Chapel and Priest: Husks part 16 and 17
Sixteen: Don't underestimate the things that I will do
Along with Charlie, McCoy joined Spock in the basement, and as the transporter brought his ghost-limbs back to him, he smelled the familiar antiseptic of a hospital ward. Six-bedded, one was occupied and two had curtains drawn about them so he couldn't tell if they housed anyone. After a brief scan of the room, he could see no observation cameras. All three of them ducked behind the fabric on one of the curtained beds. “Spock, that long wall -- one-way glass, do you think? Are we being watched?”
“Affirmative, Doctor; shall I investigate?”
“Please do.” Their hidey-hole by an unconscious patient was a relief. He had no wish to watch Spock's bony ass as he crawled away on all fours, just in case they hadn't been spied yet. Many, many beings in New Glasgow would love to see the Vulcan on his hands and knees. Like Chekov, Spock's interrogation technique - who was he kidding, seduction technique - was a sure thing, except with Chekov witnesses handed him soup and cookies. With Spock, they dropped secrets, and underwear. Charlie called him Mata Hari.
“This is weird.” Charlie whispered; she'd peeled back the sheet on the patient's upper torso to expose an attractive young woman in her early twenties, although on this planet she could be a hundred and five.
Even to McCoy, she looked familiar. “I know her... I think, or someone who looks like her big sister.”
Charlie was bent double, examining the woman's upper arm. “She looks a hell of a lot like Felicity Angel.”
“That actress with twelve children? The one who does ambassadorial work for Tarsus?” He surprised even himself.
“She's got nine kids, and she's an ambassador for Cardassia Prime. It’s OK, see Doc? You're catching on. But where are her tattoos? Tell me that. And honestly, to me, she looks a little heavy.”
“Heavy? What in tarnation are you talking about? She looks like about a hundred and five pounds.” To him, the girl looked fine, she could probably stand to put on another twenty-five pounds to better effect.
“Let's scan her, find out what her story is.” From his belt, he pulled the small scanner and ran it over the body. “Interesting, very interesting.” He mused, staring into space for a few seconds.
“What? Come on!” Charlie hissed, and hopped lightly from foot to foot, her eyes wide.
“In the last 48 hours she's had a breast reduction and rhinoplasty. Internal scar-tissue will be gone in another day or so. But do you want to hear something really creepy?” Charlie nodded yes, get on with it. “Her fingers and toes have been broken at each bone, and lengthened by a few millimetres.”
Charlie looked up at him. “This is some weird fetish, isn't it? She's an FA.”
“Would you go to the lengths of getting your toes done? Who would know? You'd have to be totally off the planet to do that. Even professional lookalikes don't do that. This looks more like a doppelgänger designed to fool those very, very close to the person. She's...” McCoy couldn't believe what he was about to say, “...had a bit of a trim elsewhere as well. She'd probably fool someone very close.”
“What?” Charlie took a moment to catch on, “Oh!” She looked towards the sleeping woman's crotch. “But why do they need to fool them? Anyway, she's too young to fool someone if it is supposed to be her.”
“I've no idea, I'm just an old country doctor. This is completely out of my area. Perhaps she's not finished?”
“We've got to find Scotty, he must have rumbled something. He's probably tied up somewhere in back.” McCoy grunted in the affirmative, and got the shock of his life when Spock's head popped through the curtains. “Spock, you Vulcan spectre! I thought you were security.”
“Security has been neutralised.” He used the same tone another person might use to say 'I've put a cup of tea on the counter for you,' but McCoy knew neutralised - such a benign word - could mean a lot of things.
“What happened, Spock?”
“On the other side of the glass partition I discovered a youth in a lab-coat wearing ear-buds at high volume, and playing a multi-player game. I believe it was HALO, series one-hundred-and-twenty, part seventeen. I confess the premise of faster-than-light travel in the original iteration was innovative, and a shrewd prediction - for the time.”
“Will you shut up about the game, Spock. What happened?”
“I nerve-pinched him. It was difficult to ascertain any difference between the before and after states.”
“So we're in the clear?” Lord the Vulcan could talk, and at the most inappropriate times.
“Unknown.”
Charlie had the patient's arm in her hand, and was examining the fingers with morbid fascination. She dropped the arm. “Right, are you ladies done? We need to find Scotty. I hate him right now but I don't want him hurt... much.”
The patient drew Spock's attention. “This woman is an ambassador for Cardassia Prime.”
Dispirited that even Spock knew what Charlie was talking about, McCoy grumbled, “Apparently, but she's really a surgically-enhanced FA, as far as we can tell.”
“What is her condition?”
“A very deep, drug-induced sleep. I have stims, we could wake her.”
The Pocket-Rocket became animated, “To do what? Ask why she's obsessed with Felicity Angel, or for her to be scared out of her wits that someone knows about her? She could have been coerced, or worse. Don't do that, please. She might not even know. Mister Spock, can't you look inside her mind? It's an invasion, but it's better than waking her up. Please?”
What Charlene said was true, how could he not see it? This girl could be Joanna in another life; scared, broke and broken, willing to go ahead with any scheme some deadbeat boyfriend suggested. Girls like her, they came expecting fame, fortune, and bright lights. Oftentimes what they got was infamy, poverty and the bright lights of a mortuary slab.
“She is unable to offer consent.” The Vulcan steepled his fingers in contemplation.
“Spock! We have to find Scotty. It might help.” Thoughts of his no-longer-a-baby girl made McCoy snippy.
With reluctance, the Vulcan stepped into the theatre created by drapes and bright hospital lights. A dark master of ceremonies, he raised an arm, and in increments that seemed to take minutes, lowered it.
McCoy had never seen a Vulcan do this before, and for the first time, the sight of Spock's face was fully alien. Despite protestations to the contrary, there was always a humanity in the Vulcan's features. Above the girl's face, slim fingers flexed, pulled by sinew and tendon; they swayed in a seaweed dance, caught beneath the surface, then drifted onto the girl's face. A minute passed, and Spock was silent. As an adolescent, McCoy's grandmother took him to church, and he felt reverence, despite his agnosticism. This was a reverential moment and he felt shame for his grouching.
