The Pon T'Keshtan

CHAPTER THREE:

"I'm telling you, Jim, someone tampered with the data!" Dr. McCoy growled.

Sitting in the medical conference room with PADDs of every description piled up on worktables around him and several bio-med monitors alit in front of him, Captain Kirk was temporarily overwhelmed. He understood only a fraction the medical jargon presented on the equipment, and felt as though he was being asked to digest an entirely new language in just a matter of seconds. His brain locked, and he put his hands up in surrender.

"Bones, Bones... One thing at a time, please. Most of this stuff is like techno-nerd-Breen (1) to me. I don't understand what I'm looking at."

McCoy tapped on the monitor that was closest to the captain's face and indicated the points of disparity between the two scans displayed there. "These two scan were taken the day Spock was brought back from New Vulcan. Look. This one, is a scan I took of him when he was aboard the Keswick and this other one, is a scan Nurse Chapel took on the Enterprise later that same day. See? Whole sections of the data had been removed from the original scan."

"Yeah? And that's a bad thing because... Why, exactly?"

"Why?" McCoy looked flabbergasted. "Because that was the scan I used for the basis of Spock's diagnosis and treatment plan!"

"The one with the missing data - "

"Yes! I didn't pay a lot of attention when Nurse Chapel's scan came across my desk, the day after Spock returned to the Enterprise, because I thought the information on it was simply redundant. I mean, knew that Spock had been brutalized on New Vulcan, but I didn't know to what extent until just this morning. But, look here, at these readings on the second scan... here, in the BGA(2) portion..."

Kirk scowled at what to him was nearly incomprehensible gobbledygook. "Sorry, Bones, it's all - "

"Techno-nerd-Breen, yeah, I know. Well, what it says in a nutshell, Captain, is that we were all lied to. The Vulcans told us that Spock had been bred to five females during his chemically induced plak-tau, and we took their word for it."

"Yeah, I remember that," the captain said. But he hated the word "bred"; it made it sound as though Spock had been used as breeding stock - which, of course, he had been, but Jim didn't want to think of what his friend had been through in those terms. It made his skin crawl.

"And what was the lie, exactly?" he asked McCoy.

"The readings from the second scan indicate that there were six females, not five - and one male."

"Oh, come on, McCoy," Kirk snorted, sitting back in his chair, not immediately taking in the gravity of what the data was suggesting. "The data has to be wrong. How could he have been bred to a male?"

McCoy gave Kirk a pained expression in response.

It took a few more seconds before the dark connotations of the data sunk in, and then the captain's face blanched. "Are you implying that Spock might have been - "

" - Raped. Yes. It took a while for that to register on my brain, too."

"Jesus, Bones - ! Bullshit. Are you sure?" Kirk looked at the data again hoping that somehow his mind could make better sense of it.

"Well, that's a male's DNA signature; there's no doubting that. And whoever he was, his semen was on and in Spock's body when the medical scanner was activated by Christine on the Enterprise. Now, according to everything I've researched on the Vulcan Pon Farr rituals, during a plak-tau, the males in the blood fever, like Spock was, don't let other males come into their mating space. In fact, they'll try to kill any male that does comes near them because they see the intruding male as competition for the female. So, in order for male to have been able to do that - " McCoy gestured at the data on the screen. " - to Spock, Spock must have been somehow incapacitated. Either the other male overpowered him, or somebody helped the other male take him down."

"Shit," Kirk hissed.

"Yeah. Well, here's where it gets really ugly..."

The captain winced in anticipation.

McCoy leaned in and continued with, "Sa'aat told Uhura and me that the female Officiate of a plak-tau, in order to secure her own safety, has a kind of limited mind-link control over everyone involved. She can use her mind to essentially hide her bodyguards from the male in the blood fever so he doesn't know they're there and won't attack them. The Officiate at Spock's induced plak-tau was T'Pau... And between her and the five females Spock was bred to, you come up with a total of six..."

The captain looked like he was going to be ill. "Bones - ! T'Pau is like, what, four-hundred years old? And she's his kinswoman, for cripe's sake; she wouldn't do anything like that to Spock."

