my patients,” he protested.

“Trust me, please.” He turned and slapped Spock twice more, hard. Hawkeye clenched his own fists at his sides.

The alien’s arm intercepted a third blow in the air. “That will be sufficient, Doctor.”

Hawkeye found himself reduced to incredulous blinking. His patient, his alien patient, was awake and looking from Bones to Hawkeye and back. He swallowed a mountain of unprofessional questions.

Spock turned away from both of them to where Kirk lay. “Jim,” he said in a voice suddenly husky. He turned sideways in the bed, only then seeming to notice the drastic change in his body’s mechanics. Even then, he spared only the barest glance at the dip in the bedclothes where his leg ought to be before turning back the unconscious Kirk. His hand, which had been lying passively atop the other man’s, wrapped protectively around it. He bowed his head for a count of eight, praying, perhaps.

When he looked up Bones filled him in. “We’ve traveled in time again. April 19th, 1951. Korea. We beamed directly onto a land mine.”

Again? Hawkeye filed away his questions for later.

“And Jim?”

“Shrapnel to the chest. There’s a lot of tissue damage, but he has a good chance at recovery, thanks to some locals. Spock, this is Captain Hawkeye Pierce, Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, 4077th.”

“Did you operate on Jim, Captain Pierce?” Spock asked.

“No, I took your leg off. I’m sorry we couldn’t save it. ”

“We’ll grow you a new one when we get back,” Bones added.

Of course they would just grow him a new one. Hawkeye wished he could tell all the boys who woke up in here without limbs they’d just grow them a new one in Tokyo. “My friend BJ Hunnicutt took care of your husband,” he said, the word hardly getting stuck on his tongue at all.

“You should not have advertised our presence to the locals,” Spock admonished. “Our lives are not worth the risk to the time stream.”

Bones grumbled, “What’s done is done. And besides, I was in no condition to protest.” He took out his scanner to wave over Spock again. “Not that I would have, time stream be damned.”

“We were driving by when you appeared,” Hawkeye clarified. “When we found you, you were all unconscious.”

Spock nodded acknowledgement. After that brief moment of anguished concern, he had schooled his face to such prim neutrality that he might have been sitting at a desk, discussing supply requisitions. “I require access to my tricorder and the highest technology radio equipment available in order to ascertain our situation and contact Mr. Scott. The more we delay, the less likely it is we will be able to reach him.”

McCoy shook his head. “I don’t have your tricorder, Spock.”

Spock immediately turned to Hawkeye. “A tricorder is a black box, roughly eight centimeters by twelve centimeters by twenty-five centimeters on a side, with a shoulder strap and a small screen on one of the short sides. Have you seen such a device?”

Hawkeye had to shake his head. He thought a centimeter was about half an inch, but he wasn’t sure. “I hate to send Radar and Klinger back into that minefield again to look for it.”

"I understand your reluctance to send colleagues into danger. I will, as you say doctor, make do. May I have a table at which to work?”

“In the morning, Spock. I’m not rousting that corporal kid out of bed to get you radio equipment at…”

“0500 hours,” Hawkeye supplied.

“Before sunrise,” McCoy amended. “We owe the kid a night’s sleep at least. He looked pretty played out last night.”

“Oh, that’s how he always looks,” Hawkeye said, before he realized how that sounded.

“What do you do, beat him?” He thought for a moment that Bones was joking, but the time traveler held his gaze for a moment too long, his gaze a little too direct.

“I would never lay a hand on Radar,” Hawkeye protested. “And I’d lay out anyone who did. He’s the best company clerk in the army, I’d swear to that. He just operates on a different wavelength from the rest of us.” He thought about it a little more. “Maybe one with the gain turned up a little too high.”

Bones nodded understanding and turned back to Spock. “Now that you’re awake I’d like to have a look at your leg.” He pulled his bag out from under the bed. “I want to run the dermal regenerator over the incisions to make sure they’re sealed.”

“Certainly, Doctor.”

The alien’s equanimity in the face of a missing limb was, frankly, alien. The doctor’s lack of same was a stark contrast when he looked up from his open bag and said, “My dermal regenerator is missing. I know it was there when Jim was in surgery. It’s gone now.”

“Radar wouldn’t have taken it,” Hawkeye said. He looked at Ginger and away. She wouldn’t have either, and if Potter had wanted a better look at the thing he’d have asked. Frank hadn’t been operating...wait. He had chased Frank into and out of the OR. Frank had backed into the table where Bones' bag lay open, nearly spilling it onto the floor. “I’ll check the OR in case it fell on the floor,” he said. “Otherwise, I think I know who the sticky fingers probably belong to.”

He stalked into the surgery, flipped on the lights over the table Kirk had occupied and searched the floor on hands and knees. It was surprisingly clean, that floor. Klinger was an excellent orderly in that regard and a part of him was glad that his Section 8 was unlikely to come through for that reason--not that he’d begrudge anyone the chance to go home. Not many of these drafted orderlies really understood the importance of a clean surgery for infection control. It occurred to him Klinger might have picked up the device and taken it back to his tent for safekeeping. He’d check there before confronting Frank.

After due diligence with a flashlight turned up nothing, he dusted himself off, checked in with the three men and Ginger, and headed out into the predawn camp, the eastern sky just beginning to lighten toward lilac ahead of the rising sun. Reveille would be in, he checked his watch, an hour and the whole camp would be up. Word of their guests had to have spread throughout the camp all evening while he and Beej were holed up in surgery. It would be all they could do to keep the ward from turning into a zoo.

He’d rule out Klinger first and wait until Frank was on shift to toss his bunk. He knocked on Klinger’s door. And again. “All right all right, I’m coming. Reveille isn’t for an hour yet.”

The door opened on Klinger in his fluffy pink bathrobe, a swath of bright plaid fabric dotted with straight pins draped over one arm. “What’s up, Captain Pierce?”

“You swept up the surgery last night, right?”

“Yeah. Not up to your standards?”

“No, it’s fine. We’re missing something. I don’t know what it looks like exactly, probably silver...it’s from that bag you and Radar brought back for our guests.”

“Those guests, right. How are they?”

“Spock, the alien, is awake. Kirk’s not so good, but I think he’ll pull through. Anyway, the thing we’re looking for, it might have fallen on the floor when Frank bumped the table. I looked, but I didn’t see it.”

“I didn’t see anything like that,” Klinger said. “That bastard. I bet he took it. Let me at him, I can make him talk. I’ve been itching for the chance to take him down a peg.”

“If he did steal it I’ll take him down a peg myself,” Hawkeye promised.

Klinger set down his mending and settled the straw hat with the fuschia flowers onto his head. “Can I watch?”

Chapter Text

There was a knock on Potter’s door. Potter felt entitled to ignore it once. If the matter were urgent, the knock would be repeated. It was. Potter checked the time. 2330 hours.

“This had better be good!” He shouted at the door.

Frank Burns barged into his room, which was the exact opposite of good. “I have been on the radio with Washington for hours trying to get ahold of Colonel Flagg about those alien spies we’ve got in the hospital. We need to get them turned over to the proper authorities.”

“Proper authorities? Alien spies?” Potter sat up and scrubbed his face with his hands. Where was that pull chain? He found it with groping fingers, then squinted in the small pool of lamp light.

“You’re not telling me you’re just going to keep that whatever it is here!”

“Yes I am,” Potter said. “Now look here, I am not happy that you called Washington without talking to me. And I don’t trust Flagg or his ilk. Two of those men are in really rough shape and I don’t want to have to argue with some spook with delusions of grandeur who isn’t even a doctor about whether or not they should be moved. Now get out of my tent and leave those men alone!”

Burns stormed out, grumbling. Potter plumped his lumpy pillow, flipped off the light, and tried to go back to sleep.

*

It took longer than usual for people to line up for reveille, which was saying something. Radar blew the bugle an extra time to stop the chatter. Potter moved to stand beside him at parade rest, taking a moment to take a look at his clerk with a critical eye. Radar didn’t look like he’d slept much. At a guess, Burns had kept him up half the night trying to get a response from Flagg.

Potter’s years of practice lent his voice the power to carry without a megaphone. “No doubt you’ve all heard about our guests by now.” A rumble of chatter rose. Potter paused for a count of eight, then nodded to Radar, who let loose a burst on the air horn. “I’d like to set some ground rules. First, as we do any time we have guests from other services, we will treat them with the respect due fellow members of the armed services. That means no sightseeing in the ward. Second, for the time being, until I finish looking into this situation myself, and I am looking into it, we don’t need to go spreading unsubstantiated rumors all over Korea. Keep your speculations within the camp. Third. These fellows arrived here with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and we had to cut those off of them. If anyone has any extra kit they could part with to outfit them, I would appreciate you dropping it by Post Op. That’s all for now. Dismissed.”

Radar tucked the bugle and the airhorn awkwardly under one arm. Potter strolled in the direction of the ward, gesturing Radar to follow. “So what do you think of them, Radar?”

“What do I think?” Radar said. He chewed his lip, thoughtful. “They change everything. But I think they’re good people.” He adjusted his hat, then stuffed his hands in his pockets, which meant that he had to pull them out of his pockets at the last second to open the door to the ward. Potter managed to catch the door in time not to get smacked in the face.

Despite Potter’s best intentions, morning shift change was necessarily a traffic jam. Hawkeye and Bones McCoy were sitting in folding chairs, McCoy beside Jim, Hawkeye next to Spock's bed. The beds had been pushed together so that only an inch or two of space remained between them. Ginger sat at the desk in the back, and Potter and Radar were trailed by Houlihan, Burns, and Hunnicutt, who were all supposed to be starting their shifts. It made for a crowded room.

The alien, Spock, was awake. He and McCoy were conversing quietly with Hawkeye, who hid a yawn behind one fist. Spock pulled his hand away from his unconscious captain’s arm a little too fast, as if caught in an impropriety.

Potter stopped at the foot of the bed. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” Potter said. “Colonel Sherman Potter. I’m the fool in charge of this outfit. And you are…?” He extended a hand to shake. Radar tugged at his sleeve, urging the hand down.

Spock offered a half nod, half bow from where he sat propped in bed. “Commander Spock. I believe I have you to thank, in part, for my captain’s survival.”

Potter diverted Spock’s gratitude with a gesture. “Oh, that was mostly BJ’s doing. Hunnicutt, get over here and relieve Hawkeye before he falls flat on his face. Burns, you’re off duty unless we get more wounded in. Go find something productive to do.” Burns started forward as though to protest, but thought better of it and left the ward. Good. He didn’t want to get into it with the Major in front of their guests.

Potter turned to the rest of the group. “Burns woke me up to give me an earful last night,” he said. “He will not be alone in this ward until further notice. Is that understood?”

There was a chorus of mumbled agreement from the assembled. “Before you go, Hawkeye, how are they doing? I want to hear from you, too, McCoy, just hold your horses.”

Hawkeye looked pointedly at McCoy. “Bones is doing well. Ankle’s sprained, not broken and should be fine in a few days if he stays off it. Concussion is mild and improving. Commander Spock is, as you can see, awake, though he should not be out of bed,” he turned his gaze pointedly on the man in the bed, “until his pulse and blood pressure are entirely back to normal. His normal. Wound is healing well, no signs of infection.”

Hawkeye turned to Kirk. “Captain Kirk is, best I can say, stable. There’s a lot of damage to heal in the chest cavity. He needs not to be moved for at least forty-eight hours, and I’d prefer twice that.”

“Thank you, Hawkeye. Now get some sleep.”

“See you in a few, Bones,” he said, then hauled himself to his feet with audible creaking. He said something to BJ that Potter didn’t quite catch, then stumbled out of the room. At the door, he turned. “I need to speak to you about a private matter as soon as possible.”

“I’ll find you in the swamp,” Potter said.

Potter pulled up a chair. Hunnicutt hovered behind him. “Radar, come on over here.” Radar took a place next to Hunnicutt.

Potter addressed McCoy. “Is there anything I can get for the two of you--aside from a hat? You’re going to need one if you plan to leave the ward anytime soon.”

“I can find Commander Spock a hat, sir,” Radar volunteered.

“See that you do.”

Spock addressed him, still with that expressionless face, broken only by sidelong glances toward the man lying unconscious on the bed beside his. “I have need of my tricorder. In addition, I have need of certain components that might be found in radios and electrical devices.”

Potter nodded. “You plan to work from bed? Because you’re not going anywhere. You can’t risk tearing out those stitches, you can’t afford to lose the blood.”

“You need not be concerned that I will attempt to leave. I will not leave my bond...my captain.”

His slip of the tongue suggested some relationship beyond the chain of command, as did his continual checking back at him. Bond something? Perhaps akin to a lord and vassal? Who knew how alien cultures might work.

“If he tries to leave, I’ll sit on him myself,” McCoy added.

“Spock, this is the company clerk, Radar O’Reilly. Radar, Commander Spock. I’m loaning him to you until you’re up and around.”

“But…” Radar said.

“Klinger can handle my office for a few days. These guys are going to need someone to show them the ropes around here. Someone I can trust. And apparently someone who knows their way around a radio.”

Radar blushed to his ears. “Me, sir? I mean, thank you sir, I’ll do my best, sir.” That boy never seemed able to take a compliment in stride.

“Yes, you. You’re the best man for the job.”

BJ stepped forward. “I’d like to take a look at my handiwork, if that’s all right with the two of you?”

Potter stood. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Radar, your first order of business is to get these two whatever is passing itself off as breakfast around here.” He left the ward and was immediately grabbed by the elbow. Hawkeye had waited for him just outside the door. He looked tired as hell. “That private conversation,” Hawkeye reminded him.

