The Stars Above Us

Chapter 19

"Bones," she whispered as she stepped into the exam room. He was staring at a covered figure laying on the bed and he didn't move. "You okay?"

"Did you know that I asked Pip for the report… after my parents…?" He didn't look at her but at least he was talking.

"No," Jim said, "but I'm not surprised. She didn't give it to you."

"Said I didn't need to know, I was too young… yadda, yadda, yadda," Bones sighed. "I found it. Never did read it. I'm not sure if it was because I respect Pippa too much or because of everything going on with you and Tarsus or if I was just scared of what I would find. I still have it… I might actually take a look."

"What happened that brought this on?"

"You hear about the crash earlier?" he asked.

"Yea," Jim nodded.

One of the cadet shuttles used for training had what appears to be a system failure and fell out of the sky near the residential part of HQ. Nobody on the ground was hurt but there were half a dozen people in the shuttle. Two died in the crash, the others were rushed to medical.

"I got tossed the easy case. I'm a fourth year med student, so I guess it should've been easy," he chuckled. "Kid had a broken leg. He limped into the building and now… he's…" he made a motion to the body on the table.

"This isn't your fault, Bones," she said.

"Oh, I know it's not. What I don't know is why my limping, talking and annoyingly cheerful seventeen year old patient stopped breathing." He looked at her and she could see just how pissed off he was that he hasn't figured out why he lost his patient. He needed to know what he missed. Bones didn't say anything for a moment but Jim could see the wheels turning in his head, "Presented with a broken femur, dead a few hours later. There are only a handful of things it could be. I might need an extra set of hands."

"Extra set," she wiggled her fingers. "What are you gonna do?"

"Run every scan I can think of on him to find the cause of death. We can check to see if there's a problem with this equipment too. I need to know, Jim."

"Of course you do, he's your patient," she said. "We'll figure this out… Well, you will. I'll just look pretty and hand you stuff."

"Very funny," he chuckled.

"I thought it was only a little funny but okay," Jim gave him a small smile. She pulled off the jacket to her black instructor's uniform and set it on one of the short cabinets. "Where do you want me, doc?"

"That machine next to you is the osteogenic stimulator that we used. Think you can look it over for me while I figure this out?"

She nodded, "You got it."

It took nearly an hour of scanning, theorizing and checking over medical equipment to figure out how Cadet Ryan Ibarra died from a broken leg. The only person that came in the room was Pippa to check on them. The veteran doctor didn't offer anything to Bones' search, she just shared a knowing look with Jim before she left them alone. The young officer was sure that Pippa was the reason nobody bothered them.

"No, that's not it either," he whispered. Bones was thinking out loud. He'd have an idea, check it and move on if it didn't mesh with the evidence he had. "A pulmonary embolism…" Bones mumbled. He checked a few things and sighed. "A pulmonary embolism caused by bone marrow from the fracture. That's why his pulse ox tanked and he stopped breathing."

"Can you tell me what that means 'cause..." she pointed to herself, "not a doctor?" Jim only understood the bit about the pulse ox because it's a measurement for blood oxygen levels. The other part was over her head.

"A pulmonary embolism is a blockage of the lung's main artery by a substance that has traveled from somewhere else in the body through the bloodstream. Normally, PE is from a deep vein thrombosis, or a blood clot in a leg, that breaks off and migrates to the lung. In rare cases, like this one, it could be an air or fat instead of a clot. According to this scan," he turned the console so she could see what he was looking at, "fat from his bone marrow got into Ibarra's lungs, probably from all the hopping around he did after the crash. He didn't mention it but I'm sure he had trouble breathing and chest pain. He was more worried about his buddies then himself and wanted me to let him go. Even If I caught it, he wouldn't've made it to the O.R."

"So, there's nothing you could've done?" she asked.

"Not really. In an ideal world, a pulmonary embolism can be fixed but you have to catch it first. Used to be one of the leading causes of sudden death in the world. We've gotten better at finding them but people still die because of PE," Bones told her. He took a deep breath. "Thanks for helping me with this."

"I didn't do anything but look pretty and hand you stuff just like I said I would, Doctor," Jim chuckled.

"Still helped. You think Aunt Pip figured it out already?"

"I have no idea," she lied.

He smiled, "You're a horrible liar."

"Only with you."

"I don't like this," Jim said to Bones over vid-comm.

"Only because you're the one on Earth and I'm out in the universe being a badass," he smiled.

Doctor Griffin, the Chief of Emergency Medicine at SMA, took the top ten officers and cadets in Bones' med school class on a mission with him to Dramia Two. The group was there to set up a massive inoculation program to save the population of the planet from a strain of the Saurian virus.

"Is that what you call hypospraying the hell out of people?" she asked. "You're not exactly gentle."

"I'm not gentle when you get banged up on purpose. I hope to give you pause when you're about to do something stupid. I want you to think, 'What will Bones inject me with if I get hurt?'" Bones told her.

