by Gene DeWeese
“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 Goddard 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, lass,” he said, triggering a subspace 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 ship and—”
“‘Beam?’” The female frowned suspiciously.
Scotty blinked, wondering anew who these two were. For all he knew, they could be escaped assassins 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-fashioned projectile weapons and knives, however, were another matter, he thought as he activated a confinement field around the Goddard’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 Goddard safely inside transporter range and synchronized its course and speed to precisely match those of the other ship.
“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 Goddard’s transport pads.
“—you doing?” she finished with a startled blink when the stasis field released them.
“Welcome aboard the Goddard,” Scotty said, “Captain Montgomery Scott at your service.” Out of the corner of his eye he could see the responses coming in to his subspace call of a few moments before. The nearest Federation ship 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 Goddard. “Why have you returned now?”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, lass, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I thought you were in a raging hurry to get away from whoever was chasin’ after you.”
“Do not toy with us! You can deal with the Proctors as if they were clawless infants!”
Scotty suppressed a grimace of frustration. “Whoever or whatever you think me to be, I’m not. I overheard your distress call and—”
“But what you just did to us—it is precisely as it was described in Proctor Corlwyn’s Journal of—”
“All I did was transport you from one vessel to another. I haven’t the time to explain, but it’s not unusual.” Although, he thought with a belated shiver, you have to be a wee bit daft to try it when both vessels are traveling at warp speed, even one this low. The slightest mismatch in either speed or direction could be disastrous.
Garamet wrinkled her brow, causing a rippling motion in the mottled fur of her widow’s peak, all of which Scotty took to be a frown. While she was apparently still trying to digest the information, her brother turned to look at her nervously.
“Garamet, if what you yourself have told me about the Wise Ones is true, this being could not be one of them. They have been gone for generations. And if they did return, do you think they would allow themselves to be seen? After going to such lengths as you described to remain un- seen for hundreds of years, why would they suddenly decide to reveal themselves?”
“I don’t know, but surely—”
“Surely you are wasting precious time, Garamet. As you also told me only hours ago, if the Proctors capture us—”
“I know what I told you, Wahlkon!” she snapped, her not-quite-human features beginning once again to register the fear that had been so apparent on the viewscreen before the transport. “We won’t be dead but we’ll wish we were!”
Abruptly, she started to step off the transporter platform, away from her brother, but she stopped and jerked spasmodically backward as she made tingling contact with the confinement field.
“We are prisoners, then?” she demanded. “Are you after all in league with the Proctors?”
Hesitating only long enough for a tricorder to determine they were carrying neither projectile weapons nor knives, Scotty deactivated the confinement field.
“Sorry about that, lass,” he said as the field shimmered out of existence. “Until I knew the lay o’ the land, I had to take precautions.”
Hesitantly, as if expecting more invisible barriers to spring up, the two stepped off the transporter pads.
Watching them out of the corner of his eye, Scotty adjusted the Goddard’s speed to compensate for the continuing slight variations in the other shuttlecraft’s speed. The variations weren’t quite as bad as he had first feared. A plan was beginning to form in his mind.
“If whoever’s after you—Proctors, you said?—can do warp five, there’s no bloody way I can outrun them. How far is it back to this ship you left behind?”
Garamet looked at him incredulously. “We can’t go back!”
“We cannot go forward either if what you say is true. The Goddard is faster than what you had, but it cannot come close to warp five. You’ll just have to trust me.” He winced inwardly as the words reminded him of what had happened to the last two people who had trusted him. But he had no choice but to forge ahead.
Impatiently, Garamet answered his questions as best she could. When their ship’s warp drive had failed, she said, they had abandoned it somewhere in what appeared from her description to be an Oort cloud of comet nuclei surrounding the system they were fleeing. The Proctors had by now almost certainly found the abandoned ship and were tracking the shuttlecraft’s warp trail. She didn’t seem to find it odd that the Proctors had sensors capable of such tracking while at the same time they didn’t have even rudimentary transporters.
While he listened and questioned, he scanned for the ancient shuttlecraft’s trail himself. As he had hoped for his evolving plan, the ship’s poorly maintained, poorly shielded engines left a warp trail that he wouldn’t be surprised to find was visible to the naked eye. Which meant that the Proctors would have an easy job of following it, even with what he assumed were relatively primitive sensors. With any luck, they might not even notice the Goddard’s far fainter trail, several thousand kilometers distant.
