There was only a newfound certainty that-somewhere, somewhen-she still had a role to play in Captain Scott's fate. She had no idea what that role was, nor what she would be forced to sacrifice for it. She only knew that, when the time finally came, she would have no choice in the matter.

Whatever had forced these feelings onto her, driving them deep into her very soul, would see to that.

She could only wait with endless uneasiness, wondering, as each new feeling made itself known to her, if it was the one she now awaited, the one she now dreaded above all others.

On Board the Shuttlecraft G.o.ddard 2370 Old Earth Date AFTER NEARLY six months of aimless wandering, Scotty was no more at peace with himself than when he had been resurrected from the Jenolen's transporter system. For a few days after he had helped Lieutenant Commander La Forge rescue the EnterpriseD from inside the Dyson Sphere, his spirits had been as high as at any time since the black day he'd let Jim Kirk die. He'd felt that he was pulling his own weight, actually making a difference, but the feeling had quickly faded. Despite the repeated and seemingly heartfelt expressions of grat.i.tude from La Forge and Picard and the rest, the truth quickly became obvious, at least to him. No matter what they said, they wanted him out from underfoot.

It was true that he had pulled off a minor miracle in resurrecting the Jenolen, but the "miracle" had been accomplished largely with the century-old technology of the Jenolen itself. He was still a fish out of water with the current technology, with the new Enterprise itself.

But worse than that, it had been his fault that the Enterprise had been put in danger in the first place. If he had done what any self-respecting Starfleet officer should have done, this grand new Enterprise would never have gotten tractored inside the sphere in the first place. If he had given Picard and the rest a thorough account of everything the Jenolen had done, someone would have recognized the dangers and avoided them. Instead, he had wasted his time-and everyone else'spoking his ignorant nose in every nook and cranny of the candy-store of advanced technology that, to his twenty-third-century eyes, the new Enterprise was. He had gotten underfoot at every opportunity. He had interfered with the running of the ship, trying La Forge's not-quite-endless patience by making suggestion after suggestion, most of which were either blindingly obvious or scientifically ludicrous. For a time he'd been obsessed with holodeck technology. He had even gone so far as to pompously suggest that it shared a few principles with the cloaking technology he'd become thoroughly familiar with when he and Kirk and the rest had virtually rebuilt the Bounty, the Klingon bird-of-prey that had taken them from Vulcan to Earth after Spock's resurrection.

Finally, even La Forge's patience had given out.

And Captain Montgomery Scott, the one-time chief engineer of this very ship's ancestor, had been exiled from engineering.

But even then he hadn't done what he should have done. Instead of giving them the information that might have kept them from being pulled into the Dyson Sphere, he had retreated into drink-and into a holographic illusion of the original Enterprise bridge, where he sat alone, once again getting drunk and feeling sorry for himself.

In the end, Picard had "loaned" him the G.o.ddard, its computer programmed with a special briefing covering the history of the skipped-over seventy-five years, and sent him on his way. A warp-two shuttlecraft was obviously a small price to pay for saving the Enterprise from what he had become: not only a technological dinosaur but a drunken Jonah.

In just a few short weeks in the twenty-fourth-century, he had disgraced Starfleet and betrayed the Enterprise.

Long before that, he had failed his friend Matt Franklin.

And worst of all, he had failed Jim Kirk.

Both were long dead, but if there was any justice in the universe, Montgomery Scott was the one who should have been dead.

Had he been given enough time on board this new Enterprise, he would almost certainly have found a way to do something even worse than get them trapped inside a Dyson Sphere, something he couldn't "make right" later by some ego-driven piece of engineering sleight-of-hand. At least this way, off cruising the back roads of Federation s.p.a.ce by himself in a low-warp shuttlecraft like the G.o.ddard, the damage his b.u.mbling could cause was limited.

Or so he felt each time he drank himself to sleep on the foul-tasting synthehol concoctions that were the best the G.o.ddard's replicator could manage.

