Work Text:
Omega IV And No Asprin
by Kelthammer
I'd kill for a simple asprin tablet.
No, that was a *very* bad choice of words. You saw Galloway cut down into particles by that fool Tracey. That boy would not think too kindly of your attitude.
It bothers me. I've got too many things to think about. Way too many. How did Chess feel when he made his last tape? If he hadn't, we'd all be dead. The effort it took him... I never met him. But Starfleet Medical is such a small, enclosed world. You finally meet somebody in person, you half-know 'em already. I met his brother once, at a convention on Alpha-C. Jay was so proud his Big Brother was the CMO of a starship. And the EXETER, no less. Who wouldn't be proud? Tracey's record was sterling. Until now.
I can't stop myself. While I watch myself work, I keep seeing him die. It's like a ghost living inside the mind, two things going on at once. That could too easily be me. I've felt real horror before, on the too many times I've been forced to believe the ENTERPRISE was in more trouble than it could get out of. When we lost the MEDICINE BOW last year, I felt sick. Romano was the CMO there. I knew *her*...she was a year older than me. Everybody said nothing could faze her, not even a torpedo going off behind her head. She split the CMO duties with Aki Ramen; a trial program. They were doing great. Will Starfleet just scrap the test now? I don't have to think what ran in their minds in the seconds before they died.
I already know.
It's not godhood that a CMO feels abject failure when the ship dies of some unknown disease, or attack by an enemy's superior firepower. Its responsibility. You can be responsible for something that you have no control over--people do it all the time. Now, sensibly, we know we can't expect a small staff making up less than 3% of the crew complement, to come up with the solutions every time, and that failure means we didn't try hard enough. But... We do what we can, and we appoint who we think--and hope--is the best for each ship. And we hope that "the best" means the ship can come home. So much hinges on that. We need the best captain, the best ship, and the best crew inside that ship. We also need commanders with at least two active brain cells and a strong sense of ethics. Its like a spider's web when you look at it: strong but easily broken. Because space is dangerous and its foolishness to act like things will never happen to you.
They pick a certain type of person to be a CMO or AMO. They want us to be older than the average age of the crew, whatever that age is (not too many kids operating the really dangerous ships, like the Nova Patrollers). They want us to feel protective, and have a fistful of metal on our chests, awards we earned from experience...a background that means we wouldn't misunderstand our CO. We need to know what makes the officers tick, and most officers, rightly enough, wouldn't respect or associate with a doctor who spent all his life in a lab and wouldn't know a combat situation. If a doctor disagreed with the captain strongly enough, it could create a wedge that would threaten the safety of the crew.
I might not like what Jim does in a given situation, but I've rarely tried to go over him. He thinks differently than I do; he has to. I *mentally* understand most of his decisions, but not always. He has a streak of idealism that's naive. Too smart by half, his history classes were confined to what he wanted to know. One of these days, I'll have to tell him his revered Abe Lincoln was actually against God, and his legal career was somewhat on the shady side...AND had some of his mother's ancestors hung by the neck for questionable reasons at the eve of the Civil War...
On the other hand, Jim's high beliefs are what keeps him strong. He needs something to look up to, or someone. Otherwise, he'd be somewhat flat and insipid. It's funny because people look up to him for the same reasons. They need somebody who won't let them down, and as far as his crew is concerned, he's the one. I patch them up, they confide in me, and on occasion, I put them together when they fall apart over some imagined disapproval from their captain. Spock and I KNOW the crew better than Jim does. Jim doesn't know a lot of people until weeks after they sign on, and when they die he obsesses about them. But Jim is absolutely vital to them. They don't seem to care if he gets their names wrong or doesn't see them for months on end. The fact that they're on HIS ship means he can trust them to do what's right. And they love it. It's that assumption of trust that they live for.
Of course, I trust him to get us OUT of this godawful mess...let's see...all we need to do is grab a communicator, or overthrow Tracey's little self-induced regime...Spock needs to avoid Tracey as much as possible. I know racial-based hatred when I see it. And Jim needs to watch out for that too--Tracey knows those two are best friends. He'd use it to his advantage.
I don't know who or what Tracey's trying to fool...Fountain of Youth, hah. Even if it DID exist, it wouldn't justify this mass extermination. And the Review Board would agree with me. If I survive this, I plan on scraping up every available doctor I can find, every xenopsychologist within 4 solar systems and I am going to HOGTIE that man with his own character flaws.
Assuming, of course, any of us do survive. My goal isn't survival so much as finding the answer. Just like Jay's going to know his brother's last act was to save our lives, buy us the time we needed to find as many of the answers as possible before we run out...
We're not like our captains and commodores and admirals. Your final moments, dissolving on the screen, might be a legacy that scares the laymen, but there's a part of us medicos that understand that, and accept that. And we even accept knowing that such moments will wind up in the libraries of medicine, a subject for student research.
But I hope this doesn't happen to us.
