Engines of Destiny

by Gene DeWeese

  For a few seconds or perhaps an eon, she drifted, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, until…

  Suddenly, she was living the nightmarish memories of her own death. Picard’s face loomed over her as his hands snapped in two the metallic spine that was all that remained of her body and let it fall to the floor…

  And even as the rest of those memories blossomed and became real, even as they showed her dying mind how Picard had, in yet another timeline, pursued her back through time and defeated and then destroyed her…

  …her consciousness faded and the final darkness enveloped her.

  Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s eyes snapped open, and for one terrifying moment he had no idea where he was. Fading memories of a dream—a nightmare—of the Enterprise disintegrating around him set his heart pounding even as his surroundings came into focus and he saw that he was in his quarters, in bed, his fingers in a claw-like grip on the crumpled sheet beneath his achingly rigid body.

  Pulling in a breath, he released his grip, forced his body to relax, then sat up abruptly, taken with an intense desire to see the bridge and the crew—to see that the Enterprise was indeed still intact, still undamaged.

  “Not that I don’t appreciate what you were trying to do, Scotty, but there are no two ways about it. You screwed up royally.”

  Scotty came awake with a gasp, almost tipping over his chair as he jerked erect. Blinking away the startlingly vivid image of Jim Kirk, he tried to focus on the screen of the unfamiliar terminal before him.

  For another instant he was still completely disoriented, unable to recognize his surroundings, but then the equations on the terminal screen came into sharp focus.

  And he remembered.

  He was in his guest quarters on board the Enterprise. The new Enterprise.

  The equations were those that he had seen Spock use to slingshot the Bounty back through three centuries of time.

  They were the equations he was going to use to take the Bounty 2 back through time.

  To save Jim Kirk.

  His stomach knotted as he remembered Kirk’s imagined words and realized that they were precisely what the captain would say if this mad scheme were to succeed.

  And it was a mad scheme, the rational part of his mind told him harshly.

  A mad scheme born not of common sense but of his own guilt, his own obsession.

  A scheme that Kirk himself would certainly condemn—as he just had in that little scene that had apparently bubbled up from Scotty’s own subconscious.

  A subconscious which, he grudgingly admitted to himself, had a much better grip on reality than did his guilt-ridden conscious mind.

  And the reality was that there were literally a million things that could go wrong on an ancient ship like the Bounty 2, no matter how well he took care of it. Even if everything worked perfectly, he would have to decloak a few seconds in order to use the transporters. Which meant that a Klingon bird-of-prey would appear, no matter how briefly, deep in Federation space at a time when the Khitomer Accords were less than a year old, at a time when Admiral Cartwright’s treachery was common knowledge throughout both the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

  Scotty shook his head. The precarious trust that had allowed the Accords to exist could be wiped out by a single incident, no matter how innocent.

  And that was only one scenario. When you meddled in the past, the possibilities for disaster were infinite.

  It would have been sheer insanity to take the kind of risk he had been planning to take just to save a single life, even if that life was that of his best friend. Kirk himself had taken risks all his life, but never anything as daft as this. Both the stakes and the odds were unacceptably high while the potential reward loomed large only on a personal level. Friendship was important, even sacred, but he couldn’t allow it to totally blind him to the consequences of his actions.

  True friendship meant knowing when to let go.

  With one last, wistful look at the equations, Scotty cleared them away—and found himself confronted with a series of engineering specs scrolling across the screen.

  For a moment he didn’t recognize them, but then he remembered. In the weeks after he had first been brought on board this Enterprise, after he had been deservedly exiled from engineering itself, he had begun skimming through the engineering specs that described all the marvels of this new Enterprise. Surely, he had thought, the technology couldn’t be totally beyond his understanding. Surely the basic rules still applied. Surely he could eventually prove he wasn’t the technological dinosaur La Forge assumed he was.