Two minutes passed. Charlie skirted the perimeter of the bed and put her arm about the Vulcan's shoulders; his hand slipped from the girl's skin. Seconds ticked by and McCoy felt dread. What was going on? Dumbstruck by propriety and respect, he couldn't ask and instead, walked round to take Charlene's place at the opposite side of the bed.
A single tear tracked down Spock's face. “She is a husk. Her mind is gone.”
“You're saying she's,” thoughts of Joanna clouded his professional demeanour, and his voice became loud, not caring about discovery, “unable to function in this state?”
There was no answer. Charlie's tiny hand wiped Spock's cheek, and she hugged him tight. His response was to allow it, an action McCoy never imagined from the Vulcan. They were the hybrid brother and sister, suffering at every ignorant fool's clumsy hands. A change of mood and morale was essential.
“We need to find Scotty so I can be first in line to give him a good ol' southern lickin'. With your permission, Ma'am.” A half smile twisted on Charlie's lips “There you go, that's better! Let's see who the rest of these folks are.”
**
An Orion woman occupied the other bed and McCoy brushed her forehead with his hand, pushing back a stray black lock. Only base brain functions displayed on his tricorder. She could breathe, and with electrical stimulation, probably walk and perform simple motor tasks, but anything more complex, without a mind, was impossible.
“You know her?” asked Charlie.
“She's Gaila's friend. I knew her; once. She looked the same, she hasn't been altered.” That night in the bar, she was sturdy and strong; here, in the bio-bed, she looked like she'd gone ten rounds in the ring, her neck and jaw bruised.
“Why haven't they altered her? Is she new here?”
“She was a mute, her voice-box was damaged as a child, possibly even deliberately, as a mark of subservience. I'd say at five years old by the scanner readings. See these trails beneath her skin? Like veins, but too narrow? They're regen-conduits. Her voice-box is being regenerated, hence the bruising. She'll have a voice for the first time since she was five, but her own memories are gone. Whatever makes that voice-box work, it won't be her. They're probably waiting for that to mend first.” He pressed the scanner to the woman's throat. “It's fully regenerated now, finished a couple of hours back.” To McCoy's horror, a tear clung to his eyelashes, then splashed onto the woman's clavicle, exposed by the folded sheet. Uncaring, he brushed it away and bent to kiss her shoulder, then covered her up to the chin.
If he switched off the body's life-support it had to be with the knowledge that her mind wasn't still stored elsewhere. Until conclusive evidence turned up to say these minds were irrevocably erased, it was essential to keep these husks alive.
What in heaven could be the motivation for such a foul process? These people had physical presence, but what was done to them was murder, as surely as if they had been shot. McCoy mulled over the political and legal implications of lobbying to introduce yet another murder charge on New Glasgow. At least with this crime, they had a body. His thoughts were interrupted by silence; the room was too quiet. Distracted from his examination of the Orion, he glanced up to see Charlie at the other curtained bed, frozen, her hand still on the drape she'd drawn back.
Scotty.
What happened next would be burned on McCoy's brain for the rest of his life.
**
A swish alerted them to the opening of the ward doors, and the trio looked up to see a stocky male orderly step through, reading a plasti-film chart, brows drawn down. He looked as if thinking would always be a bother to him. Distracted, his head rose, chin wobbling, and the stopped-breath silence of mutual discovery took over the scene. For milliseconds, each person in the tableau was caught in amber, until the orderly's hand rose, shaking and slow, towards a red button at the frame of the doors. In his peripheral vision, McCoy saw Charlene's arm lift.
A phaser blast hit the man's hand and he crumpled to his knees, sheet-white and clutching his wrist, allowing the plasti-film to cut through the air and float over the floor to McCoy's feet.
A hand. Its mechanics were simple engineering. A child could replicate them with twine, buttons and drinking straws. For the second time that night, McCoy contemplated bone, sinew, muscle and skin; he could see it all now in a real-life anatomy lesson. Where the phaser hit, flesh disintegrated in onion-skin layers to below the first finger-joint, revealing grotesque white bone. The orderly gazed at his half-flayed digits, cauterised and bloodless. Without the cohesion of cartilage and tendon, the phalanges were disarticulated; they teetered for a second then fell to the ground with the bounce of dice on baize.
Whimpering, the man scrabbled in frantic panic for his bones, gathered them up with his good hand and shoved them into the pocket of his lab-coat, his movements robotic with shock. Once the bones were secure, he appeared to return to his senses, eyes darting about the scene. Another second passed in which his eyes grew huge and his chin dropped. It was an expression McCoy knew only too well; his daughter Joanna wore it as a toddler. It was that precious moment where distraction was vital, before a fallen child screamed bloody murder, and the neighbours started hammering on the ceiling.
McCoy whipped out his own phaser and stunned the man. Today was not a good day to be nicknamed 'Bones' and he wondered how long it would take to erase the memory of a grown man collecting up parts of his own skeleton like dropped coins.
“Charlie, what in the name of Gorn was that? I nearly saw my dinner for the second time tonight.” Charlene was trembling, her arm still raised. McCoy rested two light fingers on her forearm until she lowered the phaser so it pointed to the floor. “Let's not use that one again, shall we? I don't wanna be walkin’ around with a hole shot clean through my chest.” He prised the phaser from her still-shaking hand and disarmed it, before examining the settings. They were mostly normal: D (disarmed); S (stun); K (kill) and one, unfamiliar setting: C. “Can you talk, sweetheart?”
With whispered, hesitant words, she explained; “Scotty hot-wired my phaser. He told me only to use it in extreme danger, when I wanted to really mess with someone's head.”
“Well you sure did that, Charlie, you messed with my head. Don't do that again. Did you know that was gonna happen?”