Jim laughed, "You honestly think that'll work?

"I'm hoping," he smiled. "We're doing good out here, darlin'. The people are nice and very thankful. You'd like this place."

"Mostly because you're there," she said.

"Miss me, huh?"

"Like you even had to ask," Jim smiled.

"I miss you too, darlin'," he said before he looked over his shoulder. "I gotta go. I love you."

"Love you too," she said before the screen went black.

"Sucks being on this side, doesn't it?" her dad asked as he dropped onto the couch next to her.

"What would you know, you've been single as long as I can remember," Jim chuckled.

"I wasn't single, I was just discreet. And I was actually talking about you and Hoss. It's not easy when I'm somewhere and you guys aren't. Last time I thought you were safe, you ended up in a famine that turned into a m******e," he sighed.

"Says the man who came home from a mission in a coma," she pointed out.

"Fair enough," her dad smiled. "He'll be okay, kiddo."

"I know," Jim said.

He laughed, "Still gonna worry about him, aren't you?"

"As much as I always do."

"You look exhausted, dad," Jim said to her father. The Farragut -which Jim was somehow the second officer of- was out on a survey and training cruise. She knew the Yorktown was supposed to leave for an extended survey of the Pathiad Nebulatae but that shouldn't worry her dad this much. That meant something was wrong.

"Tector has Virillian toxic fever," he sighed. "It took me weeks to figure out my senior staff and now I have two days and nine hours to pick and read-in a new science officer."

"Ouch," she said. "You can't have any of ours."

"I wasn't asking. Though I'm sure Garrovick wouldn't mind sharing," her dad chuckled. Jim thought about it for minute. "You have an idea."

"What if I told you that I knew an expert in astrography, comparative xenobiology, Semiotics, quantum mechanics, warp engineering, physics and some other stuff who is in San Fran right now?"

"I would ask who this person is," he said.

"Cadet First Class Spock," Jim said.

"Your buddy, the Vulcan Ambassador's son?"

"That's him. He's on an accelerated curriculum and he's top of his class at everything. It's insanity. Half the departments at the Academy are falling all over themselves about him," she told him. "You need a brilliant scientist, Spock's your guy."

"He's a cadet," he said.

"Give him a provisional rank and count it as a training cruise," Jim said.

"Hmm… I should comm you more often."

"Bullshit, you already thought of this. You just wanted to know what I would do. Why?" she asked.

"Couldn't fool you for long, huh?" he asked. She shook her head. "You want make captain, you have to think like one. I'm just giving you reasons to do so."

"So, continued learning?"

"Pretty much."

"I know I'm not gonna like this. Damage report," Commander… Acting Captain Chenowyth said. The officers in the room with them looked at her.

Jim took a deep breath, "We have a dozen and a half hull breaches. The most severe of which is on deck seven and has been sealed off. We're at sixty-one percent of our impulse power. Shields, comms, navigation and sensors are all down. Life support is holding at seventy-three percent. Power's down to fifty-eight percent, so we're in reduced power mode. Of the crew we do have, only forty-nine of us are in any shape to go anything. Medical has maxed out it's capacity, they're using the mess deck for triage."

"Not the cargo bay?" Samuels, the Acting Chief Navigator, asked. That was the standard operating procedure, however, there was nothing standard about this.

"No," Jim sighed. "They're using the cargo bay as the morgue."

The Farragut was performing a survey of planet Tycho Four when the ship was attacked by a creature they have yet to identify. The attack left more than two hundred crewmen dead, including Captain Stephen Garrovick. Jim, who was on the bridge when everything went down, assumed command of the ship. She managed to get them away from the creature and set a course for Starbase Sixteen. Twenty-four hours later, she turned command over to Chenowyth, the ship's first officer.

Offering to help with repairs, Jim was in engineering working on the navigational sensors when the ship was attacked again. This time, it was vicious aliens of unknown origin, unlike anything she's ever seen before, who entered the ship's secondary hull in passenger-carrying projectiles and killed many of the remaining crew, including what was left of the damage control team. Jim and a civilian scientist managed to trigger a saucer separation and evac everyone they could to the primary hull of the Farragut before Chenowyth fired on –and destroyed- the severely damaged half of the ship. Now, the saucer section of the ship was limping towards the starbase with a little over a hundred -of the four hundred and thirty- crewmen still alive.

"Time to Starbase Sixteen?" Chenowyth asked Samuels.

The navigator sighed, "Three days and nine hours… if power and impulse hold."

"Kirk?" the acting captain looked at her.

"As long as nothing else attacks us, they should get us there. I'll see if I can boost impulse without using too much power. Right now, all non-essential systems are shut down so it's gonna be tight, sir," she told him.

