It wasn't so much the violent shaking -- as a body used to getting too little sleep, I'd learned how to make the most of what I could, and a little physical violence wasn't going to get me out of that bed -- but the urgency in Nyota's tone that made me force my eyes open.
"Leonard, wake up. Spock's comming you."
And that was the second thing that got me sitting up and reaching for Nyota's hand to take the communicator. We'd agreed to maintain comm silence to keep from being tracked; if Spock was violating that agreement, it meant that he figured there was no longer any need to keep themselves hidden. Which could only mean one thing, really.
I didn't have to ask but did anyway, just in case I was wrong.
"Spock, what's going on?"
His voice was pretty calm, normal on the surface for Spock, but I could sense the tremor of concern underneath.
"They have taken the captain."
"What happened?"
"He opened the door. They were waiting outside."
I admit there are a few things I'm a little irrational about, a few phobias, but I've never really been paranoid about anything, and the suspicions I'd harbored against Phil never really sat right with me; I would have been glad to be wrong about him, and Piper too. But it looked like I wasn't.
"Okay. Let me handle it."
"Doctor..."
"No, it's all right. I know these people. If they're the ones that have him, I'm the one with the best shot at getting him back."
Spock seemed at a loss for words. I cut off his transmission and entered Piper's code; he answered right away.
"Mark. Where is he?"
A few seconds of silence, then Piper's voice, sounding tired or maybe resigned. "He's here at Medical. Come by, meet me at the Annex entrance, and I'll take you to him. Come unarmed and don't bring your communicator. And leave your lady friend behind too."
I kicked myself for being an idiot; our little room switch hadn't fooled anyone, and now I'd put Nyota at risk as well.
She took the communicator from my hand and replaced it with the key chip to her car. "Go ahead. I'll be fine."
I looked down at the key chip, then remembered that my own car was still parked at Medical from my shift two days before.
"I can't take this. You have to get away if this all goes to hell."
She smiled tightly and pressed the key chip into my hand, hard enough to hurt. "It'll be all right. I'll make a few calls."
***
The Annex is essentially the old hospital, or what's left of it, a block away from the main Medical complex; they use it nowadays for hospital administration offices and as storage space for unused equipment and old patient records. There's a little museum on the main floor where you can see displays of old-fashioned surgical instruments along with photographs and holos of the hospital in the good old days of sutures and plaster casts. I couldn't fathom why they'd take Jim there, of all places.
Piper was waiting for me out front, a stained windbreaker zipped over his scrubs. Under the circumstances, it would have been bizarre for him to shake my hand, but he offered it anyway with the same resignation I heard in his voice earlier. I didn't take it.
"Leo, I'm sorry. I tried to get you to stay away."
"Where is he?"
He patted me down to make sure I didn't have anything on me, then led me into the building. We took the lift down to the basement and wound around the storage crates lining the old linoleum hallways to a second lift. Mark held up a key chip to unlock the panel, then pressed the single down button.
The lift doors opened into a second basement. I'd never been in this part of the Annex, didn't even know it existed. Unlike the level we had just left, the floors were new, the walls not covered with old, cracked paint but sleek and bright. Modern doors, each with a combination keypad, lined a well-lit hallway. Mark led me down to one of the last rooms, punched the code into the keypad, and stood aside to let me enter.
Jim was lying on an examination table, naked and unconscious, the contents of an I.V. bottle dripping slowly into a port on the back of one hand. Sedative, I assumed. Phil Boyce had a hold of his other hand to keep the arm elevated while he palpated the brachial muscles. He didn't look up at me as I came in.
A wave of that same revulsion hit me, just like before when Spock and I walked in on him stroking Jim's legs. I charged toward them but got yanked back by a sudden hand on my shoulder, a grip too strong to be Piper's. I hadn't seen the guard just inside the door, but I sure as hell felt his phaser digging into my kidney now. I struggled anyway until that phaser hit me across the back of the head, driving me to my knees in a daze. From my new vantage point, I could see a pile of what looked to be Jim's discarded clothing against the opposite wall.
"Get your hands off him." My voice sounded spindly to my ears.
"Remarkable, isn't it, Leonard?" he murmured, almost crooning, as if I hadn't spoken at all. "The musculature, so well developed after three weeks of coma and bedrest."
He was right. Even dizzy from the blow and the pain meds, I could still see it; you'd have to be blind not to. Jim's body looked like it had been carved from marble, prominent muscles starkly defined in the surgical light. I tried to change the subject.
"How'd you get sprung?"
He put Jim's arm down and proceeded to manipulate his deltoids and pectorals, still not looking at me. "You don't get to where I am without having friends in high places. Section 31 takes care of its own."
Great. Another paranoid loony just like Marcus. If I'd been in better command of my faculties, I might not have snorted.
Piper spoke up behind me. "Leo, we'd like your help."
That was an easy one. "No."
"Now now, wait until you hear what it is we want." Boyce finished his manipulation of Jim's upper body and moved down to the end of the table to examine his feet and legs.
"It doesn't matter what you want, you won't get it from me."
Phil palpated Jim's left gastrocnemius as he answered. "You should know all the facts before you make that decision. Section 31 isn't only about arms development; we also have a Human enhancement program. This room and all the others in this subbasement are devoted to the discovery of ways to make people healthier, stronger, longer-lived. Alex Marcus didn't wake Khan up just to have him make weapons for us. He also wanted to study him, his physical traits and performance, with the goal of replicating the old experiments that originally created him and his people."
