My fellow Trekkers, by now most of us have seen Beyond, and naturally there's one question on everyone's mind: What happened to Carol? I had an immediate thought about why she might have left the Enterprise early in its journey, and somehow it turned into a 12,000-word-and-counting fanfic. I don't usually start one fic while in the middle of another, but this flash of inspiration could not be ignored. Please read and enjoy!

(Also, if you have doubts about whether this is for-profit or simply fic shared among fans...what website do you think you're on?)

Carol Marcus was in the type of bad mood that could only be cured by curling up in one's quarters, alone. As usually happens in these situations, though, one thing after another was going wrong. Being fifteen minutes late for her shift that morning had led to a formal reprimand from Commander Spock, which was complicated by the fact that she could hardly look him in the eye. The reprimand had eaten up another seven minutes before Spock decided to go off-duty at last. When she finally got into the lab and started supervising the tests on one of the samples from yesterday's away team, she'd lived in hope that the day might recover. Her hope had lasted roughly two hours, after which a soil sample had spontaneously started heating up and emitting strange fumes. Which would've been fine, except somehow, the hood with the sample in it hadn't been properly sealed. The fumes flooded into her lab.

As always, full evacuation and automated detoxing of Science Lab Four took over an hour. Carol – as ranking science officer on duty – had to take charge of interviewing all the technicians and doctors and janitors who had been anywhere near that soil sample, then referring them all to sickbay until the cause of the trouble could be isolated and neutralized. All of this, naturally, necessitated a full incident report. Since her office was on the other side of a quarantine screen at that point, she had to tap one out on a PADD while sitting on an uncomfortable chair in sickbay's reception area. It was a bad time to write a report in more ways than one. Between worrying about her crew and her lab, she could hardly manage a coherent sentence. It took ages to assemble even the most basic summary.

Finally, as she was submitting the report to Commander Spock, Dr. McCoy came over with some good news. "I count two asthma attacks and three cases of dermatitis," he said, "but overall, I'd say you got off pretty lucky in this whole thing. I don't know what was in that sample, but it wasn't radioactive, infectious, or lethal."

"Thank goodness," was all Carol could think of to say.

"Of course, we'll have his Pointiness haunting us for the rest of the week, going over everyone's symptoms while we try to figure out what this was, plus the safety and compliance officers will crawl up our asses and shout for a while. So we aren't exactly getting out cheap."

Carol groaned inwardly, and failed to keep all of the guilt out of her voice. "Well, everyone has a job to do. Of course we all want to know how that hood seal got compromised. I doubt it wore out already, so most likely someone got distracted." Maybe that someone was me, in fact, she thought. And suddenly her eyes were watering.

McCoy put a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, don't beat yourself up. Incidents will happen, when you're dealing with the unknown every day. And there wasn't much harm done. At least this time nothing exploded."

Carol tried to smile but it felt more like a grimace. "Yeah, at least there's that," she said, brushing at her eye with the back of her hand. "I'm sorry, I'm being silly. But this happened on my watch and well, it's just…"

"I understand," the doctor said. "I've sat with more than my share of embarrassed officers. Go on, get out of here. Have a hot shower. Replicate your favorite dessert in the mess hall. There's nothing going on here that can't be sorted out tomorrow, or maybe the day after if we don't feel like rushing." McCoy winked at her.

Carol hoped she wasn't blushing. If he only knew how badly I'd screwed up, he wouldn't be this nice to me, she thought, shame pulsing through her heart. "Thanks, doctor, but I think I will visit our asthmatics and our rash sufferers first. Just to keep up morale." Their morale, anyway. There's no hope for mine, she thought darkly as she headed into the bay.