Star Trek: The Labyrinth Ch 2

Star Trek TOS
Pairing: Spock/Chapel
Rating: 15

Christine stumbled onto a level floor, into another dark space that stretched away for an unknown distance around her. She stood still, taking stock. The space did not feel large. She stamped her foot, and the echoes did not sound large. Held close to the wall the tricorder showed her a hint of pale green paint, smudged and flaking and revealing layers of other pale paints beneath. And something at the edge of the pool of light…

She shifted the angle of the tricorder. It was a flat metallic panel affixed to the wall at shoulder height. She touched it – and almost shrieked for the second time. Light flooded the space, at first dazzling and flickering and unsteady, and then fading and settling to a dim glow. She blinked, unable to see even in this low illumination after the darkness she had grown used to. She pressed her hands over her eyes, holding them steady and then slowly parting her fingers, slowly letting increasing amounts of light through as her eyes adjusted.

It was some kind of computer room, it seemed. It stretched perhaps twenty feet at its widest, and was almost square, notwithstanding some niches in the walls. There were ranks of consoles before her studded with touch pads and an alien writing that was quite beautiful in its elaborate swirls and flourishes. She took a step forward, reaching out but not touching. These consoles were not dusty, she realised. Although the walls were flaking and the floor was dirty, the surfaces of the consoles, wherever there were buttons, were clean. The floor between the consoles had the look of an often-used path, worn clean and clear down the centres, blurred at the edges by the growth of dust and dirt.

This place was used…

She caught her breath, looking about nervously, and then remembering that the tricorder was far more skilled at sensing life than were her eyes and ears. She glanced at the screen. There, still, beat the Vulcan heartbeat, and there were the traces of exhaled gases – but nothing else. No tremors of alien life. No signs of non-Vulcan breathing patterns. No heat signs but –

She stared, galvanised. Finally the tricorder had picked up signs of Vulcan body heat. Another triumph to add to her tally. He was close by now…

She looked around, moving cautiously past the consoles and checking the floor behind each one. Still there was no sign. And then she saw a door. At first it had been hidden behind one of the projections in the wall, but now she had moved around she saw it clearly – a smooth panel the same pale green as the rest of the room. She moved closer and the readings grew stronger, each beat of the Vulcan heart sending a spike off the top of the screen. She turned the sensitivity down automatically, and continued moving towards the door. Those clean, used consoles made her nervous. The clear, well-trodden aisles made her nervous.

She saw that the door had a handle. No… No, not a handle. It was some kind of bolt or latch – a flat spar of silver metal firmly pushed down into a receiving depression. She touched it with trembling, dirty hands, and drew it up.

The door slid open soundlessly, retracting into the wall, revealing a dark space beyond. The stench hit her at once – the smell of a toilet abandoned by cleaners but not by users, of stale urine and worse. She recoiled momentarily, but as a nurse she was used to vibrant smells and she pushed away her instinctive reaction, trying to focus on what was important. The door, she noticed, had no handle or fastenings on the inside. If it shut, she would be trapped.

She picked up a solid rectangular block from beside one of the consoles. A stool she assumed, and the seat was not dusty in the slightest. It was bulky, but light and strong, and she laid it down on its side in the doorway to prevent the door from closing automatically. Then she opened the tricorder again and looked about by the door for a panel similar to the light switch she had found in the last room. She found it and touched it, and the light stuttered and flickered and finally came into life.

'Spock!'

He was the first thing she saw, lying on his side near the opposite wall of the tiny room – a storeroom perhaps, empty but still cramped. His eyes were closed, his legs hunched up and his arm curled about them as if to protect himself. His other arm was crooked about his neck. He did not react to her cry. His eyelids did not even flicker.

She moved closer, readjusting the tricorder to sense a full spectrum of readings rather than just picking up his slow, steady heartbeat. The smell in the room enclosed around her. He had obviously been shut in this place for some time with no access to sanitation. He had used a corner of the room as a toilet and was lying as far as possible from that place, but the smell pervaded the room.

The readings from his body were bewildering. He had lost weight – that much was obvious without instruments – but his heartbeat was strong, his breathing regular, and he showed no sign of physical injury. There were no bruises on him, no cuts or scrapes, but the soles of his feet were ingrained with dirt, and dirt was smudged over his arms and legs and smeared over his hip.