  In the end, however, all he had learned was that he was a technological dinosaur. And these were the very specs that had proven it: the specs for the holodeck and the computers that drove it. He had had some wild ideas about tying them in with the deflector system to produce a cloaking effect of sorts. But La Forge had shot him down, quickly and easily. That sort of thing just wasn’t possible.

  Except…

  It was possible!

  Somehow, without knowing how he knew, he knew!

  For an instant, it was as if he was remembering having actually done it, as if he was remembering the elation he’d felt as the pieces of the puzzle had suddenly fallen into place.

  But that was obviously impossible.

  And yet…

  But it doesn’t make any bloody difference, he told himself sharply. Whatever the reason, he knew that his supposedly wild ideas would work. All he had to do was prove it!

  And to do that…

  To do that—and a thousand other things—he would have to do what he should have done right from the start: quit living in the past and start catching up with the present.

  Suddenly, instead of being depressed at the thought of how much he had to learn in order to catch up, he felt just the opposite: exhilarated at the thought of how much he could learn, how much there was to learn. It was, he realized with an anticipatory shiver, much the same way he had felt when he first learned he had been accepted into the Academy.

  Dinosaur I may be, but this is one dinosaur that won’t be going extinct any time soon!

  Blanking the screen, he stood up and headed for the bridge, hoping Picard’s offer to arrange transportation to Earth and Starfleet Academy was still good.

  Kirk looked around at the forest and the rustic cabin nestling in a clearing and wondered idly where he was and how he had gotten there.

  He’d been in the guts of the Enterprise- B, he remembered, tearing something apart and putting it back together when the bulkhead had disappeared and he’d found himself looking out at a blinding wall of flame and lightning and being sucked out like a feather in a tornado, and—

  Or had it been the Enterprise- D? No, that couldn’t be. There wasn’t any such ship, and besides—

  Besides, he realized as he heard a horse whinnying somewhere in the distance, it didn’t really matter, any of it.

  Wherever he was, it was where he belonged.

  At least for now…

  Feelings of both satisfaction and sadness swept over Guinan as she turned from the viewscreen and saw Picard emerge from the turbolift and look slowly, almost reverently, around the bridge, as if seeing it for the first time.

  As happened all too often, her feelings of satisfaction were as anonymous as their exasperating, even infuriating source, whoever or whatever it might be. They suggested only that—somewhere, somewhen—some unspecified words or actions dictated by past feelings had finally had the desired effect.

  The source of the sadness, however, was disconcertingly specific: the death of her world at the hands of the Borg. She had lived with the sadness, gradually overcoming it, for over a century. She thought she had succeeded in at least containing it, but she obviously had not.

  But then, as Picard’s eyes met hers and the turbolift door slid open again, this time to reveal a happily grinning Captain Scott, the sadness was swept away in the most irrationally intense feeling of satisfaction, of “rightness” she had ever e
xperienced.

  For a moment—just a moment—she didn’t even care that she had no idea what it was she had accomplished this time.

  Epilogue

  Somewhere in the Nexus

  ALL WAS as it must be.

  The Hive Mind would never reign supreme, stultifying life across billions of galaxies as it searched for its warped version of perfection.

  The seed of its eventual destruction had been sown. Even the Guinan that existed here—the “echo” that always had and always would exist in this place that was both outside space and time and yet inside the minds of all who dwelt here—even that Guinan did not know how or when the Hive Mind would come to an end, only that it would.

  There were many things, that among them, which she truly did not want to know. To know everything, she suspected, would be intolerable, dooming her to a Q-like tedium broken only by meaningless but deadly games of pretend.

  To know that all was as it must be was enough.

  For now…

  Historian’s Note

  The Montgomery Scott Engineering Sciences Complex in the new Starfleet Academy was dedicated on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Professor Scott himself, sporting a trim white beard grown on a whim just for the occasion, cut the ribbon.

  About the Author

  Gene DeWeese, author of forty previous books including five and a half Star Trek novels, lives in Milwaukee with his retired-librarian wife and sundry cats.