damaged psyche reside in that remarkable body? If McCoy couldn’t tell, how could he, Kirk?
One thing at a time, he told himself.
The heads-up inside Kirk’s helmet showed their destination. At first absurdly tiny, the faint outline of the hatch was growing steadily larger as they drew nearer. He addressed his suit pickup, hoping that communications on board the warship were still sufficiently jumbled by Scott’s efforts to prevent anyone from intercepting his short-range tight-beam sending.
“Scotty, we’re there real soon! You good?”
Alone within hangar seven, Scott was lamenting the number of readouts on a console that was only half familiar. The control he sought ought to be there, high up on the right side, but it was not. Why move it to another location, his engineer’s mind wondered, when high-up-right-side was perfectly adequate? Searching, searching, he ran the fingers of his right hand along the board. He could of course try a verbal command, but if the console was programmed to respond only to specific voices, then it would refuse his request—or worse, lock itself down until local security could unfreeze it.
“No, I’m hardly good,” he muttered into his communicator. “Good is not what I am. . . .”
On the Enterprise bridge, Spock and everyone else who could spare a glance observed the progress of the captain and Khan as they approached the warship. An anxious ensign spoke up the instant Kirk’s projected trajectory turned from green to red.
“Sir, their path isn’t clear! It was when they launched, but much of the remaining debris is still in motion and they’re now on course to intersect! The captain is headed for collision at point four-three-two.”
Spock hit the command chair comm. “Captain, you have debris directly ahead and immediately in your path.”
“Copy that.” Bad luck the chunk of metal was right in front of him, Kirk thought wildly. Good luck that it was large enough to see.
Firing his backpack, he just managed to veer away from certain death from a ragged fragment of the damaged Enterprise. Surrounded by hundreds of drifting shards of metal, plastic, and torn construction fiber, Kirk fought to stay on course while avoiding certain doom. As he pondered the details of his close call, McCoy’s voice echoed in his helmet.
“Whoa, Jim, you’re way off course.”
“I know, I know—I can see that!”
At the Academy, he had spent far more time learning how to maneuver a multi-ton starship than a body in an EV suit. While the heads-up in his forward view continued its inexorable countdown ’til arrival, he gently adjusted the firing controls on his pack until he was back on course.
Inside the hangar, Scott continued his desperate attempt to unscramble the controls on the console. Was he even standing before the correct console, he asked himself? A rapid check of the hangar’s interior had shown him no other likely candidates, but that didn’t mean he might not have missed something. The warship was brand new, after all. Maybe the manual override was located somewhere else. Or worse, that particular control had been entirely eliminated from the massive starship’s design. In which case . . .
No, the override had to exist. Right here in front of him, if only he could identify it. Hadn’t Kirk’s companion said as much?
“Very close now, Mr. Scott,” came Spock’s voice over the communicator.
Damn, but Vulcans could be annoying! he thought. Even the most well-meaning ones.
“Uh, just having a slight issue opening the door.”
There! At an experimental brush of his hand, a number of previously invisible readouts sprang to life. Not perceptible until they’re needed, he realized. Now that it had made itself visible, the control he had been frantically seeking plainly stood out. To ensure that it was functional, he adjusted it ever so slightly, intending to crack the hangar door as little as possible.
Nothing happened.
Frowning, he pushed against the control a little harder, then more forcefully. Still nothing. It struck him that it, and possibly this entire console, had been affected by his own hand—by the sabotage he had inflicted shipwide. Now that power was coming back online throughout the vessel, it was likely that certain elements would have to be manually reactivated and reset—perhaps this console among them?
Well, if he had caused the console controls to shut down, he could damn well get them back online again. Ducking down, he probed beneath the console board, moving cables around until he could get at the solid-state components he sought. The designer portion of the engineer in him automatically took over.
Let’s see . .