Engines of Destiny Read online

  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 bumped 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 surreptitious 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, lass,” 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 circumstances 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 passed 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, lass. 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 façade 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.

  Puzzled at the odd encounter and the woman’s abrupt departure, Scotty sat for another minute, not quite able to resist the temptation of a third Saurian brandy, a double “for the road.” Finally he picked up his nightmare repellent and headed for the door himself.

  Halfway there, a slurred voice rose above the muted hum of a dozen soft-spoken conversations.

  “C’mon, Matt, admit it. Only reason you went to Starflop Academy was because you knew you’d never hack it at a real school.”

  His inhibitions loosened by the drinks that still warmed his stomach, Scotty turned with a frown that quickly turned to a scowl as he saw the same young Starfleet ensign he’d noticed a few minutes before. The boy—he couldn’t be more than a year out of the Academy—was lurching to his feet, knocking his chair backward onto the floor. Two casually but expensively dressed men about the same age were across the table from him, both leaning back and grinning broadly.

  The ensign leaned forward belligerently, his hands flat on the table. “And you two think you could hack it at Starfleet? You’d be out
on your cans before you got through the first semester. If they ever let you in in the first place.” He laughed derisively, almost losing his balance as he shook his head. “I’d like to see one of you tear an impulse engine apart and then fix it!”

  “We wouldn’t have to,” one of the others said. Scotty recognized the voice that had made the first taunt. “We’d just order our engineer to do it for us.” Both of them broke into drunken guffaws as the ensign’s hands clenched into fists.

  Scotty’s stomach knotted in sudden, remembered anger. For an instant, the ensign’s face was his own from half a century ago, and the other two were masked by the condescending features of a pair of one-time “friends” of his own—Gregor Campbell and Sean Toricelli, two people he had never quite been able to forget. He’d come home from the Academy to show off his brand new ensign’s uniform, but the congratulations hadn’t been quite unanimous. Gregor and Sean, a pair just like these two had—

  “Let it go, lad,” he said, stepping up to the table next to the ensign and clapping a hand on his shoulder. “I know their wee-minded type, and you don’t want to descend to their bloody level. It only encourages them.”

  All three faces swiveled unsteadily toward him, but only the ensign’s showed any sign of recognition, his angry belligerence morphing unsteadily into wide-eyed surprise.

  “Captain Scott?”

  “Who’s this, then, Mattie?” one of the others demanded. “One of your Starflop ‘professors’?”

  “This—” the ensign began emphatically, but Scotty, giving the boy’s arm and shoulder a practiced twist that had come in handy in many a previous bar, surprised him into momentary silence and had him moving in the general direction of the door before he could recover.

  “Just say I did not appreciate your ignorant remarks about Starfleet,” Scotty said over his shoulder as he maneuvered the boy out the door.

  At the same moment, he realized he’d left his nightmare repellent on an unoccupied table just inside the door. Too late now. There was no way he was going back in there, not for that.

  “I—I have to apologize for my friends, Captain Scott,” the young man stammered. “They didn’t mean—”

  Scotty cut him off with a snort. “Didn’t mean what they said? Aye, lad, they meant it all right, and don’t you ever think different. I’ve had dealings with their kind before. It’s the mealymouthed things they say when they’re sober that I would not put my trust in.”

  The young man blinked owlishly but didn’t argue any further. Instead, he squinted, trying to focus on Scotty’s face.

  “You are Captain Scott! Aren’t you? The Captain Scott?”

  “I was,” Scotty said pointedly, beginning to regret the impulse that had prompted him to interfere in something that had obviously been none of his business. “I’ve been retired for more than a year now.”

  The boy shook his head in alcoholic vigor. “I read all about how you saved those El-Aurians. And the new Enterprise itself! I’ve seen the interviews with Captain Harriman. He said it was a pure miracle, what you did! Simulating a photon torpedo—”

  “Hardly a miracle, lad. Any engineer worth his salt would’ve done the same.”

  Another vehement head shake. “I’ve read everything there is to read about deflector shields in the Academy library, and I’ve never seen anything like that even mentioned.”

  “Aye, lad, and why should it be? That’s not the way they’re supposed to work. You have to rip out some of their guts and put them back wrong way ’round before they will. If you were telling someone how to use a sonic shower, would you bother to explain that you can modify its circuits to make it work as a low-power disruptor?”

  “You can? How?”

  Scotty sighed. “Did they not teach you anything at the Academy?” Not that they’d taught him many such things, Scotty thought, not in official classes, anyway. But for anyone who wanted to be an engineer—a Starfleet engineer!—the official curriculum was just a skeleton. It was up to the individuals to put flesh on the bare bones they were given. For every thousand words of assigned text, there were ten thousand more begging to be read and absorbed. For every instructor’s formal lecture, there would be dozens of informal sources, inside the Academy and out. And it never stopped. For every bit of knowledge you had gained by the time you graduated, you’d learn a hundred more later, not only from your own experiences but from the experiences of your shipmates.