Charlene's eyes were huge, glued to the weapon in her hand, “I d-didn't, I - I swear on Starfleet, I didn't. Scotty...”
There were more important things to worry about. McCoy stooped to pick up the medical chart, and they crossed the few feet to the Scotsman's bed. Spock was there before them, his fingers splayed on Scotty's face, head lowered. Charlene, tears streaming down her face, went to the bed and took Scotty's hand and pressed it to her cheek and whispered, “I don't care what happens you dumb Scottish ass, just as long as you’re alive, please be OK, please be OK, please...” Her forehead touched the honeycomb cover over the engineer's sleeping form.
At the end of a heart-stopping silence, Spock stated, “Mister Scott is unharmed; whatever procedure they aimed to carry out has not been initiated.”
McCoy's arrested breath escaped in a loud whistle. “Are you sure, Spock?”
“I can assure you, Doctor, he is all there.”
“Is Scotty ever all there?” quipped Bones, before witnessing a dramatic change in Charlene; she shook the inert Scot and thumped him hard on the chest.
“Stupid moron! Could have got yourself killed, well screw you! See if I care! You can go to - ” Reining in some composure, she looked up from the bedside, her face contrite. “Sorry sir.”
“Alright, Charlie, let’s take this back to the office. You're scaring our Vulcan.” Noting tubes disappearing under the cover, McCoy peeled the blanket away from Scotty. “I'm going to wake him and get him untethered. I want you to beam back with him to the agency, OK?”
“Yes sir.”
**
Back at the Enterprise, Chekov helped Charlie with a stumbling, mumbling Scotty. Porthos was tucked beneath his desk in a basket Christine had taken from the couple's apartment, two of Scotty's sweaters tucked about the basket's rim to keep him still. He was dozy, but didn't appear distressed, unlike his master.
“The effects of the neuro-paralyser should wear off in a few hours.” Chapel leaned a hip against her desk, arms crossed over her chest and a wary eye pinned on Scotty. “Fancy gown you have on there Scotty. I can see your bare ass. Is that to make it easier for us to see you talking out of it?”
“Do you want to get him upstairs, Charlie?” asked Chekov, trying not to laugh at the engineer's expense.
“Yeah, we'll get him to bed, thanks Kid.” Charlie hesitated. “Christine, do you mind if I bunk with you tonight?”
“No problem, go get your stuff.” But Chekov saw something in Christine's eyes. As she spoke to Charlie, she looked up, and to the left, not at Charlie. It left him unsettled and he gave Uhura an enquiring glance; she just shrugged.
Chekov wouldn't sleep. Not until the doctor and Spock returned. Speaking to Uhura, one arm around Scotty, he asked, “You want to help me when I get back, dig into this medical clinic's files?”
She smiled a tired smile. “You bet, and Chekov?”
“Da, yes?”
“Have you got any doughnuts left?”
~~intermission~~
Seventeen: You are someone else, I am still right here
Military training at Starfleet instilled an ethos of discipline. Spaceship living was by nature ordered, spare and almost Japanese in its aesthetic. Down here, tethered to a planet, everyone, even Spock, had relaxed in their living arrangements. When Charlene needed to clear her head, she went to Sulu's apartment on the south side, an eccentric attic carved out of a large mansion, long divided up into little flats. It had a tiny glass-house on the roof where he reared a variety of plants tolerant to the dim, watery light. The apartment was cheerful and cluttered; bright art decorated the walls and tea was served in black earthenware cups painted with squiggles of slim red and white blossoms. He had blankets, stories and love to wrap you in.
Christine's living space was not that way.
“Do you really sleep here, Chris? Are you sure you don't have some secret apartment somewhere that looks like an incendiary device went off in it?” Charlene always teased her friend about her minimalist décor. This was the living space of someone who didn't want ties, the space of a dame on the lam living out of a suitcase, a situation Charlene feared.
Starfleet protected her, but contact with her parents diminished through fear of their crime being uncovered. In Charlene's head, that was her official reason, but sometimes, when she couldn't sleep at night, she let the groundwater of truth seep up. The bio-body caused a rift. They were desperate, about to lose their only child, and now they lived much as she did, in a small apartment on Terra, all their money gone and telling lies to their friends about an investment gone bad. They were a bereavement to her, but without the death.
Now sitting opposite her friend, clutching hot tea that wouldn't warm her hands, she could see things were cracked between them. If Charlene was to stay at the Enterprise, it had to be mended.
“I'm not like Roger, Chris. It took almost four years for me to accept this.” She waved a hand over her torso and lap. “Starfleet paid for the best shrinks -- they couldn't look a gift horse in the mouth -- even if the horse was loco.”
Charlie put her tea down on a coaster atop a polished, barren side table. In her and Scotty's apartment, a similar table was stacked with teetering piles of reading matter: Vogue; The International Journal of Propellants, Explosives and Pyrotechnics; and Warp Drive Mechanics. When Charlie tried to organise the piles, she found bits of paper covered in Scotty's scrawly hand, anything he could scavenge; wrappers, or thin cardboard from packaging. Engineering calculations covered the whole surface of these bits of jetsam; he said the CalcuApp on the Padd was too slow. Her eyes pricked at the thought of never finding those odd, archaic scraps again.
“It's still me, Chris. I'm still here. And I need my friend more than ever.” Christine stayed silent, looking at nothing and Charlene tried a different tack, the false cheer of her voice gating even to herself.
“What's that over there?” Charlene pointed to a tiny walnut cabinet, a few inches high, cloud shaped and with a brass mesh on the front. A faint blue light blinked behind the metal.
“It's a bio-monitor. I hooked some sensors up to Scotty, to make sure he doesn't become distressed in the night.” The nurse gave an apologetic little smile.
“What? Like a baby monitor?” Charlene smiled too. Scotty had been a cute baby; his mother insisted on sending holos, and the Scotsman got, as he said, 'a right beamer'.