“Out with it.”

“Frank stole something out of Bones’ bag when he stormed through the OR last night. A dermal regenerator, he called it.”

“Why am I not surprised?” He had to find a way to get that man transferred out of his unit. He was a serious incident waiting to happen. He should have been court martialed after the incident with the tank...people could easily have gotten killed, but everyone vouched for him. He’d never understood why. Anyone else he could see a good group like this all rallying behind, but Frank? Frank was a poisonous snake of a human being, the kind of man who attracted friendly fire in combat and almost deserved it. “What exactly does a dermal regenerator look like?”

Hawkeye, miraculously, produced a pencil sketch of the thing. It looked a lot like the other two handheld devices he’d seen McCoy use the previous evening, with a shiny chrome handle, some rubber gaskets presumably separating parts that could be taken apart, and a business end that looked not unlike a flashlight.

“You draw that?”

“Spock.”

“He’s quite the sketch artist. I’ll have to corner him later.”

Klinger intercepted the two of them at a jog. “Captain Pierce. Colonel Potter. Colonel, sir, Washington’s on the radio for you. It’s Flagg.”

“Probably calling to complain about the number of times Frank called him about aliens yesterday. At least I hope he’s calling to complain. Where is Burns?”

“I think he’s in the swamp,” Klinger said. You gave him the day off.”

“He stole one of Bones’ medical doohickeys. Don’t either of you let on you suspect anything until you’ve searched that room. Whatever it is, it’s probably one of the half dozen most valuable objects on the planet and I won’t have that son of a bitch destroy it to get out of trouble. And Hawkeye,”

“Potter?”

“Go to bed.”

Potter followed Klinger back to the radio room, noticing but not commenting on the red plaid skirt and frilly blouse he’d gotten into for the day. Klinger was all right as a clerk. He wasn’t the absolute genius at trading or, frankly managing the damn radio itself that Radar was, and he didn’t have Radar’s alternately charming and unnerving gifts, but he did a good job. Radar needed a break from Burns, Spock needed an assistant familiar with radios, and if he was going to trust anyone to be unfailingly kind to somebody a little different, Radar would be who he’d choose every time.

He picked up the microphone. “Colonel Sherman Potter here. Who’s speaking?”

“You don’t need to know who’s speaking.” It was Flagg.

“Didn’t you waste enough of my time the last time you were here, Colonel Flagg?”

“I have it on good authority that you’re hiding fugitives,” Flagg snapped. Only Flagg would consider Frank Burns to be a good authority on anything.

“Fugitives? We’re not hiding any fugitives.” He was not lying. He had no reason to believe that their guests, however unusual, were running from anyone.

Flagg snipped, “Foreign nationals of unknown origin and intentions. Expect me soon. Don’t think you can fool me with all those communist sympathizers and anti-American pansies you’ve got up there. You’re hiding something. Something big. And I’m going to find out what it is.” The connection broke.

Potter called Klinger into the room. “Assuming Flagg is in Washington DC right now, how fast could he get to this MASH unit?”

Klinger considered. “Assuming he was at the airport in DC already...There’s no way he could get here in less than fifteen hours. More likely a full day. But if he still has to arrange transportation and orders, probably two or three days.”

“So we’ll assume he may get here as soon as tomorrow morning. We need cover identities for each of them, something low rank for Kirk and Spock to make the camp roster less suspicious, and captain’s bars for McCoy. See if Hawkeye can loan McCoy some of his kit...can you make him a name tag in that amount of time?”

“Would McCoy be a captain or a major?”

“Given his job description, probably a major, but make him a captain. He’ll stick out less that way and then we can use Hawkeye’s clothes. Lord knows he’s rarely in uniform.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll take measurements. What about Spock?”

Spock was a big worry. It would be easier if he weren’t injured. “Well at the very least cover his ears and find him some fatigues. It will be easiest to doctor the records if we make both him and Kirk corporals, for now. Get Radar to help you with making up paperwork and ordering dog tags.”

“Don’t have a lot of one legged corporals around, sir.”

“I don’t intend for Flagg to see him at all, but if he forces the issue I plan to stick him behind a desk.”

“Right, sir. We’ll have to hide him before Flagg gets here. A hat isn’t going to cut it with someone actually looking for an alien, not with his coloring. I’ll try to think of a place to hide him.”

Potter nodded, but clarified, “A clean, comfortable place. We just took his leg off.”

“Of course, sir.” Klinger paused. “What about my tent? I’ve got the space, and I could arrange my wardrobe to make a sort of screen. I ought to have bunkmates anyway.”

“Klinger, you’re a life saver. You have anything in your makeup bag that could, I don’t know, fix his complexion?”

Klinger grinned. “Think nothing of it. And once they’ve gone back where they came from you can give me that section 8 for claiming my bunkmate was an alien.”

“Don’t count on it,” Potter muttered at Klinger’s back. Klinger left to start on the lengthy to do list Potter had given him. Potter started at the top of his “to sign” pile and worked his way down for half an hour until the sound of whirring chopper blades interrupted him. He startled, not sure of the last time he had been alerted by the sound itself rather than by his favorite spectacled gnome.

Klinger’s voice sounded over the PA system a moment later. “Incoming wounded. Three teams to the choppers for triage. This looks like a big one.”

Chapter Text

“I need two, um, Radar specials and one breakfast with everything to take back to the ward, please,” Radar said, fidgeting while he waited.

Igor ladled oatmeal into three bowls, added three slices of bread with peanut butter, and a scoop of a not particularly appetizing mixture of powdered eggs and mystery meat for the ‘one with everything.’ “Take a tin of fruit cocktail to split,” he said, pointing at a stack of tins behind him on a folding table.

Radar collected silverware for three and coffee for two--sighing a little internally at how much he missed decent cow’s milk--and the glass of tomato juice. Setting the tray down on the table, he reached into his pocket for the carefully crumpled ball of fine copper wire he’d wrapped in clean paper, unwrapped it without getting his dirty hands on it, and let it fall into the glass with a little plink. After making sure his load of meals, coffees, copper cocktail, and tinned fruit was balanced properly, he made his way back to the ward, skirting a cluster of nurses who, thankfully, ignored him.

He still almost dropped the trays. Everything had been so up in the air since the three time travelers had arrived. The hours he hadn’t spent sitting at the radio calling Washington with Frank had been spent having increasingly strange dreams. It was funny. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. He’d gotten used to the end of the war receding into an indefinite time in the future, sometimes as a loss, usually a stalemate, but even that was no longer certain. Everything was fragmented possibility and his brain didn’t like him to ignore fragmented possibility much more than it liked him to ignore crisis.

About the only thing he was more or less sure of was that some number of wounded would be arriving in the late morning sometime, and since he spent as much time as he did listening to troop movements on the radio, he probably could have figured that out anyway. But then, if he figured things out the regular way he’d be able to pay attention to where he was going.
He managed to stop just short of running into Frank, who was hovering outside the door to Post Op.

“Watch it,” Frank snarled. The look on Frank’s face made him want to cry and run away and tell him off all at the same time. He just shrank a little and ducked around him to the door. The coffee slopped a little in the mugs.

Radar opened the door to the ward with his foot and backed in, then set out the trays at the little table he’d scrounged before heading to the mess tent. “Corporal Spock,” he said, “We’re making you a corporal for now, just on paper I mean, sir. I know you’re really more like a Major, sir. Us corporals kind of fade into the woodwork so it’s safer. Morning, Captain Bones.”

The surgeon nodded and pulled his tray toward him.

Spock took a sip of his tomato and wire juice, then examined Radar’s tray. “It is not necessary for you to adjust your diet to avoid giving offense.” Radar finished dishing out fruit cocktail while trying to figure out what Spock meant. His eyes strayed to the hollow under the sheet where Spock’s leg should have been.

McCoy noted his lack of response and said, “He means I eat meat in front of him and so can you.”

“Oh,” Radar said, ducking his head and feeling his all too ready blush heating his cheeks. “I’m a vegetarian too.”

“God, two of you,” McCoy said while Radar was turned around setting the empty tin in the trash.

“Does it bother you, sir?” he said.

“Does what bother me?” McCoy took a bite of the egg mixture. “I think I might have to become a vegetarian too, for the duration.”

Radar shrugged and tucked into the oatmeal, which, with a few spoonfuls of sugar, was not awful. Except where it was crunchy. He didn’t like to think about what the crunchy bits might be.

McCoy remarked upon the awfulness of the coffee and Radar shrugged again. “Isn’t coffee supposed to be terrible?” He’d never consumed the stuff before Korea, hadn’t intended to start, but between the long days and the nights in which he never slept well, he’d found he’d had to start drinking it just to get through the afternoons without nodding off at his desk.

“And that’s two,” McCoy said. Two what?

Spock nodded. Apparently not one to talk and eat at the same time, he was nearly finished with his breakfast.

“I can get you another,” Radar said.

“That will not be necessary. I request a selection of items, if you can find them, so that I may begin to build my equipment.” He handed Radar a detailed list, complete with a handful of sketches. Some of the items, at a glance, would be easy to find, some he could trade for, and some he wasn’t sure existed. The coffee was cool enough now to get down in several quick gulps, like medicine, so he did.

“I’ll get a start on it, sir,” he said.

He collected the trays on his way out and, distracted by a fleeting thought of peach cobbler, which he hoped might have something to do with dinner but suspected was just wishful thinking, ran smack into the pipe frame at the bottom of the bed closest to the door.

The list started easy. Wire, spark plugs, the smallest light bulbs he could get… and moved into samples of various metals he’d have figure out how to scrounge. Copper chloride. He thought there was a chemist in Seoul whose son had been treated by Hawkeye a while back….A soldering iron. He had one of those, but would rather it stay in the radio room. Maybe he could get Spock moved in there during the day, once he was out of bed. Funny, almost all the possibilities rolling around in his head showed the three of them not going away any time soon. There were a few that showed them taken away in jeeps guarded by MPs, and a number in which Kirk didn’t survive and shortly after it was Bones, alone. He didn’t like to think too much about those. He assumed that Spock would end up building whatever it was he was building in the radio room, eventually, so he left the soldering iron there, figuring none of the doctors would appreciate soldering going on in Post Op.

The sun was higher in the sky and he wanted to be sure that Spock had something to occupy his time before things got too busy, so he tucked the list, with about a third of the items crossed off it, into the box and headed back to Post Op.

The combination of a slow, for now, morning and interesting company had brought Captain Hunnicutt over to sit with Bones and Spock. Radar set down the box on the small table they had used for breakfast. Spock had his hand resting on Kirk’s arm again and didn’t bother to remove it this time. White bandages reached almost to the unconscious captain’s neck. His face had that pinched look Hawkeye called breakthrough pain. Radar rubbed at the ache in his chest without noticing what he was doing until his fingernails caught on his dog tags. His overactive imagination made him think of how much the patients’ wounds would hurt them, and he’d just dwell on it, aching sometimes everywhere when there were a lot of guys in bandages until he had to take a break from the ward. He turned to McCoy. “Is he doing any better?”

Bones turned away from Radar to fish in his bag. “What do you think?”

He was the doctor, why was he asking Radar? “Can he have any more morphine?” he suggested.

“And that’s three. And no, any more will depress his breathing too much.”

“Told you,” Captain Hunnicutt said.

Bones nodded and it got… quiet, all of a sudden, the usual chatter anytime he was anywhere near anybody that had him trying to get a look at people’s faces when they talked to make sure they had spoken, was less than it should be. He realized there’d never been anything at all from the alien, but the back chatter from McCoy had just shut down, leaving only Hunnicutt’s musings for Radar to try to ignore. Bones pulled out his little medscanner and ran it over Kirk, then checked his little television. “What do you think, Spock? I’ve got six doses of the good stuff left. Use one now or hold onto it?”

“Save it for when I am not able to assist.”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re holding out on me again?” Hunnicutt said.

“Probably because I am. Would you like to see how this works?” Bones held up the medscanner in Radar’s general direction.

“Sure, I mean, if it’s not any trouble, sir.”

“All right. So, what this does is it gives me a look at the inside of a body. I can set it to pick up electrical signals--most of your body produces tiny electrical currents, did you know that?” Radar thought he might have heard something like that, once, but he wasn’t sure. He shrugged. “It can also emit high frequency sound waves that bounce off body structures and give me an image of someone’s insides… like radar.”

“I was unaware that Radar was a human given name,” Spock noted.

“It’s not,” Radar clarified. “It’s just what people call me. Like Bones.”

Spock didn’t ask why, for a change. Bones aimed the medscanner at Radar. “I was using this just now to get a look at the captain’s brain activity. Sometimes a bad injury with a lot of blood loss, or one that affects the lungs will cause the brain to be deprived of oxygen, and that can cause damage.”

He ran the scanner over Radar. It made the same whirring whistle as before. Radar scrubbed into his ear with his knuckle. McCoy picked up his little television--data pad, he called it--and tapped it to turn it on. “These squiggly lines give me a picture, a very rough picture,” he added, looking sideways at Spock, “of his brain activity. So I can see how he’s healing, if I can risk giving him more pain medication, or when he’s likely to wake up.”

He tapped a couple of small squares at the bottom of the screen. The display changed, the rows of squiggly lines much sharper and taller, so they overlapped with each other in places. “That’s you.”

“Why does it look so different?” Radar asked.

“You’re awake.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense. I’m kind of stupid sometimes.”

