by Gene DeWeese
And here, crossing her path again, was this Captain Scott, who had been associated with not just one but three starships with the all-too-familiar name of Enterprise.
So perhaps she shouldn’t be surprised that Scott should be the object of one of the strongest and yet most ambiguous “feelings” she had experienced in the four centuries since she had first heard of a starship bearing that name, a starship that was apparently still several decades in her future.
She just wondered, as she so often did, what it all meant and what the source of her “feelings” was.
And if that source, assuming it existed at all, would ever reveal itself…
Three
On Board the Jenolen
2369 Old Earth Date
AS THE TRANSPORTER room re-formed around Scotty, his disorientation was virtually complete. For an instant, he couldn’t remember his own name, much less where he was or why. All that was real was the pain in his left arm, held to his chest with a makeshift sling.
For another instant, he wondered frantically why the Enterprise transporter room looked so different, then realized that this wasn’t the Enterprise.
Finally, as the world came completely into focus, he saw two men standing before him. One was tall with a neatly trimmed beard while the other was inches shorter and had a metallic band fastened across his eyes like a blindfold. Both wore peculiar, form-fitting outfits he assumed were uniforms but which looked like nothing he’d ever seen in Starfleet.
For yet another instant, his thoughts whirled chaotically as he heard himself automatically thanking the two men, whoever they were. Had the transporter malfunctioned and scrambled his brain? Was that why he didn’t recognize the men? Why he couldn’t even remember what places he had been transporting between?
Had his pattern degraded?
His stomach knotted in fear at the thought that his body and mind might literally be scrambled, that the few scraps he was remembering now were all he would ever remember. Anything was possible if, somehow, the transporter’s pattern buffer had itself been damaged.
The pattern buffer!
Without warning, a splinter of memory glittered in the darkness of his mind.
The pattern buffer had been cross-wired to—
Franklin!
“We got to get Franklin out of there!” he blurted and lunged for the transporter controls.
Suddenly, the tiny shard of memory became an island, solid in the midst of the darkness that still clouded much of his mind: This was the Jenolen! They had crashed on a Dyson Sphere, of all things. He and Matt Franklin had been the only survivors, and Scotty had concocted this desperate scheme to keep them both alive until they could be rescued—
“Someone else’s pattern is in the buffer?” the man with the metallic blindfold asked incredulously.
“Aye, Matt Franklin! We went in together!” The fingers of his still-functioning right hand darted across the controls.
But it wasn’t working!
“Something’s wrong! One o’ the inducers failed!” Without looking up, he snapped an order to the others: “Boost the gain on the matter stream!”
The one with the metallic blindfold complied, but it did no good.
Finally, the ache in his heart sharper than the pain in his broken arm, Scotty forced himself to focus on the key readout on the transporter control panel, the readout he’d been purposely avoiding during his desperate efforts to retrieve the boy.
It confirmed his worst fears. The very fears he had had for himself moments before.
“His pattern’s degraded fifty-three percent,” he said, hanging his head. “He’s gone.”
Then the two men were introducing themselves and saying how sorry they were, but nothing penetrated until they came to the name of their ship: the Enterprise!
Of course! What other ship would it be? But the captain had retired. And the ship—
With a touch of returning panic, he realized he couldn’t remember what had happened to the Enterprise. Crashed and exploded? Been retired to the Starfleet Museum? Images of different versions of the ship whirled through his mind, and he heard himself muttering something inane about getting it out of mothballs without really knowing what he was saying.
How long had he been in the pattern buffer, endlessly cycling? How much of the degrading of Franklin’s pattern had been because of the failed inducer? And how much simply because of the jury-rigging, the constant cycling? How much had his own pattern degraded? Obviously enough to scramble his memory.
Unless he was still in there. A “pattern,” not a person? But still capable of dreaming? Hallucinating? No one’s pattern had ever before been stored in a buffer for more than a few minutes, so no one knew what happened to a person’s mind—to the person himself—over an extended period of time.
Then he realized he must be hallucinating. A huge Klingon was standing before him, and the bearded man was introducing it as a lieutenant.
A Klingon? In Starfleet?
“Captain,” the one who called himself Riker said solicitously, “perhaps there are a few things we should talk about.”