“Exactly, a baby monitor for a big, bare-butt baby. I drew the line at a diaper but he won't be strong enough to make it to the bathroom, so I catheterised him. I was tempted to let him wet the bed, but I did apparently take some kind of Nightingale oath to help the sick, and I didn't want to put you to any trouble. It's just an old-style Texas catheter, like a condom, but with a little surgical glue around the edge to stop leakage. The look on his face will cheer me up on a cold winter's night 'til my dying day! It was even better than the look I got when I checked his sphincter response to make sure he had full control of the rear exit.”
Charlene hiccoughed her response through tears of laughter. “Why, Christine, I think you still care,” and imagined Scotty's horror at Christine's ministrations. Despite 'shite' being one of his favourite words he was quite puritanical about bodily functions, a “bathroom door-always-closed” type of guy. She had enough ammunition to shut him up for the next ten years, if they had them. The tears turned to sorrow, but she still acted amused. “And remind me never to get on your bad side, ever.” Perhaps, Charlene thought, if they could just keep talking, things would settle and Christine would see nothing was changed.
“Well, Starfleet did pay a lot for his training.”
“Uh huh? Sure that's it?” Charlene balanced her chin on her fist and looked Christine square in the eye.
The nurse rubbed at her forehead, looked away and spoke down at a spot on the rug. “I'm...I was angry with Scotty, well, not really. I was angry at myself and I took it out on him. His reaction could have been mine. Roger died within minutes of me finding out; I only had time to to be repulsed, and to pity him. Beyond that time-frame, if he'd survived...”
“Christine, I'm not Roger, he was an android. I'm just like a real girl, if you cut me, I bleed. I'm a synthetically created biological life-form; bio-org, not cyborg.”
“So now you are working for an organisation that seeks to indict your creator?”
Now Charlene was rubbing her temple, in small circles. The small apartment felt airless as a tomb opened after a hundred years. “Khan is no more my creator than...than a robin is the creator of the cuckoo in its nest. Wow, that was a very bad analogy.”
“Were you a cuckoo in your parents' nest, Charlie? Gobbling up all their resources?” An electric silence descended between the two friends, if indeed that was what they were now.
“What, are you a shrink now? That's usually Bones' hobby, doling out pop-psychology. Believe me, after four years of Starfleet therapy there's nothing you can throw at me.” Charlene couldn't believe her ears; it was all she could do not to walk out there and then, and her ire rose. “I don't think a woman who is so terrified of love that she treats the one man who genuinely cares for her like a joke, is qualified to play at shrink. At least I jumped in the pool, knowing I could drown.”
The nurse's head jerked up and for a while, Charlie thought Christine might slug her, but instead, she watched her mouth twist and her complexion grow pink. The nurse put her hands over her face and began to tremble, she breathed a few deep breaths, and when she removed her hands again, all colour had left her.
“I deserved that.” Christine twirled one of her ringlets and, not for the first time, Charlene though the nurse's blonde curls were at odds with her sparky demeanour; she was a brunette trapped in a blonde's body.
“Chris... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to - ” Didn't mean to what? Stick the knife in? Stoop to your level? Hurt you like you hurt me?
Chapel shook her head, and waved her hand in dismissal, “Charlie, can we talk about something else?”
“Sure.”
“Why was Scotty taken? He was never a patient at that clinic, I got Chekov to look it up.”
“I wondered that myself. Maybe it was opportunistic? Everyone keeps telling him how much he looks like that comedian, Spig Gnome. Is it an extreme form of FA-ing?” Scotty's blonde doppelgänger was a source of teasing for the spaceport crew who shouted the comic's catchphrase at him so often the joke had worn micron-thin.
A sceptic's eyebrow rose on Chapel's face, an expression that was pure McCoy. “What, you mean 'have a famous person as a pet'? You'd have to lobotomise them.”
“Well, they were doing that, after a fashion.” A shiver went through Charlene as she thought how close Scotty had come to being a shell.
“What about security doubles? Lots of famous people have them.” As Christine scratched her chin, Charlie wondered if she was morphing into the doctor.
“Yeah, it would be fine until you had to make them talk by remote control, like at an award ceremony. Well I suppose with some of them you couldn't tell, they read the autocue like robots anyway. Like that Klingon action film guy, Sub Bat'leth.”
“Ha!” Christine snorted. “He doesn't need to read, he just needs to hit stuff and lift downed shuttle cars off squealing dames! But if they were just getting into a car, or something, a security decoy might work.”
“I don't know,” mused Charlene. “Seems like an awful lot of bother to go to.”
Long into the night they speculated, waiting for Spock and McCoy to come home.
**
Funny how you took walking and talking for granted -- well no, it wasn't funny. Not one bit. Scotty knew he talked a lot, he wasn't the strong silent type; a gab, his mum called him. Without Charlie the bed was cold, but at least Christine was decent enough to tell him where she was, and that Porthos was out of danger. Embarrassing as his interaction with the nurse had been, at least it was preferable to Scotty waking up in a cold puddle, or worse, indignity heaped on humiliation. He'd already formulated a strategy for the next day: apologise, apologise some more, then apologise again. And repeat. If he could speak. In a restless doze, he heard someone enter the room and he got scared, he knew he was vulnerable as an infant. Perhaps it was just Christine, coming to check on him.
“You can't talk, so you might as well listen.” Bones was sitting by the bed, in shadow. “I've got a question for you, Scotty. If I came to you today and said Charlie was dying, but we could get an illegal bio-body and cure her, would you do it? Would you break the law for her? Or would you let her die?” The doctor rose, smoothing down his trousers. As the door creaked open McCoy hesitated, silhouetted inside the frame. With his broad shoulders, height and fedora in his hand, he looked to Scotty like a gun-slinger from the old cowboy movies his father loved so much.
McCoy put on his hat, “You think about it. You've got all night.”