“You say that about yourself a lot. It’s not true, so stop saying it.” McCoy scrolled down and whistled sharply, then passed the data pad to Spock, who raised one eyebrow up to his hairline.

“I’m smart enough to know you saw something on that screen. What is it? Am I dying?”

“Of course not. You know what you told me about your nickname?”

Radar looked at Spock and felt even more sheepish than usual. “Sometimes I can tell what’s going to happen before it happens.” Really smart people usually dismissed him and thought he was even dumber when he said it. Frank used to not believe him at all, but then eventually he did, and from then on he’d hated him. No, he was scared of him. Both. One meant the other for Frank. Radar especially didn’t like people to be scared of him. He was scared enough himself around here without that.

“That sort of thing shows up in your neuroscan. You also know what people are thinking and feeling, right?” This time Radar turned to Hunnicutt for support. He put more effort than he ever let on making sure he was taken for granted and this particular kind of attention made him nervous. Hunnicutt nodded and smiled, not worried apparently. But he wasn’t the one the time travelers found interesting.

“Maybe sometimes,” he minimized.

“Most times,” Hunnicutt corrected. The knowing what people were thinking caused him trouble more often than the knowing about things before they happened. He’d gotten lucky with Colonel Potter and Colonel Blake, since the nature of his job meant they both spent a lot of time talking to his back so he couldn’t check whether their lips were moving. His brain tripped on the thought of Colonel Blake and he was sure the prickle in his eyes showed on his face

The choppers were coming up over the ridge. Saved by the bell, sort of. “We’ve got choppers,” he said. He ran to get onto the PA, reaching the radio room just as the choppers appeared over the horizon.

Klinger was just calling the warning over the PA when he arrived, so he ran over the the Pre-Op door to wait there for the wounded to arrive. McCoy emerged from the building, black bag in hand. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“You should be sitting down,” Radar agreed.

“I could break time. It’s happened before. I’ve done it before.”

“You can break time?”

Bones nodded grimly.

“But you’re still here.”

“I can’t just stand by and watch people suffer and not do anything about it.”

“Me neither.” Radar ran forward to help Hawkeye and BJ pull a guy out of the ambulance. Half his face was obscured by a large piece of shrapnel. He was screaming in this horribly shrill way that wasn’t all sound, stopping to cough, and then screaming again. He took one end of the stretcher, carefully walked backwards the dozen steps to the preop door and set the stretcher down gently, careful not to jostle the wounded man.

Bones checked out the man on the stretcher, “We need to get this kid straight to surgery before he chokes,” Bones told BJ. Radar lifted the stretcher again and followed, BJ beside him on the other corner, straight past preop and into the OR.

Houlihan took one look at the man’s ruined face with the shrapnel sticking up out of it and said. “I can’t get a mask on him.”

“Don’t tell Spock I’m using the good stuff,” Bones said, digging through his bag for an ampule of liquid and another silver handheld device. He slotted the ampule into the device and pressed it to the patient’s throat. It hissed, and the patient relaxed almost immediately.

“That will hold him for a couple of hours,” he heard Bones saying while he squeezed out between doctors and nurses to take up his available but not in the way spot by the door. He realized that, with the nurses and doctors all in the surgery, including Frank, thank goodness, Spock was all alone in Post Op.

Maybe now would be a good time to check on him.

He stopped as soon as he was past the curtain. Spock was out of bed. He’d managed to transfer himself to one of the chairs and get turned around facing Kirk. The room felt close and prickly, like the air before a lightning strike. Spock had one hand resting lightly on Kirk’s face, like maybe he was holding one of his eyes open to see if the pupils changed, sometimes doctors did that, except he just sat there and didn’t do anything except be in the center of that crackling stillness. Slightly dizzy and a little reminded of, oddly, when Father Mulcahy was giving last rites--he hoped it was just the stillness and that Kirk wasn’t dying. Should he go and get a doctor?

The atmosphere softened, Spock drew his hand up to stroke Kirk’s hair, then leaned forward and kissed him. Right on the mouth. A moment later he twitched, startled, and turned to see Radar standing at the end of the bed. His eyes widened slightly. The prickly feeling vanished and he might have been alone in the room except for Kirk, sleeping maybe more peacefully than he had been earlier. He turned to regard Radar, that perfectly neutral face making it impossible to be sure whether he was surprised, embarrassed, or even angry.

“I didn’t see anything,” Radar said, even though it was an obvious lie.

Spock slowly, almost gingerly eased himself back onto his own bed. “Doctor McCoy would be incensed if he discovered I left my bed.”

“I won’t say anything, sir.” He fidgeted with his jacket.

Spock, to his credit, thoroughly examined his bandaged stump before sliding back against the pillows. “The supplies you collected will be useful.”

“Most of the rest I think I can trade for, sir. I found a chemist in Seoul who’s willing to send copper chloride. So you won’t have to drink wire. I told him it was for fireworks.”

“You are a most efficient assistant,” he said. He busied himself pulling items out of the boxes and setting them out on the little table.

Questions popped into his head while he waited for Spock to look through the contents of the box, but he didn’t want to be the one to do all the talking--that would be pestering--and the alien was so unnaturally quiet he wasn’t sure it was appropriate to disturb him. What was that thing you were doing? he wanted to ask, and are you guys a couple? And is that okay where you come from? And why can’t I hear you and Bones thinking? And are you like me? Can you hear what I’m thinking? Am I annoying you right now? And even...am I human? He ran his fingers over the undeniably round tops of his ears, thoughtful. Maybe he’d ask Bones some of those questions. Maybe later.

The first wounded man rolled into Post Op on a gurney. “I should help get them settled,” he said.

Spock dismissed him with a slight nod. He took a corner of the blanket under the guy and lifted on three like he had done so many times. Both legs swathed in bandages, one foot gone, some bright red patches on his face that had been smeared with antibiotic cream. Mercifully still asleep, but waking up, queasy from the anesthetic. Queasy was one of the easiest things to imagine and the hardest to keep under control.

It felt less scary to think that he was imagining most of it. Then other people wouldn’t be actually suffering. Then he wouldn’t feel quite so helpless. Radar was in his element when there was something to be done that would make a difference and he could make it happen. Then everyone was happy, or at least as happy as anyone could be here, and he was useful and safe.

If he were smart enough to be a doctor, maybe he could make more of a difference, but he really wasn’t very smart. No matter what any of the guys here said. He’d had to finish high school by correspondence--and he’d cheated to make that happen--and he couldn’t imagine listening to someone drone on and on using big words to explain complicated things in one of those giant classrooms that held as many people as his town.

They were going to ask him to move another patient. He walked over to stand next to the OR door. Spock was adding things to his list with a pencil so dull he had to peel the wood from around the lead with his fingers. Radar silently placed a sharp one on the table in front of him. He convinced himself that he liked being Radar, available when needed, keeper of sharp pencils and rubber bands. He might not be smart or graceful, but he was prepared and kind, and that’s what Ma told him mattered.

He stepped up to the gurney as it rolled out. It was the guy who had shrapnel in his face. Most of that face was swathed in clean white bandages, though some blood had seeped through enough to be visible around the edges. Whatever McCoy had given him was wearing off, and something about his throat was messed up so he couldn’t yell, or moan, or do more than breathe hard, hissing breaths.

Once they transferred him to the bed, the doctors left for the OR at a fast jog. “Major Houlihan?” he said to her retreating back.

“What is it? We’re very busy here.”

“Uh, I think this man needs morphine. Ma’am.”

“Oh yeah, what do you know about it, corporal?”

“Just please, get Hawkeye. Or BJ.” He didn’t say not Frank, but he meant it and she knew it.

He made himself sit with the kid. I’m going to die, the kid was thinking. I want to die, he was thinking. With his throat messed up like that, Radar couldn’t exactly pretend he was talking. Admitting to himself that he wasn’t imagining everything felt somehow childish, even illicit, though. It made him anxious, and he rubbed his sweaty palms on his fatigues. The ache in his jaw was starting to feel more like a throb and he rubbed at it absently. How much worse was it for…”What’s your name?” he asked.

Pete, thought Pete. Why talk to me when I can’t answer...

“I think I’ll call you Pete.” Henry had taught him the term plausible deniability, though when he had they’d been talking about how Radar acquired some of the things the camp needed. He picked up the kid’s chart from the end of the bed.

Spock was watching him from his bed. Radar shrugged at him.

“I miss Iowa,” Radar said. “I miss the farm, and the cows...and the chickens. I really miss the chickens, the way they scratch for bugs and run so fast when you bring out melon rind that sometimes they fall all over each other in a heap of feathers. Sometimes when I’m here at night and scared I think about all my chickens.”

He kept going, babbling, but hopefully giving the other boy something to listen to. Sometimes he felt like they grabbed onto the words when he talked. It hardly mattered what he said, just that he stayed and kept talking. “Don’t worry, Captain BJ’s coming, he’s just getting some morphine…. That morphine’s amazing stuff, one shot and you just go right to sleep and leave the pain behind. I should know, I’ve been here a while.”

Pete had never seen a farm. He grew up in Jersey, with smokestacks and tiny apartments and more neighbors than Radar had chickens. “Sounds exciting,” Radar said, though he really didn’t much like the idea of cities. “I mean, living in a city. Your chart says you’re from Hoboken.”

BJ met him at Pete’s bedside, syringe already drawn up. “He hurting bad?”

“The stuff Bones gave him wore off,” Radar said.

“I’m going to give you a shot and you’ll feel a lot better,” he told Pete, who couldn’t even nod. “Thanks, Radar. For paying attention.”

He stayed the minute or so it took for the morphine to take effect. BJ vanished back into the OR as quickly as he’d appeared. It must be busy in there.

Radar crossed the room again to sit by Spock, rubbing at the ghost of an ache in his jaw. “Need any help, sir?”

“Not at present. You are sweating, and the room is not warm,” he noted. He was bent over a piece of paper, drawing.

Radar shrugged again. “Smashed up faces hurt a lot. I’d guess. What are you making?”

He turned the piece of paper around to show Radar. “This is an image of my tricorder. With it I can ascertain exactly how this time and place in which I and my companions find ourselves is oriented with respect to the time and place from which we came.”

“Didn’t you just go back in time?”

“There are at least five different ways in which one might travel in time, or appear to do so. Knowing which situation applies here will affect our chances of returning, as well as our options while we are here.”

“Oh,” he said, not understanding. “I’ll try to find it.” He stood.

“It would be wise for you to remain until the remaining wounded are settled.” Another gurney rolled out. Radar glanced behind him, but he wasn’t needed at that moment.

“In addition,” Spock said, “I find being in the presence of so many strangers unsettling in my weakened state. I find your presence provides some small amount of comfort.”

“I can stay until Bones gets back.”

“Jim is from Iowa,” Spock said. “He has expressed on occasion fond memories of something called a corn maze. I find I am at a loss to understand its purpose.”

“Where in Iowa?”

“Riverside.” He gazed down at Kirk’s sleeping face, distracted for a moment from his work.

“I’m from Ottumwa. That’s less than a hundred miles from Riverside.”

“Perhaps you and he will have the opportunity to discuss your home towns in the near future,” Spock said.

“Do you think he’s going to get better?”

“I believe so. He is improving, if slowly. Barring unforeseen setbacks, we suspect he will permitted to awaken tomorrow.”

He didn’t think he ought to talk about the kiss, but he wanted Spock to know he didn’t think he was well something disgusting for that. He really thought two guys kissing might be disgusting, but it wasn’t. It was sweet. Sad, but sweet. Not like when Burns kissed Houlihan at all. There was something wrong there, something broken he couldn’t put into words, but their relationship just seemed built on hating the same things. And that didn’t seem like something to build a relationship on.

And he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask about whatever it was happened before the kiss. “You miss him,” Radar said.

“Very much, though we are never truly parted as long as we both live. I miss who he is when he is conscious and whole.”

Radar knew bait when he saw it, but he just wasn’t ready to take it yet. There were frank discussions in his future, he knew it. But he just--he thought he wanted Bones to be there when those discussions happened. The fact that Spock had extracted a promise not to discuss his being out of bed might make that harder, but he’d avoid that bridge when he came to it.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t the first time McCoy had spent an entire day performing surgery after surgery, but it had been a while, and he was no longer a young man. He looked over at Potter, bowed over the sink, scrubbing off the blood of men who were little more than kids and felt guilt at feeling so tired. He also felt a little guilt at having left Spock to his own devices and at the fact that he had used Spock’s single minded focus on Jim to evade the discussion that played in his head anyway with every young body he helped to stitch back together.

He could see Edith Keeler’s face.

He knew that any life he saved here might be one that would, through no fault of its own, blast holes in time they wouldn’t be able to repair, but he couldn’t stay away. He comforted himself, paradoxically, by reminding himself that a 97% survival rate meant he probably wasn’t making that much of a difference anyway. His fellow surgeons here were just that good.

His hands hurt.

Scalpels and bone saws and retractors required muscles he was unaccustomed to using. Surgery was still a physical endeavor in his time, always would be, but to operate twentieth century tools with the force needed to cut through bone took considerable strength.

“You going to stand at the sink all night?” Hawkeye said. He might have just begun to doze off, there.

McCoy dried his hands and finished pulling off the straw colored scrubs in favor of borrowed olive drab fatigues. He stank and he knew it, but he wasn’t quite up to trying to shower unassisted on the ankle he seemed unable to rest properly. “I’m going to check on Jim and Spock,” he said.