Extending the scan as far as possible back along the trail, he fed a stream of the trail’s coordinates into the Goddard’s computer. Just as he was finishing, a ship came into sensor range. It was, as its would-be prey had indicated, doing just under warp five as it streaked along the shuttlecraft’s spect
acular warp trail.
A quick check of the Goddard’s sensor readings revealed both good news and bad. Good was the fact that the pursuer’s own sensor field extended only a fraction of the distance of the Goddard’s. Bad was the fact that the ship was heavily armed with disruptor-like weapons, primed and ready to fire. The Enterprise could have brushed off that kind of firepower easily, even with her shields down to ten percent. The Goddard, however, was not the Enterprise and would likely be fried by the first blast.
And at warp five, the approaching ship would be within firing range in less than thirty minutes, sensor range in twenty.
But there still might be time, if he didn’t waste any more precious seconds dithering. And if the remote control he had jury-rigged while killing time between nightmares didn’t fall apart on him. It had worked well the one time he’d used it, instructing the Goddard to beam him up from the surface of a planet he’d been doing a little sightseeing on, but that had been a considerably less demanding task. He had been motionless on a mountaintop while the Goddard had been in a low orbit, held stable by the impulse engines. This time both he and the Goddard would be careening through space thousands of kilometers apart.
His heart beating as rapidly as in his nightmares, Scotty locked the Goddard’s controls so that his guests couldn’t, by intent or by accident, interfere with them while he was gone. Using the remote, he once again tweaked the Goddard’s course to bring the two shuttlecraft back into precisely matched parallel courses.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, stepping onto the transporter pad and activating the transporters with a quick tap on the remote control, now nestled along with his tricorder in the utility belt whose pattern he had found months ago in the Goddard’s replicator.
The Goddard disappeared from around him, replaced a moment later by the shimmering, ghostly image of the interior of the other shuttlecraft. An unexpected mixture of sadness and nostalgia swept over him as the craft’s barren and timeworn interior solidified and became fully real. Even the seats had been removed except for one bolted solidly to the corroded floor plates in front of the control panel. A small rectangle of blinking lights was mounted to one side of the control panel—a self-contained timekeeping device, the tricorder indicated, obviously designed for eyes different than his.
The controls themselves, he saw, were similarly worn but appeared intact except for a couple of obvious jury rigs where switches from another type of craft altogether—Klingon from the look of them—had been substituted, presumably when the originals had been damaged. A quick diagnostic check revealed that the on-board computer still had enough functional circuits to do what needed to be done. In fact, he discovered as he ran a series of more detailed diagnostics, the malfunctions it did contain included a number of the very ones he would otherwise have had to introduce himself. For one thing, almost all the built-in safeguards, the circuits and sensors that would ordinarily keep the craft operating safely within its design parameters, were totally inactive.
Those same diagnostics also told him that the safeguards had not failed. They had been intentionally disabled. And his own experience told him why: to keep the craft itself in operation. If the safeguards hadn’t been disabled, the shuttlecraft’s warp drive would have long ago decided, sensibly, to shut down and wait for someone to repair it. The irony was, half of the required repairs weren’t repairs at all, merely adjustments, things that could’ve been done in less time than it had taken to jigger the computer to shut down the safety circuits. But whoever was responsible apparently hadn’t known how to make the adjustments, only how to disable the safeguards. It was like giving someone with a broken leg a massive dose of pain killers and telling him to keep walking rather than setting the broken bone and splinting the leg. Continuing to operate with disabled safeguards had of course only aggravated the problems, causing actual physical damage to systems which before had only been in need of adjustments.
But he would definitely have time to implement his plan, Scotty realized with relief. Before, he hadn’t been all that certain, but half the work—disabling the safeguards—had already been done. He would need only to introduce a few key malfunctions before going on to program in a new course. That left him time to make some of the adjustments that should have been made originally, thereby at least partially eliminating some of the un wanted malfunctions. His engineer’s soul longed to make some of the physical repairs, but those would have required not only time he didn’t have but spare parts or a fully functional replicator, neither of which was immediately to hand either.
But it didn’t really matter, he thought with a grimace as he finished the bare essentials, not for his purposes. The shuttlecraft’s drive didn’t need to keep working for long. After his tinkering, it would continue to operate—more efficiently and more reliably than before, in fact—for another hour or so before final overload. And that was all he needed.