~~intermission~~
Awesome fanmix With our Rain Washed Histories by
i_am_32_flavors
Beautiful character art by
theoreticalpixy
[ Part 1-3] [ Part 4-6] [ Part 7-9] [ Part 10-12] [ Part 13-15] [ Part 16-17] [ Part 18-end]
Along with Charlie, McCoy joined Spock in the basement, and as the transporter brought his ghost-limbs back to him, he smelled the familiar antiseptic of a hospital ward. Six-bedded, one was occupied and two had curtains drawn about them so he couldn't tell if they housed anyone. After a brief scan of the room, he could see no observation cameras. All three of them ducked behind the fabric on one of the curtained beds. “Spock, that long wall -- one-way glass, do you think? Are we being watched?”
“Affirmative, Doctor; shall I investigate?”
“Please do.” Their hidey-hole by an unconscious patient was a relief. He had no wish to watch Spock's bony ass as he crawled away on all fours, just in case they hadn't been spied yet. Many, many beings in New Glasgow would love to see the Vulcan on his hands and knees. Like Chekov, Spock's interrogation technique - who was he kidding, seduction technique - was a sure thing, except with Chekov witnesses handed him soup and cookies. With Spock, they dropped secrets, and underwear. Charlie called him Mata Hari.
“This is weird.” Charlie whispered; she'd peeled back the sheet on the patient's upper torso to expose an attractive young woman in her early twenties, although on this planet she could be a hundred and five.
Even to McCoy, she looked familiar. “I know her... I think, or someone who looks like her big sister.”
Charlie was bent double, examining the woman's upper arm. “She looks a hell of a lot like Felicity Angel.”
“That actress with twelve children? The one who does ambassadorial work for Tarsus?” He surprised even himself.
“She's got nine kids, and she's an ambassador for Cardassia Prime. It’s OK, see Doc? You're catching on. But where are her tattoos? Tell me that. And honestly, to me, she looks a little heavy.”
“Heavy? What in tarnation are you talking about? She looks like about a hundred and five pounds.” To him, the girl looked fine, she could probably stand to put on another twenty-five pounds to better effect.
“Let's scan her, find out what her story is.” From his belt, he pulled the small scanner and ran it over the body. “Interesting, very interesting.” He mused, staring into space for a few seconds.
“What? Come on!” Charlie hissed, and hopped lightly from foot to foot, her eyes wide.
“In the last 48 hours she's had a breast reduction and rhinoplasty. Internal scar-tissue will be gone in another day or so. But do you want to hear something really creepy?” Charlie nodded yes, get on with it. “Her fingers and toes have been broken at each bone, and lengthened by a few millimetres.”
Charlie looked up at him. “This is some weird fetish, isn't it? She's an FA.”
“Would you go to the lengths of getting your toes done? Who would know? You'd have to be totally off the planet to do that. Even professional lookalikes don't do that. This looks more like a doppelgänger designed to fool those very, very close to the person. She's...” McCoy couldn't believe what he was about to say, “...had a bit of a trim elsewhere as well. She'd probably fool someone very close.”
“What?” Charlie took a moment to catch on, “Oh!” She looked towards the sleeping woman's crotch. “But why do they need to fool them? Anyway, she's too young to fool someone if it is supposed to be her.”
“I've no idea, I'm just an old country doctor. This is completely out of my area. Perhaps she's not finished?”
“We've got to find Scotty, he must have rumbled something. He's probably tied up somewhere in back.” McCoy grunted in the affirmative, and got the shock of his life when Spock's head popped through the curtains. “Spock, you Vulcan spectre! I thought you were security.”
“Security has been neutralised.” He used the same tone another person might use to say 'I've put a cup of tea on the counter for you,' but McCoy knew neutralised - such a benign word - could mean a lot of things.
“What happened, Spock?”
“On the other side of the glass partition I discovered a youth in a lab-coat wearing ear-buds at high volume, and playing a multi-player game. I believe it was HALO, series one-hundred-and-twenty, part seventeen. I confess the premise of faster-than-light travel in the original iteration was innovative, and a shrewd prediction - for the time.”
“Will you shut up about the game, Spock. What happened?”
“I nerve-pinched him. It was difficult to ascertain any difference between the before and after states.”
“So we're in the clear?” Lord the Vulcan could talk, and at the most inappropriate times.
“Unknown.”
Charlie had the patient's arm in her hand, and was examining the fingers with morbid fascination. She dropped the arm. “Right, are you ladies done? We need to find Scotty. I hate him right now but I don't want him hurt... much.”
The patient drew Spock's attention. “This woman is an ambassador for Cardassia Prime.”
Dispirited that even Spock knew what Charlie was talking about, McCoy grumbled, “Apparently, but she's really a surgically-enhanced FA, as far as we can tell.”
“What is her condition?”
“A very deep, drug-induced sleep. I have stims, we could wake her.”
The Pocket-Rocket became animated, “To do what? Ask why she's obsessed with Felicity Angel, or for her to be scared out of her wits that someone knows about her? She could have been coerced, or worse. Don't do that, please. She might not even know. Mister Spock, can't you look inside her mind? It's an invasion, but it's better than waking her up. Please?”
What Charlene said was true, how could he not see it? This girl could be Joanna in another life; scared, broke and broken, willing to go ahead with any scheme some deadbeat boyfriend suggested. Girls like her, they came expecting fame, fortune, and bright lights. Oftentimes what they got was infamy, poverty and the bright lights of a mortuary slab.
“She is unable to offer consent.” The Vulcan steepled his fingers in contemplation.
“Spock! We have to find Scotty. It might help.” Thoughts of his no-longer-a-baby girl made McCoy snippy.
With reluctance, the Vulcan stepped into the theatre created by drapes and bright hospital lights. A dark master of ceremonies, he raised an arm, and in increments that seemed to take minutes, lowered it.
McCoy had never seen a Vulcan do this before, and for the first time, the sight of Spock's face was fully alien. Despite protestations to the contrary, there was always a humanity in the Vulcan's features. Above the girl's face, slim fingers flexed, pulled by sinew and tendon; they swayed in a seaweed dance, caught beneath the surface, then drifted onto the girl's face. A minute passed, and Spock was silent. As an adolescent, McCoy's grandmother took him to church, and he felt reverence, despite his agnosticism. This was a reverential moment and he felt shame for his grouching.
