First Encounter – System SV129F – Stardate 3141.5 (Old system 2247-05-25)
"Well, this is a wee bit of a mess you got yourself into, lad," Montgomery Scott muttered to himself, looking at the small spacecraft with a certain amount of worry. He was standing outside the vessel, clad in the only working environment suit, and staring at a fairly substantial tear in the hull. The actual hole was the least of it, he could patch that up easily enough with the tools on hand and some jury-rigging, even if he had to strip some more hull off some non-essential sections. The various damaged circuits, energy pathways, and associated machinery that the unexpectedly fast-moving chunk of nickel-iron space junk had left in its wake was more of a problem.
He looked around again, as if he was expecting to see a spares depot abruptly materialize out of nowhere just when it would come in handy. Unfortunately this didn't happen. Sighing again, he scanned the damage with his tricorder for the fourth time, half-hoping that it would give him a less depressing result. Like the non-existent spares, though, what he wanted and what he got were two different things.
"I can dismantle the docking clamps, that'll give me enough superconducting cable to repair the power linkages," he mumbled, making mental notes and going over the schematics of the shuttle in his head. "Don't need the weapons, no one out here to shoot at anyway. That gives me some more parts, I might just be able to fettle that into a replacement for the plasma conduit. Messy as hell but it'll work. Maybe."
Kneeling down on the surface of the small asteroid he swore under his breath as he promptly floated away from it, no longer having the benefit of the mag-boots to hold him down. He grabbed at the jury-rigged magnetic clamp he'd fashioned from one of the boots of the other suit, which had taken a piece of inner hull straight through the helmet in the impact, and plonked it down onto the rough surface, activating it with one finger. Looping the cord he'd tied to the clamp over his shoulders he pulled it snug, managing to end up moored well enough that he could work.
'Lucky the damn asteroid is mostly iron,' he mused as he peered into the gap in the hull, using his helmet light to see what was going on in there. 'A stony one would have been awkward.'
Reaching into the gash he poked a bundle of cables, trying to work out what they were connected to. Originally at least. A couple of small sparks came from one of the severed wires and he hastily pulled his hand back. The suit was allegedly insulated to several dozen kilovolts but why take chances?
'Brings to mind the saying about old engineers and bold engineers...' Shaking his head in irritation with his own lack of speed of reflex, he carefully untied himself and stood again, pushing his boots against the ground. When he was anchored he retrieved the clamp and its piece of cord and looped it around his neck for safe-keeping.
"Best get to work," he said out loud, despite there being no one within at least a parsec to hear him. The young man headed back to the airlock of the ship, which was currently gaping open since he'd disabled the inner and outer door interlocks. There was no point in an airlock getting in the way while there was no air to keep in. What had annoyed him more than anything else was how easy it had actually been to do this, he felt such an action should be much harder to arrange and was intending to raise the point with the designers when he got back.
Along with a strongly-worded complaint about the deficiencies of the small-object-avoidance part of the navigation system, which in his view was not fit for purpose. Two kilos of iron moving at about eight kilometers a second relative velocity was very definitely something it should have noticed and done something about, rather than apparently metaphorically shrugging and only letting him know about it by the extremely loud bang it had made when it hit.
The abrupt depressurization had also been something of a telltale sign of there being a problem, come to think about it…
When he'd finally got his helmet on and the suit sealed, and his heartbeat somewhere near merely much too fast, he'd thanked his instructors for all the training drills in accident procedures. It shouldn't have been necessary, but once again reality was showing it could easily make a complete mockery of predictions. And that space travel, even in this day and age, was never entirely risk free.
Going back inside the ship he ran some more diagnostics, trying to decide which was the most important thing to repair first. Life support won out since it was simple enough to do, as all he had to fix was that hole, then repressurize. Luckily this class of vessel had enough air compressed to the point it was nearly solid to refill the living quarters a dozen or more times, leaving aside the air processing systems which were working perfectly. And were nearly the only systems that were, since they were all on the starboard side and the damage was on the port.
Four and a half hours later he finally finished bonding new sections of hull plate, stripped from one of the engine nacelles, over the gash in the hull. The end result was neither pretty nor regulation but it would hold air. That engine looked tattered, and was now a definite radiation hazard, but this was fairly low on his priority list. Making it work in the first place was much higher up and some cosmetic covering was irrelevant to that.