Hawkeye offered him a chivalrous arm and he wasn’t too proud to take it, even if he did suspect the man was flirting with him a little. McCoy dropped into the chair nearest Kirk’s bed, pulled out the medscanner, and ran it over the captain. Stable, improving...the tissue of his chest seemed to be knitting well and there weren’t any signs of infection, yet...a miracle with the dirty wound, though he had taken the precaution of dosing him with a properly modern cocktail of antibiotics. It would probably be safe to allow him to wake naturally late tomorrow.

He tapped his data pad to flip to the neuroscan, which looked good as well, no persistent ischemic damage. There were some heightened resonance patterns indicating Spock had not stayed put and rested like he had strongly implied he would, but McCoy wasn’t exactly surprised. Spock lay flat as a board on his own bed with his arms crossed over his chest, pretending to be asleep.

“I’m going to check your bandages, Spock, and you don’t need to pretend you’re asleep. You know that voodoo of yours leaves fingerprints, don’t you? Can’t put anything past me, no sir,” he rambled, half to keep himself upright and focused. The bandages were clean and dry, the stump neither swollen nor excessively warm. The ward was all but full. There would be no bed for him here tonight.

He turned to Hawkeye. “Spock is eventually going to need a more private place to sleep and meditate.”

Hawkeye nodded. “I thought he might. Klinger offered him space in his tent. We’re getting some company in the next day or two and it might be necessary to put him somewhere less accessible.”

In the next day or two? Burns must have gotten someone’s attention after all. “He won’t like being away from Jim. And to be fair, he needs to be able to see him at least every few hours.”

“There’s a set of crutches by the door. Let’s get you to the showers and then back to the Swamp. I cleared out a space for you.”

McCoy let Hawkeye walk him over to the crutches and arranged himself over them. It was a good thing Hawkeye walked beside him; the ground wasn’t exactly crutches-friendly. He’d like to have said that he’d used worse showers, but bathing in a cold stream while stranded on a rock inhabited only by Klingons probably didn’t count. He lathered up under the not quite warm enough water while Hawkeye did the same. “I go on shift at midnight, but you’re welcome to a nightcap,” Hawkeye said. “I think Potter plans to stop by.”

McCoy almost took a rain check since he was technically on duty for the duration, but he could stand to turn his brain off for the night. “I think I’ll take you up on that offer.”

They made their slow way back to the Swamp, which turned out to be the surgeons’ quarters. A homemade still had pride of place in the large frame tent. He could see where belongings had been pushed aside to make room for a fourth cot, a pillow and blankets already laid out neatly on it. Hawkeye had even found a toothbrush for him. He dispensed a clear, disinfectant-strong liquid from the still into a martini glass.

Just bringing it to his lips made the hair in his nostrils curl. He took a cautious sip. It burned on the way down. “Our chief engineer’s hooch tastes a lot like this,” he commented.

“It does the job,” Hawkeye noted.

There was a knock at the door. Colonel Potter entered, collapsed into an empty chair, and held out a hand for Hawkeye to fill with a glass.

Hawkeye held his up for a toast. “And a bad time was had by all,” he intoned, then took a single small sip and set his glass down. “I’m on shift in a few hours.”

Potter leaned toward McCoy. “We made you a captain. Hope you don’t mind the demotion.”

McCoy shook his head. “You’ve let us impose on you. Now Kirk might object to being demoted to Corporal once he wakes up.”

“It’s no imposition. You’re a good hand in the OR.” He swirled the clear, bitter liquor in the martini glass. “I hate to bring this up in our down time, but you should know you’re not the strangest thing that’s happened lately, at least according to the radio.”

McCoy’s reply was interrupted by Frank Burns stomping into the Swamp and flopping onto his cot. He gave the room a bare glance, then lay back on his cot to stare at the ceiling. “As long as you’re here, Colonel, I feel like I should give you a piece of my mind about those foreign agents you’re harboring.”

Hawkeye moved his body slightly to hide McCoy, who was already in the opposite corner of the room in partial shadow.

Potter raised a finger to his lips. “All three of them are Americans, Major,” he said. “We are always hospitable to members of other branches.”

“The green one with the funny ears isn’t American.”

“His mother’s from Schenectady, which you’d know if you’d ever bothered to ask him. They’re staying as long as they need to and that’s final.”

“We’ll just see about that.” He covered his face with his pillow. “Schenectady my ass.”

“Frank, you’re as unobservant in here as you are in the OR,” Hawkeye noted. “Another glass, Bones?”

McCoy shook his head. “I may not be taking another night shift, but I’m always on duty. If something happens to one of them I might be needed.”

“Suit yourself,” Potter said. “I’ll have a second, if that’s all right, Hawkeye. So, as I was saying, apparently the stars are no longer in their courses, so to speak.”

Bones leaned forward in on his bunk, unsure of what he had just heard. “What do you mean the stars aren’t in their courses? Are you being poetic?”

“Wish I was, Bones. Scientists are all in an uproar over it. The constellations are apparently all scrambled. They’re saying something’s different about the sun, too, but we don’t get a lot of detail out here, and it’s been too overcast to see anything.”

“You mean the stars. In the sky,” Hawkeye said, refilling his glass.

“Yes, in the sky, where else would they be? Damnedest thing.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Frank sat up on his cot. “Why don’t we ask him about it? It’s probably his fault.”

“If I knew what it meant, I’d tell you,” McCoy said. Nothing good, he was sure. He was tempted to take Hawkeye up on his offer of a second glass of gin. He thought a minute. Stellar cartography wasn’t exactly his best subject, but, “If the constellations have moved, the simplest explanation would be that the planet’s moved.”

“Because that’s a simple explanation,” Hawkeye snorted. He was silent for awhile. “I’m having trouble getting my head around this.” He caught McCoy’s eye. “How are you so calm?”

“Years of practice looking calm when I’m not. Took lessons from Spock."

“The stars are wrong, the Earth has moved, I…” Hawkeye stood to put away his glass and ended up pacing the room, picking dirty clothes up off the floor and putting them back down in other parts of the room. It could almost have been tidying up if it hadn’t left the room just as messy as it had been before.

Frank sat up, took in the rearranged furniture and the extra cot, and growled, “Wait a minute, we’re not letting him bunk with us!”

Hawkeye stopped prowling the room to loom over Frank’s bunk. “Yes, Frank, we are letting him bunk with us. The Swamp is where the surgeons live. And you, of course.”

“I will not sit here and be insulted by the likes of you.”

“Oh yes you will, because Margaret kicked you out of her tent or you’d still be in there with her.”

Frank turned his face to the wall.

“It’s just not fair. What am I saying, nothing in this war is fair.” Hawkeye crossed the room again, pausing next to Potter, shaking his head, pulling a pair of socks off the line strung through the middle of the room and pitching them into the mesh wall behind his cot. “I get by here on someday. Someday I’ll get to go home to Crabapple Cove. Someday this war’s going to end. What if the world is coming to an end right now and this--this--is the rest of my life?”
McCoy hauled himself to his feet, limped over to Hawkeye, and tried to lead him back to his cot. Hawkeye wrenched his arms free of McCoy’s hands. “What’s going to happen now?”

“I don’t know, Hawkeye. I do know that you and I can’t do anything about the stars right now, or the sun.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Potter said.

Hawkeye allowed McCoy to lead him back to his bunk. There wasn’t much more he could say about moving stars or the probable involvement of powerful, meddlesome aliens. Which ones was it this time? He changed the subject. “The wars of the mid-twenty first century take up a lot more time in high school history classes where I come from. I...ah...have to admit I don’t know all that much about the mid twentieth century war in Korea. To be honest, I hadn’t remembered that there was one.”

“It’s not a war, it’s a police action,” Hawkeye said. “It just looks like a war from on the ground when they’re shooting at you.” He looked longingly at the still, but shook his head. “So I suppose that means you have no idea when it’s going to end.”

“You’d be better off asking Radar.”

Hawkeye leaned back in his chair. “You think I haven’t? Bones, do people ever get any better?”

McCoy swirled the remains of his rotgut in its martini glass. “Yeah. We do. I mean, God I wish I could tell you it doesn’t get worse before it gets better. And I wish I could tell you we were all so much better people, that we’ve matured.”

“Not at all?” Potter said.

“We’ve built governments that are better at keeping our individual faults from blowing up into wars, but we all still have to learn to be decent people the hard way. I mean, take Spock and me. I used to rag on him all the time. He’s so attached to his logic, though I swear he decides what he’s gonna do first and then convinces himself it’s the logical course. It drives me nuts. And I crossed the line more often than I’d like to admit. For a lot of reasons that weren’t his fault.”

Hawkeye drooped over his knees, his hair slipping forward over his eyes. “It just breaks me to see this, every day. I wish you could tell me it stops.”

“We haven’t had a war between countries on Earth in over a hundred years. Haven’t really had countries, at least the way you do now, for most of that time.” He wasn’t going to lie, though. “Unfortunately, some of the people we’ve run into out in the black...we came close to losing everything about a decade ago. It still gets me, how close we came. This place brings a lot of that back.”

“No countries. I knew you were a commie,” Frank grumbled from under his pillow.

McCoy decided that getting into the economics of the Federation was a can of worms he didn’t feel like opening, so he let the comment slide.

“You heard of World War Two?” Potter said.

“That one I’ve heard of. Partly because it set the stage for a lot of copycat genocides in the century after.”

“It was a lot clearer what we were fighting for back then, tell you that. Can’t imagine what the world would have looked like if the Axis powers had won.”

“I can imagine,” McCoy said, too quietly for the old soldier to hear. Hawkeye regarded him for along moment, but didn’t ask. It was well enough he didn’t.

“Well, I’ve had a long day.” Potter stood. “I think I’ll turn in. Get some sleep, Bones” he said.

“Wake me before you move Spock.”

“I will.”

*

It was still dark when the knock on the door came. “Doctor McCoy? You wanted somebody to wake you?”

He sat up, muscles protesting at yesterday’s overuse. The door opened and Radar poked his head in. “We’re going to get Corporal Spock settled in Klinger’s tent, sir.”

“It’s awfully early,” McCoy said.

Radar shuffled his feet. “I know sir, I just think we ought to do it soon, sir.” Even in the dim light, the kid looked awful, like he hadn’t slept at all.

McCoy stretched, then stuffed his feet into his boots. He’d need new ones, soon. His were suited to starship floors, not rough terrain, and they stuck out like shiny black boots in a sea of olive drab. He followed Radar, still yawning, but took a moment to look up at the predawn sky. Still overcast.

The ward was full of mostly sleeping patients. Spock sat up in bed, eyes closed, hands arranged in a meditative pose. McCoy doubted he was getting much meditation accomplished, but he commended him for the attempt.

“Mr. Spock, sir,” Radar said, just loud enough to be heard.

Spock’s eyes opened. “Corporal O’Reilly.” He turned his head slightly. “Doctor. Is there a problem?”

“We need to move you. Remember I told you about Colonel Flagg?”

Spock turned his head to regard Kirk, still lying unconscious. “I do not believe it is wise for me to leave him.”

“Mr. Spock, sir, if you don’t go Flagg will put you on a truck and send you to Tokyo!”

Spock turned that infuriatingly calm gaze on Radar. “Is that an emotional outburst or a prediction, Corporal?”

Radar’s mouth snapped shut. McCoy said, “Spock, Flagg’s bad news. You’ve got to be out of sight when he gets here.”

“Agreed. Corporal O’Reilly, when do you expect Flagg to arrive?”

“I don’t know, I just know he’s going to be here and if he sees you…”

Spock’s quiet voice interrupted Radar’s pressured words. “Corporal. Apply some logic to the situation. What means will Flagg use to arrive here?”

“He’ll fly into Seoul from Tokyo. There’s a flight that’s supposed to get in at 0600. Klinger and I checked the schedule.”

“And how long will it take him to arrive here from Seoul?” Again, the carefully neutral tone.

“If he’s quick, about an hour.” Radar shifted from foot to foot, his eyes resting everywhere but on Spock’s face.

“I see. And what leads you to believe that he will arrive on that flight?”

“Why are you asking me so many questions?”

Spock responded to Radar’s outburst with the same measured tone as he had used for the entire conversation. “Because you must learn to think, not merely react to threats. Why do you believe that Flagg is coming today?”

“Because he is!” Radar looked around for someone to take his side.

McCoy snapped, “Spock, stop torturing the kid. We need to get out of here!”

“We have already established that there is no way Colonel Flagg could arrive prior to 0700 hours. It is now 0515. Corporal O’Reilly has not answered my question.”

“Aren’t you a little tall to play Yoda?” McCoy said.

Spock raised an eyebrow. “Yoda is a villain. We have discussed this previously.”

“If the ears fit…” McCoy grumbled.

“I don’t know,” Reilly said, interrupting their nascent argument.

Spock pressed on. “I think you do. What specific perception causes your concern?”

Radar crossed his arms and frowned at the floor. “I remember Flagg and some MPs taking you away in a jeep. I mean not remember, but it’s like I remember it. If it were tomorrow it would be, um, fuzzier, sir?”

Spock nodded. “Good work, Corporal. I will leave with you at 0615. Doctor, I would like a moment of privacy with Jim.”

“Five minutes or I’ll fetch you out myself. And don’t you dare pop a stitch.” McCoy gestured with his head and Radar followed him across the ward. “The things I put up with…which one’s Klinger?”

Radar said, “Short, big nose, wears women’s clothes…”

“Right. Good man?”

“Trust him with my life, sir.”

McCoy nodded. “Good, because I’m trusting him with the next best thing to mine.”

