Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging
No one was there to challenge Pike and La’an as they materialized in Reliant’s transporter room. La’an checked her tricorder while Pike covered the door with his phaser.
“Energy fluctuations all over the ship, Admiral,” she said. “It’s making it difficult to isolate life signs.”
Pike looked at the other transporter pad. “This is Genesis,” he said, indicating the torpedo. They both moved to the transporter controls.
“Pike to Enterprise,” he said into his communicator. “We’ve located the Genesis warhead. Beaming it over now.” The device vanished in blue energy.
“We still need the control unit,” La’an said. “Without it, it’s not much more than a very extravagant bomb.”
“Can you locate it?”
She shook her head. “The sensor signature Doctor Marcus gave us is too faint to locate from here, but I think we have to assume Khan would have taken it to the bridge.”
“Let’s get up there,” Pike said.
Una shook herself back to consciousness. The railing on the gantry past the warp core was deformed where she had grabbed it to prevent herself from being thrown. Her left arm didn’t want to move. Dislocated. She reached across her chest and popped the joint back in.
She checked the control panel. Someone had started to redirect power back to weapons before the last salvo. Just redirecting again wasn’t going to be enough, and openly defying Khan at this point was still dangerous. There was only one thing she could think of. She initiated a hot restart of the warp core. She had bypassed the main energizer enough to restore power flow, so the engines would start up, even though the ship was by now damaged badly enough that it wouldn’t be able to maintain a stable warp field for long. But the restart sequence would siphon off almost all available power for about six minutes; it wouldn’t be possible to charge the phasers until then.
The two augments on the deck below hadn’t been fast enough when she ship had pitched. It was possible they were still alive, but what mattered was that they were unconscious.
She grabbed the medical kit and set the hypospray for the most powerful painkiller it contained. The pain of relocating her shoulder was nothing compared to what would come next. The tricorder was no help; whatever the parasite was made of, it didn’t register on scans. Una set aside the laser scalpel in favor of a crude metal one; she would need tactile feedback for this.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on her body, her sense of self. She had been suppressing her body’s natural self-healing. It wasn’t equipped to handle a parasite capable of complex responses to external stimuli. She allowed her immune system to work its magic now, and as she had predicted, the creature inside her thrashed in response. The world went blurry and even with the painkillers, Una had to fight the urge to retch. As she knew it would, the creature moved under her skin. She visualized the web of nerves and blood vessels in her skull. Picked the safest place. Imagined the shape of the Ceti Eel, and saw a straight line path to where its head would be that avoided the posterior auricular vein. She couldn’t quite keep her hand steady, but it would have to be enough. She stabbed upward, just behind the ear.
Something went away inside her, a cluster of neurons crushed by the death-throes of the creature. She couldn’t even remember what it was she had lost. But the pain eased. She fumbled for the autosuture. She lacked the medical skill to close the wound properly, much less while working blind, disoriented, suffering from brain trauma and heavily dosed on painkillers, but she hoped her concentration would last long enough to staunch the bleeding.
“Awake!” Khan told himself. “Arise or be forever fallen.” Half his face had burned to the console. He pulled himself up with a shaking hand. His left hand, the hand that had been his “good” one, had been burned as well. Two fingers had been blown off in the explosion.
A voice issued from the tannoy. “Enterprise to Reliant. You are ordered to surrender your vessel, respond.” Khan dimly recognized the voice from all those years ago. The Kenyan woman, Uhura. He recalled her as a strong and noble woman, and the tiniest part of him was surprised she would still be in a subservient position beside Pike so many years later. But he had little time for such reflections. Only his enhanced physiology had kept him from succumbing to shock, and even that would not protect him forever.
“No, Pike,” he said, wryly. “The game’s not over.” He limped to the side of the bridge, where the Genesis control unit stood, and pressed the button on its side that caused it to unfold.
“It is over, Khan. Move away from the controller.”
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