Two minutes passed. Charlie skirted the perimeter of the bed and put her arm about the Vulcan's shoulders; his hand slipped from the girl's skin. Seconds ticked by and McCoy felt dread. What was going on? Dumbstruck by propriety and respect, he couldn't ask and instead, walked round to take Charlene's place at the opposite side of the bed.
A single tear tracked down Spock's face. “She is a husk. Her mind is gone.”
“You're saying she's,” thoughts of Joanna clouded his professional demeanour, and his voice became loud, not caring about discovery, “unable to function in this state?”
There was no answer. Charlie's tiny hand wiped Spock's cheek, and she hugged him tight. His response was to allow it, an action McCoy never imagined from the Vulcan. They were the hybrid brother and sister, suffering at every ignorant fool's clumsy hands. A change of mood and morale was essential.
“We need to find Scotty so I can be first in line to give him a good ol' southern lickin'. With your permission, Ma'am.” A half smile twisted on Charlie's lips “There you go, that's better! Let's see who the rest of these folks are.”
**
An Orion woman occupied the other bed and McCoy brushed her forehead with his hand, pushing back a stray black lock. Only base brain functions displayed on his tricorder. She could breathe, and with electrical stimulation, probably walk and perform simple motor tasks, but anything more complex, without a mind, was impossible.
“You know her?” asked Charlie.
“She's Gaila's friend. I knew her; once. She looked the same, she hasn't been altered.” That night in the bar, she was sturdy and strong; here, in the bio-bed, she looked like she'd gone ten rounds in the ring, her neck and jaw bruised.
“Why haven't they altered her? Is she new here?”
“She was a mute, her voice-box was damaged as a child, possibly even deliberately, as a mark of subservience. I'd say at five years old by the scanner readings. See these trails beneath her skin? Like veins, but too narrow? They're regen-conduits. Her voice-box is being regenerated, hence the bruising. She'll have a voice for the first time since she was five, but her own memories are gone. Whatever makes that voice-box work, it won't be her. They're probably waiting for that to mend first.” He pressed the scanner to the woman's throat. “It's fully regenerated now, finished a couple of hours back.” To McCoy's horror, a tear clung to his eyelashes, then splashed onto the woman's clavicle, exposed by the folded sheet. Uncaring, he brushed it away and bent to kiss her shoulder, then covered her up to the chin.
If he switched off the body's life-support it had to be with the knowledge that her mind wasn't still stored elsewhere. Until conclusive evidence turned up to say these minds were irrevocably erased, it was essential to keep these husks alive.
What in heaven could be the motivation for such a foul process? These people had physical presence, but what was done to them was murder, as surely as if they had been shot. McCoy mulled over the political and legal implications of lobbying to introduce yet another murder charge on New Glasgow. At least with this crime, they had a body. His thoughts were interrupted by silence; the room was too quiet. Distracted from his examination of the Orion, he glanced up to see Charlie at the other curtained bed, frozen, her hand still on the drape she'd drawn back.
Scotty.
What happened next would be burned on McCoy's brain for the rest of his life.
**
A swish alerted them to the opening of the ward doors, and the trio looked up to see a stocky male orderly step through, reading a plasti-film chart, brows drawn down. He looked as if thinking would always be a bother to him. Distracted, his head rose, chin wobbling, and the stopped-breath silence of mutual discovery took over the scene. For milliseconds, each person in the tableau was caught in amber, until the orderly's hand rose, shaking and slow, towards a red button at the frame of the doors. In his peripheral vision, McCoy saw Charlene's arm lift.
A phaser blast hit the man's hand and he crumpled to his knees, sheet-white and clutching his wrist, allowing the plasti-film to cut through the air and float over the floor to McCoy's feet.
A hand. Its mechanics were simple engineering. A child could replicate them with twine, buttons and drinking straws. For the second time that night, McCoy contemplated bone, sinew, muscle and skin; he could see it all now in a real-life anatomy lesson. Where the phaser hit, flesh disintegrated in onion-skin layers to below the first finger-joint, revealing grotesque white bone. The orderly gazed at his half-flayed digits, cauterised and bloodless. Without the cohesion of cartilage and tendon, the phalanges were disarticulated; they teetered for a second then fell to the ground with the bounce of dice on baize.
Whimpering, the man scrabbled in frantic panic for his bones, gathered them up with his good hand and shoved them into the pocket of his lab-coat, his movements robotic with shock. Once the bones were secure, he appeared to return to his senses, eyes darting about the scene. Another second passed in which his eyes grew huge and his chin dropped. It was an expression McCoy knew only too well; his daughter Joanna wore it as a toddler. It was that precious moment where distraction was vital, before a fallen child screamed bloody murder, and the neighbours started hammering on the ceiling.
McCoy whipped out his own phaser and stunned the man. Today was not a good day to be nicknamed 'Bones' and he wondered how long it would take to erase the memory of a grown man collecting up parts of his own skeleton like dropped coins.
“Charlie, what in the name of Gorn was that? I nearly saw my dinner for the second time tonight.” Charlene was trembling, her arm still raised. McCoy rested two light fingers on her forearm until she lowered the phaser so it pointed to the floor. “Let's not use that one again, shall we? I don't wanna be walkin’ around with a hole shot clean through my chest.” He prised the phaser from her still-shaking hand and disarmed it, before examining the settings. They were mostly normal: D (disarmed); S (stun); K (kill) and one, unfamiliar setting: C. “Can you talk, sweetheart?”
With whispered, hesitant words, she explained; “Scotty hot-wired my phaser. He told me only to use it in extreme danger, when I wanted to really mess with someone's head.”
“Well you sure did that, Charlie, you messed with my head. Don't do that again. Did you know that was gonna happen?”