Returning to the ship he carefully closed both airlock doors, reversed his interlock hack to be safe, and tried very cautiously refilling the cabin with stored air. It took three attempts and two more short trips outside to get all the pinhole leaks, but in the end he was satisfied that this particular job was a good one. It was with distinct relief that he took his helmet off, since the smell of his own recycled sweat was getting a little much.
Sitting in front of the control console he started running more detailed diagnostics on what systems were currently still working, trying to get a better idea of what was needed next. Life support read as entirely functional, which amused him in a dark manner. The weapon systems on a small long range courier like this ship were fairly uninspiring, consisting of only two low-powered phaser cannon, the starboard one of which reported itself to be half-charged, the other one being entirely dead. He was unsure yet if that was the power cells or the beam emitter, not that it really mattered at the moment.
The ship was currently running on stored power, which would last perhaps a week at most, unless he could get the small warp reactor running again. Luckily the containment field for the antimatter was still working, or he wouldn't be around to worry about it. Not surprisingly the systems around that particular system were about the toughest on the entire vessel, since no one really wanted a few decagrams of anti-hydrogen going off pop next to anything they wanted to keep.
Navigation was currently out, the shield generator had entirely overloaded and failed when the ridiculously quick little projectile had hit a weak point in the overlapped force-fields by complete happenstance, and the entire comms array was fried due to a power surge. The subspace transceiver appeared to be mostly functional, but without the rest of it, he wasn't going to be talking to anyone more than about a light-second away. One engine was possibly repairable while the other one needed a proper shipyard, the artificial gravity was off, and the coffee maker had died.
The last item on the list made him quite irritated. He needed some coffee. So he spent half an hour repairing it, before he resumed inspecting the damage to the hull from the inside, which was a lot easier than from the outside in a suit.
Six hours later he straightened up with a sigh, scratching his head with the end of a plasma interlink calibrator tool, then shrugged. "Best I can do, lass," he said, patting the bulkhead. "Let's see if that helps."
Returning to the console he leaned over the pilot's seat and prodded controls, smiling a little in triumph when the warp reactor began making a low rumble, the ignition process proceeding through the normal startup sequence. Half-way through, an alarm started warbling, his eyes widened, and he slapped the emergency abort control as fast as he could.
"Oops. That would've been embarrassing..." Glad no one was around to see him make a mistake, he hurried back to the small compartment that was laughingly referred to as an 'engine room' on this class of ship, being about the size of a garage for a standard ground car, and spent another half hour adjusting the flow injectors. Finally satisfied that at least it wouldn't go boom when it started, assuming it actually started, he tried again.
This time there was a muted thump followed by a pulsating hum, which made him cock his head and listen intently. "Still misaligned a few microns," he mumbled to the ship, tweaking settings on the intermix panel to try to compensate for the slightly bent reactor. Eventually he was sure he'd managed to get it running as well as it ever would short of a complete overhaul, not something he could do with the tools and materials available. He was good, excellent even, if he was immodest about his own abilities, but some things were out of his power to fix under the circumstances.
With the main power more or less restored, the batteries were recharging, and it was only another two hours work to get the artificial gravity up again which he was pleased about. He didn't like zero g at the best of times, it made him feel slightly ill in a hard to define way. After taking a break for a three hour nap, since he was aware that being too tired led to stupid mistakes, he resumed work.
Three days after the impact, he'd fixed all the critical systems, pulling parts from ones he didn't need to fix ones he did. The interior of the ship was a mass of cables and tubes running from places where interior panels had been removed to other places of a similar nature, making it look very untidy, but most things worked fairly well. It was certainly habitable for a considerable time, since all the air and water purifiers were running perfectly, and there were enough emergency rations to keep him alive for at least a year, leaving aside the more edible food in the stasis unit.
Unfortunately, he had finally come to the conclusion that the two systems he couldn't repair were the comms and the engines. The subspace emitter array was, when he'd checked, missing a significant and vital section that looked like it had been torn off by a fragment of the impactor that had made such a mess of his ship, and was presumably still floating around somewhere. The port engine was scrap. A small piece of nickel-iron had made a neat hole right through the main bulk of it, as precisely as if it had been aimed. He couldn't have done a better job with a cutting laser.
