The young’un looked from him to the other one and back to him. “Who?” she asked, obviously not comprehending. Not that he could blame her.
“You have me confused with someone else, I’m afraid,” the older woman said kindly. “My name is Morgan, Morgan Primus. This is my daughter, Robin. She’s with Starfleet.”
Of course. Yet another young soul to be corrupted by the machinations of the Powers That Be. “So was I,” Scotty admitted, letting his tone slightly indicate just how happy he was he’d left.
Despite her name, this Morgan looked and even sounded so much like Christine, it was uncanny. Ignoring the still increasing redness of his face, he admitted as much. “The hair is different, but…you could be her twin.”
Morgan stared at him. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Just like that, she brought him down onto the hard, cold floor of reality. For a moment there he’d thought there was a chance, unlikely though it had been, to catch up on old times, asking her how her life had been after she’d left the Enterprise.
It was not to be. She might have looked like her, but she was an entirely different person.
Realizing he was being a little rude, Scotty did his best to explain his mistake and then introduce himself again. Robin was a little skeptical of his claim to be the Montgomery Scott, given his “well-preserved” state, and suggested he was a clone.
“No, no…the original item,” he said, smiling at her while attempting a quick bow. “Perhaps you ladies would allow me to buy you a drink.” Social drinking, that was the key. After all, who knew? Perhaps there was a way to make him forget not only Nechayev, but Ross as well. He certainly wouldn’t regret it one single second if he never heard of Starfleet ever again.
Besides, this Morgan woman seemed rather…interested in him, so to speak. It was best to strike the iron while it was hot, as they said, so he couldn’t let this chance pass without trying to make use of it. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said, waiting for him to lead the way to the bar, where he ordered her a screwdriver.
The young’un called Robin joined them, mumbling something incomprehensible that surely was of no importance to Scotty. He decided to enjoy this evening.
Perhaps there was even a reason to enjoy the night.
As it turned out, the relationship Morgan was interested in was of a friendly nature, but not as intimate as Scotty would have liked. Perhaps it was his own fault, talking mostly about machines and computers and not about things that interested her. In hindsight, he’d pretty much killed any chance of getting anywhere with Morgan Primus on their very first date—if “date” was the correct word for it.
However, the following days turned out to be the best since Belunis had decided to look elsewhere for the adventures that were absent in her life. Scotty and Morgan had fun getting to know each other more closely, talking about a broad variety of subjects that ranged from starship propulsion (as it turned out, Morgan had served on a Starfleet ship herself) to native Risian cuisine.
They had long since left the greeter-guest relationship behind for something better when a new player entered the game: some no-good shaan gadgie who reeked of money. His name was Rafe Viola, and he proclaimed himself an entrepreneur. When Scotty discovered that Viola was making advances toward Morgan, his alarms went up. The man was not good enough for Morgan in any case, and then there was the fact that Scotty had a bad feeling about him.
He said as much to Morgan, but she accused him of being jealous when all he wanted was to prevent her from being hurt.
Women. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em,” indeed.
In the end, when Viola turned out not only to be what he’d suspected but also a cold-blooded killer, Scotty had felt no satisfaction over having been right in the first place. A mere two weeks after his first meeting with Morgan Primus and her daughter Robin, Scotty’s life had been turned upside down, the quietness of the past few months gone as if it had never existed.
At least I’m still alive, he thought. Poor Mr. Quincy was not. Viola’s son Nik had killed him—although “son” wasn’t the correct word. “Clone,” however, was. Later, after everything had calmed down, Morgan had told Scotty everything he’d missed. He’d missed a lot, apparently.
But his temporary absence was understandable. After all, you don’t get thrown into a shaft inside a multiple-level computer core only to miraculously appear mere seconds later. He had to thank the Great Bird of the Galaxy that he’d had the common sense to put on antigrav boots before he went to inspect the core together with Mr. Quincy.
Mr. Quincy—Thomas—wasn’t the only victim of this madman’s killing spree. Part of the resort—mostly trees and other plants—had been destroyed by a computer virus that caused the wave generator at the beach to malfunction. Out of control, it threatened to flood the entire hotel complex and drown every adult and child in the vicinity. Working together with Morgan, he’d managed to undo the damage, and within one hour the water had begun to be pulled back into the lagoon, where it couldn’t hurt anybody any longer.
The resort’s owners had contacted Scotty soon afterward, offering him the post of manager of the El Dorado. Unlike so many other corporate creatures, they knew what a loss the death of a manager like Theodore Quincy was to them. They were genuinely sorry, which was a point in their favor. However, they also saw the need to go on, and in order to offer the visitors a perfect holiday, they needed to repair the damage to their computer system, their wave generator, and—most important—their public image. A Starfleet legend such as himself would be a brightly colored feather in their cap, they reasoned, and they even offered him everything he ever dreamed of, including his own boat.
The owners of the El Dorado Hotel and Vacation Resort were not the only ones to advance an offer. Others from all over the planet did the same, some even going so far as to say that he could have his own private island if he agreed to work for them.
He politely declined every offer.
