Jim is half-tempted to answer that with, 'Admiral Pike,' but that's going to open up a couple cans of worms he'd rather leave alone for now. "Nothing blew up right then, exactly, but there was a fair amount of running and screaming..."

Here's where the story gets weird, in hindsight. "I had Scotty reconfigure our shields for atmospheric pressure and we put the Enterprise in the ocean." Yeah, in hindsight, that is a stupid idea. "That let us kinda... submarine close enough to launch a shuttle near the volcano. Bones and I went into the natives' settlement in disguise to find some way of getting their attention. Those robes were awful and we had to cover up from head to toe so they wouldn't notice we looked different... Anyway, I found this temple thing and they were all bowing down to some kind of scroll, so I grabbed it and ran like hell. Got the whole village chasing after us, so mission accomplished, so Sulu, Uhura, and Spock were able to slip the shuttle into the caldera. I ditched the scroll in a tree a ways away from the village, and Bones and I jumped off a cliff into the water to get away."

"We swam back to the Enterprise, and that's when I found out Spock's harness had snapped and the shuttle's engines got cooked by the ash. Sulu and Uhura made it back okay, but Spock was stuck in the blast zone, and either the volcano was gonna kill him or his super ice cube would. It would've taken too long to prep another shuttle and I figured line-of-sight beaming was our only shot at saving him, so I ordered that we surface and go after him. Got him safe on board about two seconds before his gadget went off and vaporized the top layer of magma."