The starboard one, on the other hand, was eminently fixable, given half a dozen parts he didn't have. The thing that pissed him off most of all was that the parts required were on the other damn engine, but mirror-imaged! "What damn fool thought it was a good idea to make the engines non-interchangeable?" he shouted, slamming his hand on the console. "That's just bad engineering! Style over substance, that's what it is. I don't care what the fecking thing looks like, I just want it to work!"
Slumping back into his chair, he sighed, then looked around at the small cabin that was his home for now. And possibly quite some time to come. The chances of anyone spotting his ship sitting on this little kilometer-wide asteroid in an uninhabited system half a dozen light-years from anywhere people wanted to be was almost zero.
As a result of such depressing thoughts, the polite knock on the airlock an hour later while he was trying to come up with something he hadn't considered yet nearly made him have a heart attack.
Staring at the inner lock door with wide eyes, the young engineer spent several seconds wondering if he was hearing things. When the knock came again, he realized that he wasn't. As unlikely as it seemed, there was someone outside his ship. Turning back to the controls he prodded switch pads with practiced ease, trying to figure out why the short-range sensors hadn't alerted him to the presence of another vessel. The long range ones were still down, but he'd got the standard local navigation sensors working fine, and they should have…
"There's no ship," he finally said in wondering tones. "What the hell?"
Glancing back at the airlock he inspected it like he'd never seen it before. There was no evidence at all in the logs of any ship other than his own anywhere within several AU, yet someone was knocking on his door.
Finally remembering the external optical cameras, he rooted around in the relevant section of the interface, found the right one, and turned it on. The sight that came up on the viewscreen in front of him made him stare in shock.
"Now you dinna see that every day," he mumbled, stunned.
The figure standing outside his airlock was looking around with interest, as casually as if they were standing on a street back home. He didn't recognize the species, and a quick search through the ship's database didn't come up with a match either. It was reptilian, as far as he could tell, bipedal, something over two meters tall based on using the height of the airlock door as a scale, with a long tail. And for reasons that entirely escaped him, not wearing any form of environment suit!
He got the impression the alien was probably female, although he'd have been hard pressed to say why. She, if it was a she, was wearing what looked like casual clothing, cut to fit her non-human body, but not something that would have looked out of place back on Earth.
And a fedora on her head.
For some reason, that made him stare more than anything else. It was definitely a fedora, which was just weird.
He watched as she raised a hand and knocked for the third time. The sound, transmitted through the hull of the ship, was clearly audible inside. After another couple of seconds, despite a certain amount of worry, he stood and went over to the airlock, pausing on the way to retrieve the sole laser pistol that the ship carried. Putting it behind his back in one hand, just in case, he tapped the control that opened the outer door, looking over his shoulder at the viewscreen.
He could see the door open, and the reptilian alien look inside the airlock, before stepping inside. Activating the lock cycling process, he watched the indicators as he moved back a meter or so. The outer door one went green, the pressurization one turned amber then green as well, then the inner one went red as the door slid open.
"Hi," the lizard-like female said, smiling brightly. "I was just in the area and spotted your ship here." She, and it definitely was a she, looked around, raising one scaly eyebrow. "Very… interesting décor."
Scott followed her eyes and flushed a little, weirdly embarrassed. "It's not meant to look like this," he mumbled.
"Oh. Good. I didn't want to say anything, but these wires are a trip hazard," she grinned. "Had a bit of trouble, hmm?"
He sighed, nodding. "Run in with a wee chunk of very fast asteroid with my name on it," the engineer said. "Made a proper mess, it did."
"So I can see," she noted. Holding out her hand, she smiled again. "I'm Saurial. Nice to meet you, Mr…?"
"Montgomery Scott. Junior Lieutenant Montgomery Scott, of Starfleet, if you want to be formal," he replied, deciding that she was too friendly to be hostile. There was something about her demeanor that made him relax despite himself. "Call me Scotty."
"Nice to meet you, Scotty of Starfleet," Saurial chuckled. "You won't need the weapon, I'm not here to hurt you. Just the opposite, in fact, I'd like to help."
