Star Trek: The Original Series: The More Things Change by Scott Pearson Page A

Shifting her gaze to the engineering feeds on the other half of the monitor, Chapel saw graphs, various colored lines zigzagging, numbers flashing, red and green bars. Nothing made sense; her mind was unfocused, like it was elsewhere, like she was a reflection in a mirror with no substance of her own. Somewhere deep in this fog of jumbled sensations, there was something else, something solid, insistent, grounding. Her impression of this coalesced into a single word, a plea for help from out of the darkness: Christine  . . .
    Reality rushed into hard-edged focus around her. She staggered as if dropped onto the deck from meters in the air. Alarms jangled, slicing through the cabin, setting her teeth on edge.
    “Spock!” She rushed to the cockpit door, which didn’t open. Chapel banged on the manual controls mindlessly, then stopped to actually look at the display. Cabin pressure was decreasing slowly in the forward compartment. Luckily it wasn’t serious enough to block the override command she entered.
    She dashed into the cockpit. Spock was facedown deep in the crawlspace—she could only see his legs, which lay there limp, lifeless. No, this is not happening! Chapel grabbed him by the ankles and pulled. He’s only unconscious. I know he’s still alive. I’d feel it if . . . if he were gone. His body slid out until she could see the small of his back, then came to a sudden halt. Another tug brought no progress. She crawled over him, lying on top of his body, so she could peer into the dark crawlspace beneath the deck. As her eyes adjusted, she could see that the left sleeve of his uniform was caught on a ruptured conduit. Chapel reached up alongside him and got her hand on his sleeve. She could feel a bunch of fabric gathered along the tip of the conduit, the threads of a hole torn through the uniform, the damp warmth of blood where her efforts to pull him out had caused the conduit to slice into his triceps.
    “Dammit!” She focused her anger into one ferocious tug on the sleeve, which tore away from the conduit. After pushing his arm closer to his body, she moved down to his feet again and pulled him the rest of the way out more slowly. It was an accomplishment, but there was no time for celebrating yet. Grabbing Spock under his arms, she half lifted, half rolled him up onto the deck. She had made a mess of his neatly arranged supplies beside the access panel, but she found a couple of emergency sealing packets and tossed them into the crawlspace. She dragged him farther out of the way, near the starboard hatch, then wrestled the access panel back into place by herself.
    Her body trembling from effort and adrenaline, Chapel hurried into the aft cabin to grab a medkit. She spared a quick glance at Dax’s vitals, which were still stable, then she went back to Spock. Chapel dropped down to sit on the deck beside him. She pulled Spock up across her lap so that she could cradle his head in her left arm while she scanned him. Dull green blood ran from his upper lip—probably another injury she’d caused while yanking his unconscious body from the crawlspace—and the scan showed his oxygen levels were low. His left arm was still bleeding from the laceration, but no major blood vessels had been cut. She gave Spock a shot of tri-ox with the hypospray from the medkit and kept him cradled in her arms.
    He looked a little pale, and she placed her hand upon his forehead. As soon as her palm touched his skin, she felt a burst of jumbled thoughts. She couldn’t tell if they were hers or his. Maybe her perceptions were still turned outward by the experience of channeling the symbiont bond; maybe that and her familiarity with Spock, the time she’d held him in her mind, combined to jump-start a link. She blinked rapidly, disoriented, as bursts of his confused emotions filled her mind. The singular friendship he felt for Kirk, the tangled camaraderie shared by him and McCoy, his loyalty toward the crew . . . And then