The truth was, he did not feel he needed to remain on Risa a single day longer. Ever since Viola’s sabotage had been repaired, he’d felt restless, as if something was calling to him, telling him to move on.
One evening, a twelvenight after Quincy’s funeral, he sat in the wicker chair on his small veranda, holding a glass of Scotch in his right hand. He watched the fireworks on the horizon, a colorful display of happiness that marked the end of the Lohlunat Festival over in Suraya Bay. Melancholy was washing over him like waves at high tide, and it was not a pleasant feeling.
When he lifted the glass to his lips, he was surprised to discover that it was empty. He didn’t remember finishing his drink, nor did he remember drinking it, for that matter. He supposed he should be worried about that, but at the moment he just didn’t give a damn.
Another plume of fireworks, then nothing. After a while, the muffled sound of the explosion reached Hanotis Harbor, but the sky was dark once again, only illuminated by the constellations of the stars and the two moons.
In a weird, morbid way, the fireworks reminded him of exploding ships in planets’ atmospheres, and this, in turn, reminded him of the story that Ross had told him. A person’s mind was a strange thing. So utterly abstract, yet there was no denying its existence. And the worst thing was, it operated in mysterious ways. Nobody could tell what dreadful memory of the past it dredged up next.
Ross and his offer, though, were not all that unexpected. Scotty had thought about them on an on-and-off basis during the last two weeks, and he grudgingly admitted to himself that it was indeed rather tempting. Yet he didn’t know if he shouldn’t just make a clean break now, leave Starfleet forever and buy himself a house on Caldos Colony, far away from SFHQ.
Absentmindedly, he took another sip of his Scotch only to notice again that the glass was empty. Something was wrong with him—had to be—because he normally never failed to consciously enjoy a drink.
Oh, sod it.
He ab
ruptly rose from his wicker chair and entered his bungalow. Once inside, he went into his office and activated the com terminal there.
“Computer, do me a favor, will you?”
“Please state your request.”
“Get me Admiral Ross’s office. And better make it quick, before I change my mind.”
“Working.”
“You’re a good lad.”
Epilogue
Stardate 53509.7
May 2376, Old Earth Time
“I knew the planet Kropasar rang a bell,” Geordi La Forge said, setting down his glass. He was on his third drink—yet still, the taste of Scotty’s Scotch lingered. “I remember some of the da Vinci crew talking about the S.C.E.’s relief efforts there.”
“Aye, laddie,” Scotty said. “We’re only just beginnin’, an—”
He was cut off by a chirp from his comm badge. “I hate these bloody things,” he grumbled. “No damn off-switch.” Despite his complaints, he tapped it. “Go ahead.”
“Sir, this is Deg,” came the voice of his aide.
“What is it, lad? I thought I told you I was out.”
“There’s a bit of a crisis in lab seventeen that…needs your touch.”
Scotty shook his head. “Fine, beam both of us over.”
“Aye, sir.” Scotty stood up, and Geordi followed suit just before both of them were swallowed by the blue sparkles of the transporter beam.
When they rematerialized, they were in what seemed to be the cockpit of a Starfleet runabout. It resembled the Danube-class La Forge was used to, but seemed more advanced. Alarms were blaring, and red lights were flashing.
There were two engineers already in the cockpit, though La Forge didn’t recognize them. “What have you done, lads?” Scotty shouted. Both engineers were furiously tapping buttons on the runabout’s control panels.
One of the engineers, a human man, looked up from his work to reply. “I’m not sure, sir!” he shouted above the din of the alarms. “We just switched the reactor on to see if we’d fixed the dilithium fracture, and now the power won’t stop building!”
“Did you try an emergency shutdown?” La Forge asked, joining the man at his console and looking over the readouts.
“Of course!” he shouted back. “First thing!” The other engineer, a Guidon, looked up from its panel just long enough to let off some agitated squeaks in the typical manner of its species.
Scotty shook his head. “Lasca, what have I told you, over and over? Get your hands dirty!” He moved to the rear of the runabout. “Give me a hand, Geordi!”
La Forge helped Scotty remove an access panel from the wall next to the transporters. Immediately, Scotty plunged his hands inside and began yanking out and rearranging bits of circuitry.
“Power is still building!” called Lasca, watching his screen. “It’s at one hundred forty-seven percent and rising! In another thirty seconds, the warp core will explode!”
La Forge briefly considered telling Scotty to hurry up, but years of unnecessarily being told that by his own commanding officers meant that he knew better.
“I cannot do it!” Scotty was frantically pulling bits out of the wall now, with no apparent regard for what he was doing. “I need more time!”
La Forge joined Lasca once more. “It’s no good,” he said. “The tetryon flow is continuing to multiply.”
“Slow it down, lad!” Scotty ordered.
“I cannot change the laws of physics!” La Forge shouted back—doing his best Scottish brogue. The Guidon engineer looked up from his console to stare in amazement. La Forge supposed not many of the people here would dare to mock the “living legend” that way.
Lasca was still watching the clock. “Fifteen seconds!”
Scotty grinned. “No, you can’t do that! But I can!” With that he jerked his left hand out of the mechanics compartment, and reached across the runabout to the opposite wall, where a finger stabbed down on a single button.