Chapter Text

At 0630 there was a knock at Klinger’s door. He swept aside the boudoir curtain he had added to provide a modicum of stealth and privacy and peeked through the crack between the door and frame. Radar stood outside next to their patient, who despite being given the appellation Corporal Sean Teague Spock, did not look in the slightest bit Irish. Unless that was what leprechauns looked like.

Klinger pulled open the door, ushered them in, and helped Spock pivot into the bed, taking the crutches and sliding them behind the wardrobe. “Corporal Klinger,” he said, by way of introduction.

Spock, like most people, looked at him for a beat longer than one might expect, as though processing his attire, but unlike most people his face betrayed no opinion, and he didn’t remark upon it. Of course, given that he was an alien, maybe he didn’t realize Klinger’s choice of clothing was in any way unusual.

The second cot wasn’t ideally placed to allow a one legged man on crutches to enter and leave the tent quickly or easily, but Klinger had a few ideas about how to change that once they got rid of Flagg. He’d placed the extra cot behind his pop up closet and extra rack of dresses so that the dress rack could be pushed in front of the bed, entirely hiding it from view. He’d rearranged the vanity and placed an extra chair so that two could comfortably sit. If any more people were going to be moving into his tent, Kirk for example, he’d have to extend the back,but for now this would do and at need, Spock’s cot could be completely hidden with about ten seconds notice. Radar hovered near Spock, as though uncertain whether he should leave.

“It’s OK, Radar, I’m practically a nurse by now.” Klinger grimaced. “Don’t tell Houlihan I said that. I can keep tabs on him and call one of the docs if there’s a problem. I’m sure you have plenty to do.”

“I’m going to stay with Captain, I mean Corporal Kirk for a while.”

“Inform me if his condition changes,” Spock said.

“I will sir, I mean, I will, Spock.” Radar ducked out of the room.

Klinger hadn’t had a roommate since Radar moved to a cot in the office three days after he’d moved in. Neither of them fit in well with the other corporals, for different reasons, and Klinger had gotten used to having his own space. He had no idea how to make inoffensive small talk with an alien who seemed to be imitating a statue. “So...you heard about the constellations yet?”

“The constellations?” One eyebrow rose toward the alien’s hairline. “I have not. Enlighten me.”

“You’ll like this.” He thought about that. “I mean, you won’t, but you’re a scientist, right?”

“Yes,” Spock said, caution slipping into his tone.

“So maybe you’ll find it interesting, at least. I only know what I hear on the radio, but they’re saying the Earth isn’t where it was two days ago. All the stars are in the wrong places. And there’s something off about the sun, but Sparky couldn’t say what.”

“Interesting,” Spock said. “It is unfortunate that my tricorder was lost. Tell me, do you have a map of the local night sky as it was before the stars moved?”

“There should be one in the office. I’ll get it for you when I go out.”

“That would be helpful.”

“So, Colonel Potter wanted me to see if I could make you up to pass better.” Klinger collected the cosmetics he had set aside while setting up his room.

“I have covered my ears.”

Klinger handed him the hand mirror off the vanity. “The apples of your cheeks are Granny Smith. Green, I mean. We should also do something about your eyebrows.”

Spock nodded and returned the mirror. “I admit a certain distaste for appearing in public without, as you would say, my face on.”

Klinger set the mirror on the vanity. “Wait, you usually wear makeup?”

“I admit it is somewhat less common for human males to wear lipstick and mascara than females in my time, but most people apply some cosmetics. I assumed that the male physicians were required to refrain for sanitary reasons while on duty.”

Klinger snorted. “Uh, no, men generally don’t wear makeup. Or dresses.”

“Then your clothing is a matter of personal preference.”

Klinger shrugged, already rummaging through the drawer in the vanity for foundation, cream would be best, and some warm sunset colors for cheeks and eyes that would cover up the greenish cast. “It started as a way to try to convince my old commanding officer that I’m crazy, so they’d send me home.”

“And yet, you are still here.”

“Yeah, it hasn’t worked out. Everyone’s used to this,” he indicated his clothes. “I’m hoping rooming with an alien will get me my Section 8. But that’s really not going to work either.”

Spock considered his words. “If wearing clothing culturally coded for women has not had the desired effect, why do you continue to do it?”

Klinger tossed the cream foundation and powder to Spock, who began to apply it with an expert hand. He thought about the alien’s question. “You know, I think it’s my way of thumbing my nose at this damn war. It’s like...body armor for my soul.”

Spock did not comment. He had applied the foundation, shaded his cheekbones, a bit too sharply, and checked his appearance in the hand mirror. “I can pluck your eyebrows and draw in round ones,” Klinger suggested.

“I prefer not to be touched,” Spock said.

“What if I wear gloves?”

“That would be acceptable,” he conceded.

Klinger found one of his pairs of opera gloves, the silky brown ones, and slid them on, then fished through the drawer for his tweezers. “Look at me,” he said. He plucked the upper half of Spock’s eyebrows, then drew them back in, rounder, with a black eyebrow pencil. “I ought to do my own, but I’m not into pain,” he noted while he worked.

“I shape mine, but generally not to appear more human,” Spock admitted. He examined the cases of eyeshadow Klinger had selected for him. “I prefer blue or violet shadow.”

Klinger shook his head. “Not for passing as human. You get...uh, what is this color...dusty rose. I have some dusty rose for your lips, too.”

Spock’s face registered a minute expression of distaste before smoothing back to its typical neutrality. Klinger handed him the shadow to apply himself.

“Is this satisfactory?” Spock said, turning to face Klinger.

Spock had run the shadow up a little too high, but other than that, he looked...passable. More or less. “I think I’d like to add some contouring here to soften those cheekbones.” Spock endured Klinger’s makeup brush without further comment. “All right, as long as nobody looks too close, you should pass. Just don’t take off the beanie.”

“I have sojourned in Earth’s past before, for forty-five days, in New York. I believe I can remember to leave my hat in place.”

“You never crack a smile, do you?” Klinger said. The aliens were obviously under a lot of stress, but Spock seemed to be so emotionally flattened he worried that he might be in shock. Which would be understandable.

“Vulcans prefer to suppress our emotional responses and base our actions solely on logic.”

Klinger turned to put his makeup back in the drawer. “So I bet the purpose of all that foundation is to make it hard for anyone to see you blush.”

Spock sat silently for a long moment. Klinger hoped he hadn’t said something offensive. “I always believed it to be an aesthetic choice. However, your suggestion has merit. A matte finish would serve both to reduce the visibility of vasodilation in the face and to minimize the appearance of small muscle movements.” He returned the makeup to the drawer. “I do not wish to be inconsiderate, but I must meditate, and have found it difficult to do so while in the ward. If you would excuse me…”

“Of course. I’ll take a walk, but I’ll stay nearby in case Flagg wants to search my place. Fortunately, he’s so put off by my wardrobe he might avoid my tent entirely.”

“That would be fortunate. Would you return with a report on the captain’s status? And the star chart.”

“Captain McCoy?”

“No, Captain Kirk. Corporal Kirk,” he corrected himself.

“Will do.” Suppresses his emotions, really, thought Klinger on the way out the door. He wasn’t too sure. He’d seen an awful lot of young soldiers with faces as blank as Spock’s, faces that would show no expression because there was no space between feeling nothing and falling apart. He closed the door to his tent behind him.

Radar stood in the middle of camp, arguing with a tall, thin man with a uniform as obviously fake as his mustache. The man’s medals clinked against each other as he gestured aggressively at Radar. The kid held his position, though his body language betrayed his discomfort as the new arrival--Klinger was close enough now to identify him as Flagg--jabbed him repeatedly in the chest with one stiff index finger.

“What’s going on here?” Klinger interrupted.

“I know you’re hiding fugitives and aliens in this camp and I’m going to find them!” Flagg turned from Radar to Klinger, eyeing him with a combination of contempt and distaste that Klinger found paradoxically satisfying. “I’m going to turn this compound upside down!”

Klinger took Flagg’s arm. “It would be easier for us to help you if you could tell us a little about these fugitives.”

“Well.” Flagg straightened his uniform. “Isn’t there anyone else I can talk to beside you two...noncoms?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. We got in a bunch of wounded yesterday and we just evacuated most of them this morning,” Radar said. “So you see, sir, we’re all you’ve got.”

Flagg turned to pace away from them, turned on his heel and paced back. He tucked his hand in between the buttons of his uniform coat as if posing for a portrait. “So it’s to be this unwholesome travesty of manhood or the idiot child.”

“Hey!” Radar protested.

Flagg sighed theatrically. “Very well. I will speak slowly. My sources tell me three men were brought here in strange uniforms, one of whom is an alien with green blood and pointed ears. They arrived at nearly the same time as the stars changed places in the sky. I was told that two of them underwent surgery. I will be searching the operating room and postoperative ward for these men and I will be taking them with me back to Washington for questioning.”

Klinger nodded. “Oh, those guys. They were coming back from a costume party, drunk as skunks, and wandered through a minefield. The amputee already left for Tokyo. We called for copies of their papers. Captain Pierce is at Gimpo collecting them now.”

“My sources were very certain of what they saw.”

Radar held his clipboard over his chest, protesting, “Aw, come on, Mr. Flagg sir, I know it was Major Burns, I’m the one who patched through the call. Four times. Over night.”

“So you see, a reliable source. I’m going to inspect the ward.” Flagg strode off toward the main ward. “When I make them tell me what they did to the Earth, I’ll be made a general for sure!”

Klinger and Radar followed, half jogging to keep up with the taller man. “Who’s left in the ward?” Klinger asked, quietly.

“Pete Jillson and Jim Kirk,” Radar whispered.

Flagg flung the door open loudly enough to startle Able from her paperwork and cause Pete to flinch violently in his bed. “Do you mind?” Able said, standing and stepping into Flagg’s path. “This is a hospital and these patients need their rest.”

“I have reason to believe at least one of these patients is a foreign agent, possibly an alien,” Flagg said, sidestepping her to look at Pete’s chart. Pete stared at him, wide eyed. “Well, what have you got to say for yourself. Name, rank, and serial number, soldier!”

Radar interceded. “Sir. Private Jillson took shrapnel to the face and throat. He can’t talk, sir.”

“How convenient. And this one?” He stopped in front of Kirk’s bed.

“Corporal Jim Kirk, sir. Land mine.”

By that time, BJ had reached Kirk’s bedside. “Corporal Kirk suffered extensive injuries to the heart, lungs, and chest cavity. I had to take out half his right lung. He can’t be moved until his wounds have some time to heal.”

“Wake him up so I can question him.”

“Absolutely not. In any case, he’s still unconscious and will probably be for quite some time. If he wakes up at all.” Klinger shot a quick look over to Radar at the doctor’s grim tone.

“I have time. Now, there was a third man. Impersonating a surgeon, apparently. Where is he?”

“Mess tent, I think,” Radar said.

“Very well, I shall seek him out in the mess tent.” Flagg said. He stalked out of Post Op.

Klinger tried to follow him, but Radar held him back. “Something’s up with Captain Hawkeye.”

“Didn’t he leave already?”

Radar stuffed his hands further into his pockets and looked everywhere but Klinger’s face. “Yeah, that’s just it. I don’t think he made it to Gimpo.”

That couldn’t be good. “Is he hurt?”

Radar fidgeted, blew his breath out of pursed lips, then looked off into middle distance, quiet. “Don’t just react, think it through,” he told himself. “I think so. I think maybe he flipped his jeep? Someone should go after him. ”

“That’s really specific, for you,” Klinger said.

Radar shrugged. “Something Corporal Spock said to try.”

“Well go then, but tell Potter and take Bones with you. That will keep Flagg away from him. Make sure he takes that bag of his along. If he did flip the jeep, you’ll need it.”

“Good idea.” Radar rushed off toward the Swamp. Klinger headed for the mess tent to catch up with Flagg, determined that he have a chaperone.

Flagg was having it out with Colonel Potter. “I was told that the fugitive, Captain Leonard McCoy, if that’s his real name, which I doubt, was in the mess tent. So where are you hiding him?”

“I told you on the phone we’re not hiding any fugitives. Burns got all excited about some folks who’d had a little too much to drink at a costume party and got lost. Call Gimpo if you want their credentials. Now if you don’t mind I’m going to finish my coffee.” Potter turned away from Flagg.

Major Burns stood next to Potter’s place at the table, his arms crossed, impatiently tapping the fingers of one hand against his elbow in time with the tapping of his left foot. Once the Colonel finished talking, he snapped, “That’s not true, Colonel, and you know it. Colonel Flagg, he’s lying to you, to all of us. Those...people...came here with technology I’ve never seen before and at least one of them is an actual alien. The other two look human, but you never know.” He produced the shredded remains of a gold shirt, streaked with reddish brown and teal stains. “You see? Look at that material. It’s weird is what it is! And it’s got some of the alien’s blood on it.”

Klinger snatched the shirt out of Burns’ hands. “Cheap costume fabric, and that’s paint.” He held it up as though to examine it critically, but only for a fraction of a second, then rolled it up and tucked it into his bodice. “I’d be ashamed to wear that to a masquerade!” He’d burn it later.

“Give me that!” Flagg shouted, grabbing for his chest.

He danced out of the way, clutching his bodice and affecting his best shocked expression. “I beg your pardon, sir! Hands to yourself!” He stalked away as quickly as he could manage, back toward the ward to get an update on Kirk that wasn’t colored by BJ’s need to make sure Flagg wouldn’t try to take the poor man into custody.

As soon as got into the ward, he pulled out the remains of the shirt and handed it to BJ. “Burn this. Or hide it really well, I don’t care, but don’t let Flagg find it. How is Kirk really doing?”