She knelt by him and touched his arm, shaking him lightly.

'Spock,' she said, in a voice louder than she was comfortable with. 'Mr Spock!'

There was no reaction from him. If he had been sleeping naturally, surely he would have awoken?

She began a deep body scan, seeking out artificial chemicals, poisons, medicines – but there was nothing unusual in his bloodstream but a lower level of vitamins than was healthy, and anaemia that was bordering on severe. She gave him a shot to balance out some of the loss, and then reloaded her hypo with a dose of radiation protection she had brought for the purpose. After almost forty days his original dose had long since worn off.

She sat back on her heels again, regarding him. There was a slight flush on his upper arm where she had given him the hypo, but that was the extent of reaction she had gained from him since finding him here.

She adjusted the tricorder again and directed the scan towards his brain. He was not sleeping. That was clear from the readings. There was a very low level of activity in his cerebral cortex, but activity enough that it was obvious he was conscious, if unresponsive. She tapped a finger on the floor in a regular rhythm and noted the spike of activity in his cerebellum. He was listening, and probably automatically timing and analysing the simple pattern.

'Spock,' she said, bringing her mouth close to his ear. 'I need you to wake up. We need to get away from here.'

Again, the spike of reaction in his brain activity, but no visible reaction at all. He continued still and silent, his eyes resolutely closed.

She bit her lip into her mouth, considering. There was nothing obvious wrong with him – but going by the depletion of vitamins in his body, the weight loss, and the evidence of the waste in the corner, he had been in this room for some time, presumably receiving some food and water but very little care. There was a half-full carafe of stagnant-looking water not far away from Spock's body, and sticks of something dense and orange that may have been some kind of ration bars, indicating that although he had been attended, the attendance was not regular. Solitary confinement such as this appeared to be could have drastic effects on its victims.

Ordinarily she would call for beam-up and he would be being treated in sick bay within minutes. Ordinarily she would have given lengthy consideration to the mode of treatment – or would hand over the case to Dr McCoy and let him make the decisions. But her communicator still crackled with static, and the evidence suggested that Spock had been held captive by someone who cared little for his welfare, but who also might reappear at any time. She could not carry him – he had to be able to walk.

She sighed, and opened her medical bag again, perusing the available options.

She had cordrazine in there. She hesitated over the small red capsule, running Spock's human-Vulcan physiology through her head and recalling discussions with McCoy on the subject of using the drug on Vulcans. Primarily used for heart conditions, it did have a strong stimulatory effect. It might be enough to jerk Spock out of this strange catatonia, just enough to make him respond to the urgency of the moment.

One cc. She set the hypo carefully to one cc and touched it to his arm. A second of hesitation and then she depressed the trigger and the drug hissed into his arm.

The effect was instantaneous. His eyes flicked open at the same time that his heart rate lurched and he stared wildly at her, looking as if he had woken from a nightmare. She tried to reassure him, putting her hand on his arm to steady him, but he simply stared at her, jerking upright to sit with his back against the wall and his arms curled about his hitched up legs.

'Spock,' she said clearly, looking at him in concern.

Her eyes flicked from his face to the readings on the tricorder and back again. The reaction in his body was subsiding, his heart rate steadying.

'Commander Spock, do you know who I am?' she asked him, looking closely into his eyes.

Slowly, mercifully, he nodded. Relief cascaded through her – although his eyes were still distant, the expression in them veiled and cut off. He would not look directly at her.

'Have you been down here all this time?' she asked him while going about the business of checking his pulse for a physical reassurance of his condition and seeing that his pupils were returning to normal after their unnatural dilation.

His lips moved momentarily, but he did not speak. Looking down again, she saw that his hands were shaking.

'We need to get out of here,' she said. 'Can you walk?'

He looked about slowly, taking in the stool wedging the door open and the light that glowed from the ceiling, and then slowly his eyes settling on the mess in the corner of the room, and then dropping again.

'Mr Spock,' she said, putting her hand under his arm and prompting him to stand, noting abstractedly that his temperature was a little lower than usual.