As La Forge watched, the power overload suddenly disappeared, the meters dropping down to zero.
“You did it!” shouted Lasca. “If that had overloaded, it would have taken out the entire Tucker Building!”
“At the very least, laddie,” said Scotty. “I knew let-tin’ you lot run tests on the surface was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have let you start up the whole tetryon plasma experiment again in the first place.”
“But aside from that, the Yellowstone is flawless,” protested Lasca.
“Aside from that, the Yellowstone is like any other runabout,” said Scotty, “so it would be, wouldn’t it? Well, except for your precious retractable sensor pod, but that’s bloody useless.”
The Guidon engineer waved his hand for Lasca to join him at his panel. The two conferred over the readouts briefly in hushed tones, and then Lasca looked up. “I don’t understand, Captain Scott. How’d you do it?”
Scotty shrugged. “Sure, I could tell, you, laddie. But who would want to hear me spout off a load of technobabble?”
“Are you sure you have to go, laddie?”
La Forge and Scotty were in the lobby of the Tucker Building once more, in front of the holoframe depicting the eponymous engineer. “Captain Picard has called me,” the younger man said, “and so I must go. Sorry I won’t get to hear the rest of your story.”
Scotty waved his hand dismissively. “There wasn’t much left, just a wee bit.”
La Forge looked around at the massive room, engineers and other Starfleet personnel streaming in and out. “You’ve done well for yourself here,” he said. “You’re enjoying yourself.”
Scotty shook his head. “It’s only been two months,” he said. “Give me time to be unhappy again, lad; it’ll come.”
“I don’t know…” said La Forge. He noticed the Vissian woman Scotty had berated this morning rush past, her head ducked to avoid attention. “I think you’re enjoying passing your knowledge on to the next generation.”
“I suppose so, lad,” Scotty admitted with a smile. “Someone’s got to whip them into shape—their professors certainly don’t.”
“You’re being challenged. That’s good for you.” La Forge tapped his combadge. “La Forge to Enterprise. One to beam up.”
“Acknowledged. Thirteen seconds, Commander,” replied the clipped voice of the transporter chief.
“Good-bye, laddie—Geordi. Hopefully, I see you again soon. It’s been too long between visits.”
“Sure has,” La Forge said. “Good-bye, Scotty.” He continued to speak even as he felt the beginnings of the transport sequence. “Maybe someday you’ll get a chance to finish telling me that story….”
Future Construction
Stardate 53426.4
April 2376, Old Earth Time
The visitor on the starship’s bridge silently observed the goings-on that characterized every single vessel of the Federation’s exploration/defense fleet, amusing himself with comparisons of single crew members to friends of times long gone.
In the center seat of the bridge sat a lean Bolian man, his collar pips clearly identifying him as the ship’s captain even though his posture alone did a very good job at doing the same. His name was Bor Loxx, and he commanded the ship that Scotty himself had picked as the vessel to extend a hand of friendship toward the people on Kropasar who had been so deviously relieved of their prized possession of Breen origin.
The ship’s name was Akarana, and it belonged to the class of transport vessels named for the city of Istanbul on Earth. Usually when Scotty needed a ship to send somewhere, he just tapped one of the four Saber-class ships that carried around the S.C.E.’s mobile teams, but this time all he needed was a ship capable of transporting a group of people from one place to another. The mobile response teams were better deployed elsewhere, considering all the postwar reconstruction going on, and so Scotty had called on the crew of the Akarana.
“Entering Akiganel sector,” the Vulcan at navigation announced.
“Thank you, Mr. Lorin,” Loxx said.
Scotty sat on an empty chair at one of the science stations aft of the captain, next to the starboard turbo-lift. From there, he could survey the entire bridge, watching everybody there doing their jobs, accompanied by the sounds the computer made reacting to command inputs.
Their mission here was simple: help the Kropaslin rebuild their society by lending what technological help they could.
Of course, this was not simply a Starfleet mission—it couldn’t be. This was a matter of immediate concern to the entire Federation, which was why Scotty had had to address the entire Council in the Palais de la Concorde, and not just once, but twice in as many weeks. Despite his recently increased influence as the head of the S.C.E., he was sure it would not have worked if President Zife had not supported his petition.
Yet why exactly the Bolian had done so was beyond him—just as it had been beyond him when Nechayev had told him about Zife’s decision to reopen negotiations with the Kropaslin. Then, the numpty had had an ulterior motive: technology. It was highly likely that there was such a motive now as well.
But Scotty didn’t care. As long as they let him help the people on Kropasar pick up the pieces of their society and start anew, he didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about what the president thought he’d get from it.
In the time between the petition and now, Scotty had feared he’d strangle himself with red tape as there was a googolplex of forms and documents to fill out and sign, a myriad of people to talk to and practically beg on his knees for their support.
But all that was now a thing of the past. Now Scotty was on his way, aboard the U.S.S. Akarana, to deliver goods, technology, and a shipload of engineers and ambassadors to Kropasar so that the people there had a fair chance of survival, despite all the pain and sorrow Starfleet had caused them without their knowledge.
The Future Begins Page 9
