by Gene DeWeese
“Mr. Scott!” Picard said, his tone filled with as much authority as he could muster. “I order you to stop!”
“His communications system has shut down, Captain,” Data said. “All power is being diverted to the warp drive and the shields. He did not hear your order.”
“He didn’t want to hear it,” Riker snapped.
The Klingon ship was bulleting toward the Arhennius corona, once again accelerating despite the fact that it was already far exceeding its design specs. Picard half expected it to fly to pieces at any instant.
“Follow him,” Guinan said, coming as close to shouting as he had ever heard her do. “If you ever trusted me, Captain, trust me now!”
Suddenly, the chronometric radiation intensified a hundredfold, setting off a klaxonlike alarm on the bridge, and Picard felt the universe—his memory of the universe—begin to shift like windblown desert sand.
With his last rational thought, he barked out the order that sent the Enterprise plunging into the Arhennius corona only seconds behind Scott and the Klingon ship. But even as the Enterprise shuddered under the strain, new images began to appear on the viewscreen, images beyond the corona they were shooting through at impossible speeds.
Images of a solid phalanx of Borg cubes.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2005 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.
This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 1-4165-0671-3
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Cover art by James Wang; Cover design by John Vairo Jr.
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com/st
http://www.startrek.com
In memory of Don Senzig, Jr., 1951–2004
A better friend than I deserved, a twentieth-century Scotty of the computer world, whose miracle-working and generosity kept me going the last twenty years.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Rick Sternbach for patiently answering several Trekkish questions, to Marco Palmieri for resurrecting what had once been lost, and to Keith R.A. DeCandido for some provocative and informative editing.
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, sadistic 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 starship’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, assuring 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 ship 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 space 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 ship 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 passed, leaving in its wake a mixture of bemusement 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 starship’s sterile corridors.
Two
Glasgow, Scotland
2294 Ol
d 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 ship 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 passed 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 ships and now had the Enterprise in its gravitometric grip, looked like the gate to Hell itself: a spaceborne tornado funnel thousands of kilometers long, twisting and lashing, 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 scraped 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 ship.
Suddenly, without quite knowing how he got there, he was staring up through the smoke at the massive 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 de-activate 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 assistance, 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 vanishing in a coruscating energy flare. As had happened all those other times, everything not bolted down would be sucked out into space, 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.
In fact, there wasn’t a sound of any kind. Even the earthquake-like shaking of the Enterprise-B had stopped. And Scotty was once more weighted down with age, as if invisible masses of neutronium had been attached to his arms and legs.
His heart pounding, he turned toward his friend, fully expecting to see that Kirk as well had been returned to his rightful age.
Instead—
Scotty gasped, almost choking as the stench of burning flesh engulfed him.
A corpse, its face charred beyond recognition above a still-pristine ceremonial uniform, stared blindly back at him out of blackened eye sockets.
“You didn’t keep her together, old friend,” the corpse said, its voice like the crackle of flames.
As he always did after the fourth or fifth repetition of the soul-shriveling accusation, Scotty woke up. His heart was pounding even harder than in the nightmare, his bed-clothes icy with evaporating sweat, his throat so tight he could barely breathe.
Shivering, he sat up and grabbed the bottle that had become his constant bedside companion since he’d moved out of his sister’s house in Cromarty and into this small cottage on the outskirts of Glasgow. The guilt would never go away, but he could sometimes at least banish the nightmare.
But not tonight, he realized as he lifted the bottle to his lips and was rewarded with only a sour-tasting trickle, then nothing.
Grimacing, he dropped the bottle into the recycler chute and lay back down, his stomach knotted. He was too old for this, far too old.
And too tired.
Even though he wasn’t doing anything—except fighting off nightmares—he was exhausted. Constantly.
And there were things he could be doing—should be doing. Not a week went by that he didn’t get another invitation to do an article for some engineering journal or other, and he had a standing invitation to resume being a “design consultant” with Starfleet. There had even been a series of requests for him to “guest lecture” at both Glasgow University, a few short kilometers distant, and at Starfleet Academy, half a world away.
But
he couldn’t bring himself to do any of that, not anymore, not after the fiasco of the Enterprise-B. Knowing what he had done—and what he had not done—he would have felt like a complete fraud, hiding behind the façade of competence he no longer deserved.
Even before the Enterprise-B—before he’d let nearly four hundred El-Aurian refugees die, before he’d sent Jim Kirk to his death—he hadn’t particularly enjoyed any of it. The rosy picture he’d painted for Chekov and the others about his “bonnie retirement” had contained more than a wee bit of face-saving blarney. At best, he had felt “gratified” to know that he was respected for his knowledge and experience, but that was as far as it went. There had been no joy in it, no enthusiasm of the sort that had filled his years with Starfleet.
And he didn’t even want to think about the women—widows, mostly—that his sister Clara and her husband Hamish were constantly introducing him to. To them he was “the famous Starfleet officer,” not a real person. And not a one of them, no matter how gracious or ingratiating, had a clue as to what he’d really done or why he’d loved it so much. Not that they were all that different from most of the other people he met, men and women alike. Virtually all were well-meaning, as were his family and friends, but more than once he’d found himself considering leaving Earth altogether, going someplace—perhaps even to one of the so-called retirement colonies—where he wasn’t known, where he wasn’t reminded every single day of what he had once been but no longer was.
The Starfleet consultancy and the rest had at least kept him busy in the off hours when the blind dates and his “doting uncle” routine had begun to wear thin, not only with him but with his sister. There were reasons—Starfleet duty tours aside—that he had never had a family. During his long career, even the most domestic of situations had never fully involved him. A small corner of his mind had always remained in its “engineering mode,” and that small corner had been likely to surface and take control at any moment. After retirement, matters had only become worse as it gradually sank in that he would never again set foot in a starship’s engineering section except as a guest. No such place would ever again be his. Never again would he experience the sheer joy, the exultation that exploded in him when an ingenious solution to a seemingly impossible problem popped into his head.