Aye, lad, Scotty thought silently as the man with the metallic blindfold signaled for them to be transported somewhere. For instance, is any of this real? Or is it the figment of my addled brain?
Resolutely, more than a little fearfully, he waited once again to be swallowed up by a transporter.
Her name was still Guinan, and she had finally caught up with the Enterprise she had been anticipating for more than four-and-a-half centuries. For over five years now she had dispensed drinks and occasional advice in the ship’s bar while she observed the endlessly fascinating creatures, human and otherwise, that made up her clientele. She hadn’t consciously thought of Captain Montgomery Scott since coming aboard, but neither had she forgotten him.
She couldn’t.
The day she had first heard of the Jenolen’s disappearance and presumed destruction, she came closer than ever before to losing faith in her “feelings,” even to rejecting them outright. How could it possibly be “right” that, through her own unwitting but deliberate interference, Scott should meet Ensign Franklin only to take an unofficial berth on the doomed Jenolen? If she had kept them from meeting, kept Scott safe on Earth—that would have made sense. And yet her “feelings” insisted that whatever she had done was right, no matter how it looked.
For a decade, she had fully expected the Jenolen to be found, all hands alive if a bit older and wiser. For another decade the expectation faded to a hope, then a wish, and finally to a regret.
Thus, she was more surprised—and more relieved—than anyone else on the Enterprise when the news filtered up to Ten-Forward: Captain Scott was still alive. Not only that, he apparently was still the same age he had been when she had last seen him and Franklin on the streets of Glasgow. The Jenolen had indeed crashed, just as everyone assumed. But Scott had survived the crash itself and had, through some kind of engineering legerdemain, managed to use the Jenolen’s transporter to save himself—to literally store himself in the pattern buffer for seventy-five years, until the latest Enterprise found him.
And now Riker and La Forge had retrieved him, completing the operation, essentially transporting him not across space but across three-quarters of a century of time.
And now that he had been rescued, at least one small part of the puzzle came clear to Guinan: Scott was meant to be here, in this time. Whatever far-reaching destiny she had originally sensed hovering about him required it.
Her first impulse was to pull a bottle of Saurian brandy out of her private stock and invite him down for a “welcome to the future” toast.
But she didn’t.
Before her fingers even touched the scimitar-like bottle, she was gripped by a feeling almost as powerful as the one that had marked the beginning of her link to this apparently remarkable man. A feeling that told her to keep her distance—for now.
He would already be disoriented, she rationalized. Waking
up to a world seventy-five years removed from his own, he couldn’t help but be. And seeing her, as unchanged as himself, could only add to the disorientation. And lead to questions she couldn’t have answered seventy-five years ago and still couldn’t answer today.
No, he was here because he was meant to be here, in this time.
He was needed here.
But at the same time…
For just an instant, an uneasy chill rippled through her, coupled with a sourceless deluge of sadness that brought a lump to her throat and very nearly a tear to her eye.
It was not over, she realized with a start. Yes, Captain Scott was now here. He was supposed to be here. Something of great import depended on his being here.
But something could yet go wrong—terribly wrong.
What? she screamed silently in her mind, the word a curse hurled blindly at the infuriatingly elusive source of the feelings. Tell me what you want of me!
There was of course no response.
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.
Four
On Board the Shuttlecraft Goddard
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 Enterprise-D 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 gratitude 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’s—poking 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 ship, 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 ship’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 Goddard, 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 space by himself in a low-warp shuttlecraft like the Goddard, the damage his bumbling 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 Goddard’s replicator could manage.
And so he felt whenever his nightmares—now filled with two accusatory corpses rather than one—invaded his cocoon 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 Goddard. 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 Goddard 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 Goddard,” 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 “windshield” 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 scrapes visible on all surfaces, it would’ve lo
oked 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 scraped 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 space-faring vehicle of any era. Although, Scotty realized belatedly, his own nightshirt-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 assistance 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 stitched shut but had no protective covering, not even an old-fashioned bandage. “Our ship broke down and unless I miss my guess, the Proctors can’t be more than an hour behind us, doing warp five. Our ship might’ve been able to outrun them, but this thing can barely do warp one.”