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It was hot.
God, had he ever been this hot?
“ Enter— ...aptain Kirk…. ead?”
Huh?
Jim Kirk shifted and froze immediatiely as pain shot through his legs. He opened his eyes to a dark, hazy scene that might be a shuttlecraft, and his mind started filling in blanks.
Renondapha. He hated brokering peace treaties.
“We will never capitulate to their demands, Captain Kirk of the Federation,” the ruler of the Maddina had growled. They looked like humans, except for the extra arms and purple eyes.
Her Minni counterpart was equally adamant. Minni were pink-skinned and had only two arms a piece, but no noses. “Our demands are no more than we deserve,” he averred. “She and her kind are simply too slow-minded to understand them.”
“How dare you insult my people, Markoosi!”
“It is no insult if it is true, Pottoo Ma’o’a.”
It sort of went downhill from there, despite Jim pulling out every sincere and earnest tool in his arsenal. Chancellor Ma'o'a had actually apologized to him for the breakdown in talks.
How he got from the doomed negotiations to sitting in a crashed shuttlecraft, though, he wasn’t exactly clear. The shuttle was nose-first into something—he had vague memories of steering toward a low hill—and the deck was sloped toward the front end and canted slightly sideways. The light filtering in from the half-buried and cracked windshield was dim, but enough to see that this ship wasn't flying again any time soon. It was time to go.
“ Enterprise , this is Kirk, do you read?” He knew his voice was rough and too quiet, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. And it was met with deafening silence. “ Enterprise, please respond.”
Well, this is just great, he grumbled silently, Bones’s voice providing the soundtrack. The doctor had been predictably pessimistic about this mission.
"The Maddina and the Minni haven't agreed on the color of their sun in two hundred years," he'd declared testily. "Even that patented Kirk charm is going to have a hard time making this one work."
Jim hated when Bones was right.
He tried to move again and bit off a cry of agony as his left leg sent a shot of lightning directly into his brain, setting off a minor fire in his side on the way past. His right leg ached, but it moved, thank God.
He blinked, trying to clear his eyes, and stared dumbly at the way his leg was trapped under the crushed-in main console of the shuttlecraft. The side console showed he had minimal battery power. The environmental controls weren’t up to keeping the interior livable—it was an oven. He felt like he was thinking through sludge, like his brain had already melted, even before he woke up.
Oh, and he was hungry, too, because neither sentient species that inhabited Renondapha had a digestive tract close enough to a human’s to make the food safe. He was only supposed to be here for a day at most. Normally, the protein pack he’d eaten as he piloted the shuttle down to the planet’s single spaceport would have held him for that long.
Except that, whatever their differences, all Renondaphans liked to eat when they negotiated. It was the one cultural trait they shared. Ten hours of watching everyone in the room enjoying a leisurely meal or four and he was almost ready to ignore the warnings about the planet’s toxic food. He didn't know how long it had been since the crash, but it must have been a while, because at this point, he was ready to gnaw off that trapped and messed up leg of his.
Last thing he remembered was being asked to leave the failed talks and return to the safety of his ship before hostilities could break out again. His chrono was busted, but it felt like it had been a long time. And God, he felt like a dried out husk. This had to be the worst planet they’d ever been sent to. The daytime temperature was a sweltering 42 to 44 degrees Celsius, and those days were 34 Earth hours long.
“— rise. Do....” The voice that burst unevenly over comms might have been Uhura’s, but the static made it hard to tell.
Because there was the whole business with the magnetic storms that had plagued this area of space for the last week or more—since shortly before the Enterprise had arrived, of course—and wreaked havoc with transporters and communications… Or it was the crash itself, destroying his ability to communicate with anybody. Pike was getting an earful when he got back— if he got back.
Okay, that last was clearly Bones talking, so Jim tried to shove the pessimism to one side and formulate a plan. The console in front of him was scrap now, and he hoped his leg wasn’t in similar shape. He should probably worry that he couldn’t tell, but for now, he was trapped and probably in shock and that kept the pain from being unbearable, so he needed to go with what he had while he had it. He reached out to the relatively undamaged side console and found the switch for the emergency beacon, and thanked God when it actually lit.
