Chapter Three

“JIM, YOU ARE one nosy sonofabitch,” Dr. McCoy growled, glaring up at Kirk from his cabin lounge chair.

“Thanks. I try.”

“That was not a compliment!”

“I don’t care,” Kirk said pleasantly, helping himself to a drink and sitting in a facing chair. “What I do care about is you. If you’re going to hide things from me, how the devil am I going to help you deal with this?”

“I didn’t notice I was asking for help.”

“Well, fortunately, I did.”

McCoy rubbed his eyes wearily, losing the bite in his voice. “Lord protect us from starship captains who think they’re psychotherapists,” he moaned. Then he lowered his hands, peeking out as if hoping Kirk would no longer be sitting there, looking at him. But the captain hadn’t budged an inch.

“Now, tell me what really happened between you and Mark Rousseau aboard the Feynman.”

Howard Weinstein

“All right,” McCoy sighed. “It wasn’t long after I shipped out. I was still getting used to Starfleet life, getting used to the idea that being a space docwas as different from my dad’s practice in Georgia as night and day. There I was, as green as grass, and Stardeet’s sending me from one emergency to the next …”

… Those first few months away from Earth, I saw more blood and butchery than I ever thought I’d see in ten lifetimes. I still wasn ‘t sure who I was or what I was doing. I still wasn’t sure I shouldn’t go back home and try to make some sense of everything I’d run away from

When I’d go to sleep, I’d see the faces I left behind. My wife… I still didn’t know why our marriage didn’t work. And Joanna … how she looked the last time I saw her. My little girl … and I wasn ‘t going to be there to see her grow up.

And then, out of the blue, I get transfer orders. Nobody told me why, and I was too chicken to ask questions. So there I am, hopping a Starfleet supply ship on its way to a starbase rendezvous …

Every time McCoy stepped into a transporter, the little wise-ass voice in the back of his head would laugh maniacally: Your atoms are about to get scattered to the four winds. Say bye-bye, sucker …

So far, though, the little voice had been wrong. And once more, McCoy gratefully found himself wholely reconstituted in the transporter chamber of the U.S.S. Feynman. Seeing the hesitation in his step, the transporter chief waved him off the platform.

“You’ve got to move your feet, son,” said the gray-haired woman. “Nobody’s going to do it for you.”

His duffel bag slung over his shoulder, McCoy nodded dumbly and shuffled down the steps, hoping someone would eventually tell him why he was here. When the doors to the corridor suddenly slid open, he

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looked up with a start as Mark Rousseau strode through.

“Welcome aboard, Leonard!” he said, clapping McCoy on the shoulder.

Caught thoroughly off guard, McCoy could only blink. Then he realizedhis friend was wearing a captain’s uniform. “Mark, is this your ship?” he finally managed to ask.

“Damn right,” Rousseau said, grinning. “And you’re my new chief surgeon.”

McCoy’s eyes bugged wide and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Ch chief surgeon?”

Now, keep in mind I had about as much right being a chief surgeon at that point in my career as you do, Jim. It didn’t take long for me to find out how I got there: Mark happily admitted he’d greased the right wheels and whistled the right tune. Hell, he was Starfleet’s pride and joy, so they couldn’t begrudge him a little favor, like having his completely underqualified friend assigned as his chief medical officer …

“What makes you think I want to be your chief medical officer or anybody’s for that matter?!”

McCoy had been aboard long enough to find his cabin and his righteous indignation. Right now, he found himself in a private corner of the Feynman’s cramped rec lounge, waving his arms angrily at his old friend and new commanding officer.

“Cool your rockets, Leonard.”

“Is that an order sir?” McCoy said sarcastically.

“What are you so upset about? Didn’t we talk about serving together? Well, I was in a position to make it happen.”

“So I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life thanking you?”

“Once would be enough, if you ever stop snarling at me.”

McCoy shook his head. “What the hell am I thanking you for?”

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“Well, for one thing, most doctors have to wait years to make chief surgeon, even on a little science ship like this one. Or aren’t you interested in career advancement?”

