by Gene DeWeese
Bracing himself for their reaction, he told them he planned to keep the Bounty 2, going on to explain that he would of course transport them to the nearest starbase or, if they preferred, return them to the Narisian system and, once he’d checked out the Klingon transporters, beam them down to wherever in that system they wanted to go.
To his relief, they didn’t seem to be at all troubled by the prospect of losing the Bounty 2 or of being taken to a starbase. Garamet in particular seemed positively thrilled at the thought of seeing firsthand what Scotty’s “Federation” was really like, while Wahlkon was apparently happy to go wherever his sister went. Both, however, refused to even consider being returned to Narisia. Garamet had been put automatically on a list of traitors the moment it was discovered that her implant had been damaged and she hadn’t reported it. She would already be dead—or at least reimplanted—and Wahlkon either dead or a prisoner if they hadn’t had the incredible good luck of having their distress call picked up by Scotty and the Goddard.
Since the off-worlders had vanished generations ago, the various Proctors had gotten even more paranoid and aggressive than before, Garamet explained. Each suspected that one or more of the others had managed to either monopolize the off-worlders’ attention or destroy them and steal as much of their technology as possible. As a result, each Proctor had been pushing his own people to not only expand upon the technology they already had but to search the Narisian system and surrounding space for anything the off-worlders might have left behind.
It was on one of these searches through a particularly dense segment of one of two asteroid belts in the Narisian system that Garamet had stumbled across the derelict Klingon ship, invisible to her ship’s sensors until she was nearly on top of it. Unfortunately, a searcher from a different Narisian faction had shown up not long after, and Garamet’s ship had ended up colliding with the other ship as both tried to take possession of the prize.
Both ships were disabled by the collision, the other pilot killed. Garamet suffered only a few cuts and bruises, but one of her injuries was a blow to the head, which apparently disabled her implant. In any event, as she tried to repair her ship, thoughts that would have seemed unthinkable only hours earlier began to bubble up in her mind. She even found herself thinking that the secrecy that had surrounded the Wise Ones from the first day they had appeared was totally wrong-headed. And now that they were no longer around to keep all the Narisian factions under at least minimal control, the secrecy and the internecine warfare among the various Proctors had gotten immeasurably worse. As witness what had just happened between her and the other pilot. What was needed, she realized with a start, was for the truth to come out. Before her injuries, such a thought would have triggered a physical illness, forcing her to abandon it.
But there was nothing she could do about it, not in a disabled ship that was capable of communicating only with the Proctors.
In the end, after days of futile attempts to repair her own ship, she boarded the Klingon ship, still functional according to her ship’s surviving sensors, and was eventually able to decipher enough of its controls to get its impulse drive working and, eventually, its warp drive as well.
But it all took time, too much time for the impatient Proctors, and when her superior contacted her, she was unable to conceal the fact that her implant was no longer functional. She was instantly ordered back to Narisia, of course, and when some hesitation was detected in her answers, her brother was threatened. If she didn’t return immediately, she was told harshly, he would be the one to suffer. With the Klingon ship, however, she was able to get to Wahlkon before the Proctor’s people and pick him up. She hadn’t yet figured out how to operate the Klingon weapons systems, so she could only flee. And then the ship had blown the couplers and dropped out of warp drive, leaving Garamet and Wahlkon with only the shuttlecraft.
They had been sending out distress signals blindly, hoping they might somehow attract the attention of the off-worlders, the Wise Ones whose ships they still assumed the bird-of-prey and the shuttlecraft to be. And that was where Scotty and the Goddard had come in.
Neither Garamet nor Wahlkon had any idea what either a Federation shuttlecraft or a Klingon bird-of-prey was, let alone how one had ended up inside the other, abandoned in the Narisian system. Scotty was equally at a loss to explain the latter, though he did have hopes of eventually accessing the Klingon logs. His immediate concern, however, was not where the bird-of-prey had been or what it had done. His only interest, now that he had control of the ship, was what it would be doing.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s eyebrows inched upward in mild surprise as Captain Montgomery Scott’s smiling face appeared on the Enterprise main viewscreen.
“Captain Scott,” he said, returning a modest version of the smile, “this is an unexpected pleasure. To what do we owe the honor of your return?”
“You remember suggesting I might want to try playing engineering catch-up? Well, if the offer of the use of the Enterprise data banks is still open, I wouldn’t mind getting started. At least I’ll know just how much catching up I’ll need to do.”
“Of course, Captain Scott. You’re always welcome. Should I assume retirement didn’t entirely agree with you?” Scott, Picard suspected, was, like himself, not one to appreciate the virtues of prolonged inactivity.
“You could say that, although you may have heard I haven’t been entirely idle.”
Picard nodded. He’d wondered if Scott would mention any of the reports that had been circulating through Starfleet. “Captain Stratton did file a report on a…false alarm, shall we say? He also made mention of a detailed report you indicated was forthcoming, as did the commander of Starbase—”
“Aye, and you’ll have them. But if you’d like the short version…?”
“If you please, Mr. Scott.”