All right , he thought. One thing done.
Next, he tried to twist and get a look at the rest of the shuttle to see what he had to work with. There had to be some way to get this thing off his leg— Bad idea. Really bad idea. His leg, side, and head protested and he was suddenly so dizzy he was pretty sure he was going to throw up.
I’ll just wait on that.
It took a long moment for the spell to pass, and he was left shaking when it did. His heart was beating hard in his chest and the heat was killing him. Maybe literally, he thought wryly. And damn it, there went Bones again!
Leonard McCoy was this weird mixture of determination to prevail no matter the circumstances and certainty that the world was going to end any second now in some really horrible way. Jim always sort of rejected the world-ending scenario, so it was weird to feel so… fatalistic?
He took a deep breath of the hot, oppressive air, and reopened the channel to the ship, pretty sure that, since he couldn’t hear them, they couldn’t hear him. But damn it, he was going to try. So there, Bones.
“ Enterprise , this is Kirk,” he said slowly and clearly. “If you can hear me, I have activated the emergency beacon.” Memories came to him as he spoke, the last of the holes in his short-term memory closing up. “My shuttle was brought down in the crossfire of an air skirmish.” He lowered his voice. “And the Renondaphans suck at negotiations.”
“...stood, Captain.” Okay, that was clearly Uhura, worried and relieved, but efficient as always. And at least part of what he’d said had been heard. “—ott is attem… beam… to assess—”
Jim sighed as the transmission dissolved into static. At least they were working on it up there.
There were days—like, when he was trapped in a shuttlecraft that had been shot down in a fight between two peoples he’d completely failed to help find peace—that he wondered why he did this. And whether he was cut out for it.
Okay, where is this coming from?
“Keep your gloom and doom to yourself, Bones,” he kvetched to the air.
He was good at his job. It wasn’t his fault the Renondaphans weren’t cut out to share the same planet… Actually, that was an idea. He should check with Spock and see if there was another planet in a nearby system. One of the civilizations could relocate—they’d both moved to this planet in the last four generations. And they probably wouldn’t wage war against each other from a planetary system away.
Maybe.
He sat still for a long moment with his eyes closed and tried not to pass out from the heat that seemed to be inside him as much as outside. Where the hell had he crashed? And how was the Enterprise going to find him with their sensors muddled by the magnetic storms? Though between them, Scotty and Chekov could...
“Stay awake, Jim,” Bones commanded.
Jim’s eyes snapped open as he shook himself from a doze. He peered through the dim haze.
"Bones?"
McCoy was nowhere to be found, but the voice hadn't been over comms. Bones could have been sitting in the ruined copilot's seat from the sound of it.
“Okay…” Jim whispered. “That’s probably not good.” Hearing people who weren't there was not good when you were in danger of cooking to death. Having Bones-like thoughts in his head was one thing. Having a hallucination of the man actually talking to him was a whole different thing.
God, it was hot. Too hot. If he was actually here, Bones would be telling him to drink, wouldn't he? Why hadn't he thought of that before?
Moving slowly, so he wouldn’t set off any of the many pains in his battered body, he reached over to the nearby bulkhead and mentally crossed his fingers as he pried open the small locker marked "supplies."
“Yes!” He removed one of the emergency bottles of water and grunted as cracking it open proved more difficult than it should be. He reached back into the cabinet and dug around as much as he could, but failed to come up with any food packs at all.
“At least you won’t die of dehydration,” Bones said approvingly as Jim sipped at the water. “Your brain’ll boil first.”
Jim closed his eyes, opened them again, and sighed when his best friend wasn’t magically there. Of course he isn’t, he thought bitterly. He’s safe on the ship. Probably having dinner. Still, Jim was all alone. Might as well talk to someone, right? “I’ll probably die of starvation before either of those,” he pointed out.