“Geez, Mark,” McCoy said, getting up and pacing to the observation window, “I don’t know what I’m interested in. I don’t even know if I’m gonna stay in Starfleet.” He felt a supportive hand touch his shoulder, but he refused to turn away from the window that overlooked the starbase asteroid sparkling in the starlight.

“Leonard, you can’t keep looking back. You’ve got to get on with your life.”

“Shouldn’t that be my choice?” Bitterness colored McCoy’s voice, but he didn’t care. He was tired of wrestling with the grief and the self-pity and just as tired of keeping it to himself. Hell, lots of marriages flop. His wife wasn’t the first to find comfort in the arms of a man other than her husband, and McCoy knew he was to blame for pushing her toward that fateful step with his own unintentional indifference.

Arid Mark’s right, damn him. I should be moving on. But McCoy frankly had no idea if he’d ever be strong enough to do that, decisively and finally. And until he was, he knew he’d resent and resist anybody however well-meaning who tried to help him. He knew how stupid it was to feel that way, how much energy it wasted, but he couldn’t help how he felt.

At last, he turned toward Rousseau. He spoke softly. “I’m not a goddam chess piece.”

Mark frowned at his friend for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “You’re right. I probably should’ve asked if you wanted to transfer here.”

“Probably?” said McCoy with a jiggle of his eyebrows.

Mark shrugged in surrender. “Okay. I should have. If you want to go back to whatever godforsaken place I

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saved you from, just say the word. I’ll look like an idiot “

“Not that uncommon, apparently.”

” but I’ll do it for you. We’re not leaving starbase for two days. Why don’t you think it over for that long?”

“Fair enough.”

“You stayed?”

McCoy nodded at Kirk, taking a sip of brandy. “Entropy. I was there already. It’s not like I had anyplace better to go. But I never got over how I felt, not completely.”

“The resentment?”

“Yeah. I kept thinking the Mark Rousseau I knew before would never’ve done anything so high-handed and presumptuous.”

“Maybe he really thought he was doing you a favor.”

“He probably did,” McCoy said with a shrug. “But that’s not how I saw it. We hadn’t seen much of each other since we were kids, almost ten years. People can do an awful lot of changing from nineteen to twentynine. And I couldn’t decide if he’d changed or if I’d never really known him at all. After seven months of that, I finally decided Mark was right. I did need to get on with my life, without all the baggage I’d left behind on Earth and without him. So I transferred off the

Feynman. “

Kirk sat quietly for a moment. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. Sorry there weren’t any more fireworks.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so.”

“Good.” Kirk stood up. “I’m glad you feel better.”

“Who said I feel better,” McCoy grumbled.

“No need to thank me,” Kirk said as he left the cabin with a wave over his shoulder.

Howard Weinstein

The door slid shut, leaving McCoy back in his preferred solitude. Should he have told the rest of the story, what had really happened on Nova Empyrea? Was it dishonest to tell only the partial truth? He’d answered the questions Kirk had thought to ask. Probably best to leave the unasked ones buried as long as possible.

After all, he had no idea what would happen once they got to the Empyrean colony. Maybe what happened all those years ago would remain in the past. Maybe he had nothing to worry about. Maybe pigs ‘ll Jly, he thought ruefully.

He got up and padded barefoot to the computer terminal at his desk. “Computer,” he said as he sat down, “access records of the U.S.S. Feynman’s mission to Nova Empyrea.”

“Accessed.”

McCoy rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe this going back there after almost twenty years. He tried to recall the person he’d been back then. Could he trust his own memories? It seemed like more than a lifetime ago, yet as close as yesterday. Despite his knowledge of the human psyche, it still amazed and puzzled him the way the mind could encompass concurrent perceptions of time that were utterly and mutually exclusive.

“Does this file have Empyrean personnel records?”

“Affirmative.”

McCoy swallowed like a diver taking a gulp of air right before a deep plunge into unknown and murky waters. “Okay. Let me see the file for Elizabeth March.”

In barely a heartbeat, she was there on his viewscreen. He knew it was a romantic cliche of the worst kind, but the dark-haired, dark-skinned beauty of her image took his breath away today just as it had when he first saw her eighteen years ago.

“Bet you never took a bad picture either,” he

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muttered to the image displayed on his monitor. Even in this two-dimensional representation, her pale eyes sparkled with a knowing intelligence. He could almost see her full lips curling into a smile, almost taste them against his.

