Chapter Text
The world had never hummed before – not her world, anyway. Kanna thought she knew every sound the complex made: the woosh of climate control in the walls, the miniscule crackle of algae generating power. She knew what creatures came to her thin window and when, and even the occasional jump of the transports.
The hum was none of those. It was too subtle to hear, barely strong enough to vibrate through her bones, but it was there, all around her. Either she was dead, or her hare-brained scheme had worked, but she could not seem to open her eyes to find out which. She floated.
All at once, she was aware of her lungs and the hundreds of tender muscles surrounding them. They spasmed, and she felt rather than heard herself cough. The oxygen kick started her body, and her legs and arms began firing afferent nerves, but she could only wait as they banged against metal and told her about the cold air – she had no control. The interminable hum grew louder.
Sympathetic first, Kanna thought, trying to calm herself. Parasympathetic follows: internal knowledge, outside sense, vision, hearing. Muscle control. Then intersympathetic.
A lifetime of heartbeats. Then oxygen surging her through with glucose and adrenaline. The hum reached a fever pitch, blaring painfully. Electrical static against her skin resolved into clear bodies, people surging around her. Their language, when her ears adjusted, burbled from their mouths like ball bearings.
“Please,” she gasped. Agony shot through her head as she opened her eyes. Red-covered figures loomed, their hands on their hips. She made out the blurred outline of their captain and touched her forehead, gesturing towards him. “Please.” He did not understand her request to connect to him, only kept on burbling, thinking they had spoken his language this whole time. Kanna gasped in response, gaped. Was it meant to hurt so much to breathe after beaming through space, if that’s what she had done? No body like hers had ever done such a thing. She tried to remember what had caused her to slam the button and came up with a handful of blood. Her efferent nerves were barely working, much less her intersympathetic system. She could not communicate beyond useless verbal speech.
Kanna wondered where he was – the one who healed her, standing so close that she could have fallen straight into his mind if she hadn’t be forbidden.
“Please,” she managed again. Darkness was beginning to dart at the edges of her vision. She thought of his fingers brushing her jaw, the discomfiture, how strange it had been to be touched. The captain reached for her, his hand outstretched, and she lost herself in the black.
First watch had just ended when the alert blared, sending senior officers sprinting from their rec to their departments. Scotty swore and threw his fork down in disgust.
“One bloody meal.” The first six months of the Enterprise’s mission had hardly been smooth sailing, and the alarm was the end to hopes that their first real diplomatic mission to an uncontacted planet had gone without a hitch.
Spock was already on the way to the bridge where he found Sulu in command. “Security incident on the freight transporter, sir,” he reported. “Looks like someone planet side transported onboard unexpectedly. Captain’s there now with security.”
Spock didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “Via freight?”
“Yes sir. Medical is already on scene.”
“Any comms?”
“Nothing sir,” the lieutenant at the station reported. “All channels are open, including visual.”
Spock settled in the captain’s seat and called into the engineering room to nothing but a terse ‘copy’. It wasn’t logical for both him and Jim to be in the transporter room, he reminded himself. It made much more sense to keep one of the two most experienced officers on the bridge. Even if that just meant waiting. And waiting.
“Orbit status?” He said after a long while. Over the central channel, someone called an all clear and the alarm switched off.
“Holding steady sir.”
The minutes ticked by. On the screen, Gwydion-F turned slowly beneath them. The deep maroon of anthocyanins marbled the continents, cut through by vast deserts and hot shallow seas. The idea of anyone planet-side forcing a transport made him frown. The inhabitants were still in the most basic stages of space exploration. They had local transports, but the Enterprise was orbiting well above their thousand-mile range.
But he had read about something recently – in fact, he and Scotty had been discussing the possibility only last week. A recent article in the journal Frontier had demonstrated the electron signature that remained in the atmosphere after a transport, dependent on the force of the magnetic field to disperse in much the same way jet streams feathered in winds. The natural implication was a trace, and Scotty had mentioned that he’d not been able to stop thinking about the idea.
He had a suspicion, but it was nothing without proof.
Even running full blast, the scrubbers could never quite rid medical of its astringent scent. Christine Chapel was vicious with the med techs – it wasn’t unheard of for her to make them re-sanitize four times if she felt they had been sloppy.
But now Spock could detect the hot, metallic stench of gore. A trail of pinkish Gwydion blood lead to the closed door of the operating room. The captain and Scott stood by McCoy’s desk, leaning over a small black box.
“Ah, Spock, good.” The captain waved him over. “What do you make of this?”
“I can hardly believe it,” Scott exclaimed. “I was telling the captain we were only just on this ourselves. What a coincidence!”
Spock turned the box over in his hand. It was around five centimetres square, too large to be worn on a wrist, but small enough for a pocket. The back popped off to reveal a mess of shoddily soldered boards and batteries. He poked at the blue-glowing algae battery and rolled a wire between his fingers. Even that small movement pulled it from the node. He nodded.
“You don’t recognise it?”
“I mean, the casing’s the same. I’m only upset that she got to it before I could. Could use some refinement of course but-”
Spock cut him off with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t think she beat you to it.”
“Will someone tell me what’s happening?” Kirk snapped. His irritation got the better of him when he felt helpless, and nothing made him feel more helpless than someone having knowledge about his ship that he didn’t.
Spock moved to the small observation window and peered through. McCoy glanced up, his expression unreadable behind the surgical mask, then turned back to the deep wound he was gluing up. Spock traced up the side, following the line of the sanitary drapes, to the patient’s face. Despite the sedation, her eyes flickered wildly under her lids.
“Mr Scott and I met this young woman planet side,” Spock said. “Once as an aide while touring the generator, and while we were out collecting samples. The second time, she had this.”
“Aye, it looked similar on the outside,” Scotty said again. “But I know what I helped her build inside, and it was nothing so powerful as this.”
“I believe that to be true,” Spock admitted. “Captain, I think its possible that she pulled the plans from Scott’s mind psychically. With such skill that neither of us knew she was there.”