Star Trek_ A Choice of Catastrophes - Michael Schuster [80]
“That would have relieved you of the responsibility, wouldn’t it?” asked McCoy’s father. He was following him like a well-trained dog. “If someone could just solve this problem by getting the Enterprise out of the distortion zone, then maybe you wouldn’t have to do anything.”
Dad… no, he wasn’t Dad, he was an illusion, a figment of his imagination. Why was his mind doing this to him? Why did it torment him, reminding him how helpless he’d felt, watching his father waste away, ravaged and weakened by that damned disease?
In the end, his father had weighed so little. McCoy’d had nightmares the whole time, and they’d only intensified when his father died. To see the elder McCoy in that wasted state, here and now, was like being punched in the stomach every time their eyes met.
“That’s what you like, isn’t it?” Jocelyn said. “Shifting the blame for your problems elsewhere.”
“That’s not even true!” McCoy snapped, unable to avoid rising to the bait. “I’ve always accepted responsibility for my actions.”
“Oh? Is that why you enlisted in Starfleet rather than stick it out on Earth?” asked Jocelyn.
“And is that why you always blame me for my death?” asked his father. His voice was becoming hoarse; every breath sounded labored, like it had been back then. Toward the end, he’d been unable to speak, merely giving barely perceptible nods or shakes of his head in reply to McCoy’s questions.
“You asked me!” McCoy said, unable to help himself. “You begged me! What else could I do?”
His father looked at him reproachfully. “Leonard, I wasn’t in my right mind. You should’ve known that. How many people have asked you to let them go when the pain got to be too much?”
He’d refused that request so many times… but not that time.
“And you had no better idea than to run from that, too,” Jocelyn pointed out. “After you’d gone back to Earth for the first time in years to help your father… the first thing you did after he died was to run to Capella IV.”
“And then, you ran here,” added McCoy’s father. “Not because you believed it was the best thing to do, but because Jim Kirk asked you to take Mark Piper’s place and you thought—”
“And I thought out here in space, I could finally get away from it all,” McCoy said, glad that nobody else was using this corridor.
“But you haven’t!” Jocelyn wore a victorious smile, like when she won an argument. “I’m here, your father’s here… even Joanna’s here. You can keep on running, but you’ll never make it.”
They were right. He had never chosen to do this, he just ran… That’s why he was wandering the corridors instead of working his ass off to find a cure.
His aimless wanderings had brought him to a turbolift junction. He stepped inside, Jocelyn and his father following closely. But where should he go?
It occurred to him that sickbay hadn’t heard anything from auxiliary control. It was worth a visit, to make sure everyone was doing all right.
And hell, he wanted to know if his idea had panned out.
Jocelyn and his father didn’t say anything on the trip to auxiliary control. They stood there, watching him, accusing him with their eyes. Their presence was a reminder of why he was out here, why he was about to fail the five comatose crew members and probably the entire crew. He felt sorry for poor Bouchard, Petriello, Santos, Fraser, and Salah. They deserved better. They deserved a doctor who knew what he was doing.
When McCoy and his entourage stepped into auxiliary control, things were relatively calm. Uhura was standing over Singh’s shoulder at the main console, while Padmanabhan worked off to the side. DeSalle was nowhere to be seen—likely somewhere in engineering.
Uhura looked up as he entered, and smiled faintly. McCoy estimated she must’ve been up for more than eighteen hours. “I thought you might need a house call,” he said, removing a hypo from his kit