***
I'm lucky I still have a hand. Tracey sure can pick 'em. And it started out crazy enough. Plotting viral chains is not for the faint hearted, and mix that with glycoproteins, the mechanism of which is unique to every living individual, but I have to assume the tissue samples are a full example of-- --anyway, I'd thought at first, *I* was the one snoring. I'd been thinking about sleep. When I wasn't trying to bury my everpresent worry about Jim and Spock between the sidelines of all this Enforced Mental Activity. Sleep would get rid of this headache.
I got depressed in a hurry when I realized I was letting my brain flip through 5 different subjects, one after the other: Infection/Exeter/Insane Tracey/Jim and Spock/sleep. Infection/Exeter/Insane Tracey/Jim and Spock/Sleep. Hate might be a strong word, but I certainly do not like this fur-clad, sword swinging ape. But that's only fair. He doesn't like me either. Definite parlay of dislike going on here. He was just pretending to be asleep; I wasn't making any noise, but as soon as I touch the communicator--WHAM! That oversized filleting knife comes down on the table, way too close to my fingers for comfort. Guess it was silly to just keep on going and pretend I was reaching for the phial next to it, but I could tell he was wanting me to lose it. Cry and whimper, I suppose. Broke my heart to disappoint him. I don't like to think what would happen if Tracey was gone...or decided I was cost-ineffective.
***
Back to the grind. I'm more tired than I thought. It just occurred to me that these tissue samples aren't final. All the natives' tissues, they're different from the rest of us. Spock's is the most interesting--usually is, although I usually choose another word when I'm telling him about it. I wish we'd had at least decent images of the extinct viral cultures from the bacteriological wars. "Dirty bombs" they called it. God. As if you could make an ugly word even uglier. When they found the cures for those bugs, they took the following step of eradicating all forms of it. If I remember right, trillions of livestock were slaughtered worldwide, incinerated, because they could contaminate humans. Too late for a lot of them--whole populations vanished without a trace. Right off the map--some of those germs were short-lived but volitile, able to devour anything carbon within hours. Almost like the old influenza outbreaks in ancient history, whole families found dead in their house, only it was worse; there'd be *nothin* left behind. Not even a trace. A virus isn't supposed to devour calcium, for heaven's sake!
That was one reason why the Diaspora hit so strongly; with so much of their history--and family--gone, a lot of humans didn't see the use in sticking around. Another planet sounded better, with the chance to start anew. With the soil they either sterilized it, or introduced hostile mycelium colonies. It took centuries, and by then, a lot of people had already acquired immunity. There was no way they could really clean out the warmer climates; and as for the far north...who knows what's still out there, suspended in the ice ready to thaw out?
I remember that most of the Diaspora came from urban populations; the cities had the highest mortality rate. Nobody knows why the rural families didn't get hit as hard.
When I asked--well, demanded--tissue samples from everybody, I also meant the so-called savages Tracey was going to execute. And I don't see any of them here. I'm sure Tracey would say they're too dangerous and can't be restrained long enough for a simple cell excision, but I'm not going to swallow that. He has the phasers, for god's sake. And he'd have a lot more of them if he used the STUN setting over the KILL. The next time I see him, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind. He's crazy, but he's not--quite--stupid enough to ask Sulu to send down another physician to take my place. Sulu can accept a lot of strange things, but he has a healthy sense of suspicion. I'm starting to get a bad feeling. It all hinges on the savages. They're playing a role I don't understand, because I don't have all the information yet. "Go with your instincts," they tell us when we're dealing with a patient, but when we're faced with a crime scene and a corpse, they say, "assume nothing." Spock has no idea how funny he sounds when he calls me contraidictory.
So, while I'm looking at the Kohms' tissue signatures, I'm forced to assume they might not be identical to the Yangs'. Our cells are not the same as the Kohms'. The cellular matrix is much different. Kohm cells have two types of Leukocytes that we don't have, and are designed for a lot more punishment. I wouldn't be at all surprised that this is why they live so long. I even split one, and watched while the cell repaired itself. Then I split it again. The cell put up with that treatment four times before it started to break down. No power in this Universe could make a human's body do that.
Big Boy is starting to seriously annoy me. He just stands there, at stance, and he's waiting for me to screw up again. God, I hope that wasn't a relative of his I was smiling at. A sister or cousin.
Sometimes, all a doctor can do is play detective. But I don't have enough pieces. It makes things worse that I KNOW what I need, but I can't get it until I can get ahold of Tracey. He won't like hearing that I have to have samples off the Yangs. ALIVE samples, thank you very much. I'd almost enjoy upsetting him with that.
I need to work with what I've got.
***
Morning came slowly to Omega IV. The dark sub-surface room began to pale along the edges of the barred windows. The heavy wooden door of the makeshift lab creaked behind its guard.
The Kohm thought he detected a slight scratching sound, when it happened again. He turned suspiciously, and opened the door just in time to see the Offworlder in yellow stop in the middle of a dash. His reflexes spoke for him, and he lunged, weapon raised, his neck falling neatly under Spock's neck pinch.
His eyes saturated with the blue light of the scope, McCoy heard a shuffling and a clinking behind him. Figuring it was about time, he tured over his shoulder to see the Kohm hustled inside between the help of the captain and first officer.
"Oh, good morning, Jim," he said, and went back to his work.
FINI