Charlene's eyes were huge, glued to the weapon in her hand, “I d-didn't, I - I swear on Starfleet, I didn't. Scotty...”
There were more important things to worry about. McCoy stooped to pick up the medical chart, and they crossed the few feet to the Scotsman's bed. Spock was there before them, his fingers splayed on Scotty's face, head lowered. Charlene, tears streaming down her face, went to the bed and took Scotty's hand and pressed it to her cheek and whispered, “I don't care what happens you dumb Scottish ass, just as long as you’re alive, please be OK, please be OK, please...” Her forehead touched the honeycomb cover over the engineer's sleeping form.
At the end of a heart-stopping silence, Spock stated, “Mister Scott is unharmed; whatever procedure they aimed to carry out has not been initiated.”
McCoy's arrested breath escaped in a loud whistle. “Are you sure, Spock?”
“I can assure you, Doctor, he is all there.”
“Is Scotty ever all there?” quipped Bones, before witnessing a dramatic change in Charlene; she shook the inert Scot and thumped him hard on the chest.
“Stupid moron! Could have got yourself killed, well screw you! See if I care! You can go to - ” Reining in some composure, she looked up from the bedside, her face contrite. “Sorry sir.”
“Alright, Charlie, let’s take this back to the office. You're scaring our Vulcan.” Noting tubes disappearing under the cover, McCoy peeled the blanket away from Scotty. “I'm going to wake him and get him untethered. I want you to beam back with him to the agency, OK?”
“Yes sir.”
**
Back at the Enterprise, Chekov helped Charlie with a stumbling, mumbling Scotty. Porthos was tucked beneath his desk in a basket Christine had taken from the couple's apartment, two of Scotty's sweaters tucked about the basket's rim to keep him still. He was dozy, but didn't appear distressed, unlike his master.
“The effects of the neuro-paralyser should wear off in a few hours.” Chapel leaned a hip against her desk, arms crossed over her chest and a wary eye pinned on Scotty. “Fancy gown you have on there Scotty. I can see your bare ass. Is that to make it easier for us to see you talking out of it?”
“Do you want to get him upstairs, Charlie?” asked Chekov, trying not to laugh at the engineer's expense.
“Yeah, we'll get him to bed, thanks Kid.” Charlie hesitated. “Christine, do you mind if I bunk with you tonight?”
“No problem, go get your stuff.” But Chekov saw something in Christine's eyes. As she spoke to Charlie, she looked up, and to the left, not at Charlie. It left him unsettled and he gave Uhura an enquiring glance; she just shrugged.
Chekov wouldn't sleep. Not until the doctor and Spock returned. Speaking to Uhura, one arm around Scotty, he asked, “You want to help me when I get back, dig into this medical clinic's files?”
She smiled a tired smile. “You bet, and Chekov?”
“Da, yes?”
“Have you got any doughnuts left?”
~~intermission~~
Seventeen: You are someone else, I am still right here
Military training at Starfleet instilled an ethos of discipline. Spaceship living was by nature ordered, spare and almost Japanese in its aesthetic. Down here, tethered to a planet, everyone, even Spock, had relaxed in their living arrangements. When Charlene needed to clear her head, she went to Sulu's apartment on the south side, an eccentric attic carved out of a large mansion, long divided up into little flats. It had a tiny glass-house on the roof where he reared a variety of plants tolerant to the dim, watery light. The apartment was cheerful and cluttered; bright art decorated the walls and tea was served in black earthenware cups painted with squiggles of slim red and white blossoms. He had blankets, stories and love to wrap you in.
Christine's living space was not that way.
“Do you really sleep here, Chris? Are you sure you don't have some secret apartment somewhere that looks like an incendiary device went off in it?” Charlene always teased her friend about her minimalist décor. This was the living space of someone who didn't want ties, the space of a dame on the lam living out of a suitcase, a situation Charlene feared.
Starfleet protected her, but contact with her parents diminished through fear of their crime being uncovered. In Charlene's head, that was her official reason, but sometimes, when she couldn't sleep at night, she let the groundwater of truth seep up. The bio-body caused a rift. They were desperate, about to lose their only child, and now they lived much as she did, in a small apartment on Terra, all their money gone and telling lies to their friends about an investment gone bad. They were a bereavement to her, but without the death.
Now sitting opposite her friend, clutching hot tea that wouldn't warm her hands, she could see things were cracked between them. If Charlene was to stay at the Enterprise, it had to be mended.
“I'm not like Roger, Chris. It took almost four years for me to accept this.” She waved a hand over her torso and lap. “Starfleet paid for the best shrinks -- they couldn't look a gift horse in the mouth -- even if the horse was loco.”
Charlie put her tea down on a coaster atop a polished, barren side table. In her and Scotty's apartment, a similar table was stacked with teetering piles of reading matter: Vogue; The International Journal of Propellants, Explosives and Pyrotechnics; and Warp Drive Mechanics. When Charlie tried to organise the piles, she found bits of paper covered in Scotty's scrawly hand, anything he could scavenge; wrappers, or thin cardboard from packaging. Engineering calculations covered the whole surface of these bits of jetsam; he said the CalcuApp on the Padd was too slow. Her eyes pricked at the thought of never finding those odd, archaic scraps again.
“It's still me, Chris. I'm still here. And I need my friend more than ever.” Christine stayed silent, looking at nothing and Charlene tried a different tack, the false cheer of her voice gating even to herself.
“What's that over there?” Charlene pointed to a tiny walnut cabinet, a few inches high, cloud shaped and with a brass mesh on the front. A faint blue light blinked behind the metal.
“It's a bio-monitor. I hooked some sensors up to Scotty, to make sure he doesn't become distressed in the night.” The nurse gave an apologetic little smile.
“What? Like a baby monitor?” Charlene smiled too. Scotty had been a cute baby; his mother insisted on sending holos, and the Scotsman got, as he said, 'a right beamer'.