Scotty hesitated, as if he’d been expecting—or at least hoping for—a different answer, but then he pulled in a breath and launched into a bare-bones account of how he’d encountered two aliens and what he had learned from them. “Whoever these Wise Ones were,” he finished, “they obviously violated the Prime Directive. But it all ended generations ago.”
“And you think it was someone from the Federation?”
Scotty shrugged broadly. “I cannot say ’tis impossible, especially with the Federation shuttlecraft they had. Do you have any record of the ship it came from? NCC-1951?”
“Mr. Data?”
Picard’s android second officer spoke without hesitation. “NCC-1951, Captain, the Antares-class science vessel Senzig. It vanished at approximately the same time the Jenolen was lost. It was on its way to investigate an anomaly that, according to recent speculations, may have been related to an uncharted Borg Transwarp Conduit. There is no record of its having ever been found, nor of any survivors.”
Picard frowned. “Someone obviously found it. But we’re unlikely to ever learn the truth at this late date. Any extensive investigation in the Narisian system could only compound the violation.”
“Aye, Captain. If what they told me is true, very few Narisians know the so-called Wise Ones even exist, just the leaders and the people working directly with them. Everyone else thinks that all the scientific advances of the last two hundred years were made by the Narisians themselves. To discover instead that the inventions were virtually all given to them, as if they were helpless bairns…” Scotty’s voice trailed off suggestively.
Picard nodded again, this time with a slight grimace. “It could be traumatic for the Narisian psyche, certainly. I don’t envy whoever will have to decide how to handle the situation when and if the Narisians do establish contact with the Federation. But such matters are not the responsibility of Starfleet captains, particularly not of retired ones. Although,” he added with the barest trace of a smile, “this particular retired captain might consider expediting his official report of the incident. A thorough account, made before one’s memory begins to play its inevitable tricks, could be of consi
derable help to whoever does eventually inherit the problem.”
Scotty’s smile froze for a moment but then widened as he shrugged. “Aye, Captain, you’ll have it in your computer before I come aboard.”
“Excellent, Mr. Scott. I look forward to your arrival, as I know Commander La Forge does as well.”
Scotty let out a sigh of relief as the link to the Enterprise was broken. He was simply not accustomed to lying, even by omission, and it made him uneasy despite all the good intentions in the galaxy. All in all, though, it had gone as well as could be expected and far better than he had feared. He of course hadn’t mentioned the existence of the Bounty 2, and Picard hadn’t, for whatever reason, questioned him about how he had covered the distance from Narisia to the Enterprise’s current coordinates in the Goddard, which he still had not been able to push much past warp three. He’d been prepared to trot out as a last resort a story about how he had hitched a ride part way on the unnamed ship of a somewhat shady interstellar trader, a twenty-fourth-century equivalent of tribble mogul Cyrano Jones, but he was mighty relieved it hadn’t been necessary. He was even more relieved that Garamet and her brother had apparently followed his instructions and had deleted the Bounty 2 from their accounts as well.
With any luck at all, he could get what he needed from the Enterprise and be gone before anyone decided to ask him any really tough questions.
By then it would be too late. He’d be back on the Bounty 2, and no one could stop him from doing what he had realized he had to do.
He hoped.
Six
SCOTTY FROWNED as a soft, chiming sound announced someone was at the door of the guest quarters to which Picard and La Forge had escorted him less than twenty-four hours earlier.
“Come in,” he called, hastily blanking the screen of the terminal he was working at.
For a long moment nothing happened, but finally the door slid open with a barely audible hiss. His eyes widened as he saw the woman standing in the corridor, a Mona Lisa smile on her chocolate-brown face, a bottle of Saurian brandy in one hand. Guinan, she had called herself more than three-quarters of a century ago on Earth. And she still seemed to glide rather than walk, he realized as she crossed the threshold in a floor-length gown not unlike the one she had worn then. As the other gown had, this one only contributed to the illusion that she could defy gravity.
If it was an illusion, Scotty thought sharply as he watched her come to a stop in the middle of the room and turn toward him, her oddly regal features showing not the slightest sign of the passage of three quarters of a century.
“I’m older than I look, Mr. Scott,” she said, her eyes now smiling as well as her lips.
“Aye, I would say so. Unless you managed to skip over a few decades the way I did.”
She shook her head minutely. “No, although there have been some I wouldn’t have minded skipping. Not the last few, however, since I joined Captain Picard here on the Enterprise.”
“You were here when they found me on the Jenolen, then?”
“I was. I thought of offering you another sip of Saurian brandy, to make up for the synthehol you found so objectionable when you first visited Ten-Forward. However, the situation soon became a bit hectic, as you may recall. And then you were on your way.” She held up the scimitar-shaped bottle. “But now you’re back, and the Saurian brandy never left.”
As it had seventy-odd years ago, his mouth almost watered at the sight, but this time he shook his head. “I appreciate the thought, lassie,” he said regretfully, “but when you’re tryin’ to make sense out of the last seventy-five years of Starfleet engineering advances, you’d best keep a clear head if you don’t want to sink like a stone.”
