• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“The cavalry’s here.” Kirk smiled to reassure his crew.

“Just in the nick of time, sir,” Giotto said. “We’d almost given—” He cut himself off. “You’re wounded!”

Kirk waved it away. “It looks worse than it is. How’s Chekov?”

“Hard to say for sure, sir. He needs a doctor.”

“We need to turn this ship around. The Farrezzi have collected the guns from the slavers we knocked out. They’re ready to fight…. We’ll have surprise on our side.”

“How did you manage it, sir?”

“Diplomacy, Commander. And a kindergarten teacher.”

Giotto gave the captain a curious look. He ripped off a piece of his sleeve for a bandage. Wrapping it around Kirk’s arm, Giotto said, “Thank you, sir.”

“Let’s get Chekov out of here.” Kirk could only guess at what Chekov had gone through. “We’ll head for the command center.”

Stardate Unknown

McCoy was on his own in the darkness, with nothing to do but think.

“Pains you, doesn’t it?” a voice said from nowhere. It didn’t belong to one of his ghosts, nor to one of the espers. But whose was it? “When you have to stay in one place and can’t hide from what’s bothering you. You’re not used to that. You always ran rather than face your problems.”

“Who are you?” McCoy asked.

“Don’t you recognize yourself?”

It was his own voice. He shouldn’t be surprised—after engaging in conversations with hallucinations, talking to yourself was the next logical step.

“You sound like me, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

A chuckle in the dark. “Always the skeptic. Everybody lies, at least when they’re dealing with you. Isn’t that your opinion?”

“I never say that.”

“But you fear it, don’t you? Oh, I know you do. I’m you, after all.”

A figure appeared, a couple of meters away, but it was as if it had been there all along and he only just noticed it. It looked like him.

“Can’t you put away your doubts? Hell, I had no idea talking to yourself could be so aggravating.”

McCoy chose to get to the heart of the matter. “What do you want?”

“To help you. And me, of course. We’re in this together, you might say.”

“How do I get out of here?”

His mirror image raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”

“I wouldn’t still be here, playing your damn game, if I knew, would I?”

“You can’t run away. You have to face it. Make a choice.”

“I’ve always made choices.”

His other self shook its head. “But you always picked the easy choice, didn’t you? The choice that let you leave anything behind that troubled you, that inconvenienced you, that limited you. Your wife, your daughter, your dying father. The list goes on. Even right now, you want to leave the Enterprise.”

“That’s not true,” McCoy replied, but without conviction.

The other him snorted and took a step closer. “You may fool the others, but you can’t fool yourself. You left because it was easier than staying. In space, nothing could touch you.”

McCoy wanted to protest, to say that this wasn’t true. But there was an element of truth in it.

“You thought if you could be out here,” the other McCoy said, “where nobody knew you, you could avoid making connections with people.”

“I like people. I have friends.” He forced the words out. “And they like me.”

“Do they? Or are they just claiming to like you? It’s hard to tell, isn’t it? You can never be sure if their affection is real. You’d have to be a mind reader to find out, like old Pointy Ears.”

“Shut up.”

“What?”

“Shut up, I said.” McCoy could barely contain his anger. Instead of venting it aimlessly, he chose to focus it on what he’d come here to do. He wouldn’t let himself be derailed, not even by what claimed to be a part of him. “I’m a doctor. In here, I can’t do anybody any good. I have to leave.”

“You can’t.”

“Let me go!”

His other self laughed. “You don’t want to go, not really. Or you wouldn’t have to ask for my permission.”

“I need to allow myself to leave,” McCoy said, in order to make himself believe it. “I can’t stay here. I’m needed out there.”

His double waved the comment away. “So what?”

“I’m a doctor. Saving lives is what I do. I used to run away. But I haven’t run away in a long time, I’ve chosen. I’ve run to