Star Trek Into Darkness Page 0,98

on the top of the cylinder. The transparent cover slid shut over the recumbent captain. The procedure as complete as he could make it, he turned his attention to the nearest communicator.

“McCoy to bridge. I can’t reach Spock from sickbay. Listen to me. Khan—I need Khan alive. You get that murderous sonuvabitch back on this ship right now.” He took a deep breath. “I think he can save Kirk.”

As he closed the communication, he found Carol gazing at him intently. “What about bringing one of the other members of Khan’s crew out of cryosleep? Even if they don’t revive . . . properly . . . it’s not their opinions we need.”

McCoy looked toward the prone form of Kirk lying motionless on the gurney, where he continued to be prepped and monitored by the team of medical technicians.

“Too risky. I think this might work with Khan. I don’t know how much alike he and his crew are, and I don’t have time to find out. If there’s even the slightest unresolved difference between their respective physiologies, then we might be doing nothing but wasting our time and what little, if any, Jim has left. And I have to have Khan alive, because I don’t know what death might do to his body . . . or the viability of its respective components.” He shook his head in dismay. “It’s Khan—or nothing.”

The bridge was the scene of almost as much activity as sickbay as Sulu and his fellow officers sought to track the movements of two people in a crowded city far below. Beyond placing the Enterprise in a stationary orbit above San Francisco, there was little more the helmsman could do.

“Can we beam them up to the ship?” Sulu asked his current second-in-command.

Chekov studied his instrumentation. “I think they’re on a transport of some kind. They keep moving too fast in and out of structural surroundings filled with people to still be on foot. I can’t get a lock on either of them.”

Looking over Sulu’s shoulders, Uhura had already come to a decision of her own. And for once there was no one to contradict her as she spoke to the helmsman.

“You can’t beam them up. Can you beam someone down?”

Training had made Spock every bit as good a fighter as his opponent, but Vulcan or not, he didn’t possess the endurance of his artificially enhanced adversary. Khan continued to pound his prone opponent, until the science officer was sufficiently weakened so that his enemy was again able to apply his two-handed grip to the Vulcan’s head.

And this time Spock was too beaten down and too tired to respond with a third nerve pinch.

With his prone opponent trapped beneath him, the fight was as good as over. But it was not in Khan’s nature to dwell on this kind of victory. Killing the science officer was simply something that had to be done, a next step in securing the latest iteration of his freedom. Focused on his now-pinned foe, Khan continued to apply pressure to the Vulcan’s skull. Pressure capable of breaking bone.

Only to be distracted by a glimmer in his prey’s eyes. A flashing of light that ought not to be there.

Whirling, he saw Lieutenant Uhura materialize, phaser in hand. Taking aim with the pistol, she began firing. One shot after another struck home. They slowed but did not put him down.

Why isn’t her weapon set on kill? the battered, injured Spock wondered as he struggled to clamber back onto his feet. Ignoring the contradiction as well as the pain that now racked his body, he staggered erect, stumbled forward, and reached Khan.

Slowed by the repeated hits from Uhura’s phaser, Khan was unable to counter the punch Spock threw at him. It caught his opponent across the face, dazing him and spinning him around. As Khan staggered, refusing to go down, Spock grabbed the enhanced human’s extended arm and executed a formal Vulcan martial-arts move. Only unlike in training, this time he did not stop himself halfway through the movement.

The arm snapped. As Khan cried out, Spock employed another move to lift him, spin him, and slam him to the metal deck. Crouching atop his now-helpless enemy, the Vulcan proceeded to throw a closed fist into his face. Again and again, harder than Kirk ever had on Qo’noS. Blood pouring from his wounds, Khan no longer possessed the energy to fight back—but he refused to pass out, refused to surrender.

That was fine with Spock, who continued to pummel his