Invisible Bones snorted. “It’s only been a day.”
“Uh huh,” Jim replied. Invisible Bones just didn’t get it, with his pessimism and his imaginary dinner…
Okay, definitely not good. Maybe his brain was baked already.
“No, you’ve probably got another hour or so before the heat in here puts you in real trouble,” Bones told him. “Scotty’ll get you out before then.”
“Finally, some optimism,” Jim told the hallucinatory voice. “You know, you might be even more negative when you’re imaginary.”
“I’m a realist, Jim,” the voice said. “If I were being negative, I’d point out that, even if you do survive at this point, you’ll probably lose some function in that leg.”
Jim had to admit, that might be a problem. He couldn't feel his foot, his thigh burned constantly, and the console really was just crushed to Hell around the trapped limb. That should probably worry him more than it did.
"It's the heat," Bones explained. "Casts a whole unreality on the situation."
"Because you're somehow so real?"
"I'm not real at all, Jim. That's kind of the point, isn’t it? To provide you with a voice of reason?"
" Spock is a voice of reason. You're just a voice of doom."
"Doom's inevitable, Jim," Invisible Bones responded. "You know that."
“Look, I can go back to sleep!” Jim argued. And stopped immediately, because he was arguing with no one . He took another long drink of water, just to prove he could take care of himself—and promptly threw the whole thing up.
“Great!” he hollered, because no one was here to hear him. He tried to lean forward to remove his sodden command shirt and gasped at the pain in his side. “Now I need a new shirt.”
“Again?” Invisible Bones said, sarcasm thick in the turgid air.
Jim laid his head back and closed his eyes. “Shut up.”
“Jim?” Invisible Bones sounded really far away. And a little like he was talking through plastic. Or something.
“Just go away.” Jim was tired of imaginary doctors. God, he felt like crap. Had he slept? He must have slept.
“Believe me, I’d like to. But when I go, I’m taking you with me.”
Jim tried to open his eyes. His eyelids were stuck together, though, and he didn’t have the strength to pull them apart. Something touched his lips, and he jerked away.
“Come on, Jim, drink this.”
Jim drank the thing that didn’t taste at all like water, damn it, and immediately wished he hadn’t. “I’m warning you, I may throw up on you.” He wasn’t kidding, either.
“Don’t throw up,” the Bones who talked through plastic said. Invisible Bones was usually easier to understand. Something nudged lightly at his arm, and he felt a tiny bit more alert. Hypospray...
His brain worked hard to figure out what might have changed since he fell asleep, and came up with a weird hypothesis. Jim pried his eyes open painfully and looked up through a haze of heat. Yep. The real McCoy. He grinned drunkenly at the silent joke. “You’re… wavy.”
“Fabulous,” Bones griped. Then he shrugged. “Well, I’d rather have you delirious than unconscious.”
“‘M not delirious.” And he wasn’t. Was he?
“Just drink, Jim,” Bones counseled, putting the bottle to his lips again.
“I’m gonna throw up,” he repeated. He thought he’d made that very clear.
“You’re not,” Bones said, like saying it made it true. “You can’t. Jim, look. Your fever is 40.5, you’re severely dehydrated, and if you throw up again, you’re going to ruin more than another shirt.” He took on that tone that just courted catastrophe. “You’ve already started cooking your organs. No need to finish the job.”
Jim swallowed a little more of whatever it was Bones was giving him and another hypospray hit him, but didn’t seem to do much. “I really feel shitty,” he might have whined. A little.
“Better than the alternative,” Bones snapped back, distracted.
“I thought you said ‘doom was inevitable,’” Jim pointed out.
“What?” Bones looked in his eyes carefully. Probably looking for his mind. “Of course doom’s inevitable. Doesn’t mean you have to just give in to it.”
Huh. Yeah. Made sense. Was the air getting thicker?
“Why aren’t we in the med bay?” Jim asked, panting. “It’s really hard to breathe in here.”