BJ stalled in the aisle. “Shirt?” He looked down at it. “Right.” He tucked it inside his coat. “He’s stable. We might try to wake him up this evening...right now we have him on drugs to keep him unconscious so he won’t move around. How’s, ah, Corporal Spock?”

“Resting comfortably. I think he wishes he were back here, though. I just came by to get an update for him.”

Klinger looked across the aisle at Pete Jillson. “How’s he?”

“He’s started showing signs of a wound infection this morning.”

Klinger lowered his voice. “I think I’d rather never walk again than never talk again.” BJ shook his head slightly, though whether it was in disagreement or in sympathy for the kid with his face swathed in bandages, he didn’t know. The shirt successfully passed on, Klinger swung by the mess tent again to grab a meal to split with Spock. Flagg and Burns had moved on to wreak havoc somewhere else in camp.

He knocked on his own door to warn Spock, but entered after a silent count of three. The clothes rack had been pulled forward to completely enclose Spock’s bed. “Spock? Corporal?” he said quietly, hoping those pointed ears might have better hearing than his own. “Are you in there? Answer quietly if you are. The walls are pretty thin. Heck, they’re not really even walls.”

“I am here,” the level voice answered after a pause. “Did you see Jim?”

Spock had kind of one track mind, Klinger noticed. “BJ said they might reduce his medications so he can wake up this evening.”

“That would be gratifying. I have missed his counsel. Is Doctor McCoy tending to him?”

“BJ is looking after him. Bones and Radar went to Gimpo to check on Hawkeye. Radar thinks Hawkeye flipped the jeep.” He sat down in the chair by the vanity. “Which is a lot more detail than we usually get out of him. He said you had something to do with that.”

“I merely suggested that he focus his attention on the impressions he receives, rather than disregarding them until they become too distressing to ignore. Where is Gimpo?”

“A few miles down the road. Hawkeye went to get papers and tags for the three of you. You’re Irish now, by the way. Radar put your name as Sean Teague Spock.”

“Acceptable. Am I still confined to this room?”

“Until one of the docs clears you to be up and around, and until Flagg is out of here, probably. I can’t imagine he’ll stay the night. Potter and I will make sure he spends a miserable night if he does.”

“It is imperative that I construct a device that will allow me to determine exactly when and where in the sum-over-universes we find ourselves. The integrity of the time stream and our potential return to our home depend on it. Were you able to find a star chart?”

“I haven’t been back to the office yet.”

There was a loud knock at the door. Flagg and Burns opened it without waiting for Klinger to answer. Fortunately, neither he nor Spock had moved the rack of dresses that hid Spock and his cot from view. “I heard you talking. You’ve got one of them in here, haven’t you?” Burns said, inviting himself into Klinger’s cramped tent to peer into the corners and closets and swish through the rack of dresses without any effect aside from wrinkling them and making them smell like his awful cologne.

“I talk to myself all the time, Major. I’m crazy, remember?”

Burns waved his arms around and blustered, making a show of searching Klinger’s tent without noticing any of the actual changes Klinger had made to create the room within a room that contained Spock’s cot, probably because his focus was on impressing Flagg and not handling more of Klinger’s girly accessories than necessary. As if Klinger’s fondness for women’s clothing were contagious.

“You’re wasting my time, Major Burns. Take me to Colonel Potter. I will make him give up his fugitives and see that he is prosecuted for conduct unbecoming an officer.”

“Then I’ll be in charge, and we’ll finally have some order and discipline around here.” Burns rubbed his hands together in anticipation. The man was ridiculous, but just dangerous enough to get somebody killed one of these days. He walked away with Flagg, the two of them discussing something in conspiratorial tones, their heads close together, kindred spirits united against a world full of communists and deviants.

Klinger wished he could vomit, but he frankly didn’t have the energy. Once the two of them were our of earshot, he pushed aside the rack ofclothes just enough to pass Spock a meal tray. “Spock, the biscuits are like rocks, but the gravy has lumps in it that might be meat...ish. I guess you could dip the biscuits in the tomato juice.”

“I have been imprisoned on many occasions, on many worlds and have been subjected to far worse food than this.”

Klinger knocked his biscuit against the wall. “My condolences.”

Chapter Text

Flagg was wrong, the stars were wrong, the world was wrong, everything was wrong, wrong, wrong and now there was something wrong with Hawkeye and he needed to get on the road as soon as possible. Bones did not look at all certain about getting into a jeep again. “It’ll be fine, I’m a really good driver,” Radar assured him. The doctor tucked his little black bag in next to his feet and sat down.

Radar peeled out of camp and down the road only slightly faster than was quite safe. They hadn’t gone more than half a mile when a Korean girl, maybe ten or twelve years old, flagged them down.

Radar pulled to a stop at the side of the road. The girl gestured down the road, speaking rapidly in Korean. “Okay, okay,” Radar said. He started to help the girl into the back of the jeep.

“I’ll ride in the back,” Bones said. He grabbed his bag, perched on the back seat and leaned forward to strap the girl into the front passenger seat. Radar pulled back onto the road. The girl beside him continued to chatter and point. Radar heard, “Here, say that again.”

In a few moments, Radar heard a fair facsimile of the girl’s voice coming from behind him, speaking English. “...at my house with Mother and Grandmother and my sister and brothers. I think he might be crazy. He talks a lot, more than anyone I have ever met.”

“What does he look like?” Bones asked.

“Tall, and American. Dark hair. Skinny. Very skinny for an American.”

“Did he say his name was Pierce? Hawkeye Pierce?”

“Yes, yes, Hawkeye!” The girl said. “He crashed his car. Hit his head.”

Radar saw the overturned jeep before he noticed the house set back a little from the road. Before he had completely rolled to a stop, Hawkeye stumbled out of the house, took half a dozen steps toward their jeep, and collapsed. Bones had already rolled out the back of the jeep and after running the first couple of steps, was jog-hopping his way over to him, bag in hand. Radar thought he ought to check the jeep lying on its side at the edge of the road, so after a moment’s wait to see that Bones had matters well in hand with Hawkeye, he hopped out to walk around the wrecked vehicle. A black rectangle caught his eye. He bent to pick it up. It was made of hard textured plastic and had a shoulder strap, a handful of buttons and a tiny glass screen on one end. He couldn’t remember what it was called, but it had to be the thing Spock had been looking for. It must have fallen off or been taken off him when Hawkeye was working on him in the jeep the other day.

He threw it over his shoulder for safekeeping and hurried to where Bones sat on the ground, supporting Hawkeye with one arm while running his medscanner over him. Hawkeye’s eyes were unfocused and glassy.

“Quite a cut you’ve got there,” Bones was saying. “Wish I had my dermal regenerator. We’ll just put some antibiotic on it for now…”

“Where’s Beej?” Hawkeye asked.

“He’s back at camp, sir,” Radar said. “Is he going to be okay?” he asked Bones. There was something disturbingly broken about Hawkeye, like he was suddenly made even more than usual of sentence fragments and snatches of music.

“He’s got a concussion, like I had, maybe a little more severe. There’s no significant bleeding into his brain though, so he just needs rest.”

“Not fractured?” Hawkeye said, his attention caught by Bones’ discussion of his injury. Bones consulted his datapad.

“Hairline, maybe a centimeter or two long where the temporal bone is thinnest. I’ll knit it when we get you back to the jeep. Take care you don’t get into any fistfights for a while.”

“Fistfights, I’ll tell you I’ve been in a few of those…”

“I’m sure you have.” Bones helped Hawkeye up and Radar ducked under him on the opposite side. Together they got him back to the jeep.

“Head hurts,” Hawkeye noted. “I missed you. Hoped you would come. Kept yelling for Beej to come get me before I fell asleep. Didn’t want to fall asleep. Yelled for you, too Radar. Did it work?”

Radar shrugged. “Well, I’m here aren’t I?”

McCoy walked him over to the front seat of the jeep. “That’s just fine. You can fall asleep when we get back to camp.” He rummaged through his bag. “I’m going to knit that fracture before we go anywhere, though. Shouldn’t hurt, but it does feel hot.”

“Radar, hold his head still….on second thought, Hawkeye, put your elbow on the dash, here, and brace your head against it. Try not to move.” He held the bone knitter, a device very similar to the others in his bag, but perhaps a little chunkier, a couple of inches from the injury and moved it slowly down the wound. “There.” He tucked the device back into its slot.

Radar guessed Bones didn’t think he was trustworthy enough to help out with medical stuff. That stung a little. “I found this,” Radar said, holding out the box. He couldn’t remember what it was called, but he was pretty sure it was the missing piece of Spock’s kit.

“Spock’s tricorder? Where did you find it?”

“Next to the jeep. It must have been under the seat or something.” Radar hopped into the driver’s seat to return to camp, driving more carefully at first, to avoid injuring Hawkeye further. His foot started to lean on the gas pedal, and his attention to wander to Flagg after a couple of minutes until Bones shouted, “Slow up or you’re going to leave me behind!”

Radar didn’t tap the brakes, but he did ease up on the gas pedal. A little. They pulled into camp and Radar hopped out of the jeep without opening the door and walked briskly, his short legs maximizing their stride, toward Post Op. He could hear Bones and Hawkeye lagging behind him.

When he arrived in Post Op, he had to wonder if he was wrong or just early again. Nurse Able was suctioning Pete Jillson. BJ was at the desk, writing who knows what, and Kirk looked pink and felt like he usually did, achy, restless, but not aware enough to break through the horse-sized dose of morphine he was on to keep him from moving around.

He took a chair beside Kirk’s bed anyway, crossed his arms and legs. The top leg kicked a little, idly, but he didn’t stop it. He wanted to feel tougher and wondered if he would look tougher with a pencil in his mouth. He didn’t feel tougher with a pencil in his mouth, so he stuck the pencil back in his pocket and tried to keep his mind on where he was.

The door smacked open. Radar flinched. Bones half walked, half carried Hawkeye into the room. “Doctor Hunnicutt!”

BJ hurried over to the pair, helped Bones lead Hawkeye to a chair and examined him briskly. “What happened, Hawk?” He tsked at the cut along tracing down the side of his face. “That’s going to need stitches. Help me get him into the OR.”

Hawkeye protested, “We have to get to Kimpo to get those dog tags.” He looked around Post Op shakily. “Don’t put me under, I’m afraid I won’t wake up.”

“I’ll give you a local, Hawkeye. Come on.” BJ and Bones crossed the rest of Post Op and disappeared through the surgery doors.

Hawkeye with a concussion was kind of like Hawkeye drunk, except the concussion made Radar more nervous. Something was making Radar nervous at any rate. The three doctors disappeared into the OR, leaving no one in Post Op but Radar, Able and the patients. He felt sick to his stomach. Stop and think, don’t just react, he told himself. He thought about the possibility that Kirk would die, then Spock would die and then things got hazy about what happened to Bones and even in such a short time he’d really gotten to like those guys. He tried again, unsuccessfully, to stop his thoughts from circling uselessly around in his head.

The door slammed open again. Radar’s feet hit the floor with a stinging slap. Frank and Flagg stormed in side by side. Flagg was carrying something silver and black in his hand.

Radar jumped to his feet. “Hey, that’s not yours!” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“This fine upstanding American collected it as evidence,” Flagg said. “It’s obviously some sophisticated piece of spy technology.” He approached Kirk’s bed. Radar stepped in between him and Kirk, his heart racing. “He’s hurt really bad. You’re not supposed to bother him.”

“He’s an enemy agent and I plan to interrogate him.” He stepped forward so that Radar’s nose was almost touching Flagg’s chest. “Don’t you understand, these people rearranged the whole sky! It has to be them. Who else could it be? I need to know what their plan is.”

Radar glanced toward the OR for a spare second. “Corporal Kirk is sedated,” he said, raising his voice in hopes the other three men would hear.

“Then unsedate him.” He marched to the OR door to stick his head in. “Get in here and wake this patient up,” he shouted. “Or I will.”

Flagg leaned over the bed, arms reaching out to grab Kirk, like he was going to shake him or something and Radar grabbed him from across the bed and shoved him backwards.

“You little punk!” Flagg said, rushing back toward Radar.

Radar flung his arm back, made a fist, and punched wildly at Flagg’s face. Pain blossomed simultaneously in his nose and right hand so his left hand didn’t know which part to grab. He settled on clutching his nose with his good hand and jamming the bad hand between his thighs. He could hear Frank saying something to Flagg and the door from OR swinging open. “What are you doing to my patient!” BJ shouted, shoving Flagg on his decorated chest.

McCoy, almost in the same moment, added, “You want to talk to one of us, you can talk to me.” Radar looked up and pulled his hand away from his nose. No blood. And it didn’t hurt so much anymore. His right hand, though, throbbed, so he kept it tucked between his thighs.

McCoy caught sight of the dermal regenerator. “Hey, that’s mine.” He tried to grab it from Flagg, but Frank collected it first and held it up high while Flagg sat down, blood streaming from his nostrils.

“Kid broke my nose!” he said. “I want him court martialed.”

“You hit him?” BJ said.

Radar sagged miserably back into his chair, all the restless energy of the last several minutes spent at once, leaving him deflated. He nodded. His hand was hurting more, not less and he cradled it to keep it still. Flagg was still yelling at him.

