Scotty time! Hugs need to be shelved for a moment as our favorite Engineer maneuvers himself in place just in time to save the day – and wonder why the hell he ever listened to Jim Kirk in the first place.
This part is for L. Burke, who keeps my brain ticking over and was only talking about Scott a few hours ago.
Also, while I've done my best to work the science as well as I can, there is simply no getting around the fact that in the movie the times spent at warp are completely ridiculous. I can't even. There are rules to physics that even Scotty can't break.
Rant over! Three parts left to go. A Jim, a Bones and a Spock! Enjoy x
Jim Kirk was a bastard.
He was, Scott though as he tried desperately to remember where he'd put the emergency kick-your-drunken-ass-to-the-curb hypo Doctor McCoy had so graciously given him after one too many shots of tequila with Jim had left him staring at a spanner for a good twenty minutes wondering what the hell it did, a complete and utter bastard.
And Scott was, he also thought, rather too drunk to be behind the wheel of anything, let alone an anything that went up into space.
But really? Who the hell did Jim think he was, forcing Scott's hand like that and then calling him right in the middle of a perfectly good rant to be all contrite and apologetic and 'maybe you're right, Scotty,"? Of course he was bloody right!
It didn't take a genius to see that anything Section 31 had their hands in equaled Bad News, which, thank god! Because if Jim was the genius he suspected him to be, you'd have fooled Scott with the way the kid was acting.
His fingers closed around the hypo and he lofted it in the air like a sword. "Aha!" He announced before plunging the chemicals into his blood stream to wage war on the evil alcohol that had made Jim's 'oh just hop on a shuttle and go check out these co-ordinates for me will you?' sound like a good way to spend the rest of his night.
This was what he got for going into space with a crew whose average age was twenty-eight. Twenty bloody eight! Scott was thirty-five. He was almost twice their age. He was twice Chekov's age. And he was a decade older than Jim, who was either five or ninety-five, depending on the day and the number of times he'd been shot at.
His was the voice of experience, and that experience was saying danger, danger, do not poke! And Jim didn't poke, oh no, he beat the seven hells out of the bugger with a bloody sledgehammer. Subtlety, thy name was not James Kirk.
It would be easier if Scott didn't like the bastard. If Jim was just another Admiralty cloned Commanding Officer with a stick up his ass and an overinflated ego, Scott could have washed his whole hands of the mess and maybe gone and been a pirate or something. They always got to play with interesting bits of tech – at least the ones the Enterprise had encountered anyway.
The problem was…he liked Jim.
He'd have liked Jim even if the kid wasn't the reason Scott had been returned from a wintery exile to the Promised Land of Engineering Awesomeness. He'd have liked Jim if the man hadn't practically blackmailed an Admiral just to get him assigned as Chief – actually, there wasn't really any 'practically' about it. Jim had Archer over a barrel with something and he wasn't sharing for love nor brandy.
He just…Jim was likeable.
His ego was justifiable; his arrogance a product of tried and tested experience; his stubbornness hammered into him with the type of violence that was shocking.
He was about as far from perfect as a man could be.
And Scott liked him for it. He liked the man who held grudges for strange reasons but forgave grave slights for others. He liked the man who knew the ship's engines as well as Scott did and could only get a moment's peace when pressed against the hum of her heartbeat. He liked the glimpses of the sweat kid Kirk might have been that showed through when he gabbled excitedly with Chekov or looked at Spock like he'd hung the moon. He liked the man who had won the friendship of the least friendly man Scott had ever met and valued it for the gift that it was.
He liked Jim.
And to hell if that wasn't just pissing him off.
Sobriety did not make him favor Jim with kinder thoughts. Quite the opposite, actually, as he abused his privileges to commandeer a shuttle and bypass the security that had tightened like a noose around Earth's airspace.
"Do ye have any bloody idea who I am?" Scott bellowed through the comm. to the flustered looking Ensign on duty at the boarder. "I'm Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer of the USS Enterprise…you know, that big beauty hurtling through space in defense of kin and country!" He really, really hoped Jim – or Spock more likely- hadn't submitted his papers through the official channels yet. That might be a tad awkward.
Fortunately, the poor bastard suddenly blanched and was authorizing his leave like his life depended on Scott not being there any longer. "Sorry sir, we've having to be extra careful who we let in and out in light of the recent attacks."
Scott waved an impatient hand, absurdly pleased his bluster had worked. He'd seen Jim pull the trick off more than once but hadn't believed he'd manage it quite so well. Perhaps there was a future in espionage for him…
"One moment, sir, I have to-" The Ensign's harried expression shifted to one of concern as he read from his console.