He hoped.
“Sorry, old girl,” he murmured as he began to program a series of delayed commands into the ancient ship’s computer. “You did your duty and deserve better.”
The programming complete, he gave the Goddard’s course and speed one final tweak to bring them back into precise synchronization with those of the doomed shuttlecraft, then triggered the Goddard’s transporters. The last thing he heard as the stasis field gripped him was the angry, piercing whine that erupted from the craft’s engines as certain of his adjustments took hold and the ship began to wind itself up in preparation for the speed and course changes he had programmed into it.
As the Goddard took shape around him, his guests turned abruptly toward the transporter pad, away from the viewscreen they’d been watching intensely. Questions were plain on Garamet’s face, uneasiness verging on open terror on her brother’s. But Scotty didn’t have time to hold their figurative hands, not yet. The moment the transporter’s stasis field released him, he sprinted the few meters to the Goddard’s controls. As expected, the sensors showed the other shuttlecraft already veering from its previous course parallel to the Goddard and shooting away at a forty-five-degree angle, already millions of kilometers outside transporter range, moving faster than its original warp one-point-five, on its way, he hoped, to a well-out-of-spec warp two-point-five.
Most importantly, it hadn’t exploded, which prompted a heartfelt sigh of relief. Scotty’s unspoken fear had been that something both he and the eighty-year-old diagnostic routines had missed would turn the warp drive into a photon torpedo an hour sooner than he wanted. Such a premature explosion might not have killed his plan, but it would’ve crippled it. For this to work, he needed the pursuers to be distracted for as long as possible, giving him as much time as possible to see what could be done with the ship the two had abandoned.
Assuming he could do anything with it.
Assuming the Proctors hadn’t destroyed it.
Bringing the Goddard about, he set in a course that would send it in a huge arc that would essentially leapfrog the Goddard over the area covered by the Proctors’ limited-range sensors, then reacquire the warp trail at a point well behind the Proctors’ ship. Then he could easily follow the trail the rest of the way back to the abandoned ship while the Proctors continued sniffing along the trail in the other direction like warp-drive bloodhounds. Until they caught up with the expanding cloud of elementary particles the ancient shuttlecraft would have by then become.
If the abandoned ship was what he hoped it was—the Starfleet vessel whose shuttlebay the NCC-1951 shuttlecraft had once graced—he would try to jury-rig enough repairs to get it moving for at least a few hours. If he was really lucky, the Proctors would not detect the Goddard’s warp trail at all and would assume the two fugitives themselves had been turned into elementary particles along with the shuttlecraft.
With a little less luck, the Proctors would only be delayed, not fooled, and would ferret out the Goddard’s relatively faint trail and follow it. But even then, assuming he had found the abandoned ship and been
able to at least partially restore its warp drive, he should still be able to elude them long enough to rendezvous with one of the Starfleet ships he’d earlier contacted via subspace. The nearest, the U.S.S. Yandro, commanded by Captain Buck Stratton, was by now less than twenty-two hours away.
Surprising even himself, Scotty managed to cajole and trick the Goddard’s warp engines into producing—more or less safely—just under warp three rather than the warp two that the manuals insisted was the maximum for any sustained period.
When they were finally underway, with sensors showing the Proctors nearing the point at which the shuttlecraft had shot off on its new and accelerated course, Scotty settled down to get what information he could about his two fugitive guests, starting with a computer check of the star system they were fleeing.
He learned little. While the system was well within what was now considered Federation space, it and a dozen other nearby stars were unknown except for their stellar coordinates. There weren’t even notations about possible planets, Class-M or otherwise.
Not that it surprised him. With a strictly limited number of Federation ships hopscotching through billions of cubic light-years, selecting their targets from among hundreds of millions of stars, it was no wonder that even here, little more than a hundred parsecs from Earth, there were more stars that were still only numbers on a star chart than there were that had actually been visited and scanned for life forms. Even a five-year mission like that of the original Enterprise could only scratch the surface of one small part of the almost incomprehensible population of stars in just the Alpha Quadrant alone. Warp drive is fast but it isn’t that fast. If a world didn’t call attention to itself through subspace communications, either intentionally or accidentally, it would likely not be noticed. And if it was accidentally noticed, it would even more likely be left alone because of the Prime Directive.