Engines of Destiny.

by Gene DeWeese.

One.

En Route to the Enterprise-B 2293 Old Earth Date HER NAME, at this particular juncture, was Guinan, and her silent scream reverberated throughout Time, a despairing echo she could never escape. The transporter's grip had not brought with it the usual momentary numbness. Instead, she could feel her body being torn apart, molecule by molecule, while at the same moment everything that had ever brought joy or comfort to her life was being stolen. Even her memories were being transformed from nostalgic sources of happiness to wellsprings of torment, s.a.d.i.s.tic reminders of what she had once experienced but would never experience again.

But even at that moment of supreme anguish, there was a fundamental part of her that knew that whatever was happening to her, whether she would ever fully understand it or not, was both right and essential. She didn't know why it was right or what it was essential for. She only knew that it was.

And that she had no choice but to endure, as she had endured before and doubtless would again.

It was her gift, this sourceless knowledge.

And it was her curse.

It had been a part of her for as long as she could remember-which was a very long time indeed. For all that time, and possibly more, she had been subject to "feelings," sometimes of foreboding, sometimes simply of a vague wrongness or, less often, a similarly vague rightness. Sometimes they came upon her suddenly, other times with maddening slowness. Sometimes they were urgent, forcing her to blurt out a warning to those around her even though she had little or no idea what it was she might be warning them against. Sometimes they were nagging little itches in her mind, the sort of distraction a human suffers through when she realizes she has forgotten something but cannot, no matter how hard she tries, remember what it was.

But the intensity and the steely certainty of the feeling that gripped her now transcended any she had ever experienced before. It transcended even the physical and mental agony that had brought it into being and was, in fact, all that kept her from translating her mental scream of anguish into a blind fury of destruction that would have laid waste to everything and everyone that had the misfortune to be near her. And that would only have added to her grief once she regained control and saw what she had done.

Finally, after an eternity that she somehow knew had lasted only the few seconds it had taken the transporter to "rescue" her, the physical pain faded to a tolerable level.

With glazed eyes, she looked around and saw only bedlam. The Lakul was gone, replaced by another starship's crowded sickbay. Her fellow refugees, those that hadn't collapsed to the floor or slumped across the beds, milled about aimlessly, helplessly. She wished she could share with them her certainty of the rightness of what had happened to them. It would be small comfort to anyone other than herself, but it would be something.

Then a solicitous young man in a Starfleet uniform was gently taking her arm and leading her to a biobed, a.s.suring her she was safe and well. For a moment, his uniform caught her eye, and something twitched within her. A new "feeling," she thought resignedly, something that had been there all along but had until now been buried beneath the rubble of her own disintegrating life.

There was something-or some one-here on this ship that would- Would what?

She didn't know.

She knew-felt- only that there was something of monumental importance about this time and this place, something with tendrils that snaked out, not only through s.p.a.ce but through time, and enfolded more worlds than even she had seen.

It was why she was here, why she had to be here.

Sudden anger surged through her, an anger not at the captain of this ship for the agony he had subjected her to in his misguided "rescue," nor even at the supremely intelligent yet essentially mindless creatures whose destruction of El-Auria was still like a corrosive acid in her veins.

This anger was directed inward, toward whatever it was within her that was responsible for these "feelings."

But it was a futile anger. To be angry at something that was so intimate a part of herself would be like being angry at her own heart for beating too loudly.

As it had countless times before, the anger pa.s.sed, leaving in its wake a mixture of bemus.e.m.e.nt and implacable determination.

Whatever the object of this latest feeling was, she would find it, as she had found countless others.

She had no choice, not as long as she still wished to allow her existences to continue.

Putting everything else out of her mind, she eased herself off the biobed, took one last, sorrowful look at the still-dazed faces of her fellow refugees, and, leaving that part of her life behind her, began her seemingly aimless search through the starship's sterile corridors.

Two.

Glasgow, Scotland.

2294 Old Earth Date.

CAPTAIN MONTGOMERY Scott, Starfleet Retired, clung to the engineering station handgrips as the bridge of the Enterprise-B bucked and lurched, the entire ship shaken like an eagle in the jaws of an angry tiger.

"Keep her together till I get back," Kirk called over his shoulder as he once more lunged up the quaking steps toward the turbolift doors, already shuddering open.

"I always do," Scotty said, his aging eyes riveted on the wildly fluctuating readouts. But even as the words pa.s.sed his lips, he knew they were a lie.