“Give me my dermal regenerator, you backward fool!” Bones stopped short of tackling Frank, but he did grab him by the arm. Frank raised a hand as though to strike him and Bones spun into sudden motion, twisting the arm he’d grabbed up behind Frank’s back and bringing him to his knees, then plucking the dermal regenerator out of his immobilized hand. “Looks like unlike you, I paid attention in unarmed combat training,” he said. “Now get out of here and I just might not tell Colonel Potter you’re a thief.”

Frank stumbled out of Post Op, leaving Bones with only Flagg to contend with. “I want him court martialed!”

Bones just sat down on the empty bed beside Flagg’s chair. “Why did Radar hit you?” he asked, quietly, almost gently.

“I was just going to try to wake that Kirk guy to ask him some questions.” He dabbed at his nose with his sleeve. “You three have a lot to answer for.”

“Were you going to move him? Shake him maybe?” He took Flagg’s shoulder and gave him a light shake.

“Yeah, what of it?” Flagg mumbled irritably into his sleeve.

“Jim Kirk is being held together by tissue regeneration lattice and stubbornness. One good shake and you could tear something inside him. His lungs could collapse, or he could bleed out like that.” Bones snapped his fingers for emphasis. “Even shelling near the hospital could kill him. That’s why we’re keeping him sedated. You want answers, you get them from me. BJ, is Jim okay?”

“He’s fine, Bones. Radar, did Flagg move or shake him?” Radar shook his head. He was not going to let the tears stinging into his eyes fall, and he wasn’t sure what his voice would sound like if he spoke, so he just bit his lip and kept quiet. His whole hand throbbed. It was bearable if he kept perfectly still. “I’ll tell Potter you deserve a commendation, not a court martial.” Radar nodded his gratitude, embarrassed.

The door slammed open again, admitting Potter. “What is this I hear about a fistfight in my hospital?” He turned directly to Flagg. “You do not come into my hospital and manhandle my patients for any reason whatsoever. You could have killed that man, or that one! The stable patients get evac’d, which means anyone you see here is either fresh out of surgery or too fragile to move. Jim Kirk and Leonard McCoy are under my personal protection. Do you get me?”

Flagg nodded miserably.

“Good. Because if you ever put a patient or a soldier in my hospital at risk again I’ll break your whole face!” Potter pointed at the door. Flagg stood stiffly, tugged on his uniform, and marched out, feigning dignity. Potter turned away from Flagg to look Radar over critically. “Radar, you don’t look so good.” He pulled up another folding chair to sit knee to knee with Radar. “Let’s have a look.”

Radar gingerly presented his right hand. Now that he got a good look at it, he wished he hadn’t. The hand was already puffing up and the thumb had started to turn purple. “You definitely broke the thumb,” Potter told him. “Looks like you might have broken a couple of metacarpals, maybe sprained the wrist.”

Bones walked up behind Potter. “May I?”

“Sure,” Potter said. McCoy pulled up an empty bed and laid open his bag. A quick pass with the medscanner and he confirmed, “Thumb’s dislocated at the first joint, hairline fracture of the second phalange, fractured the index metacarpal and sprained your wrist here and here.” He pulled out the bone knitter, peered at a reading on it, and frowned. “I’ll get Spock to work on building a power converter for these.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I couldn’t think of another way to stop him,” Radar said.

“It’s all right, Radar,” Potter told him. “You did good. On the other hand, you never tuck your thumb in when you punch somebody. Did you pay any attention at all in Basic Training? ”

Radar frowned down at his broken hand. “Not enough.”

Bones flattened his hand out a little--ouch--and started to work with the bone knitter. He wasn’t kidding when he said it would feel hot. He stopped for a moment. “You want to get some local anesthetic, BJ? I need to reduce the thumb.”

BJ brought a big needle. Radar didn’t much like needles, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. The needle wasn’t so bad. Having his thumb yanked back into place was a weird, unpleasant feeling even if it didn’t hurt, exactly. Bones ran a different shiny device over Radar’s wrist, front and back. “That ought to take your recovery time down to a couple of days,” he said. He checked a tiny screen on the handle. “I’ve only got a few minutes use left on these unless Spock can rig up a power converter,” he noted. “I’m sure it won’t take long with you lending a hand. He let Potter finish wrapping and splinting Radar’s hand.

“I should take Spock his, this thing,” Radar said, holding it out to show Bones.

McCoy grinned. “You found it! That’s great. Run it over to him and we’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on out there.”

*

Radar knocked on Klinger’s door left handed, the tricorder still draped over his shoulder. Klinger shouted through the door. “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Radar.”

“Who’s with you?”

“Nobody.”

The door opened. Radar ducked through the gauze curtain and looked around the room. “Where did you hide Spock?” he asked. A rack of dresses moved aside to reveal Spock, sitting on a cot that had been cleverly hidden by Klinger’s furniture. “I found your box thing,” he said. He passed it to Spock, who in the subdued light of Klinger’s room looked almost human. “Oh, and the astronomical chart. You can keep it. I guess we’ll have to get new ones.”

Spock perused the chart silently. “What do you think of my work?” Klinger said.

“Uh, yeah. I guess it might fool somebody,” Radar said to be polite.

Klinger noticed Radar’s splinted hand. “What did you do to your arm?”

Radar blushed and ducked his head. “I punched Colonel Flagg. Broke his nose and my hand.”

“You’ve never punched anyone before, have you?” Klinger asked.

“I’ve never needed to before, and I hope I never have to again. He was going to try to wake Captain...Corporal Kirk. He’s not supposed to be moved.” He found a chair and dropped into it, yawning. The excitement with Hawkeye’s concussion and his fight with Flagg over, Radar’s body reminded him just how tired it was.

Spock put the tricorder down. “Was he successful? Was Jim injured?”

“No, I made sure he never laid a hand on him.”

Spock dipped his head slightly in acknowledgement. “Do either of you have any gold on your person? Or any other pure metal.”

“I have the copper wire balls for your supplements in my pocket,” Radar said.

“Acceptable.” He held out a cupped hand to receive it.

Radar handed one over and Spock ran the tricorder over it. “Hmm.”

“So?” Klinger said.

He tapped a couple of additional buttons and peered into the tiny screen. “Grantville-Alexander resonance pattern. The amplitude is fairly small, so the divergence is recent, as might be expected.”

Radar muttered into Klinger’s ear. “You understand any of that?”

“No,” Klinger replied.

Spock turned to both of them. “It means that this Earth is a duplicate, meaning that the captain, the doctor, and myself no longer reside in our original timeline. Are my movements still restricted? I wish to return to Post Op to discuss my findings with Dr. McCoy. I would also like to take a scan of the sky.”

Radar looked out of the tent to assure himself that the jeep had in fact left. “Coast is clear, sir. Colonel Potter put Colonel Flagg in a jeep and sent him off to Seoul. He said if he saw him again he’d break his nose himself.”

“That will deter the crazy bastard for a week, tops. Talk about people who ought to get a Section 8,” Klinger said. “He’ll be back.”

Radar helped Spock to his feet while Klinger procured the crutches. “I knew Flagg was going to try something,” he told Spock. “I tried to keep calm and think about it, but I got too scared and I couldn’t do it.”

Spock considered. “You knew enough to change the outcome. That’s what matters. You cannot expect to master any skill immediately. I suggest you continue to,” he paused to work his way out the narrow doorway with his crutches, “practice as often as you can. There are meditative techniques I can show you that may be of assistance.” Radar wasn’t so sure about meditation. He’d seen the occasional Korean patient sitting quietly with his eyes closed, quiet inside as though they were deeply sleeping. He wasn’t sure he could be still for so long. At this point he would settle for a decent night’s sleep. Even though Frank had left him alone last night, his sleep had been interrupted enough with unremembered nightmares and startled wakings that he might as well not have bothered.

Once they were out in the yard, Spock aimed his tricorder at the sun and took a reading. “Spectral analysis indicates that is not Earth’s sun.” He swept the tricorder from horizon to horizon, then crossed the camp on his crutches and swept the other half of the sky. “I will need to analyze this data to determine our position.”

“Would that be easier to do at a desk?” Radar suggested.

“It would be easiest to do at my captain’s side,” Spock said. “I find myself preoccupied with his condition, and as such, my efficiency is affected.” He pivoted toward Post Op. “May I return at this time?”

“Can’t see why not,” Klinger told him. “Radar, he’s all yours. I should head back to the office, check the radio.”

Radar kept pace with Spock as he step-swung his way to Post Op. “So,” he said. “You guys are together-together?”

“We are bonded. Married, in human terms.”

“But you’re guys.” Radar puzzled. “You are a guy, aren’t you?”

“I am male. Does that make a difference?”

“It’s...it’s sodomy! You can get a dishonorable discharge for stuff like that.” He hadn’t meant for it to come out that way. Really he hadn’t. After all, everybody knew Hawkeye liked guys as much as he liked girls--and boy did he like girls. Hawkeye just never gave the wrong people quite enough evidence to use against him. He realized Spock hadn’t addressed his accusation, so he tried to clarify. “Just be careful who knows. It...might matter to some people even more than you being an alien and all.”

“That is highly illogical,” Spock said.

“Yeah, well, that’s people.”

Chapter Text

BJ Hunnicutt pinched the skin on the inside of Kirk’s elbow and was rewarded with a faint groan. Bones, standing beside him, checked the medscanner again. “The tissue around his lungs and heart is firming up.”

BJ nodded. “I’ve reduced sedation. He should be waking up any time.”

The alien scientist, Spock, sat in a chair next to Kirk’s bed, a rolled sheet and pillow helping him keep his balance while he became accustomed to his missing limb. He slipped one hand around Kirk’s wrist, fingertips whitening where they pressed in alongside the pulse point. “He is in pain,” Spock said.

“I know,” BJ said. “We need him to start waking up and to do that we need to reduce the morphine. Talk to him. Let him know you’re here.”

Spock quirked an eyebrow. “He knows I am here.”

“Right,” BJ said. It was clear enough from watching him interact with his unconscious captain and apparently, husband, that the two had some sort of psychic connection. BJ had scrupulously refrained from asking, but his reluctance to be touched and his almost proprietary interest in Radar suggested that his abilities might not be limited to his partner. It was pretty clear Radar had drawn the same conclusion from the way the kid’s gaze tended to gravitate to where the two men touched, then dart away. Though that might just be discomfort with the fact that they were a couple, another thing about the pair BJ found it hard to not think about.

Spock turned to Bones. “Corporal O’Reilly located my tricorder. Consequently I was able to compare resonance patterns on a few metallic samples. I have ascertained additional information as to our situation.”

“All right then, out with it.” Bones fidgeted with the medscanner, probably just to have something to do with his hands. He was almost as fidgety as Hawkeye.

Spock looked from BJ to Radar, who was sitting next to Jillson on the opposite side of the bed from BJ. “To what extent do you wish to involve the local inhabitants in our discussion?”

McCoy shook his head. “I think that horse left the barn a long time ago. I assume you’ve heard about the changes in the constellations around this planet?” McCoy spoke to all three of them. Radar nodded. BJ regarded the clerk for a moment before following suit. He’d heard about the stars being in the wrong places from Hawkeye in the morning before he left for Kimpo. It gave him a twitchy feeling. He wanted even more than usual to make a call to San Francisco to hear Peg’s voice. Unfortunately, everyone else on the switchboard had the same idea and calls were restricted to official business only.

Spock reported, “The resonance patterns associated with copper, iron, and silver indicate a Grantville-Alexander type temporospatial displacement accompanied by duplication within roughly 1.3 hours of our arrival here.”

“You want to try that in country doctor?” McCoy said. It was hard for BJ to imagine the time traveler as a country doctor, southern accent notwithstanding.

Spock paused to rephrase for beings of limited intelligence. “We are not residing in our own past, but on a parallel Earth, a duplicate that was created upon our arrival here. The event shows evidence of intent. I took a scan of the sky on my way here, but have not yet had a chance to analyze it thoroughly. I will need an additional scan of the sky in two hours to pinpoint our location and time.” He tapped a few buttons on the box he was holding and peered into the screen. “According to spectral analysis, this planet is currently orbiting the star HR 7783, 56.9 light years from Earth.”

BJ stopped him. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, parallel Earth. This is just Earth. Always has been.”

“At near the time of our arrival here, Earth was copied,” Spock explained. “There are a few rare cosmic circumstances that can cause this. Cosmic string collisions, for example.”

“Wait, so we’re copies?” Radar said. “I don’t feel like a copy.” He pinched at his own cheek with the hand that wasn’t still encased in a splint.

“A quantum duplicate, to be exact. Neither Earth is privileged over the other. You are no less real than the Radar O’Reilly who exists in the unaltered timeline.”

“What are our chances of getting home? McCoy said.

“That depends on whether the duplicate remains within our home universe and when in that universe it resides. I will be able to make a more detailed analysis when I make a second scan in a few hours. BJ and Radar are home, though their entire world has been displaced to a different star system. Where it will presumably remain.” Spock looked down at Kirk for a moment, possibly distracted by a slight movement. “In our time, HR 7783 is located three point six light years inside Klingon space.”

“Well, isn’t that just terrific.” McCoy tightened his lips in a not-smile.

BJ took another chance to interrupt. “Wait a minute, slow down. Klingon space? What’s that?”

Bones replied for them. “Klingons are nasty, violent, ugly bastards who murder civilians and make a mess of the territories they conquer.”

“Whether we are inside their territory or not depends on when we are as much as where we are,” Spock noted.

McCoy waved one of his scanner devices over Jim Kirk again. “You can go ahead and help him along a little,” he told Spock. “Wait a second though. What are the chances that our actions will damage the time stream?”

“We can have effectively no effect on our own past, as we have been removed from our own time stream.” Spock turned his attention to his husband.