And so he felt whenever his nightmares-now filled with two accusatory corpses rather than one-invaded his coc.o.o.n of sleep and eventually ejected him into painful reality.

Until one night...

The increasingly grisly corpses of Jim Kirk and Matt Franklin were taking turns railing at Scotty for his failure to save them when a disembodied third voice invaded the grimly familiar nightmare and drowned them both out.

And woke him up.

After the usual moment of stomach-churning disorientation, reality clamped down on him. He was aboard neither the Enterprise nor the Jenolen but the G.o.ddard. And the voice, a monotone that still held an edge of desperation, was not a part of his nightmare.

It was a distress call, originating out here, in the real world!

Abruptly, instincts born of half a century in Starfleet kicked in, and Scotty scrambled from his bunk as fast as his aching head allowed. Even before the bulkhead had completely closed over the smoothly retracting bunk, he was at the shuttlecraft's controls, simultaneously opening a channel to the other vessel and initiating a sensor scan. As his fingers flew over the controls, he was glad that one of the first things he'd done on the G.o.ddard was improvise a way to impose some order on the multi-function control panels and display screens. In effect, he'd frozen them into a default configuration that bore at least a superficial resemblance to the seventy-five-years-out-of-date equipment he was accustomed to. The other functions and configurations, while still available if needed, obediently stayed out of his way unless he actually requested them.

"This is the Federation shuttlecraft G.o.ddard," he said. "Please identify yourself."

The voice fell abruptly silent. At the same moment, a barrage of information flashed onto the main sensor display screen. Automatically, Scotty extracted the key bits of data from the jumble of letters and numbers as they scrolled up the screen and soon filled it.

Frowning, he leaned closer, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Or, worse, his mind! What he was seeing was obviously impossible.

But then the shuttle "windshield" switched over to viewscreen mode, and the source of the distress call appeared abruptly, wavered a moment, then solidified and filled a good quarter of the screen. It was, just as the sensors had indicated, a Federation shuttlecraft.

But not a shuttlecraft from this era! Instead, it was from his era, now seventy-five years dead.

Except for the number-NCC-1951-and the countless scratches and sc.r.a.pes visible on all surfaces, it would've looked right at home in the shuttlebay of the original Enterprise. Even more remarkably, all systems seemed to be at least marginally functional.

Another time traveler, he wondered? Or a piece of junk that someone had managed to resurrect?

Then the anomalous image of the exterior of the shuttlecraft was replaced by the equally anomalous image of its equally scratched and sc.r.a.ped and downright barren interior. For several seconds there was no movement, no sign of life, but finally a young-looking humanoid with a widow's peak of short, mottled fur extending downward almost to the top of a broad, flat nose stepped nervously into range of the viewscreen. His startlingly green eyes were saucer-wide but with vertical, cat-like slits for pupils. His tattered clothes would have looked more at home on a nineteenth-century dirt farm than on a s.p.a.ce-faring vehicle of any era. Although, Scotty realized belatedly, his own nightshirt-clad image wasn't the most dignified way for a Starfleet officer-even a retired one-to introduce himself.

"What's the problem, lad?" he asked when the young humanoid remained silent despite the nervous trembling of his mouth.

"Are you one of the Wise Ones?" the other asked abruptly, almost cringing as the words emerged.

"I don't feel particularly wise," Scotty replied, stepping out of viewscreen range for a moment and grabbing a freshly replicated, seventy-five-years-out-of-date semi-dress uniform, the jacket of which at least partially disguised his middle-age spread, "but do you need a.s.sistance or not?"

"We most certainly do," a second voice broke in, "no matter who you are!" A moment later, as Scotty finished shrugging into his uniform and stepping back into range of the viewscreen, another humanoid, this one apparently female, stepped into the picture behind the male, who winced anew at the other's words and angry tone. She was wearing what looked like a military uniform. A small but nasty-looking wound just above her right temple and just below the razor-edged fur-line had been clumsily st.i.tched shut but had no protective covering, not even an old-fashioned bandage. "Our ship broke down and unless I miss my guess, the Proctors can't be more than an hour behind us, doing warp five. Our ship might've been able to outrun them, but this thing can barely do warp one."