"Why? To make a bunch of super-soldiers to go fight the Klingons?"
"That's not the only reason," Piper said from behind me as Boyce's probing fingers skated upward to Jim's left thigh. "Imagine a world where people's lives are longer and better because of what we learn from Khan. We don't want to create a new race of superior beings; we just want to use the information they can give us to eliminate disease and the suffering that comes with it. We want you to be a part of that."
Dazed as I was, I couldn't help barking out a laugh. "You actually believe that crap? Newsflash, son, there's a reason the Eugenics records were sealed -- so that no one would repeat the efforts that led to that war in the first place! You think you're going to be able to put the genie back in that bottle once you've gotten what you want?"
Phil moved to the opposite side of the table to inspect Jim's other leg, speaking with his back toward me as he did so. "It's as simple as this: the Human race will be exterminated very shortly if we don't prepare ourselves. Nothing is more important than that, regardless of what your so-called ethics suggest."
"So that's how you justify kidnapping a man, drugging him, and analyzing him like he was some kind of bacterium in a petri dish?"
Boyce straightened from the examination table and turned to face me, leaning against the table and folding his arms. "It would have been better if he'd stayed in the hospital in the first place." He nodded down at Jim. "We could have examined him without the need for all this. But you forced our hand by releasing him early."
I shook my head in disbelief; he actually seemed to buy into his own bullshit. I looked over the guard's hand, still on my shoulder, at Piper.
"Mark, I can't believe you're in on this. You're better than that."
He looked genuinely apologetic. "I'm sorry, Leo. But there's a bigger picture here, a greater purpose. An end to illness, perhaps even to death. Surely, as a healer, you can see the tremendous value in that."
"Yes I do, but not at his expense. What you're doing here is wrong; he wouldn't want this."
Phil crossed the room to pull several vacutainer tubes from a cabinet on the wall, stuffing them into the breast pocket of his lab coat. "What he wants is immaterial compared to what we can learn from him and the good we can do with that knowledge."
"Good? You're so full of shit your eyes should be brown. There's a reason that what you're doing has been banned since Tuskegee -- it's the equivalent of medical rape."
He returned to the exam table and picked up Jim's hand, then tilted his head to look down at me.
"If you really care so much, here's your chance to prove it. I'll let him go on one condition."
My vision blurred; I didn't think I was going to be upright for much longer.
"What is it?"
"That you give me everything you have on his treatment aboard the Enterprise before he arrived here at Medical."
I almost agreed on the spot. The records consisted of little more than biobed readings, and good luck to anyone trying to get anything meaningful out of them.
But then he continued: "And, you tell me exactly what you did to bring this dead man back to life."
I hoped to hell they didn't notice the quick shiver that ran up the back of my neck. "That's already in my report. I performed CPR, intubated him, electrically and chemically restarted his heart. There's nothing I did that any emergency med tech wouldn't have done."
Boyce smiled slightly and began filling tube after tube with Jim's blood, tapping it directly from the I.V. port on his hand. "Oh, I beg to differ. There were plenty of witnesses in your Sickbay and in the corridors who told of their poor dead captain zipped up inside a body bag. I'm not stupid, Leonard. I know Kirk was dead, that you did something to him that involved Khan, something that amounted to physical and mental resurrection. Something that allowed him to recover in a matter of days from the effects of a coma that would keep a normal person bedridden for months if not permanently. Something that altered his body composition to the point that his lean body mass exceeds what it was when you yourself recorded it at his last physical exam, in spite of his having been comatose for two weeks. Did you really think I wouldn't notice?"
He moved across the room to put the tubes in a lab cooler, then turned and motioned to the guard to bring me to my feet. It was a good thing he still had a grip on my shoulder because I couldn't stand without leaning on him, and even then, I felt myself swaying into the phaser in my back.
"I won't need Kirk if I have you. Tell me what you did, and I'll let him go. "
I didn't figure he would, even if I did. And the possibility that he might then use Khan and his people as plasma production units sickened me almost as much as him fondling Jim's flesh.
"Go fuck yourself."
Boyce sighed and shook his head. "Then you're condemning both of you. I'll just get what I need from him eventually, and you, unfortunately, will have to disappear. Can't have you spreading all this--" he nodded at Jim "-- around."
I was getting real tired of his bullshit, real fast.
"You don't have the sack to kill me."
"You're right about that, but he does." He nodded at the guard behind me. Beside me, Piper was stunned.
"Phil, no! That's not what we discussed!"
"Don't be an idiot. If he won't cooperate, we need to get him out of the way."
Mark moved faster than I'd have thought such a big guy could move and shoved me, hard, to the side. The guard's grip on me loosened enough for me to tuck and roll away; I didn't see while Mark go for the phaser, but I knew he had when I heard a grunt from the guard followed by the sound of the weapon discharging.
For a moment, I thought I'd been hit; my body didn't feel like it belonged to me anymore, and I could barely see through the bleariness in my eyes. But when I looked around, disoriented from the odd perspective, I saw Boyce lying near me on the floor. And as I stared at him, I saw him brighten, yellow beams playing across the white of his lab coat, and, glory be, I heard the sound of Spock's voice, and Nyota's. And after that I don't remember much of anything except Nyota propping me up against the wall and sitting next to me, her hand warm on my thigh, both of us watching Spock walk up to the examination table, reach down for Jim, and pull him tightly to his chest.
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