Disclaimer: Characters contained within do not belong to me, but to Gene Roddenberry, Paramount Pictures, etc.

Author's Notes: Thank you so much for keeping with this story, despite its premise. I hope you'll keep reading. Special thanks, as always, to my beta/BFF, Lisa.

Oh and if you happen to live in L.A., drop me a line. I'm putting together a Los Angeles Star Trek meet-up to see the movie this weekend. The more to come along, the merrier!

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If Tomorrow Never Comes

by Kristen Elizabeth

******

The inside of the abandoned shuttlecraft was so dark that Chekov didn't even notice the blood on the main controls until he'd managed to boost the auxiliary power and the overhead lights came on. Dark red drops spattered across the panels. He jerked his hands back as quickly as possible.

"Captain!" he shouted, scrambling out of the pilot's seat so fast that he landed on the floor. It didn't take him long to realize that the floor was also covered in blood...and now he was, too. "Captain Kirk!!"

Kirk bolted into the shuttle and Spock followed him a second later.

"Oh shit..." Kirk breathed, looking around. The walls looked like a horror-house version of a Pollack painting. "Spock?"

"It is blood," Spock confirmed. "I will need DNA samples if we are to determine if any of it belongs to the crew of the Grissom. However...." He looked up from his readings. "It is not all human."

Kirk paused as he for Chekov's hand to help him up. "What else is it?"

Spock met his eye. "Some of the blood is Klingon."

"I knew it." Kirk swore violently. "I knew this wasn't just an equipment malfunction!"

Chekov looked at his bloody uniform shirt with wide, unblinking eyes. "I have never seen so much," he said numbly. He tried to wipe his hands on the gold fabric, but it only made the problem worse. "It is everywhere..."

"Hey...hey!" Kirk grabbed the younger man's shoulders. "I know this is a lot to process, but I need you to focus. We need to get into the ship's computer, okay? We need to know what happened here. Can you do that, Mr. Chekov?"

Finally, Chekov blinked. "Da. Yes." He took a breath, steeling himself. "Yes, sir."

"Good. I'm trusting you to..."

Spock cut him off. "Where is Lieutenant Uhura?"

Kirk looked around. "I thought she was right behind us."

Without a word, Spock was out of the shuttle. He barely acknowledged Kirk behind him as he began circling the vessel.

Following him, Kirk whipped out his communicator. "Kirk to Uhura. Uhura, can you hear me?" Met with silence, he shook his head. "She's not answering."

He wasn't out of breath, but Spock's chest rose and fell rapidly. "She could not have gone far." The words were logical, yet they came out with a frantic edge that was entirely Human. Spock cupped his hands around his mouth. "Nyota!"

Kirk did the same. "Uhura!!"

Their voices echoed off the rock formations all around them. Spock struggled for each breath. "Nyota!" he yelled, as if raising his voice would keep his growing panic at bay. "Nyota, where are you?"

They heard the crunch of footsteps on the rocks at the same time. Together, Kirk and Spock whipped around to locate the source of the noise.

When Spock saw Uhura, a great wave of relief washed over him. But just like the tide on the shores of the San Francisco bay, it disappeared a second later as he realized who was standing behind her.

The hands she held in the air shook with understandable fear. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

Kirk's face was chalk-white, but he managed to raise his phase pistol. "Stop!" Spock ordered him, more harshly than he'd ever spoken to a superior officer in his entire career. "He is a Klingon. He will kill her without hesitation."

"I thought they were supposed to be all about honor," Kirk spat out, his eyes burning a hole through the Klingon who held Uhura at gunpoint.

"It is entirely honorable to kill one's enemies." Spock's mouth felt drier than the lost deserts of Vulcan. He tried to swallow, but couldn't. "And as far as he is concerned, we are his enemies."

Kirk gritted his teeth. "Uhura...you okay?"

"I've been better," she admitted, keeping her voice as level as possible. Her eyes locked with Spock's. "It's been one of those days."

The captain nodded, silently approving of her instinct to make jokes to keep from panicking. "Don't worry," he said gravely. "We're not gonna let anything happen to you."

Still staring at Uhura, Spock interrupted him with a surprisingly composed question that he spoke in Vulcan. For her ears only.

"I don't know what he wants," she replied in Federation Standard. "He doesn't appear to have a universal translator. When we..."

The Klingon cut her off. Impatient with their babble, he began shouting in his gruff native tongue, waving his weapon wildly for emphasis.

Keeping her back straight, Uhura replied in her less-gruff version of Klingon. Whatever she said made the man laugh, only his laugh was more frightening than his scowl. Uhura winced.

