Aviophobia (Leonard McCoy)

15. Daystrom

Kate and Leonard rushed to Star Fleet headquarters together, both of them having put their half drunken mistake behind them.  At least for the time being.  It was going to have to be talked about at some point, but right now there were more pressing matters.  It took them about ten minutes to rush across the city to get the headquarters, then they had to change into gear that was more appropriate for entering what was essentially a war zone, as it had been described to them.  Kate felt her stomach drop at the description.  Jim was in there, and on the walk there she finally processed that Chris and Spock would have been in there too.  Three of the people she cared most about in the world were in Daystrom when it was attacked, and she had no idea if they were alive or not.

They arrived at Daystrom via a medical shuttle as things were too severely damaged to try to take the lift up to where most of Star Fleet command in this area had been gathered.  Stepping off the shuttle, Kate tried very hard to turn on her emotional response to the situation.  Pure hell was the only description she could give.  It looked like an army had opened fire and she wasn't sure how anyone had managed to survive, but there were several people dressed in command uniform milling about the floor assisting their colleagues until medical help arrived.

She felt a hand on her shoulder give a soft squeeze and turned to see Leonard give her an encouraging look, though he seemed to be just as upset and concerned as she was.  She patted his hand briefly and took off so that she could start assessing injuries and treating the ones that needed immediate treatment.

As she wondered through Daystrom in a fog, she realized that most of the people that had been up there were either one hundred percent healthy and just shaken up about the attack, or had been killed.  There were hardly any injuries, and the few injuries seemed to be fairly minor considering the scale of the attack.  Even so, she focused on the work at hand, calling it when she came across someone who had passed already, and treating the injuries that she was able to treat.

She wasn't sure how much time had passed, but she finally did see some familiar faces and, for the first time since hearing about the attack, felt a sense of relief.  As she looked up from treating a patient, she saw Leonard across the room talking to someone whose back was to her.  When Leonard's eyes met hers, a pained expression came across his face and he made some sort of motion to the person he was talking to.

Kate felt her stomach drop in worry.  The look Leonard had given her was not a good one, but that worry quickly faded when the man turned around and she saw that it was Jim. She stood up from beside the person she was treating and ran over to Jim and hugged him tightly as she said, "I've been so worried about you," letting all of her emotion out in her words.

She felt Jim hold tightly onto her for a few moments, then he pulled away from her.  As he pulled away, she really looked at him for the first time.  His eyes were red and he looked like he had been crying, and that made the worry settle deep in her stomach again.  Jim said softly, "Kate..." and then his voice trailed off, almost as if he didn't want to tell her something.

She knew immediately that either Spock or Chris had died.  There wouldn't have been anything else that could have upset Jim this much.  She grabbed hold of Jim's hands and asked softly, hearing the fear in her own voice, "What happened, Jim?"

Jim turned his head to his left and looked at something on the ground as he said in a broken voice, "He was gone already when I found him," then looked back at her with tears in his eyes.

Kate didn't know if she had the courage to look where Jim had been looking, but she also knew that her life had changed forever regardless of who she had lost.  Trying to brace herself to be able to handle her emotions better, she turned and looked where Jim had been looking, but she had not been prepared to see Chris lying broken on the floor.