"She's actually more around a hundred-and-fifty (3), and... You didn't see her during the proceedings for the Ek'tevan Prerogative. She was adamant about forcing Spock to go through the process. And, of course, the general consensus now is that she's pretty much unhinged. You know that she lost her position on the Vulcan Transitional Council for declaring war on the Federation when we helped Spock and the Fonn Vuhlkansu leave the planet..."

"Yeah. No Vulcan in her right mind would have done anything like that," Kirk admitted. " She's lucky she disappeared before she was committed."

"Disappeared?"

"That's the last I heard, yeah. There's no record of her leaving the planet, but... nobody can seem to find her. Or Semuk, one of the other Ministers, for that matter... A sixth female, and a male... Kirk muttered.

"My mind went there, too.

The captain rose from his seat and walked blindly around the room with a hand to his forehead. It felt as though someone had just clubbed him with a baseball bat. He shook his head as if trying to jostle away the repulsive images that were forming in his mind. After a few seconds, he said, "Okay. Umm, one thing at a time. The male... Can you tell who it was?"

"Not specifically, no," McCoy answered. "The data from the scanner isn't that detailed. I can get genders, and species, and blood types and things like that from it, but no detailed DNA analysis that would let me identify specific individuals. The biobeds and medical tricorders do the more detailed stuff."

"Okay. The biobeds and tricorders, then; what do they tell us?"

"Spock wasn't admitted to the Medical Bay on the night he returned from New Vulcan, so there is no biobed scan to check," McCoy said. He looked ashamed.

"What?"

"I had over a hundred Vulcan refugees to process through a general quarantine when we got back to the Enterprise, and Spock... I... I signed off on his going directly to his quarters after he came aboard."

"Bones..."

"Both Nurse Chapel and Sarek believed that whatever injuries Spock had sustained during the plak-tau weren't life-threatening and could be healed by the po-zung, that meditative sleep thing he was under for a couple of days..."

"So no biobed scans," Kirk reiterated. "And the medical tricorder? You never leave home without one of those."

McCoy looked at the monitor, dejected.

"Aw, come on, Bones. Tell me you got something on a tricorder."

"Prior to the scans Nurse Chapel and I did, while Uhura and I were still on New Vulcan, Sa'aat took my medical tricorder saying that he wanted to use it to record the genetic codes of the females who had been mated with Spock, so he could track them later and find out if they got pregnant. When he brought the unit back to me, it had been purged, but he might still have the information from it in the databanks on his own ship."

"Well, good, then we can contact him, and - "

"Jim... Sa'aat was the last one to touch my scanner's data tablet before I downloaded its information into the main system; the same tablet that ended up with missing information on it. He might have been the one who erased it."

"Great," Kirk said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

"I'm sorry, Jim, I..."

Kirk put a hand up; he didn't want to hear any apologies at the moment. His mind was still grinding away at the facts and possibilities. "Wait, wait..." he said. "Both you and Christine saw Spock that night, didn't you? If he had been through what you believe he had, wouldn't there have been some physical evidence of it?"

"Rape doesn't put a brand on your forehead, Jim. There aren't always obvious physical indicators. Besides, when I examined him on the Keswick, he was sitting down and strapped into a flightseat, bundled up in a heavy robe. And according to Nurse Chapel's report, she never examined Spock closely either because, as soon as they got Spock to his quarters, Sarek took him directly to the shower and cleaned him up..."

"So, we got squat in the evidence department."

"Not 'squat', exactly. We just don't have anything definitive yet. What we have are two medical scanners that don't agree with each other; one which suggests something unspeakable happened, while the other is mute on the subject."

"So... How do we know the scanners were functioning properly when they were used?"

"I thought of that already. Had them checked out. Both were and are in pristine working condition."

"Then we're back to the sabotage of our medical equipment, with Sa'aat as a suspect..." Kirk shook his head. "I don't know; my gut just doesn't jibe with that idea. I wasn't around Sa'aat as much as you were, but I'd gotten the distinct impression that he really cared for Spock."

"Me, too, "McCoy admitted. "As annoying as that green-blooded son of a bitch was, I kind of liked him."

"So, what's left?" The captain asked. "The data on the scanner... You said it could tell you genders and species, right?"