“Exactly, a baby monitor for a big, bare-butt baby. I drew the line at a diaper but he won't be strong enough to make it to the bathroom, so I catheterised him. I was tempted to let him wet the bed, but I did apparently take some kind of Nightingale oath to help the sick, and I didn't want to put you to any trouble. It's just an old-style Texas catheter, like a condom, but with a little surgical glue around the edge to stop leakage. The look on his face will cheer me up on a cold winter's night 'til my dying day! It was even better than the look I got when I checked his sphincter response to make sure he had full control of the rear exit.”
Charlene hiccoughed her response through tears of laughter. “Why, Christine, I think you still care,” and imagined Scotty's horror at Christine's ministrations. Despite 'shite' being one of his favourite words he was quite puritanical about bodily functions, a “bathroom door-always-closed” type of guy. She had enough ammunition to shut him up for the next ten years, if they had them. The tears turned to sorrow, but she still acted amused. “And remind me never to get on your bad side, ever.” Perhaps, Charlene thought, if they could just keep talking, things would settle and Christine would see nothing was changed.
“Well, Starfleet did pay a lot for his training.”
“Uh huh? Sure that's it?” Charlene balanced her chin on her fist and looked Christine square in the eye.
The nurse rubbed at her forehead, looked away and spoke down at a spot on the rug. “I'm...I was angry with Scotty, well, not really. I was angry at myself and I took it out on him. His reaction could have been mine. Roger died within minutes of me finding out; I only had time to to be repulsed, and to pity him. Beyond that time-frame, if he'd survived...”
“Christine, I'm not Roger, he was an android. I'm just like a real girl, if you cut me, I bleed. I'm a synthetically created biological life-form; bio-org, not cyborg.”
“So now you are working for an organisation that seeks to indict your creator?”
Now Charlene was rubbing her temple, in small circles. The small apartment felt airless as a tomb opened after a hundred years. “Khan is no more my creator than...than a robin is the creator of the cuckoo in its nest. Wow, that was a very bad analogy.”
“Were you a cuckoo in your parents' nest, Charlie? Gobbling up all their resources?” An electric silence descended between the two friends, if indeed that was what they were now.
“What, are you a shrink now? That's usually Bones' hobby, doling out pop-psychology. Believe me, after four years of Starfleet therapy there's nothing you can throw at me.” Charlene couldn't believe her ears; it was all she could do not to walk out there and then, and her ire rose. “I don't think a woman who is so terrified of love that she treats the one man who genuinely cares for her like a joke, is qualified to play at shrink. At least I jumped in the pool, knowing I could drown.”
The nurse's head jerked up and for a while, Charlie thought Christine might slug her, but instead, she watched her mouth twist and her complexion grow pink. The nurse put her hands over her face and began to tremble, she breathed a few deep breaths, and when she removed her hands again, all colour had left her.
“I deserved that.” Christine twirled one of her ringlets and, not for the first time, Charlene though the nurse's blonde curls were at odds with her sparky demeanour; she was a brunette trapped in a blonde's body.
“Chris... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to - ” Didn't mean to what? Stick the knife in? Stoop to your level? Hurt you like you hurt me?
Chapel shook her head, and waved her hand in dismissal, “Charlie, can we talk about something else?”
“Sure.”
“Why was Scotty taken? He was never a patient at that clinic, I got Chekov to look it up.”
“I wondered that myself. Maybe it was opportunistic? Everyone keeps telling him how much he looks like that comedian, Spig Gnome. Is it an extreme form of FA-ing?” Scotty's blonde doppelgänger was a source of teasing for the spaceport crew who shouted the comic's catchphrase at him so often the joke had worn micron-thin.
A sceptic's eyebrow rose on Chapel's face, an expression that was pure McCoy. “What, you mean 'have a famous person as a pet'? You'd have to lobotomise them.”
“Well, they were doing that, after a fashion.” A shiver went through Charlene as she thought how close Scotty had come to being a shell.
“What about security doubles? Lots of famous people have them.” As Christine scratched her chin, Charlie wondered if she was morphing into the doctor.
“Yeah, it would be fine until you had to make them talk by remote control, like at an award ceremony. Well I suppose with some of them you couldn't tell, they read the autocue like robots anyway. Like that Klingon action film guy, Sub Bat'leth.”
“Ha!” Christine snorted. “He doesn't need to read, he just needs to hit stuff and lift downed shuttle cars off squealing dames! But if they were just getting into a car, or something, a security decoy might work.”
“I don't know,” mused Charlene. “Seems like an awful lot of bother to go to.”
Long into the night they speculated, waiting for Spock and McCoy to come home.
**
Funny how you took walking and talking for granted -- well no, it wasn't funny. Not one bit. Scotty knew he talked a lot, he wasn't the strong silent type; a gab, his mum called him. Without Charlie the bed was cold, but at least Christine was decent enough to tell him where she was, and that Porthos was out of danger. Embarrassing as his interaction with the nurse had been, at least it was preferable to Scotty waking up in a cold puddle, or worse, indignity heaped on humiliation. He'd already formulated a strategy for the next day: apologise, apologise some more, then apologise again. And repeat. If he could speak. In a restless doze, he heard someone enter the room and he got scared, he knew he was vulnerable as an infant. Perhaps it was just Christine, coming to check on him.
“You can't talk, so you might as well listen.” Bones was sitting by the bed, in shadow. “I've got a question for you, Scotty. If I came to you today and said Charlie was dying, but we could get an illegal bio-body and cure her, would you do it? Would you break the law for her? Or would you let her die?” The doctor rose, smoothing down his trousers. As the door creaked open McCoy hesitated, silhouetted inside the frame. With his broad shoulders, height and fedora in his hand, he looked to Scotty like a gun-slinger from the old cowboy movies his father loved so much.
McCoy put on his hat, “You think about it. You've got all night.”
~~intermission~~
Awesome fanmix With our Rain Washed Histories by
i_am_32_flavors
Beautiful character art by
theoreticalpixy
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