Chain of Attack by Gene DeWeese

arm.
    "Will she be all right, Bones?" he asked as McCoy, pulling in a deep, relieved breath, extracted his hands from the surgical machinery, removed the vision helmet and stepped back.
    "It looks good so far," he said. Pausing, he looked back at the operating table and the machine—largely an enclosed cluster of micro-manipulators and optics—that was only now being removed from the arm. "You know, Jim, I make a big deal now and then out of being just a country doctor who doesn't trust every new gadget that comes down the pike. But every now and then, I have to admit that I'm damned glad I've got a few of them."
    "They're no better than the person who operates them, Bones," Kirk said quietly. "That was good work, as usual."
    A faint, crooked smile worked its way onto McCoy's still-haggard features. "Thanks, Jim. And thanks for not saying I told you so. You and the green-blooded goblin both."
    "There are times when such things are neither appropriate nor logical, Bones, and this was one of those times. Meanwhile, if you're interested, we've discovered how to defang our friends."
    "Those walking disintegrators, you mean?" McCoy's eyebrows twitched upward inquiringly, and some of the tiredness seemed to fade from his face.
    "Exactly. We brought a second one back, and now that we've defused him, we're going to haul in the other two." As they made their way back to the transporter room, Kirk filled McCoy in on the last hour.
    The doctor only shook his head. "What kind of people would do something like that?" he asked incredulously when Kirk finished.
    "People who are desperate or fanatical or both," Kirk said. Then he added quietly, "Humans have been doing it for millennia in one form or another. Don't forget where the term 'kamikaze' originated."
    McCoy sighed. "I know, Jim. Every now and then I try to forget that that kind of insanity was a part of our history, but it always comes back. And it's always just as hard to understand."
    "Hard to accept, perhaps, Bones, but not always that hard to understand," Kirk said. And then he continued before McCoy could protest, "Now let's see if we can find out what drove these people to such measures. Now that we know how to keep them alive long enough to ask them some questions, maybe we've even got a chance of getting some answers."

    It was fifteen hours and a fitful sleep later when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Nurse Chapel, Rajanih, and Dr. Crandall, along with Tomson, Reems, and Creighton from security, stood in the largest diagnostic room of the medical section waiting for the first of the three surviving aliens to awaken. Cushioned straps held him firmly to the similarly cushioned table, the upper half of which had been tilted upward so that the alien was half upright, facing his captors. A universal translator, linked directly to the main computer, would pick up every sound the alien made as well as monitor and map his neuronic activity. Under these conditions, with the translator augmented by the full capacity of the computer, communication would be possible in a matter of minutes.
    Finally, after nearly ten minutes of silence except for the nervous shifting of Crandall's feet, the instruments monitoring the alien's condition indicated he was fully awake.
    Yet he did not move.
    "Playing possum, do you think, Bones?" Kirk asked softly.
    His answer came not from McCoy but from the alien. At the sound of Kirk's voice, the alien stiffened, but his eyes did not open. Instead, after sucking in a single rasping breath, he clamped his teeth together, grinding them forcefully.
    When the expected sudden death did not come, he ground his teeth together even more violently, until the grating sound was audible to everyone in the room.
    "When he finally decides to open his eyes, Dr. Rajanih, show him what you took from his tooth," Kirk said, still purposely keeping his voice as calm and unthreatening as he could.
    For nearly half a minute in all, the grinding continued, the alien's face becoming