“I know,” Bones answered, comforting but stressed. “Your heart’s pumping too damn fast. The meds I’ve given you should hold you until Scotty can boost the transporter enough to beam us both out.”
Jim nodded at that. Or tried to. Instead, his entire upper back and neck seemed to seize up tight. He groaned in pain, and Bones was right there.
“What’s going on, Jim,” he said intensely. “Talk to me.”
“Back. Seized up all of a—” And then his jaw clamped shut and every muscle he had was twitching so hard he was sure he’d break bones. More bones.
“Bones…?”
“Jim?” The voice receded even as it became more urgent. “Jim!”
The world narrowed to the feeling of being electrocuted, but Jim still heard, dimly and through that same plastic, his best friend, sounding panicked and controlled in a way only Leonard McCoy could ever master.
"You die on me, Jim, I swear to God I'll drag your carcass back to the ship and bring you back to life myself."
Jim would have smiled if his lips would obey him.
Inevitable, my ass…
********
“You know there’s every chance we’re gonna get our asses handed to us, right?”
Jim had smiled. Bones walked into every situation with a healthy dollop of doom. So unnecessary.
“It’ll be fun, Bones.”
McCoy shook his head and walked into the bar anyway. “I die, it’s on your head.”
“If I die,” Jim shot back, “remember to use your amazing healing powers for good, all right?”
Jim slid into wakefulness and took a long moment to figure himself out. His mind felt clear, though he had an idea it hadn’t been before. He remembered Bones, and Invisible Bones, and the shuttlecraft.
“You’ll probably lose function in that leg.”
Jim flexed his quads experimentally.
“God damn— ”
“Don’t do that,” Bones’s voice cut across the excruciating pain as Jim’s leg seized up on him.
Jim snapped his eyes open and glared at the mocking face above him. “Go to Hell,” he sputtered. Though he almost forgave the doctor when McCoy put a hypospray to his neck and the medication began to take the edge off the pain immediately.
“I already went to Hell,” Bones countered. “Dragged you out of it, too, seizing all the way.” The words were the usual flip, but Jim heard a current of recent panic in them. Bones’d get over it, though—he always did. Lucid now, Jim wondered if the man didn’t just live in a constant state of pessimism because he could then point out all the things that didn’t go colossally wrong, and make himself feel better.
“Yeah,” Jim whispered, voice still sore. “Thanks for that.”
“Thank Scotty,” Bones replied, studying some readout or other above Jim’s head. He looked back into Jim’s eyes. “But don’t ever ask me to beam through a class-D magnetic storm again, all right?” He shuddered. “Damn lucky I have all my bits attached.”
Jim nodded, trying to lift his head and look at his leg.
“You have all yours attached, too,” Bones assured him. “Though I think Scotty got gray hairs trying to separate your signal from the shuttlecraft’s.” He patted Jim’s shoulder and his voice softened. “You’ll be fine. With a little rest.”
“And your amazing healing powers,” Jim replied with a grin. He lay there silent a moment, just thinking. “The Renondaphans?”
Bones sighed. “The Minni high council has taken responsibility for the strike that brought you down,” he told him. Then he grinned. “The Maddina, too.”
Huh.
“They both feel so bad about nearly killing ‘the selfless Federation representative whose only goal was to help our two sides find common ground’ that they’ve called another ceasefire and are asking—again—for Federation arbitration.”
Jim shook his head, exhausted all over again. “Next time I’m bringing more snacks,” he mumbled, eyes closing.
“There’s not going to be a next time,” Bones assured him, something in his voice causing Jim to open his eyes and look up at him. “Spock made it abundantly clear that the Federation would try to send someone else— anyone else—as soon as possible.” He smirked. “Then he high-tailed it out of the system.”
Jim smiled and let his eyes close again. “He’s a good man, Spock.”
“If you say so,” Bones griped, that irascible affection he had for their resident Vulcan clearly evident.
Jim chuckled. “You’re a good man, too, Bones,” he assured his friend. “Now… Do you have anything to eat ?”
******
the end