Part 2 (1/2)

There was only a newfound certainty that-somewhere, somewhen-she still had a role to play in Captain Scott's fate. She had no idea what that role was, nor what she would be forced to sacrifice for it. She only knew that, when the time finally came, she would have no choice in the matter.

Whatever had forced these feelings onto her, driving them deep into her very soul, would see to that.

She could only wait with endless uneasiness, wondering, as each new feeling made itself known to her, if it was the one she now awaited, the one she now dreaded above all others.

On Board the Shuttlecraft G.o.ddard 2370 Old Earth Date AFTER NEARLY six months of aimless wandering, Scotty was no more at peace with himself than when he had been resurrected from the Jenolen's transporter system. For a few days after he had helped Lieutenant Commander La Forge rescue the EnterpriseD from inside the Dyson Sphere, his spirits had been as high as at any time since the black day he'd let Jim Kirk die. He'd felt that he was pulling his own weight, actually making a difference, but the feeling had quickly faded. Despite the repeated and seemingly heartfelt expressions of grat.i.tude from La Forge and Picard and the rest, the truth quickly became obvious, at least to him. No matter what they said, they wanted him out from underfoot.

It was true that he had pulled off a minor miracle in resurrecting the Jenolen, but the ”miracle” had been accomplished largely with the century-old technology of the Jenolen itself. He was still a fish out of water with the current technology, with the new Enterprise itself.

But worse than that, it had been his fault that the Enterprise had been put in danger in the first place. If he had done what any self-respecting Starfleet officer should have done, this grand new Enterprise would never have gotten tractored inside the sphere in the first place. If he had given Picard and the rest a thorough account of everything the Jenolen had done, someone would have recognized the dangers and avoided them. Instead, he had wasted his time-and everyone else'spoking his ignorant nose in every nook and cranny of the candy-store of advanced technology that, to his twenty-third-century eyes, the new Enterprise was. He had gotten underfoot at every opportunity. He had interfered with the running of the s.h.i.+p, trying La Forge's not-quite-endless patience by making suggestion after suggestion, most of which were either blindingly obvious or scientifically ludicrous. For a time he'd been obsessed with holodeck technology. He had even gone so far as to pompously suggest that it shared a few principles with the cloaking technology he'd become thoroughly familiar with when he and Kirk and the rest had virtually rebuilt the Bounty, the Klingon bird-of-prey that had taken them from Vulcan to Earth after Spock's resurrection.

Finally, even La Forge's patience had given out.

And Captain Montgomery Scott, the one-time chief engineer of this very s.h.i.+p's ancestor, had been exiled from engineering.

But even then he hadn't done what he should have done. Instead of giving them the information that might have kept them from being pulled into the Dyson Sphere, he had retreated into drink-and into a holographic illusion of the original Enterprise bridge, where he sat alone, once again getting drunk and feeling sorry for himself.

In the end, Picard had ”loaned” him the G.o.ddard, its computer programmed with a special briefing covering the history of the skipped-over seventy-five years, and sent him on his way. A warp-two shuttlecraft was obviously a small price to pay for saving the Enterprise from what he had become: not only a technological dinosaur but a drunken Jonah.

In just a few short weeks in the twenty-fourth-century, he had disgraced Starfleet and betrayed the Enterprise.

Long before that, he had failed his friend Matt Franklin.

And worst of all, he had failed Jim Kirk.

Both were long dead, but if there was any justice in the universe, Montgomery Scott was the one who should have been dead.

Had he been given enough time on board this new Enterprise, he would almost certainly have found a way to do something even worse than get them trapped inside a Dyson Sphere, something he couldn't ”make right” later by some ego-driven piece of engineering sleight-of-hand. At least this way, off cruising the back roads of Federation s.p.a.ce by himself in a low-warp shuttlecraft like the G.o.ddard, the damage his b.u.mbling could cause was limited.

Or so he felt each time he drank himself to sleep on the foul-tasting synthehol concoctions that were the best the G.o.ddard's replicator could manage.

And so he felt whenever his nightmares-now filled with two accusatory corpses rather than one-invaded his coc.o.o.n of sleep and eventually ejected him into painful reality.

Until one night...

The increasingly grisly corpses of Jim Kirk and Matt Franklin were taking turns railing at Scotty for his failure to save them when a disembodied third voice invaded the grimly familiar nightmare and drowned them both out.

And woke him up.

After the usual moment of stomach-churning disorientation, reality clamped down on him. He was aboard neither the Enterprise nor the Jenolen but the G.o.ddard. And the voice, a monotone that still held an edge of desperation, was not a part of his nightmare.

It was a distress call, originating out here, in the real world!

Abruptly, instincts born of half a century in Starfleet kicked in, and Scotty scrambled from his bunk as fast as his aching head allowed. Even before the bulkhead had completely closed over the smoothly retracting bunk, he was at the shuttlecraft's controls, simultaneously opening a channel to the other vessel and initiating a sensor scan. As his fingers flew over the controls, he was glad that one of the first things he'd done on the G.o.ddard was improvise a way to impose some order on the multi-function control panels and display screens. In effect, he'd frozen them into a default configuration that bore at least a superficial resemblance to the seventy-five-years-out-of-date equipment he was accustomed to. The other functions and configurations, while still available if needed, obediently stayed out of his way unless he actually requested them.

”This is the Federation shuttlecraft G.o.ddard,” he said. ”Please identify yourself.”

The voice fell abruptly silent. At the same moment, a barrage of information flashed onto the main sensor display screen. Automatically, Scotty extracted the key bits of data from the jumble of letters and numbers as they scrolled up the screen and soon filled it.