For several agonizing seconds, he continued to glare helplessly at the increasingly chaotic, increasingly deadly displays while the turbolift doors closed and blocked off the last fleeting smile anyone would ever see on Jim Kirk's face. On the viewscreen, the so-called energy ribbon, which had already destroyed two ships and now had the Enterprise in its gravitometric grip, looked like the gate to h.e.l.l itself: a s.p.a.ceborne tornado funnel thousands of kilometers long, twisting and lashing, spewing out jagged arcs of some demented form of nucleonic lightning, destroying everything it touched.

You can't let him die, not again! Scotty's own voice screamed in his mind.

Tearing his eyes from the displays and the viewscreen both, he turned and forced his way through the chaos of the bridge, past the grim-faced Captain Harriman, to the turbolift. The doors sc.r.a.ped open as he lunged through them and rasped out his destination. Seconds later and fifteen decks down, the shaking was so bad it had warped the turbolift itself and he had to pry the doors open before he could stumble out into a corridor filled with acrid smoke. His eyes began to water, his lungs to burn even before he took his first breath.

Squinting into the roiling smoke, he realized without surprise that he was no longer wearing the heavy, ceremonial uniform he had reluctantly donned for the Enterprise-B dedication. Somewhere during the jolting turbolift descent, it had changed, unnoticed, to the plain red tunic and boots he had worn as chief engineer on the first Enterprise a quarter century ago. At the same time, the burning in his smoke-filled lungs faded and his vision cleared, but even so, he couldn't see more than two or three meters through the smoke.

Feeling years younger and pounds lighter than he had only moments before, he set out at a run, trusting to his memory of the blueprints Starfleet had sent him as a courtesy during the construction of the ship.

Suddenly, without quite knowing how he got there, he was staring up through the smoke at the ma.s.sive deflector generators, at least twice the size and ten times the power of those on the original Enterprise. They just might have the power to do what he needed them to do after all: simulate a photon torpedo detonation powerful enough to disrupt the ribbon's intense gravitometric field long enough to allow the Enterprise-B to break free.

If...

Jim Kirk, Scotty saw out of the corner of his eye, had gotten there ahead of him. He was already prying loose a bulkhead panel, revealing the glittering circuits that would have to be disconnected and reconnected into a configuration its designers had never intended, had probably never even imagined possible. Like Scotty, Kirk looked the way he had decades before, young and trim and wearing the simple, unostentatious uniform of his first command. His voice, too, was young as he snapped an order to the bridge to deactivate the main deflector, making the circuits safe to touch but making the Enterprise completely vulnerable until power was restored.

Without hesitation, Scotty brushed Kirk's hands aside and reached through the opening in the bulkhead. Speed was of the essence, and Scotty saw instantly which connections had to be broken, precisely how the glittering circuits had to be twisted and rerouted, and the most efficient way of reconnecting them in the new configuration. Kirk, no matter how good a captain he had been, was not an engineer. From simulated emergency drills on the old Enterprise, he would know what circuits needed to be rerouted. He would even, given time, be able to identify them and make the required changes. But he didn't know those circuits the way an engineer-particularly this engineer-knew them. For Jim it would be like navigating through a strange city using a memorized road map, while for Scotty it would be like racing through the back alleys of a city he had lived in all his life.

This time, he vowed, the modifications would be made not only in time to save the Enterprise but in time to save Jim Kirk as well.

The deck lurched even more violently beneath his feet as he disconnected the key deflector circuits, but Kirk braced him, keeping him from being thrown backward, away from the open bulkhead panel. Without that instinctive a.s.sistance, he would've lost precious seconds.

But then it was over, the circuits reconnected, the new configuration complete. Even before Scotty had slammed the bulkhead panel back in place, Kirk barked an order to the bridge to activate the main deflector.

Then they were both running, lurching back the way they had come short minutes before. Behind them, the deflector generators trembled under the strain of doing what they had never been designed to do.

Even if the turbolift doors could still be pried open, Scotty worried as they ran through the smoke, would the lift itself move? Or had the buffeting by the wildly varying gravity been too much for the structural integrity field, warping the turbolift so far out of shape that it was frozen in place?

But the doors opened, letting them both plunge in. The last thing Scotty saw as the doors closed behind them was the far bulkhead vanishing in a coruscating energy flare. As had happened all those other times, everything not bolted down would be sucked out into s.p.a.ce, but this time those things did not include Jim Kirk.

This time he and Scotty were both safe within the turbolift, which to Scotty's huge relief lurched unsteadily upward. Grinning, the triumphant engineer watched the indicators as they counted down toward deck one and the bridge.

"We did it, Captain," he said, limp with relief. "We did it."

But Kirk didn't answer.

In fact, there wasn't a sound of any kind. Even the earthquake-like shaking of the Enterprise-B had stopped. And Scotty was once more weighted down with age, as if invisible ma.s.ses of neutronium had been attached to his arms and legs.