On top of being the acting XO, Jim was also the acting chief engineer. Engineering was the hardest hit department on the ship and the team Jim managed to scrape together was made up of anyone with real world engineering experience… and a handful of cadets without any experience. Medical was just as bad and they were taking any able bodies to help out what was left of the medical staff.

"Anything you can do will be appreciated," Chenowyth sighed and looked at the four officers standing in Garrovick's ready room. "I know we've taken heavy losses. I know you all… we all have people to mourn for but right now, the one hundred and seventeen people on what's left of our ship need us to keep it together. You have all gone above and beyond the call of duty and I need you to hang on for three more days."

"We'll get it done, sir," Lieutenant Hernandez, the acting chief science officer who's been helping in medical, said.

After a round of small smiles and nods of agreement, Chenowyth dismissed the officers to their various tasks and duties.

"Kirk, stand fast." After they had the room, he sank into the chair behind the captain's desk. "Have a seat, kid." She sat across from him and Jim could feel her body protest, she was gonna be in so much pain when the adrenaline wore off. "All that training for the big chair and I wasn't prepared for this."

"There's no way to be prepared for this, Chenowyth," she said. While Captain Garrovick didn't really like Jim, his first officer, who served on the ship under Rabin, treated Jim with the same respect he showed every hardworking officer. They weren't friends but they did get along well with each other.

"I suppose that's true," he sighed. Somehow, Jim knew what he was thinking.

"We need a duty roster so that everyone can rest. And we need a causality list," Jim said. The acting captain nodded. "I'll make it happen. You need to get some sleep."

"I'm fine," Chenowyth told her.

"We both know Doctor Moran will just pull you from duty if you don't rest and that's the last thing we need right now."

"Acting CMO for two days and you'd think he's been at it forever," the acting captain chuckled. He was right, the guy was a natural caretaker who reminded her of Bones and Pippa. "You sleep first. I got some rest when I was in medical but you've been on duty for two days."

"Is that an order?" Sleep sounded good but she had a million and three things to do.

"Not unless you force me to make it one. Get some rest and relieve me in six hours. That way Moran won't b***h at us," he said.

"Understood," she said. They sat in silence for a moment as their new reality sank in.

"You did good getting us away from whatever that was. You saved the ship."

"We're not outta the woods yet, sir."

"Sir, I'm getting something on the RF channel," Lieutenant Nya, the communications officer, said to Jim. The two women managed to fix comms enough that they had short range communications that didn't drain power. Jim was still under the communications panel when they picked up the system.

"On speaker," Jim ordered as she pushed herself up.

"USS Farragut, this is the USS Hood, come in," an officer repeated over comms.

"Can we talk to them?" Jim asked the Orion.

"No but I can send a signal using Morse code," Nya told her.

"Go ahead and respond."

The other officer nodded while Jim handed the con to the officer at the helm and climbed down to deck four so she could wake up Chenowyth. Together, the pair went to the transporter room just as a group of officers beamed in. Jim swallowed the lump in her throat, knowing full well who was on the Hood.

"I'm Captain Michaela Harrari," a slight woman in command gold said. "Are you all okay?"

"Depends on how we're defining okay. Acting Captain Art Chenowyth. This is Acting Commander Kirk, my XO," Chenowyth said before he gave Captain Harrari a quick rundown. Jim was only half paying attention to them, her eyes on the medical team. "Kirk, why don't you guide these guys to medical."

"Yes, sir. Ladies and gents, this way," Jim said. The whole group followed her as she weaved them through corridors, in and out of Jefferies tubes and around the handful of officers on duty.

"Where is everyone?" one of the female officers asked. "This ship has a crew of over four hundred."

"We had three hundred and thirteen casualties. Of the one hundred and seventeen crew members left, sixty-eight of us are injured and receiving medical care. The forty-nine of us still standing are in two duty sections of twenty-four, split up between medical, engineering and three on the bridge," Jim said.

"Oh my God," the girl whispered.

"It could be worse," the Farragut's acting first officer said.

"How?" the young woman, who Jim was sure was a medical cadet, asked.

"They could all be dead," Bones said from the back of the group. Jim nodded but didn't say anything. He was pissed off enough as it was and she was not adding fuel to that fire. They got to the medbay and Jim stopped.

"The worst cases are in here. Everyone else is down the corridor in the mess hall," she told the group. Jim took a breath and before she let them go, she looked over the whole group. "Look, a lot of medical officers died in the two attacks. Most of the medical staff we have are volunteers from other departments. They're all working their asses off with next to no sleep and limited resources, so don't be assholes to them or you'll have to deal with me."

"Yes, sir," the group said and Jim stepped out of their way.

"You okay?" Bones stood in front of her and said just above a whisper.

"I watched my captain die two days ago," she told him.

"That's a no," he said as his eyes checked her over.

"I'll be fine for now, too many people need me to be," Jim said. "We have work to do. We'll talk about this later."

"Yes, ma'am, we will."