Part 1 (1/2)

Engines of Destiny.

by Gene DeWeese.

One.

En Route to the Enterprise-B 2293 Old Earth Date HER NAME, at this particular juncture, was Guinan, and her silent scream reverberated throughout Time, a despairing echo she could never escape. The transporter's grip had not brought with it the usual momentary numbness. Instead, she could feel her body being torn apart, molecule by molecule, while at the same moment everything that had ever brought joy or comfort to her life was being stolen. Even her memories were being transformed from nostalgic sources of happiness to wellsprings of torment, s.a.d.i.s.tic reminders of what she had once experienced but would never experience again.

But even at that moment of supreme anguish, there was a fundamental part of her that knew that whatever was happening to her, whether she would ever fully understand it or not, was both right and essential. She didn't know why it was right or what it was essential for. She only knew that it was.

And that she had no choice but to endure, as she had endured before and doubtless would again.

It was her gift, this sourceless knowledge.

And it was her curse.

It had been a part of her for as long as she could remember-which was a very long time indeed. For all that time, and possibly more, she had been subject to ”feelings,” sometimes of foreboding, sometimes simply of a vague wrongness or, less often, a similarly vague rightness. Sometimes they came upon her suddenly, other times with maddening slowness. Sometimes they were urgent, forcing her to blurt out a warning to those around her even though she had little or no idea what it was she might be warning them against. Sometimes they were nagging little itches in her mind, the sort of distraction a human suffers through when she realizes she has forgotten something but cannot, no matter how hard she tries, remember what it was.

But the intensity and the steely certainty of the feeling that gripped her now transcended any she had ever experienced before. It transcended even the physical and mental agony that had brought it into being and was, in fact, all that kept her from translating her mental scream of anguish into a blind fury of destruction that would have laid waste to everything and everyone that had the misfortune to be near her. And that would only have added to her grief once she regained control and saw what she had done.

Finally, after an eternity that she somehow knew had lasted only the few seconds it had taken the transporter to ”rescue” her, the physical pain faded to a tolerable level.

With glazed eyes, she looked around and saw only bedlam. The Lakul was gone, replaced by another stars.h.i.+p's crowded sickbay. Her fellow refugees, those that hadn't collapsed to the floor or slumped across the beds, milled about aimlessly, helplessly. She wished she could share with them her certainty of the rightness of what had happened to them. It would be small comfort to anyone other than herself, but it would be something.

Then a solicitous young man in a Starfleet uniform was gently taking her arm and leading her to a biobed, a.s.suring her she was safe and well. For a moment, his uniform caught her eye, and something twitched within her. A new ”feeling,” she thought resignedly, something that had been there all along but had until now been buried beneath the rubble of her own disintegrating life.

There was something-or some one-here on this s.h.i.+p that would- Would what?

She didn't know.

She knew-felt- only that there was something of monumental importance about this time and this place, something with tendrils that snaked out, not only through s.p.a.ce but through time, and enfolded more worlds than even she had seen.

It was why she was here, why she had to be here.

Sudden anger surged through her, an anger not at the captain of this s.h.i.+p for the agony he had subjected her to in his misguided ”rescue,” nor even at the supremely intelligent yet essentially mindless creatures whose destruction of El-Auria was still like a corrosive acid in her veins.

This anger was directed inward, toward whatever it was within her that was responsible for these ”feelings.”

But it was a futile anger. To be angry at something that was so intimate a part of herself would be like being angry at her own heart for beating too loudly.

As it had countless times before, the anger pa.s.sed, leaving in its wake a mixture of bemus.e.m.e.nt and implacable determination.

Whatever the object of this latest feeling was, she would find it, as she had found countless others.

She had no choice, not as long as she still wished to allow her existences to continue.

Putting everything else out of her mind, she eased herself off the biobed, took one last, sorrowful look at the still-dazed faces of her fellow refugees, and, leaving that part of her life behind her, began her seemingly aimless search through the stars.h.i.+p's sterile corridors.

Two.

Glasgow, Scotland.

2294 Old Earth Date.

CAPTAIN MONTGOMERY Scott, Starfleet Retired, clung to the engineering station handgrips as the bridge of the Enterprise-B bucked and lurched, the entire s.h.i.+p shaken like an eagle in the jaws of an angry tiger.

”Keep her together till I get back,” Kirk called over his shoulder as he once more lunged up the quaking steps toward the turbolift doors, already shuddering open.

”I always do,” Scotty said, his aging eyes riveted on the wildly fluctuating readouts. But even as the words pa.s.sed his lips, he knew they were a lie.