"Yes. It confirms that sixth female and the male were both Vulcans."

Kirk walked over to one of the workstations and picked up a PADD. "But these things aren't infallible They do malfunction, right? Garbage in, garbage out. Isn't that the saying? "

"So, your hypothesis is that one medical scanner somehow deleted specific information from itself, while at the same time another scanner was so defective that it falsified the readings on the number, gender and species of people who had physical contact with Spock during his plak-tau... Is that it?"

"Okay. When you put it that way, it sounds pretty unlikely," the captain muttered. He dropped the PADD back down onto the work station, and mumbled, "Crap - "

"Look, Jim, my brain went through this whole falderal, too. It couldn't have been a male because a male couldn't get near Spock; and the only way a male could get near Spock is if T'Pau let him; and if T'Pau let another male near Spock, then she was complicit in the assault. She saw what was happening and let it happen. And she was a sixth female who had access to Spock, so she might have battered him, too..."

Kirk was shaking his head. When he spoke, he sounded exhausted. "There has to be another explanation. There has to be."

"I'd love to hear it, believe me." McCoy said dismally.

The captain stopped pacing and sat back down in his chair, numb with confusion. He rubbed his eyes with his fingers, and gazed at the monitors for a while, then he said, "Do Vulcans ever perpetrate rape?"

"They're as capable of it as the next species, Captain, you know that," McCoy answered.

"I know they're capable of it, but do they do it? I mean, with all of their rigid social structures and belief in emotional repression, Vulcans as a species don't break the law. In fact, there are so few recorded instances of crime in modern Vulcan society that they don't even have a formalized legal system to address criminal activity. No courts, no jails, no police."(4)

"Jim - "

"They don't swear; they don't lie. They hold truth and honesty as dear as they hold logic. I can't believe that a Vulcan would... would... Cripes, I don't even want to say the word."

McCoy finished for him, "Rape somebody. Yeah, well, we didn't think Vulcans capable of murdering one of their own, either, until Spock Prime showed up dead."

"Reports said an assassin did that."

"Yes, but it was the Ministers on the Transitional Council who wrote that report, not an independent investigator. The same Ministers who told us that Spock had been bred to five females instead of six, and failed to mention anything about a male."

"So, now you're saying that the information surrounding the death of Spock Prime may have also been manipulated? Aren't we getting a little paranoid here, Bones? Come on..."

"Do you think your denials are going to help Spock?"

"Well, I certainly can't accuse one of the former Ministers of New Vulcan of orchestrating the sexual battery of my First Officer without some kind of proof, now can I? So... what do we do?"

"We find the proof."

"Great. Where?"

"I'm a doctor, Jim, not a detective…"

"You know, that excuse is getting really old, Bones..." Kirk said, trying to inject a morsel of levity into a discussion that had actually made him quite sick to his stomach.

McCoy didn't smile. "We can start with Sarek and Sa'aat. See if they have the information that will corroborate our theory."

"Right. I'd have Uhura contact them - she'd be great at finessing them into cooperating with her - but I don't want her to know what we suspect yet."

"I agree."

"What does she think is wrong with Spock?"

"I don't know. I'm sure she knows something is wrong, but I don't know if her mind has gone to 'that place' just yet," McCoy answered. Then he added, "I can make the calls if you want."

"No, I'll do it. It'll give me a chance to use what little diplomatic skill I have."

"Okay." Standing beside the monitors, McCoy looked despondent. "I really messed up, didn't I, Jim?"

"Bones - "

"I didn't follow protocols, I didn't do the follow-up I should have done. There's no excusing me. It's just... Spock really seemed fine when he came out of the po-zung. And I was just so used to his compartmentalizing, and his flat affect, and his self-demanding physical quirks that it never occurred to me that he was having problems. I mean, if I had seen that kind of behavior in a Human, yeah, red lights would have been going off all over inside my head immediately. But Spock's a Vulcan; he always acts like that."

"I'm not blaming you, Bones."