Kirk looked back and forth between them, never letting his grip on his phase pistol falter. "What are they saying? Spock?!"

"He asked who was in charge of the landing party," Spock told him. "She said that she was." Spock's jaw clenched. "Apparently he finds that amusing." When Kirk frowned, he continued. "She is protecting you, Jim. She wants him to believe that he already has control of our leader." He paused. "I am not certain if that is logical, but we must not reveal her charade now. Her life depends on it."

Uhura said something in Klingon which earned her a body-jarring poke in the back with the warrior's weapon. She stumbled to her knees and it took every ounce of self-discipline Spock possessed not to run forward to grab her before she hit the ground.

Kirk, on the other hand, chose to ignore any control he might have had. His officer and friend was in trouble, and he had every intention of helping her. But he only made it a few steps before the Klingon grabbed Uhura's ponytail and dragged her to her feet.

To her credit, she didn't cry out at the agonizing yanking of her hair, as she hadn't uttered so much as groan of pain when her knees had landed on the rocky ground. Blood from the scrapes trickled down her legs as the Klingon forcibly uprighted her. Her very Human instinct told her to fight back, to lash out at her attacker and win her freedom.

But then she looked at Spock. He was standing so still, with such incredible composure. She knew him well enough to know that every muscle in his body was stiff, but his face was like a expressionless mask, revealing nothing to the unknowing eye.

No, she wouldn't embarrass herself by displaying too much emotion, by making an illogical choice that might lead to all of their deaths. If there was no way out of this situation, she didn't want his last memory of her to be one that reminded him all of the differences between them.

Ignoring her stinging knees and throbbing scalp, Uhura spoke to the Klingon in his language. "Let us go," she ordered him, hoping she put the correct emphasis on the words. "We pose no threat to you or to your mission, whatever that might be. We are only here to find our missing science team."

"You have seen too much," he barked back.

Uhura took a breath. "We have seen nothing," she assured him. Gesturing around, she added, "What is there to see?"

The Klingon considered this for a second. "It is only the three of you?" he demanded to know.

She swallowed, thinking of Chekov. Had Jim sent him back to their shuttle? Wherever he was, he was out of sight and therefore safe for the moment. He had just barely turned eighteen years old...she wasn't about to drag him into this if she could avoid it. "Yes," she lied. "Just us three. We have only come to find our people."

"Your science team are all dead."

"You killed them?"

The Klingon's eyes narrowed. "There was a battle. Warriors on both sides died."

Uhura shook her head. "What happened here? What happened to our people?" she asked after he ignored her first question.

All he would say was, "They were a threat to the Empire."

"And your people?"

To this, the Klingon merely replied, "They died well."

"Do you intend to kill us, too? Are we a threat to the Empire?"

"You talk too much, woman!" The Klingon raised the back of his hand to her. "You may speak our language, but you do not know your place!"

Uhura stood her ground, even when she heard Kirk snarl, "Lay a hand on her, Klingon, and it'll be the last thing you do!"

"You have no authority here," Uhura told the warrior, looking up at his alien face. For once, she didn't have to try to make her Klingon sound guttural. She had enough anger boiling up within her to spit out the words with the proper force. "This planet is on our side of the Neutral Zone. You are outnumbered and alone. If you kill me, you'll only succeed in assuring your own death. And I don't think it would be an honorable one."

He snorted in what was almost laughter. "Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam," he replied.

Uhura swallowed. "No. Today is not a good day to die."

Just then, with the worst timing possible, Chekov emerged from the shuttlecraft. "Captain, I have found..." He trailed off as he took in the scene that he'd been completely unaware of as he'd sat in the shuttlecraft, attempting to reboot the computers. "Chyort voz'mi!" he swore in his native tongue.

Upon seeing the fourth member of their party, the Klingon's eyes flew open, enraged. "Dishonorable liar!" he shouted at Uhura. Raising his weapon, he instinctively fired.

"No!!" Uhura shouted.

But it was too late. The discharged blast of energy struck Chekov directly in the stomach, throwing him back against the shuttlecraft. But instead of his body slamming into the metal, he simply vanished.

Vaporized. The perpetually eager, happy, excited officer, the youngest and most brilliant mind to come through Starfleet in years...was gone without so much as a trace.

It was like the world stopped moving. All Uhura could see was the place where Chekov had just stood. All she could remember was the first time they'd met, in the middle of the Nero crisis. Afterwards, they'd spoken Russian together, on the long nights when bridge duty seemed unending. He had parents in Moscow. A brother at Utopia Planetia. He loved pirogues. He hated vodka.

With all of that in her mind, Uhura did the only thing she could.

She fought back. For Chekov.