Frowning, he leaned closer, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Or, worse, his mind! What he was seeing was obviously impossible.

But then the shuttle ”winds.h.i.+eld” switched over to viewscreen mode, and the source of the distress call appeared abruptly, wavered a moment, then solidified and filled a good quarter of the screen. It was, just as the sensors had indicated, a Federation shuttlecraft.

But not a shuttlecraft from this era! Instead, it was from his era, now seventy-five years dead.

Except for the number-NCC-1951-and the countless scratches and sc.r.a.pes visible on all surfaces, it would've looked right at home in the shuttlebay of the original Enterprise. Even more remarkably, all systems seemed to be at least marginally functional.

Another time traveler, he wondered? Or a piece of junk that someone had managed to resurrect?

Then the anomalous image of the exterior of the shuttlecraft was replaced by the equally anomalous image of its equally scratched and sc.r.a.ped and downright barren interior. For several seconds there was no movement, no sign of life, but finally a young-looking humanoid with a widow's peak of short, mottled fur extending downward almost to the top of a broad, flat nose stepped nervously into range of the viewscreen. His startlingly green eyes were saucer-wide but with vertical, cat-like slits for pupils. His tattered clothes would have looked more at home on a nineteenth-century dirt farm than on a s.p.a.ce-faring vehicle of any era. Although, Scotty realized belatedly, his own nights.h.i.+rt-clad image wasn't the most dignified way for a Starfleet officer-even a retired one-to introduce himself.

”What's the problem, lad?” he asked when the young humanoid remained silent despite the nervous trembling of his mouth.

”Are you one of the Wise Ones?” the other asked abruptly, almost cringing as the words emerged.

”I don't feel particularly wise,” Scotty replied, stepping out of viewscreen range for a moment and grabbing a freshly replicated, seventy-five-years-out-of-date semi-dress uniform, the jacket of which at least partially disguised his middle-age spread, ”but do you need a.s.sistance or not?”

”We most certainly do,” a second voice broke in, ”no matter who you are!” A moment later, as Scotty finished shrugging into his uniform and stepping back into range of the viewscreen, another humanoid, this one apparently female, stepped into the picture behind the male, who winced anew at the other's words and angry tone. She was wearing what looked like a military uniform. A small but nasty-looking wound just above her right temple and just below the razor-edged fur-line had been clumsily st.i.tched shut but had no protective covering, not even an old-fas.h.i.+oned bandage. ”Our s.h.i.+p broke down and unless I miss my guess, the Proctors can't be more than an hour behind us, doing warp five. Our s.h.i.+p might've been able to outrun them, but this thing can barely do warp one.”

”Who- ”

”Whoever you are, can you and this 'Federation' help us or not? If you can't, just say so. We can't waste what little time we have just chatting. If the Proctors catch us, they may not kill us but what they will do is worse!” She winced as she indicated the wound above her temple with an angry tap of her fingers.

The Prime Directive darted through Scotty's mind but only for an instant. His interpretation had never been all that strict to begin with, and the fact that these two were already riding around in a Federation shuttlecraft, even one so ancient, pretty much mooted the point so far as he was concerned.

But what could he do to help them? If their pursuers were indeed capable of warp five, then the brand spanking new G.o.ddard had no more chance of outrunning them than did the ancient shuttlecraft they were currently using.

It was times like this that he really missed the Enterprise. In any of its incarnations.

”I'll do what I can, la.s.s,” he said, triggering a subs.p.a.ce call of his own at the same time he altered course to intercept the other craft, which continued limping along at an unsteady gait that averaged out at less than warp one-point-five. ”For a start, I can probably beam you both aboard my own s.h.i.+p and- ”

”'Beam?'” The female frowned suspiciously.

Scotty blinked, wondering anew who these two were. For all he knew, they could be escaped a.s.sa.s.sins or terrorists, and the so-called ”Proctors” could be the local police.

But he would have to sort that out later. For now, if the Proctors were as close and as dangerous as the pair said, there was no time to be wasted explaining transporter terminology or quizzing them in a fruitless effort to make sure they were the innocents they claimed to be.

On the other hand, there was no reason to take unnecessary risks. A quick check of the sensor readings told him there were indeed only two life-forms, both humanoid, aboard the ancient shuttlecraft, and neither one was armed, at least not with weapons of the type the sensors would automatically pick up. Old-fas.h.i.+oned projectile weapons and knives, however, were another matter, he thought as he activated a confinement field around the G.o.ddard's two-person transporter pad.

”Stand by,” he said, which seemed only to make the male more apprehensive, the female more impatient. Still, they did nothing to sever the comm link as he brought the G.o.ddard safely inside transporter range and synchronized its course and speed to precisely match those of the other s.h.i.+p.

”What are- ” the female began but was cut off as Scotty locked onto the two and the transporter's stasis field froze them both. They vanished in the familiar light show and reappeared moments later on the G.o.ddard's transport pads.

”- you doing?” she finished with a startled blink when the stasis field released them.

”Welcome aboard the G.o.ddard,” Scotty said, ”Captain Montgomery Scott at your service.” Out of the corner of his eye he could see the responses coming in to his subs.p.a.ce call of a few moments before. The nearest Federation s.h.i.+p was more than twenty-four hours away at maximum warp, so whatever situation he'd stumbled into, he was on his own, for good or ill.

”I am Garamet,” the female said, her entire tone changing from desperation to suspicion. ”My brother is named Wahlkon. And you must be one of the Wise Ones,” she added accusingly as she looked around at the interior of the G.o.ddard. ”Why have you returned now?”