"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 G.o.ddard 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, la.s.s," he said, triggering a subs.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 G.o.ddard'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 G.o.ddard 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 G.o.ddard's transport pads.

"- you doing?" she finished with a startled blink when the stasis field released them.

"Welcome aboard the G.o.ddard," Scotty said, "Captain Montgomery Scott at your service." Out of the corner of his eye he could see the responses coming in to his subs.p.a.ce 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 G.o.ddard. "Why have you returned now?"

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, la.s.s, 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, la.s.s," 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 G.o.ddard'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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 G.o.ddard 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 a.s.sumed were relatively primitive sensors. With any luck, they might not even notice the G.o.ddard'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 G.o.ddard'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 spectacular warp trail.

A quick check of the G.o.ddard'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 G.o.ddard'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 G.o.ddard, 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 G.o.ddard 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 G.o.ddard had been in a low orbit, held stable by the impulse engines. This time both he and the G.o.ddard would be careening through s.p.a.ce thousands of kilometers apart.

His heart beating as rapidly as in his nightmares, Scotty locked the G.o.ddard'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 G.o.ddard'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 G.o.ddard's replicator.

The G.o.ddard 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 subst.i.tuted, 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 ma.s.sive 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 G.o.ddard's course and speed one final tweak to bring them back into precise synchronization with those of the doomed shuttlecraft, then triggered the G.o.ddard'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 G.o.ddard 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 G.o.ddard's controls. As expected, the sensors showed the other shuttlecraft already veering from its previous course parallel to the G.o.ddard 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.

a.s.suming he could do anything with it.

a.s.suming the Proctors hadn't destroyed it.

Bringing the G.o.ddard about, he set in a course that would send it in a huge arc that would essentially leapfrog the G.o.ddard 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 G.o.ddard's warp trail at all and would a.s.sume 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 G.o.ddard's relatively faint trail and follow it. But even then, a.s.suming 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 subs.p.a.ce. 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 G.o.ddard'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 s.p.a.ce, it and a dozen other nearby stars were unknown except for their stellar coordinates. There weren't even notations about possible planets, Cla.s.s-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 pa.r.s.ecs 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 subs.p.a.ce 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.

According to Garamet and her brother, however, their world of Narisia had been noticed about three hundred years ago by the so-called "Wise Ones," an otherwise anonymous race or group that either hadn't heard of-or had no use for-the Prime Directive. Whoever they were, they obviously preferred aggressive meddling to the inconvenience of having to stage an actual invasion and occupation. That could qualify, Scotty supposed, as a perverse sort of wisdom.

"And you have no idea who they really were?" Scotty wondered. Such apparently "covert" operations hardly seemed in character for either the Romulans or the Klingons, both of whom would've leaned much more toward open invasion. There were, however, any number of other less "honorable" enemies to cope with these days. The Carda.s.sians, covered extensively in the G.o.ddard's briefing program, came instantly to mind. And the blue-skinned Andorians: Even though they had been a founding member of the Federation, there apparently were rogue factions that still went in for the same kind of underhanded tactics they had been known for in pre-Federation days. And there were of course the hive-minded Borg, seemingly roaming the Delta Quadrant at will in near-indestructible ships that looked suspiciously like ma.s.sive compacted cubes of sc.r.a.p metal.

From what Wahlkon and Garamet told Scotty, however, he doubted that the Borg or any of the others were the ones masquerading as the "Wise Ones." Narisia, a pre-technological M-cla.s.s planet, had been co-opted several generations ago, or at least its leaders had been. Or perhaps "tempted" was a better term. No invasion force had descended on the planet. No armada had appeared in the sky, threatening fiery destruction from above, although it was understood from the start that such things were far from impossible-if they were ever needed.