******

Throughout Uhura's conversation with the Klingon warrior, Spock had been carefully listening. Her mastery of the alien language was flawless; through all the other emotions weighing on his chest, he felt proud of her. Although he could have translated himself had she not been there, he did not possess the linguistic skill Uhura did. His Klingon would have come out with an accent. Hers sounded as though she'd grown up on Qo'nos.

"Spock, I don't like this," Kirk said, bringing him out of his thoughts. "There's two of us and one of him. Uhura can handle herself if we..."

"No." Spock's tone left no room for argument. "She is doing her job. Do yours and think before you act."

Kirk's hands tightened around his weapon. "You better hope she knows how you feel about her," he muttered. "'Cause to the outside eye, it seems like you couldn't give a shit if she lives or dies."

Uhura was so intent on translating the Klingon's words that she seemed to have completely tuned out whatever Kirk and Spock were saying to each other. She just kept firing off her questions in perfect Klingon until he raised his fist to her, as if ready to strike her for her insolence.

Kirk lost it. "Lay a hand on her, Klingon, and it'll be the last thing you do!" When he received no response from either Uhura or the warrior, he looked at Spock. "Why aren't you doing anything?! She's your girlfriend, Spock!"

Girlfriend. It seemed like such a juvenile Human classification. A girlfriend was something Jim Kirk might have for a few weeks here or there. It was a completely inadequate term to describe Spock's relationship with Nyota.

Truthfully, he had yet to find the right term. She was his lover, as they had a sexual relationship, but their connection was so much deeper than merely physical. Yet, she was not his bonded mate. He had not initiated that step with her. Even when they touched in the heat of passion, he held back from exploring her mind or letting her explore his.

Why he had done so was as much a mystery to him as it probably was to her. What he had told himself over and over again, until he began to believe it, was that she was not Vulcan. She could not understand what bonding truly meant, therefore it would have been unfair to impose it upon her.

Right then, however, that excuse seemed weak and cowardly.

"Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam," the Klingon said. Spock's stomach felt as though it had just dropped to his knees. A Klingon who accepted oncoming death meant to do something that would bring about that death. In this case, it had been made clear to him that harming the woman he'd captured was one way to Sto-vo-kor, the Klingon afterlife.

Uhura's life was in danger.

"No." She spoke bravely, but he could feel her terror. She didn't just understand the words; she understood the meaning, too. "Today is not a good day to die."

In a heartbeat, everything changed. Chekov chose that moment to step out of the shuttlecraft. Only a few seconds later, he was gone. And before either Kirk or Spock could react to that, Uhura yanked her phase pistol out of the holster around her slender waist. She aimed at the Klingon, but he was a warrior from a race of warriors.

She'd never really stood a chance against him.

He knocked the phase pistol of her hand and with a single blow, sent her sprawling to the ground. True to his word, Kirk fired, but his shot missed the Klingon as he advanced on Uhura. Her lip had been split open and blood flowed down her chin, but she managed to scramble back to her feet in time to see the Klingon aim his weapon once again.

Uhura looked at Spock. In that second, he could almost read her mind, as if they had inadvertently bonded on all those nights they'd slept skin to skin.

I am yours, Spock. Forever.

The Klingon fired. And as quickly as it had been with Chekov, her body dissipated into thin air.

Nyota Uhura. His first love. His only lover. The other half of his soul. Gone. Dead. Disintegrated.

The next thing Spock knew, he had the Klingon on the ground. Having wrestled away his weapon with the incredible strength coursing through his body, Spock's fists pummeled the Klingon's face. His knuckles were pink with alien blood, but he kept going, unable to stop. When Uhura's killer was too dazed to struggle any longer, Spock didn't hesitate. He just acted on instinct.

Kirk hadn't stopped him, hadn't wanted to stop him. He knew from first hand experience what it was like to be on the receiving end of Spock's emotions, and he wanted the Klingon killer to experience that pain. But when Spock grabbed the Klingon's head and twisted and the sickening snap of broken vertebrae echoed off the rocks, Kirk had to swallow back bile.

Even after the Klingon lay dead beneath him, Spock's hands remained wrapped around his thick neck. It wasn't until Kirk said his name, quietly, firmly, that Spock released him.

Spock's chest rose and fell with each heavy breath. It seemed like the only sound on the entire planet was him struggling to put air into his lungs.

"Jim..."

Kirk nodded tightly. He didn't need...didn't want to hear whatever Spock was going to say. "I know."

Still, Spock continued, his voice as distant as the far end of the universe.

"I have lost her."

******

To Be Continued

A/N: Hang in there with me, everyone. Twists and turns are coming and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised... Thank you for reading!!