For several agonizing seconds, he continued to glare helplessly at the increasingly chaotic, increasingly deadly displays while the turbolift doors closed and blocked off the last fleeting smile anyone would ever see on Jim Kirk's face. On the viewscreen, the so-called energy ribbon, which had already destroyed two s.h.i.+ps and now had the Enterprise in its gravitometric grip, looked like the gate to h.e.l.l itself: a s.p.a.ceborne tornado funnel thousands of kilometers long, twisting and las.h.i.+ng, spewing out jagged arcs of some demented form of nucleonic lightning, destroying everything it touched.

You can't let him die, not again! Scotty's own voice screamed in his mind.

Tearing his eyes from the displays and the viewscreen both, he turned and forced his way through the chaos of the bridge, past the grim-faced Captain Harriman, to the turbolift. The doors sc.r.a.ped open as he lunged through them and rasped out his destination. Seconds later and fifteen decks down, the shaking was so bad it had warped the turbolift itself and he had to pry the doors open before he could stumble out into a corridor filled with acrid smoke. His eyes began to water, his lungs to burn even before he took his first breath.

Squinting into the roiling smoke, he realized without surprise that he was no longer wearing the heavy, ceremonial uniform he had reluctantly donned for the Enterprise-B dedication. Somewhere during the jolting turbolift descent, it had changed, unnoticed, to the plain red tunic and boots he had worn as chief engineer on the first Enterprise a quarter century ago. At the same time, the burning in his smoke-filled lungs faded and his vision cleared, but even so, he couldn't see more than two or three meters through the smoke.

Feeling years younger and pounds lighter than he had only moments before, he set out at a run, trusting to his memory of the blueprints Starfleet had sent him as a courtesy during the construction of the s.h.i.+p.

Suddenly, without quite knowing how he got there, he was staring up through the smoke at the ma.s.sive deflector generators, at least twice the size and ten times the power of those on the original Enterprise. They just might have the power to do what he needed them to do after all: simulate a photon torpedo detonation powerful enough to disrupt the ribbon's intense gravitometric field long enough to allow the Enterprise-B to break free.

If...

Jim Kirk, Scotty saw out of the corner of his eye, had gotten there ahead of him. He was already prying loose a bulkhead panel, revealing the glittering circuits that would have to be disconnected and reconnected into a configuration its designers had never intended, had probably never even imagined possible. Like Scotty, Kirk looked the way he had decades before, young and trim and wearing the simple, unostentatious uniform of his first command. His voice, too, was young as he snapped an order to the bridge to deactivate the main deflector, making the circuits safe to touch but making the Enterprise completely vulnerable until power was restored.

Without hesitation, Scotty brushed Kirk's hands aside and reached through the opening in the bulkhead. Speed was of the essence, and Scotty saw instantly which connections had to be broken, precisely how the glittering circuits had to be twisted and rerouted, and the most efficient way of reconnecting them in the new configuration. Kirk, no matter how good a captain he had been, was not an engineer. From simulated emergency drills on the old Enterprise, he would know what circuits needed to be rerouted. He would even, given time, be able to identify them and make the required changes. But he didn't know those circuits the way an engineer-particularly this engineer-knew them. For Jim it would be like navigating through a strange city using a memorized road map, while for Scotty it would be like racing through the back alleys of a city he had lived in all his life.

This time, he vowed, the modifications would be made not only in time to save the Enterprise but in time to save Jim Kirk as well.

The deck lurched even more violently beneath his feet as he disconnected the key deflector circuits, but Kirk braced him, keeping him from being thrown backward, away from the open bulkhead panel. Without that instinctive a.s.sistance, he would've lost precious seconds.

But then it was over, the circuits reconnected, the new configuration complete. Even before Scotty had slammed the bulkhead panel back in place, Kirk barked an order to the bridge to activate the main deflector.

Then they were both running, lurching back the way they had come short minutes before. Behind them, the deflector generators trembled under the strain of doing what they had never been designed to do.

Even if the turbolift doors could still be pried open, Scotty worried as they ran through the smoke, would the lift itself move? Or had the buffeting by the wildly varying gravity been too much for the structural integrity field, warping the turbolift so far out of shape that it was frozen in place?

But the doors opened, letting them both plunge in. The last thing Scotty saw as the doors closed behind them was the far bulkhead vanis.h.i.+ng in a coruscating energy flare. As had happened all those other times, everything not bolted down would be sucked out into s.p.a.ce, but this time those things did not include Jim Kirk.

This time he and Scotty were both safe within the turbolift, which to Scotty's huge relief lurched unsteadily upward. Grinning, the triumphant engineer watched the indicators as they counted down toward deck one and the bridge.

”We did it, Captain,” he said, limp with relief. ”We did it.”

But Kirk didn't answer.