He remembered everything, every feeling, every sensation. Like yesterday …

But none of it happened yesterday. Almost two decades had passed. She was the president of the Empyrean Council now, and he didn’t have the slightest idea why he’d been summoned. Or what she remembered. One thing was certain: He hoped to God she didn’t remember the first time they’d met …

“I said, what’s your name?”

Unable to find his voice, young Dr. McCoy stared at the woman who had just asked him a fairly simple question. Twice.

Her dark hair softly framed her face, just brushing her shoulders. Her flawless skin was the shade of medium coffee. She was as tall as he was, and he couldn’t keep himself from looking into her sky-blue eyes. Which was just as well. Had he looked away from those eyes, his gaze would have wandered up and down her faultlessly proportioned body, taut and firm beneath the clinging knit of her clothing. Compared to the effortless physical perfection of the Empyreans he’d seen, he felt like a scarecrow, his uniform hanging on his rawboned frame.

He knew he was making a complete fool of himself, but he couldn’t help it. It was that simple. He just couldn’t help it.

It wasn’t her looks alone. She wasn’t classically pretty, if there was such a thing. Individually, some of her features could be called imperfect. Nose a bit too long, with a noticeable bump at the bridge. Mouth a bit too wide. In combination, though, they were as striking as a golden-fire sunset.

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But it was more than that. Though she’d barely said more than hello, he knew without a doubt that she had a soul, a spirit, an intellect, like no one he’d ever met. He didn’t know how he knew. He just knew. No woman before had ever bewitched him so completely or so instantly.

The pathetic truth was, he’d barely looked at a woman since he’d joined Starfleet. And it wasn’t that no one had stirred him. No, no, not at all. In fact, there’d been quite a few ladies who might have caught his eye, both at the Academy and in his first few assignments away from Earth, had he been willing to permit himself the pleasures of their company.

But after crawling away from the self-wrought wreckage of his marriage, he didn’t think he could be trusted with companionship, much less romance. What’s more, he didn’t think he deserved that kind of happiness. Not after winning his one great love, and then losing her.

Could it be that, deep down inside, McCoy had always felt like a fraud with his wife? Taking a good, hard objective look at himself, he had no idea what she could possibly have seen in him. With what sleight of hand had he convinced her to marry him? And if he had no clue to what that magic had been in the first place, how in hell could he possibly conjure it up again and again, through all the days and weeks and years that were to follow?

Could that have been why he’d allowed his career to take over his life, knowing damn well it was exactly the wrong thing to do? Maybe the hours spent away from home, studying and working, were the least painful way he could convince his wife he wasn’t the man she’d thought he was, giving her the chance to conclude on her own that she deserved better and that she should end their marriage sooner rather than later. Why wait for years of bitterness to build walls that simultaneously trapped and separated them?

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Maybe he had never quite been able to shake his belief in a self-fulfilling prophesy based on the old joke about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

I’m a great one for self-analysis. Too bad I can’t reach any useful conclusions.

In any case, in the couple of years since his marriage had ended and he’d joined Starfleet, he’d been following the road upon which fate and his own flaws had set him. He’d devoted himself completely to medicine. Women were colleagues and casual friends. He had allowed no sparks to strike and would not unless he could be certain he would not repeat the mistakes he’d made with his ex-wife, not until he was ready to believe he deserved to love and to be loved. Not until he set eyes on Elizabeth March, the young Empyrean science attache (he guessed her to be about twentyfive) who had just asked him that simple question.

“Your name?” she prompted one more time, slightly amused by his dumbstruck reaction. “Come on, you can do it.”

He blinked to clear the hormonal haze around his brain. “Utah, McCoy, ma’am. Leonard McCoy, M.D.”

A hint of a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Well, it seems we’re going to be working together, Leonard McCoy, M.D. That is, if you’re up to it.”

He managed a lopsided smile and a charming tip of his head. “I’m up to it, Dr. March.”

“Good.”

And I was up to it, too, McCoy thought, permitting himself a smile as he allowed Elizabeth March’s face to fade from his monitor screen. Now the question was, would he be up to it again?