  “What’s your name, lad?” Scotty asked, softening his tone as he saw the stricken look on the ensign’s face.

  “Franklin, sir, Matt Franklin. And I would be deeply honored if you would allow me to buy you a drink, Captain Scott.”

  “I don’t think that’s what either one of us needs right now, laddie.”

  “I’m sorry. I just thought—”

  “On the other hand,” Scotty added with a sudden grin, “it might be just what we deserve.”

  Twenty minutes later, they were sipping their second highly social Saurian brandy at the bar in the boy’s nearby hotel. As Scotty had guessed, Matt Franklin was barely a year out of the Academy. He was also at least as enthusiastic as Scotty himself had been at a similar stage in his career, even though the young man’s only assignment so far had been on a transport ship, the Jenolen, delivering supplies and occasional passengers to a half dozen worlds throughout the Federation.

  As they talked and sipped, one thing became glaringly obvious, at least to Scotty. Finally, as Ensign Franklin ordered a third round, Scotty sighed. “You have no idea, lad, how I envy you,” he said softly, barely louder than the sigh that had preceded it.

  Franklin’s eyes widened, seeming ready to pop. “Sir? You envy me? You’ve served on the Enterprise! You’ve done everything!”

  “Not quite everything, lad. And even if I had, that’s all in the past. For me, it’s over.” A wave of alcohol-enhanced self-pity swept over him. “For lads like you, it’s just beginning. I’d trade places with you in a second. All that’s left for me is one of those bloody retirement colonies. Or worse,” he added, remembering the pathetic bottles of nightmare repellent that lately had become so much a part of his life.

  Franklin seemed stunned, although that, too, was probably partly due to the Saurian brandy. “But surely, someone like you—” he began, then broke off, blinking. “And the retirement colonies, they’re…” He blinked again. “They’re nice,” he said earnestly. “I saw the one on Norpin V when we delivered supplies—and a half dozen new residents—last year. And—and the people couldn’t be happier. Why, one of the new ones said that was the reason he came—friends of his were already there and they’d told him how great it was.”

  “Aye, it’s a bloody paradise, I’m sure,” Scotty said.

  But even as he spoke, he found himself—and the Saurian brandy—wondering: How bad could it be? It might not be a paradise, but at least it wasn’t the purgatory that Earth had become after the Enterprise- B.

  Signaling to the bartender for yet another refill, he hunched forward over the table toward the still-distressed-looking ensign. “Norpin V, you said? Tell me more, lad.”

  As Guinan watched the two men, strangers only minutes before, move off into the night, deep in conversation, she still had no idea what, if anything, she had accomplished just then or in the six months since she had first glimpsed Captain Montgomery Scott, beleaguered by a group of reporters who had finally run him to ground in an isolated corner of the Enterprise-B recreation deck. All she knew was that, whatever she had done, it had turned out right.

  For those six months, she had, as she had intimated to Scott himself, done little but play the tourist. She hadn’t dogged his footsteps or even kept track of where he had gone after he and the others transported down from the Enterprise-B. She had simply followed her “feelings,” barely aware of their existence after that first, startlingly intense one that had gripped her like a vice in the aftermath of her “rescue.” The only hint that they still existed was the chill mixture of apprehensi
on and gloom that rippled up and down her spine whenever she found herself thinking about leaving Earth.

  So she had given up trying to resist. She had even given up trying to outguess the feelings or to understand them.

  And by not resisting those feelings, she had ended up here, at this Glasgow bar, when Scott had walked in. No one had been more surprised than she, or more irritated at whatever was the source of the feelings. Things would be so much easier if they would just come out in the open and tell her whatever the devil they had in mind for her, instead of playing this long-drawn-out cat-and-mouse game.

  Not that she begrudged the last six months, of course. This peculiar—and peculiarly interesting—world of endless paradoxes had always fascinated her, even though she couldn’t even remember who had first made her aware of its existence. It was as if she had always known about it.

  Or perhaps it had been one of her “feelings,” long before she had become conscious of their existence, that had steered her here. At the time of her first visit, the humanoid inhabitants hadn’t even developed electricity or an internal combustion engine, let alone a star drive. If they had followed the path of other worlds she had known, they would have been millennia away from even the most rudimentary space travel. Nor would they have been within millennia of having the emotional maturity to accept the fact that they were neither alone in the universe nor even particularly remarkable, just one planet-bound civilization among tens of thousands.

  Yet here they were only a few centuries later, the center of a full-fledged federation of worlds, most of which had preceded them into space by centuries.