His heart pounding, he turned toward his friend, fully expecting to see that Kirk as well had been returned to his rightful age.

Instead- Scotty gasped, almost choking as the stench of burning flesh engulfed him.

A corpse, its face charred beyond recognition above a still-pristine ceremonial uniform, stared blindly back at him out of blackened eye sockets.

"You didn't keep her together, old friend," the corpse said, its voice like the crackle of flames.

As he always did after the fourth or fifth repet.i.tion of the soul-shriveling accusation, Scotty woke up. His heart was pounding even harder than in the nightmare, his bed-clothes icy with evaporating sweat, his throat so tight he could barely breathe.

Shivering, he sat up and grabbed the bottle that had become his constant bedside companion since he'd moved out of his sister's house in Cromarty and into this small cottage on the outskirts of Glasgow. The guilt would never go away, but he could sometimes at least banish the nightmare.

But not tonight, he realized as he lifted the bottle to his lips and was rewarded with only a sour-tasting trickle, then nothing.

Grimacing, he dropped the bottle into the recycler chute and lay back down, his stomach knotted. He was too old for this, far too old.

And too tired.

Even though he wasn't doing anything-except fighting off nightmares-he was exhausted. Constantly.

And there were things he could be doing-should be doing. Not a week went by that he didn't get another invitation to do an article for some engineering journal or other, and he had a standing invitation to resume being a "design consultant" with Starfleet. There had even been a series of requests for him to "guest lecture" at both Glasgow University, a few short kilometers distant, and at Starfleet Academy, half a world away.

But he couldn't bring himself to do any of that, not anymore, not after the fiasco of the Enterprise-B. Knowing what he had done-and what he had not done-he would have felt like a complete fraud, hiding behind the facade of competence he no longer deserved.

Even before the Enterprise-B- before he'd let nearly four hundred El-Aurian refugees die, before he'd sent Jim Kirk to his death-he hadn't particularly enjoyed any of it. The rosy picture he'd painted for Chekov and the others about his "bonnie retirement" had contained more than a wee bit of face-saving blarney. At best, he had felt "gratified" to know that he was respected for his knowledge and experience, but that was as far as it went. There had been no joy in it, no enthusiasm of the sort that had filled his years with Starfleet.

And he didn't even want to think about the women-widows, mostly-that his sister Clara and her husband Hamish were constantly introducing him to. To them he was "the famous Starfleet officer," not a real person. And not a one of them, no matter how gracious or ingratiating, had a clue as to what he'd really done or why he'd loved it so much. Not that they were all that different from most of the other people he met, men and women alike. Virtually all were well-meaning, as were his family and friends, but more than once he'd found himself considering leaving Earth altogether, going someplace-perhaps even to one of the so-called retirement colonies-where he wasn't known, where he wasn't reminded every single day of what he had once been but no longer was.

The Starfleet consultancy and the rest had at least kept him busy in the off hours when the blind dates and his "doting uncle" routine had begun to wear thin, not only with him but with his sister. There were reasons-Starfleet duty tours aside-that he had never had a family. During his long career, even the most domestic of situations had never fully involved him. A small corner of his mind had always remained in its "engineering mode," and that small corner had been likely to surface and take control at any moment. After retirement, matters had only become worse as it gradually sank in that he would never again set foot in a starship's engineering section except as a guest. No such place would ever again be his. Never again would he experience the sheer joy, the exultation that exploded in him when an ingenious solution to a seemingly impossible problem popped into his head.

Then came the Enterprise-B, the final straw.

Grimacing at the wave of nausea that the memory always brought, he threw back the sheets, got dressed, and set out on his anonymous late-night errand. For a moment, the thought of a lovely bottle of Saurian brandy flitted through his mind, but he quickly dismissed it. It was part of that other life, the life that had ended with the death of Jim Kirk. To make it a part of this one, to use something produced with such care and affection as nothing more than a nightmare repellent, would be degrading, like donning his old Starfleet uniform to go beg on a street corner.

Shuddering at his maudlin train of thought, he looked around the midnight streets and tried to remember where he'd gotten the bottle he'd just emptied.

Scotty almost b.u.mped into the woman as he turned abruptly away from the bar, two bottles of nightmare repellent in the brown paper bag that was still, even in the latter days of the twenty-third century, the concealment of choice for surrept.i.tious drinkers.

Averting his eyes as he tried to slip past her, he noticed only the dark gown that covered her from neck to toe. "Sorry, la.s.s," he mumbled.

"Not your fault," she said. "I was crowding you. I thought you were someone I knew."

He shook his head silently, his eyes still averted. To be recognized was the last thing he wanted.