He stood unsteadily, allowing her to hold him, looking down at his feet as if he were amazed at their existence.

'Come on,' she said, urging him to walk.

He followed her out of the room, stepping over the stool with difficulty. She let go of him and he stood, passive. With a sudden afterthought she stepped back into the room, bending over the orange ration bars and scanning them to be certain that they were fit for consumption. Not ideal nutrition for either a human or Vulcan, she noted, but they were better than no food at all, and would last a few extra days on top of the rations she had brought with her. She scooped them up and crammed them into her pack, then turned out the light, returned the stool to its original position and carefully closed the door behind her, dropping the catch back into its niche.

'I want to get out of this room,' she said. 'I don't know when they might be back.'

Spock looked left and right slowly, looking from the door back into the dark stairwell and right to another door on the other side of the room.

'The stairwell's half-destroyed – it's not used,' Christine said, leading him towards it. 'But I want to get somewhere they won't chance across us. We can't get out that way. We need to work out if there's another way to the surface. But for a minute I just want to sit still and think.'

She took him to the shadow of the stairs and moved him back towards the dark recess where the concrete began spiralling up. He sat without prompting and she let her eyes linger on him, worry rippling in her mind. He was either unconscious or unconcerned about his nakedness and the filthy state of his body. A month's growth of beard shaded his jaw, and his hair was longer than he would prefer it.

He looked back at her and there was a moment of connection between their eyes. She smiled reassuringly.

'I'm just going to switch out the light in there,' she told him. 'Otherwise they'll know…'

He nodded silently and she smiled again, then pressed her hand to the light switch in the computer room. The place sank into darkness again and she opened up the tricorder, making her way back to Spock with care. In the ghostly light of the screen his face looked gaunter than ever, and a stab of sadness pierced her.

'Is it that you can't speak, or just – ?'

He looked at her passively and she held the tricorder towards him, doing a close scan of his vocal cords and then of those areas of his brain relating to speech.

'Nothing wrong with the Broca's,' she murmured. 'You should be able to produce speech.' She sighed. 'What did they do to you?'

Spock's eyes dropped momentarily, a flicker of something passing over his face.

'Mr Spock,' she said, reaching out instinctively to touch her hand to his face.

He shied away as if he had been burnt, a moment of panic lighting in his eyes. Intrigued, suppressing her urge to utter apologies, she began to scan the telepathic centres near the front of his brain. The readings scrolled onto the screen and she turned the tricorder so that he could see it too.

'Signs of recent stimulation in the Stovak labyrinth,' she said, and he nodded very slowly, as if reluctant to admit to that truth. 'They melded with you?'

He pressed his lips together, his eyes becoming cast down again.

'There's no brain damage that I can pick up with my tricorder,' she said, unsure as to whether she was trying to reassure him or herself. 'No significant damage from the radiation. Mr Spock, have you spent any time out of that room? Do you have any idea of a way out of here? Which way did you come in?'

He turned his head towards the darkness above them where the staircase twisted up into broken nothingness. His hand rubbed at his wrist, as if remembering an old hurt. And then he said in something just above a whisper, 'I fell.'

Christine's joy at those two words was incandescent inside her. It was very little, but it was a start. His voice sounded hoarse and ragged, as if he had been screaming with full force, but it was, at least, a voice.

She touched his arm, but the responsiveness was gone.

'Mr Spock, do you know of a way out of here?' she asked him.

In the semi darkness it was all she could do to make out his minimal reactions. His eyes flicked back to the computer room, but if anything he seemed further introverted.

She handed him her flask and he took it and drunk swiftly. She offered him one of her ration bars, but he did not move to accept it.

'It's Vulcan-approved,' she said with a smile. 'Completely vegetarian.'

Still he did not take it, and she sighed. She had known Spock long enough to know that trying to persuade him to eat when he did not want to was a hopeless cause, unless she could back herself up with the threat of medical confinement. Here she had no backup at all.

She set the tricorder for a long range scan, reassuring herself that there were no living creatures within range (whatever the range was with the radiation-addled sensors, she reminded herself grimly), and then stood up.

'Come on,' she said softly. We need to start moving.'

Spock stood, just as unsteady as before, and followed her back out of the stairwell and across the darkened room.