"Er, carry on, then!" Scott stammered, punching the co-ordinates and all but making a run for it.
…maybe not.
Defiantly not.
Jim Kirk owed him a whole lot of alcohol. Expensive alcohol. Scotch. Proper scotch. Single blend preferably from as high in the Highlands as you could get without running into Big Foot.
And a lot of it.
Granted, Jim had told him to 'check out' the co-ordinates and nothing more. Scott had been the one to see the behemoth hidden behind Jupiter and decide to have a wee nosy around… he couldn't really blame Jim for that.
But he would, because Jim owed him one. Several actually. Several dozen. On the rocks.
Aware that his decision to park his shuttle inside the giant ship and make his way on board was probably taking his WWJ(im Kirk)D a tad too far, Scott briefly considered getting back in his one man shuttle and hop, skipping and jumping as far away as possible.
Only, well… well he was the Chief Engineer on the flagship of the fleet. His department was the best, the cutting edge, the very pinnacle of all Starfleet could accomplish (and finance).
And he'd known nothing at all about the commission of a Dreadnaught class ship.
He'd seen the schematics, of course. He'd even given notes on them because, yes, he was the foremost expert in his field, thank you very much. The feeling at the time had been that the cost of actually building one of the monstrous ships was not matched by the necessity. They were at peace and looked to remain so for a long time. Starfleet's credits were better spent on exploration and fortification, not building weapons.
Only, well, someone clearly hadn't gotten the memo.
She was a beautiful thing of course. A miracle of modern accomplishment, and if he was honest with himself, he'd rather like a few hours (weeks) to have a poke around under her skirt, so to speak. For all that he could appreciate the beauty in her design though, the sheer fact of her existence was disturbing enough to keep him from getting too distracted.
A good thing too, because barely an hour after making the jump to warp and Scott had the uncomfortable thrill of realizing that they'd crossed Federation space a whole lot faster than they should have been able to.
That, and the fact that all of the ship's considerable firepower was aimed at the Enterprise, which hung in space like a cripple, doing nothing to evade the fact that there was enough fire power being aimed at them to take out an entire planetary system.
If Jim Kirk had broken his bloody ship…
Scott only had a moment to question why one Starfleet ship was aiming fire at another – Jim was captain of the second ship and people had a thing about shooting at him. Perfectly understandable sometimes to be honest, but no excuse to damage the paintwork – when the Enterprise finally jumped to warp.
Scott didn't breath a sigh of relief, not when he calculated the space they have covered and the time they had done it in. when the ship followed in to warp, Scott knew they could run the Enterprise down.
Having been in more than a few crisis situations, both with Jim expecting him to do the impossible at a split second's notice, and as a grunt responsible to his own supervisor, Scott knew how to keep a cool head when he needed to.
He was able to keep a hold of that, at least long enough to access the ship's computers. Then they started firing on the Enterprise and he knew what kind of damage his girl was taking.
He told himself it was the upgrades, the personally perfected little tweaks that made his ship so perfect…losing that would be devastating.
But in reality it wasn't the nacelles or Jefferies Tubes that he thought of as he hacked his way crudely through the strings of defensive code. It was the men and women in his department, the cranky doctor who always shared his booze, the brilliant kid who worked a mile a minute and followed Scott like a puppy, eager to learn. It was the hotshot pilot and the cool beauty of the woman who didn't need words to understand him. It was the composed logic and the mad brilliance of the best command team he'd ever served under. It was Jim Kirk's soft, hesitant voice I think you might have been right and the look in his eyes when Scott had begged him not to do something stupid.
No bloody way was anyone, Starfleet or not, blowing his ship up.
The code crumbled and the ship's weapons went off line.
If he danced a little on the spot in glee, well, no one was around to see it.
Actually, no one was around, period.
Seizing the chance, he flipped open his comm.
"Enterprise, Enterprise, can ye hear me?"
A moment of silence, then "Scotty!" That was the Jim he liked best, young and earnest and determined to do best for his crew.
"Aye, it's me. Did I no bloody tell ya those sodding torpedoes were dodgy?"
"You're on that ship." State the bloody obvious, Jim.
"Oh aye, I'm on the ship, and since I just committed an act of treason against Starfleet, I'd rather like to get off now."
Jim laughed through the comm. "Yeah, yeah sure. Just hang in there. We're having a few power issues but we'll get you back as soon as we're back online."
Power issues? One day. He's gone one bloody day!
"James Kirk, what the bloody hell have you done to that ship?"