"No harm done," she said, a shrug in her voice, her hand coming to rest lightly on his forearm. "But I have the feeling you could use a drink. You have a look about you-perhaps a Saurian brandy look? It's been my experience, you can never go wrong with Saurian brandy."

His eyes widened momentarily, then narrowed in a frown as he brought them up to meet hers-and realized with an uneasy start that her oddly regal, chocolate brown face did look familiar. He was instantly certain he had seen her-at least glimpsed her-somewhere before, but the circ.u.mstances refused to reveal themselves to him.

Was her presence, he wondered irritably, another bit of well-meaning meddling by his former comrades? It wouldn't surprise him. McCoy had already tracked him down and given him a stern lecture about solitary drinking, among other things. Even Uhura, as lovely and concerned as ever, had checked in from the Intrepid II only a few days after McCoy's appearance. Ostensibly she had called to offer belated condolences on Kirk's death and to say how sorry she was she hadn't been able to make it to the memorial.

Her real motives had been quickly obvious, however. As diplomatically as she could, she'd given him a soft-edged version of McCoy's demands that he move on with his life and quit blaming himself for things that weren't his fault. And she had of course gently suggested that the flood of invitations the Academy had deluged him with were still open and would always be.

"In my years at Starfleet Command, I had a lot of friends there," she had said earnestly, "and hardly a week went by that one or the other of them didn't tell me how some engineering student had stumped them with the sort of 'hands-on' question you could answer in your sleep."

Pushing aside thoughts of past meddling by his friends, Scotty returned to the present. Common sense-or what pa.s.sed for it in his current state-told him to ignore this woman, whether she was someone McCoy had recruited or not. But now that he found himself looking into her solemnly smiling eyes, he felt his resolve faltering. For one thing, she was right about Saurian brandy. His mouth almost watered at the thought of its delicate, smoky savor.

And this wouldn't, he rationalized abruptly, be drinking alone in his room, solely to ward off nightmares. This was being social, which was just what the doctor had, literally and gruffly, ordered.

"Aye, that's been my experience as well," he said, almost smiling. "I'd be honored to join you, if you'll tell me who you are-and have a second round on me."

"You can call me Guinan," she said with a barely discernible nod and smile as she turned and led him to an out-of-the-way table. She seemed to glide rather than walk, as if the floor-length gown concealed not legs but an anti-grav unit. Self-consciously, he set the sack of nightmare repellent out of sight on the chair next to him, but the woman didn't seem to notice as she settled herself on the opposite side of the table and signaled to the bartender.

A few curiously wordless moments later, they both held small goblets of Saurian brandy in their hands. The woman lifted hers in a motion that seemed to be half toast, half inspection of the amber liquid.

For just a moment, as her lips began to part, he was afraid she was going to come up with one of the oldest-and least welcome-of toasts: "To absent friends."

Instead, after a long moment of silence, she raised her goblet another millimeter and said, "To the future. As one of your world's more engaging charlatans often said a few centuries ago, that is where we will all spend the rest of our lives."

At once relieved and a little puzzled, he downed the drink, sipping it slowly, as it deserved.

"My world, you said? You're not from around here, then?" he asked as he signaled for the second round, his treat.

"No, but I've been here before-on your world. It's one of the more interesting ones. I like to check in every so often, see what's changed since my last visit."

Scotty found himself grinning. "Then you've come to the wrong country, la.s.s. We Scots aren't noted for keeping up with the latest fashions. The local university is more than nine centuries old and hasn't changed its facade for three. Nor much of its curriculum." Which in fact had been one of the talking points of the oddly old-sounding young woman who'd invited him to "guest lecture" there instead of-or in addition to-Starfleet Academy.

The woman smiled wryly. "There's something to be said for tradition, properly employed. Personally, I like to think we can use it to guide ourselves into the future rather than chain us to the past." She glanced around the room, her eyes falling on a young man in a Starfleet uniform sitting with civilian friends a few tables away.

"Take Starfleet, for example," the woman went on. "I'd be surprised if it didn't have traditions that have their roots in the days of sailing ships, but if there's any organization that looks more toward the future, I couldn't name it."

It hadn't been a question, but her face invited a reply. "Aye, they have their moments," he said noncommittally.

"And what about your future?" she asked abruptly. "Do you have any plans?"

To survive, he thought, whether I deserve it or not, but he said nothing, only shook his head, hoping she wouldn't press the issue.

Then the second round was there. "To the future," she repeated, her cryptic smile making her look even more maddeningly familiar, and then added: "Keep a close eye on it. You never know what it has in store for you."

Moments later, to his surprise, she murmured something, set down her emptied goblet, and glided away, not back to the bar but out into the night.