Chapter Text
Jim knew it was a mistake before Spock disappeared from the transport pad. He was at the wall panel shouting orders at the intercom so fast that Spock was still there enough to cock his head at the sound of them. They needed to launch a shuttle, now, to get Spock and the elders from their sacred mountain. He wondered if Spock would realize his blunder now that he’d heard Jim compensating for it and hoped that worrying about it wouldn’t slow the Commander down. He turned to the young Russian man operating the transporter once the orders about the shuttle were confirmed.
“Chekov, you know what you did with me and Sulu? I want you to try again, find a large group of Vulcans and just start grabbing people, especially pairs that are touching so we can double our numbers. We’ll be heavy on the high school sweetheart demographic, but that’ll just give the species a ready breeding stock.” Jim winced a bit at the reference to animal husbandry. He’d been switching over from using the wall panel to talk with the shuttle bay to using his hand held comm to talk to the bridge and the cargo transporter while he spoke with Chekov, and Lieutenant Uhura was sure to have something to say about the insensitive phrasing. It was accurate, though, this was more about saving the species as a whole than any individual and everyone needed to have their head in the game. Vulcans were uniquely reluctant to create fully functional colony worlds, and only had small outposts with no permanent residents or children. A handful of older kids might visit family on a space station in any given year, but from what Kirk understood Vulcan kids stayed on their home planet as a cultural rule. Chekov was already operating the transporter screen, locking onto a group from Shi’kar according to the readout as Jim started a new set of orders.
“This is an evacuation operation as of now. If we have one, we need a map with the schools and major labs marked on it down in the main transporter bay. Cargo Transporter: I want you to play this as safe as possible. Your system down there is optimized for things, not people, so remember that and go for solid locks on strong Vulcan life signs. The main transporter is going to get a lot of kids, you focus on adults. Over 1.6 meters if you need a hard statistic, but that’s not an order. Get beaming, don’t stop, use your discretion to keep the speed up. We don’t have time for fiddling with weak or fuzzy signals. Any Vulcan you can catch, we aren’t asking permission and I’ll handle any apologies later. Security, we need escorts to bring our guests to the Gymnasium, and the ship’s quartermaster needs to organize incidentals like people pulled out of a shower and enough warm blankets to go around. If it starts getting cramped, move on to the observation decks and recreation room. Let’s use the meeting room across the hall from Sickbay to triage minor wounds so they aren’t overrun.”
“A map of schools, hospitals, and the main VSA laboratories and libraries has been transmitted to the transporter bays,” Uhura said when Jim took a breath.
“Hospital… On my authority I’m telling you to target strong life signs only,” Jim ordered. “God forgive me.” Sickbay had been shot to hell, and Bones was still slammed treating their own patients. They were one banged-up ship, they just couldn’t afford to be too generous with their limited resources.
James Tiberius Kirk was a modern-day jack of all trades. That was why Pike wanted him in the ‘fleet so badly he came to Riverside looking for him. He’d managed enough advanced class credits to get a Liberal Arts BA when he left high school, blew the top off the aptitude tests, finished up a Mechanical Engineering master’s degree while working at the shipyard, tinkered with all sorts of things, and read a small library’s worth of non-fiction books out of simple curiosity. It helped a lot in his mixed-track training missions because he understood the Red-shirt engineers and the Blue-shirt specialists were talking about when they dropped into technical vernacular well enough to give them efficient orders without needing them to rephrase in more detail or with smaller words. That pissed off some instructors because it meant they weren’t getting practice dumbing down their words for less well-read superiors, but Jim didn’t think that was his problem.
Relevant to the current moment: Jim knew the ballpark capabilities of the transporters, both the expected routine function and their theoretical limits. That kid Chekov was able to push into some of that theoretical territory when he caught Jim and Sulu on the same pad with pure skill and a total lack of knowing better than to try it. Spock probably thought that the kid could compensate for the gravitational fluctuations the singularity was causing without any problem, which was a great complement to the Ensign, but Jim wouldn’t bet Spock’s life on the Commander having factored in Mount Seleya - Salya? the Sacred Vulcan Mountain - and what it would do to the transporter signals. It was possible Spock figured Jim was an asshole who thought that if he couldn’t do something nobody could and wouldn’t be distracted by worrying about it.
“How’s that shuttle coming?” Jim asked when he jogged onto the bridge.
“It’ll be cutting it close,” Sulu said, returning to his station so Jim could take the captain’s chair. “Nielson’s a racer at heart, won some competitions back home. If anyone can do it, he will.”
“Why are we sending a shuttle for Spock instead of just using the transporter?” Uhura asked. It was a fair question, but he could do without the glare or hostile tone. Jim straightened himself and faced her with all the authority he could muster. She didn’t seem terribly busy at the moment, though the department she was running was hard at work trying to re-establish subspace communications. Probably waiting on more detailed damage reports before she could give the next round of orders, which was fine. Avoiding micro-management and using waiting time to get an explanation was probably the best thing for her department right now. A look around confirmed she wasn't the only one who wanted to know.
“To oversimplify certain elements of Commander Spock’s religion to the extreme: Vulcan’s Forge is sacred ground because that’s where they dropped bombs until even the most violent asshole on the planet was willing to go pacifist. That mountain he’s going into is sacred because it is a natural bomb shelter. The rock is mostly heavy metals that will absorb or refract any radiant energy thrown at it, and so dense that it’s a wonder of geology. The whole area is dusted with a layer of two- millennia- old radioactive fallout. All that distorts transporter beams on a good day. The chances of bringing up the entire Vulcan Council through that distortion and the gravitational fluctuations of the unstable singularity currently eating the planet aren’t great, and we can use our tractor beam to help the shuttle escape if we must. By that point… Well, we won’t need to divert so much power to the transporters anymore. In the worst case, if the shuttle starts falling, the tractor beam can hold them steady enough so that we can beam them from the shuttle once they are clear of the mountain’s distortion.”
“I… I understand, sir,” Uhura said respectfully, something a little haunted in her eyes. Jim turned away to check the data streaming across the main screens.
“If Chekov can pull up pairs on the main transporter pad, that’s the best use of of it. It’s a high chance of betrothed pairs or siblings, so they won’t be completely alone in the world. If it breaks, or overloads, or anything else goes sideways because we’re pushing the limits…” Jim shrugged. “At least we tried, and we’ve got the cargo transporter and that shuttle on the way. Now, engineering, how’s the damage control coming?”