"No? Well you should be. Because according to the reports I got overnight from Lieutenant Uhura and Nurse Chapel, Spock has been having nightmares and avoiding sleep for months - and I didn't know about it until this morning. I'm the Chief Medical Officer aboard this ship, and I was completely oblivious to the fact that one of the commanding officers was having mental problems. Then last night, Spock started hallucinating. I can't even begin to imagine what he's been going through."

"He's tough. He's a Vulcan..."

"In this sort of circumstance, I think that would make things more difficult for him, not easier. Imagine being a rape victim in a society that won't let you openly grieve or get angry; that doesn't have laws or a police force to protect you; whose general response to any kind of mental distress is to lock you up or ship you off to a monastery for mind-manipulation... Damn it, Jim, Spock has been suffering because I didn't do my job!"

"Stop beating yourself up. We don't even know yet if Spock's dreams or hallucination are connected to anything that happened to him on New Vulcan. It could be a delayed reaction to losing his home world and his mother. For all we know at this point, it could have been some bad plomik soup (5) or something. And if what we think happened to Spock did happen to him, well… You're not the only one who screwed up. Spock is my First Officer, my friend. I'm with him for most of every day, and I didn't know he was missing sleep or seeing things either."

"So, what do we do to fix this, Jim?"

"Well, until we're certain of more of our facts, we don't broach the subject of rape with Spock, or Uhura, or anyone else."

"Christine already knows."

"Can she keep it confidential?"

"Can she? She's so protective of the patient's charts that she was pissed off over the fact that I had approached you with the information. I had to explain to her three times that I had to tell you because you were Spock's superior officer and his problems could affect his ability to perform his duties."

"How'd she take that?"

"She teared up, and then kicked me in the shin."

"Small price to pay, Doctor."

"Really? You've obviously never been kicked by her."

Kirk forced out a slight smile. "I think you'll live."

As he then stood up to leave, the captain said, "I'll keep Spock off the bridge so he's not making any command decisions until after he's had a psych-eval. If you'll arrange for the evaluation, I'll rearrange his duty roster."

"Will do, Captain."

Kirk then reached out to clap McCoy on the shoulder. "Buck up, Bones. None of this was your fault."

"Yeah? Tell that to my digestive tract."


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(1) Breen: a race of beings from an ice planet that are never seen without their refrigeration suits when they're off-world. Because of the suits, the Breen's voices are "extremely shrill and almost impossible to understand." "Indiscretion" (DS9) "Flesh and Blood" (VOY; hologram)

(2) BGA: "bio-genetic analysis"

(3) T'Pau's Age: According to , T'Pau was born in 2122, so in the alternate reality time line she would be around 147-150 years old, a little past "middle-age" for Vulcans (who live to be about 250). Spock, by comparison was born in 2232 (or 2230, the information conflicts on that) and would have been about 37-40 years old at the time this story takes place. Author's Note: The age thing is tricky. For my story, I was basing Spock's age on his published birthdate (2230-2232) and the time when he supposedly started working with James Kirk (around 2265-2267, according to TOS canon) which would put him around age 37-40 in my story-line; and the statements made by JJ Abrams in interviews in which he described Spock as "much older than Kirk". Vulcans age much slower than Humans, so Spock may look 29 when he's actually 40. I also figured Spock would have to be over 30 if he was considered mature by Vulcan standards, since Vulcans are generally considered "children" until they're about 30 years old. It all gets kind of confusing and imprecise, though, because there doesn't seem to be much continuity in the dates (that I can find in my research). For the purposes of my story, however, I'm considering Spock to be 37-40 years old.

(4) No Police Force: This was based loosely in Trek canon and on information at the Memory-Beta site, which reads in part: "...Their society had no property authority for investigating violent crimes since they rarely occurred. Vulcan belief held that those who had the ability to commit murder had a form of mental illness. Whilst they were capable of killing in cases of defense or racial survival; to actually murder for personal gain was not considered logical." One of the Star Trek games suggested that the V'kor were the Vulcan police force, but this was never part of accepted canon. For more information see the site at: .com/wiki/Vulcan


(5) Plomik soup: Plomik (or plomeek) is a kind of Vulcan vegetable which is usually rendered into a soup, broth or tea and consumed at the morning meal. For a recipe to make your own plomik soup, go to: .