BJ checked on Pete Jillson again, suctioning the fluids that Jillson could no longer swallow. It was becoming increasingly evident that Jillson had caught some germ that the available antibiotics weren’t able to handle. The kid was probably going to die, and there wasn’t a thing BJ could do about it but keep suctioning and hope. He’d tried to send Radar off to get some rest since he was looking worn out and pasty, but Radar had gotten attached, as he sometimes did, and refused to leave his bedside. Radar looked up at him as if he knew BJ was contemplating him, but returned to fidgeting with his splint in a moment.

Bones got up and crossed the room. “BJ, can I have a look?” BJ moved a little out of the way, but stayed nearby to watch.

“What are you doing, doctor?” Spock asked.

“I’m tired of sitting over here watching this kid die. Radar, he conscious? Can he hear me?”

Radar looked at him like a frightened rabbit. “Me, sir?”

“Yes, you.”

Radar chewed his lip. “He can hear you if you stand on this side. The other ear...he’s deaf on that side. I guess, the shrapnel?” Bones nodded his thanks.

“Okay, Pete,” Bones said, dropping down next to Radar and laying his bag open on the empty bed opposite them. “I’ve got a couple of tricks up my sleeve we’re going to try. BJ, do you mind?”

“Be my guest,” BJ said, bemused. McCoy wasn’t going to make it worse.

“Doctor,” Spock said from across the room. “The Prime Directive…”

“You said yourself this is a duplicate. A Grantville duplicate, besides, and in Klingon space. This whole planet’s been tampered with. Prime Directive does not apply.”

“I do not believe you have the legal standing for your assertions.”

McCoy took detailed scans of Pete Jillson’s face and neck. “Find a court to convict me,” he snapped. “Infection’s invaded the bone and the cerebrospinal fluid,” he told BJ.

“Meningitis.” Given that chloramphenicol had failed to even slow the the infection down, BJ might as well stop suctioning the kid and let him go to spare him further pain. Radar flinched beside him. “Sorry, Radar.” he said. Did that kid hear everything that went through his head? BJ hoped not.

Radar scrunched himself a little smaller in his seat.

Bones loaded an ampule into his spray hypodermic. “This is similar to the antibiotic combination I gave to Jim,” he told BJ. He pressed the hypo to the kid’s neck. He loaded the next ampule into the device. “This is an anti-inflammatory. It should help with the headache and limit the damage. He should have a pretty good shot if these work.”

“Sir?” Radar said.

“Yes, Radar?” BJ said.

“Um.” Radar twisted the hem of his jacket in his hands. “Pete wants to know whether he’ll ever be able to talk again. If he doesn’t die.”

BJ nodded his acknowledgement to Radar, then turned to Pete. “I don’t know, Pete. There are some terrific surgeons in Tokyo. They can do wonders with these kinds of injuries.” If by some future science miracle the kid lived.

BJ pulled Bones aside. “What are his chances, you think?”

Bones shrugged. “Ask me in a couple of hours. Look, if Spock’s right, there’s a good chance the three of us are never going home. I’m a little pissed at the universe right now and giving that kid a fighting chance, even if it is against the rules…”

BJ leaned in. “Which kid do you mean?”

Bones took a minute to figure out what BJ meant, then, catching on, said, “Radar doesn’t need saving. Education, maybe.”

“Doctor, the Captain is awake,” Spock said.

Bones hurried back to Jim’s bedside. Spock already had one hand pressed onto Jim’s shoulder to keep him from trying to pop straight up out of bed. He had a history of doing so, according to Bones. Bones took Jim’s free hand. “Squeeze my hand if you understand me.”

Jim’s fingers tightened enough for BJ to see. He whispered something, coughed, swallowed, and tried again. “What happened?”

Spock answered for him. “You were injured by an explosive device. You had to have surgery. You have been unconscious for two days.”

Jim shifted in the bed. Bones pressed his hand to the shoulder Spock wasn’t holding down. “You have to lie still and stay calm while your chest heals.”

“The ship?” he said next.

McCoy sighed. “We’re not on the ship.”

“We have no reason to believe that the ship is under threat,” Spock added. “However, we do not have access to the ship at this time.”

Bones caught BJ’s eye. He gestured to a chair. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he told the doctor. BJ sat. Radar craned his neck forward, clearly hoping to hear. “You too, Radar,” McCoy added. Radar scooted his chair forward.

Jim’s eyes narrowed slightly in response to Spock’s words. He licked his lips, cleared his throat again, and said, “Mr. Spock, report.”

“Promise me you will lie still and permit me to assist you in remaining calm,” Spock said.

Jim licked his lips. “Agreed. What happened? Have we been kidnapped?”

“In a manner of speaking. We have been caught in a temporospatial dislocation. We are in a mobile army surgical hospital in Uijeongbu, Korea. It is April 20th, 1951 local dating system.”

The sigh that escaped the captain’s lips could be described as annoyed. “Again?”

“Indeed, Captain.” Spock’s voice was grim.

“You sound like you have more bad news.”

“It appears that we form the locus of a Grantville-Alexander dislocation. I am as yet uncertain as to whether we are residing in our home universe or a near parallel. This Earth is a duplicate orbiting HR 7783, three point six light years within the boundary of Klingon space in our time.”

“Grantville-Alexander. So, kidnapped. I see.” The captain took a moment to digest that information. He closed his eyes for a couple of breaths. “And we may have emerged next to Klingons. Recommendations?”

“My plan is to attempt to construct a subspace receiver to monitor traffic within the system. In addition, I hope to enlist the aid of a local clairvoyant to assess the level of threat.” He looked pointedly at Radar, who twitched uncomfortably, but recovered enough to offer the injured captain a wan smile and a wave. “At present, we must remain in Oijeongbu, as you cannot be moved in your condition.”

Radar turned to Spock to interrupt, “I don’t think I can do that,” in a harsh whisper.

“We will also have the subspace receiver. Do not be concerned.”

“How am I supposed to not be concerned now?” Radar said to BJ.

“Radar, you don’t have to try anything you’re not comfortable doing, right Spock?” Bones said, frowning in the direction of the alien.

“I merely expect you to report anything unusual you perceive, Corporal,” Spock explained.

Bones turned back to Kirk. “Given the technology I’ve had to work with and the severity of your injuries, it won’t be safe for you to be out of bed for at least a week, and will take several more for you to get your strength back.”

“I can’t lie around in bed for a week, Bones,” Jim countered. “Not if what you say is true.”

Bones shook his head, then turned to BJ. “Don’t expect thanks from this one. He thinks he’s unbreakable. The surgeons here saved both you and Spock. BJ, introduce yourself, would you?”

BJ leaned forward into Jim’s line of sight. “Doctor BJ Hunnicutt. Glad to see you awake. You had us pretty worried.”

“Spock.” Jim said. “You operated on Spock?”

“My friend Hawkeye operated on Spock.”

Jim turned to Spock. “Are you okay?”

Spock nodded. “I am recovering. However, I have suffered the loss of my right leg.”

“You cut off Spock’s leg?” Jim’s voice cracked.

“Jim, we had to,” Bones said. “It was a bad injury, and T-Negative isn’t exactly available on mid twentieth century Earth.”

Spock squeezed the captain’s hand, then brushed his hair out of his eyes. After a little over a minute, Kirk squeezed his eyes shut, then reopened them. They were shining. “Thank you for saving his life,” he said to BJ.

“You can give Hawkeye your thanks when you see him,” BJ said. He patted Kirk on the knee. Kirk nodded slightly.

He closed his eyes again, then opened them, turning his head slightly to look at Radar. “What’s your name, son?”

“Corporal Walter O’Reilly, sir, but folks call me Radar.”

“Good to meet you, Radar. I need a workspace here, Spock. Keep me apprised of everything you find out.”

Spock turned back to BJ and Bones. “Jim is fatigued.”

“That’s fine, he can sleep. How’s his pain?” Bones asked.

“Significant, but not unmanageable. I will remain with him.”

*

Jim awakened twice more during the early evening, for a little longer each time. Spock left him to scan the sky just after sunset, returning to discuss the results with his captain. The discussion had not been encouraging. Flagg did not return. Just after sundownt, BJ walked back to the Swamp to check on Hawkeye. Unlike the night before, the sky was full of stars.

Hawkeye sat outside on a folding chair looking up at them. “So that’s what they meant about the stars being wrong,” he told BJ.

BJ pulled up a camp stool, leaned back, and looked up, trying to find familiar constellations by the brightest stars. He found nothing familiar. It was as though the stars had been stirred.

“What about the other planets?” he asked.

Hawkeye shrugged. “I don’t see any. Moon’s there, though. Right where it belongs, so far as I can tell. Peace talks broke down of course. Russia’s blaming us.”

“It’s just an excuse to keep fighting. The alien, Spock, he took some measurements of the sky. We’ve moved. Three hundred and forty trillion miles. The star we’ve been assuming is the sun for the last couple of days? Not the sun.” The temperature had dropped, and a light wind ruffled BJ’s collar.

“That’s a long way to move a whole planet,” Hawkeye said. He squeezed BJs arm. “And we didn’t even notice.”

“We were kind of busy at the time.”

Another set of footsteps padded toward them. “Thought I’d take a look. See what all the fuss is about,” Potter said. He gazed up at the sky for a long moment. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“This have anything to do with our guests?” Hawkeye asked.

BJ shook his head. “Not in the sense that they made it happen or anything. But they did let me know what they’ve figured out so far.”

“Well, spill it, BJ. I’d like a chance to wrap my head around the situation before I talk with them again.” Once Potter’s eyes were on the sky, he couldn’t pull them away any more than Hawkeye could.

“Well, the short version is the Earth has been moved so it’s going around a different star in a different time. Spock took a second measurement of the positions of the stars and pinpointed the year. 2270. So a little over three hundred years from now. The same time, to within a few months, as they came from. If we’re in their universe, we’re in something called Klingon space.”

“Think they all wear dresses there?” Hawkeye quipped.

“I don’t know, but our guests didn’t sound happy to find out who our neighbors might be,” BJ said. “They’re an expansionist empire without a lot of concern for civilian populations.”

“Figures.” Hawkeye swept an arm across the night sky, taking it all in. “So somewhere out there is another Earth, except three hundred years ahead of us? I’d love to see that someday.”

“Wouldn’t that be something.” BJ agreed. He gripped Hawkeye’s forearm briefly, but pulled his hand back, thinking of Potter.

“Kirk’s awake,” BJ said. “Now there’s a man with presence. Can’t sit up. Can’t speak any louder than a whisper and he filled the whole room.”

“Good,” Potter told them. “He may have to.”

Potter leaned back in the camp chair, hands behind his head. “We’ve sat on this long enough. I’ve got to bring in some brass. I’m going to try to get General Clayton here ASAP, he’s got a decent head on his shoulders and he’s stationed in Seoul. And Sidney if I can. I suspect he might be a little busy right now.”

“General Park,” Hawkeye said.

“The South Korean?” Potter tapped his lip with one finger. “You know, that’s an excellent idea. BJ, try to figure out how we can include Kirk in the meeting without putting his recovery at risk. We may need to meet in Post-Op. Make sure Corporal Spock--we’ll keep up the charade until we have a chance to meet with a couple of generals--make sure he has a space to work and whatever materials he needs.”

“I think you’re just trying to keep busy,” Hawkeye said.

“Maybe I am. You got a better idea?” Potter chewed on his pipe, eyes still fixed on the foreign stars.

Hawkeye hauled himself to his feet. He raised one hand to his temple for a moment, but snapped it back to his side. “I’m going to have a glass of gin.”

“Oh no you’re not, not with a head injury.” BJ interrupted. “I’m taking you to bed.”

“Oh, are you?” Hawkeye said, the flirt in his tone undisguised, even though Potter was sitting right there. A sign of impairment?

“Head injury,” BJ muttered back at him. Potter excused himself with an exaggerated yawn. “See that he gets some rest,” Potter told BJ. “Likely to be another long day tomorrow. Bones has Post Op until midnight, then I’m on till 0600 hours.” He turned back toward his quarters and walked away.

“Let’s get you inside,” BJ said. He opened the door for Hawkeye to pass, then followed him in.

“Not going to sleep,” Hawkeye said.

“I know. You have to try.” BJ didn’t expect he’d sleep much either under the circumstances.

“Where’s Frank?”

BJ thought. “With Houlihan. Maybe this time he’ll stay there.” He was probably bemoaning the unfairness of a universe that failed to reward his bigotry.

“Bunk with me?” Hawkeye’s eyes were slightly pink and shining, and his hands betrayed a slight tremor. BJ caught him stealing a glance at, the carafe beside the still, but even Hawkeye wouldn’t risk mixing alcohol and brain injury.

BJ nodded, crossed the room to sit on the edge of Hawkeye’s cot, and pulled off his boots. “Course. If Frank comes in I’ll just tell him I’m keeping an eye on you.”

“You can keep an eye on me anytime,” Hawkeye said, wiggling his eyebrows and then wincing when the gesture pulled his stitches.

BJ chuckled. “You’re impossible. Now lie down.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” He lay down, stitches side down. “Ouch.”

“Turn over.” Hawkeye turned. BJ lay behind him, molding his body to Hawkeye’s back, one arm holding him snug.

Hawkeye nuzzled, but gingerly, under BJ’s chin. “That’s better. Feels nice.”

“Head injury.”

A soft, disappointed sigh “But if didn’t?”

BJ allowed himself the indulgence of an extra squeeze against Hawkeye’s back. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”