The woman shrugged, the motion as subdued as her smile. “Then accept it as my gift. Have a celebratory sip when you’ve made enough sense for one day.” She paused and glanced at the blank terminal screen as she set the brandy next to it. “Are you making good progress?”
“As good as can be expected, I imagine. Do you understand such matters?”
“Only at a layman’s level.”
Scotty gave her what he hoped was a suitably rueful smile. “The last seventy-five years have almost turned me into a layman. I’ve a lot of catching up to do.”
For a long moment she said nothing, her eyes fixed on his as if searching for something. There had been, he realized uneasily, a similar look about her in that Glasgow bar just before she’d disappeared into the night, just before he’d met the unfortunate Matt Franklin.
“Then perhaps I should leave you to your work,” she said quietly, and once again she was gone.
As the door to the corridor hissed shut behind her, he realized he’d been holding his breath.
Guinan made her way slowly back to Ten-Forward, walking the corridors rather than taking the near-instantaneous turbolift system. She needed time to think.
Something was wrong.
She felt it but she didn’t understand it any more than she had understood what she had felt that day, on an earlier Enterprise, when she had first become aware of Captain Scott’s existence. Or what she had felt, barely six months ago, when he had been resurrected from the Jenolen.
Was this signaling the beginning of what the “feelings” had warned her about then? The beginning of whatever role she still had to play in Captain Scott’s life?
But no answer came.
There was only the maddening frustration of utter helplessness, of knowing that something was coming but having no idea of its nature or its direction. Animals staked out as bait in those barbaric hunts that had been popular on nineteenth-century Earth must have felt this way, she thought with a silent grimace, when the first scent of a distant predator reached their nostrils.
But she was no helpless animal.
And she was not alone, despite how it often felt.
Stopping at the nearest companel, she linked to the bridge. “Captain,” she said, her calm tone belying the feeling of urgency that gripped her, “I must speak with you.”
Captain Jean-Luc Picard settled back on the couch in his ready room while Guinan stood silently in the middle of the room, her eyes not meeting his. Others would have thought her the epitome of calmness, but Picard knew better. He knew that, for her, the barely noticeable rigidness in her posture, the slightly compressed lips, the avoidance of eye contact—all these were the equivalent of anyone else’s pacing the room on the verge of a panic attack. He had never seen her like this, not ever. Time and again, on the Enterprise and elsewhere, when events around her had been spinning out of control, she herself had never even come close to losing control. Sometimes she had been the only one, an island of wait-and-see calm in the midst of chaos.
“What do you know of Captain Scott’s plans?” she asked abruptly.
Picard shrugged. “Nothing specific. As I understand it, his intent is to review the technological advances made while he was in the Jenolen transporter, although I suspect he is at the same time indulging in some innocent nostalgia.”
“How so?”
“In addition to summaries of a few thousand articles only an engineer would understand, he’s been accessing the logs of previous incarnations of the Enterprise. But I don’t believe there’s anything to worry about this time. He hasn’t been drinking and he hasn’t been spending any time in the holodeck simulation of the first Enterprise, even though he would have a legitimate reason to do the latter. He’s already had at least one offer from the Academy, suggesting he lecture to the cadets about his era in return for an accelerated course in all the engineering developments he’s missed out on.”
“And he has no other plans?”
“None that I am aware of.”
“What of the Narisians? Are you certain his reports tell the entire story of what happened there?”
“I suspect they do not,” Picard said with a faint smile, “but given his record I cannot but believe that any omissions were made for good cause.”
“One man�
��s good cause, even a good man’s good cause, can be another man’s disaster.” For just an instant, her eyes seemed to glaze over. “To ‘rescue’ someone who doesn’t want or need to be rescued, for example,” she murmured, then blinked, as if consciously pulling back from whatever precipice her mind had unwillingly approached.
“Do you have reason to believe this is the case with Captain Scott?” Picard asked.
Guinan closed her eyes for a moment, as if marshaling her strength—or perhaps testing her balance. “No reasonable reason, just a feeling, a worry.”
“You don’t need me to remind you that you’ve had such feelings before,” he said, the beginnings of a frown narrowing the corners of his eyes. “Or that they have virtually always been proven valid in some way.”
“I know, Captain, I know. But it’s different this time. The feelings are somehow related to Captain Scott and his being here, out of his own time. There’s more, much more, but I don’t know what it is, what any of it is.” She shivered, something he had never seen her do. “It’s like when you catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye, a glimpse of something that terrifies you even more than death itself, like the first time someone sees a Borg cube. It’s bearing down on you, but when you look directly at it, it’s gone. But you know it’s still there, just outside your range of vision, still coming. I know it’s still there. And I know it’s meant to be there, that Captain Scott is meant to be here, but…”
Picard watched her startling performance, fully realizing for the first time the true depth and intensity of the turmoil that boiled beneath her rigidly controlled exterior. He rose from the sofa and stood facing her, surprising himself by gently laying his hands on her shoulders.
“You’ve seen me through any number of dark times,” he said quietly when she didn’t draw back from his touch. “Your intuitions have saved me more than once, on the Enterprise and before. If there is anything I can do to help you through…whatever it is that’s troubling you, please, let me do it. Let me help you this time.”