Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [25]
A disembodied voice phasered gasps into the cool cellar, but he barely registered the sound as his own. Why was it taking so long? Did it take hour to set a bone? Why didn’t Spock just cut the arm off?. Stiles dealt with the loathsome pain and the sudden heaving of his stomach at this, his first taste of dynamic physical torment.
“Another moment..” Spock’s voice was his lifeline, but for the first time he didn’t believe the hollow reassurance. “Almost finished, ensign.”
“why do you have to hurt me?” Stiles moaned. “You’re the only one I ever respected….”
“One more wrap… relax now. Let me secure this. Your arm will adjust in a few minutes. Relax, Ensign… relax.”
A gentle hand pressed to the hollow of his shoulder, poised there, and beneath the steadiness and reassurance of that contact Stiles let his neck and shoulders go limp, and finally convinced his legs to lie quiet. Then the nausea set in. His brow furrowed and his lips clamped against the surging in his stomach and throat. Moans shuddered through his body. He heard them, felt them, but could no more control them than harness the shattered building that now cradled him so far below the street.
His own groans wakened him from the drowse brought on by pain. The first concrete thing he noticed was that the searing jab of broken bones in his arm had drained to a manageable ache. Or perhaps it hurt more than he thought it did, but he was conditioned now to the racking and this was better than that. Desolation of spirit sank in on him, and he opened his eyes and looked to his right.
A narrow form stood over him, plucking at the wrappings on his arm. The slick dark hair seemed so familiar… the features somewhat less angular than he remembered, but close enough… soft light from overhead dipping into the curves of those famous pointed ears, which had come to represent such style and trust to anyone in the Federation ….
Stiles blinked his eyes clear and moved his right leg. The knee came up where he could see it. Torn pants. His right leg? Wasn’t it pinned under a rock? “Did you move that by yourself?.”
“With a lever,” the other man said. The voice was different. “A piece of rod from the broken wall.” He held up a three-foot remnant of wall rod, then set it down again. “It broke, but it did serve to move the slab from your leg. You’re free now. Don’t move, however. You’re injured.”
‘TII be fine;’ Stiles protested. “Takes more than an earthquake to get a Starfleeter down.”
“Of course. Try not to move. I’ve splinted your arm with two bent pieces of linoleum and strips of my blanket. I hope it holds. Does it seem to pinch at all?”
“Where’s everybody else?” Stiles asked, ignoring the other question. “Where’d they go?” “Who?”
“The Evac Team. They were here… sit me up, will you, sir?” Stiles drew a full breath, the first one in a long time that wasn’t cramped and tight. Oxygen surged into his body, clearing his head. “You need not call me ‘sir.’” “But I can’t just…” “You may call me Zevon. I don’t care for the other.”
Stiles gazed briefly at the long fingers holding him gently in place. Now that his eyes were adjusted to the dimness and no longer blurred by pain, he surveyed that hand, the long dark red sleeve, the velvety padded jacket of gunmetal gray and with a turtleneck collar of the same dark red, and above that a stranger’s face with somehow familiar features. The upswept eyebrows, dark eyes, becalmed face but a young face. And the hair was not cut in the typically Vulcan slick helmet, but instead a rather roughly cut shag of cordovan brown, longer than Spock’s, less orderly, tucked behind the lovely shellshaped ears, the left of which had a small but noticeable scar, a slight nip out of the side edge. So he’d been through something, some time in the past.
Young, though. Not a hundred-plus-year-old ambassador with a stunning history spanning back to the first openings of deep space-someone else. Stiles straggled