A little embarrassed, he pulled the pistol from behind his back and looked at it, then turned around and put it down. "I don't suppose you happen to have a spare warp coil for a Deneb Heavy Industries type six long range shuttle in your pocket, do you? That would help a lot."
This time she laughed. "Not as such, but I think I can help anyway. Let's have a look at the damage. I'm not familiar with your specific engineering but I'm a fast learner."
Scotty inspected her. "How can you help? You don't even have a ship. Or an environment suit, for that matter. Which raises the question of how you survived a hard vacuum, actually." He was very curious indeed.
"Pff, oxygen, it's overrated," she snickered, waving a hand dismissively. "Never been too worried about the stuff. And I don't need a ship, I have… other methods... available." Holding out a hand, she grinned when he blinked in shock as a complex mechanism appeared in it, out of nowhere. "And as for how I can help… You show me what you need, I'll make it for you."
"What the..." He gingerly lifted the thing out of her hand, weighing it in his, then studied it. The device, whatever it was, was definitely real, and as definitely hadn't been there ten seconds before. Taking it back from him, she pressed a control on the top, which made it start playing music, something that surprised him.
"One of my dad's favorites," she noted, putting it down next to his laser gun and adjusting the volume to a low level. "Music always helps. Now, let's get your ship fixed up, shall we?" She sniffed as he stared at her, then added, "Any chance of a cup of coffee?"
Slowly, he began smiling. He didn't know how, or why, or where she'd come from, but apparently today was his lucky day.
"Of course, lass, no trouble at all," he said as he headed to the tiny galley. "I'm very pleased you could drop in."
"I always like meeting new people," she said as she followed, her tail-tip twitching around as she carefully inspected the jury-rigged repairs. "First time for me in your universe, and I run into someone in trouble. Weird how often that happens. Nice job under the circumstances, by the way. Why are you all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?"
"I was on leave and borrowed the ship from someone who owed me a favor," he replied, pouring out two cups of dark nectar, while wondering about that 'your universe' comment. "It's a new design, I was helping evaluate it for him as part of the deal. First time I've been out of the Sol system since I graduated the academy six years ago. I decided to take the scenic route since I was in no hurry." He handed her one cup, which she took as she listened with interest. "Unfortunately, things went a touch wrong a few days ago." He shrugged, looking around. "Could have been worse. It made a mess of the ship but it didn't kill me instantly."
"Don't you have force-fields or something?" she asked, sipping her coffee.
"Nothing solid enough to stop something moving that fast, and it hit the wrong place anyway," he commented. "It lost a lot of energy overloading the shield generator, but was still moving quickly enough to punch a hole in the hull, throw fragments all over the place, and make a mess of everything." He indicated a few places where there were small shrapnel holes in the interior panels. "Missed anything immediately fatal other than letting all the atmosphere out, but I barely had enough control on the reaction thrusters to get it to this asteroid. I thought it would mostly protect me from other bits of rubble if there were any. But the reaction mass tanks are empty now, and with the main engines down..."
Scotty shrugged. "I was looking at a long wait."
"Good thing I happened to be in the area then," she smiled. Handing him the now-empty cup, she cracked her knuckles. "Let's see what we need to do, OK?"
He finished his coffee as well, watching her with a sort of bemused wonder, then smiled back. "Why not? I didn't have anything else planned for today," he joked, leading her to the command console and bringing up the first set of engine schematics.
"What the hell did you do to my ship?" Commander Henrick yelped, staring at the vessel docked to the side of the station. "Why is it bright blue?"
"The lass liked the color?" Scotty snickered, shrugging. "I didn't have the heart to say no, all things considered."
"And what's that written on the port engine nacelle?" His old friend grabbed a pair of binoculars, focusing them on the craft a few hundred meters away. "'FamTech™ Instant Engine Repairs.' What in god's name…?" He lowered the binoculars and glared. "What did you do to my brand new shuttle, you lunatic Scotsman?"
"Made a friend, learned a few interesting tricks, and wrote out a list of things I really want to talk to your ship designers about," he replied, pulling out an old-fashioned notebook and opening it, then giving the other man a good hard look. "Let's talk about how daft it is to make the engines mirror images of each other for a start..."
Henrick looked at the notebook, which had at least four pages of neatly written notes in it, then at the expression on his friend's face, which didn't seem pleased. With one last look at his repainted ship, he sighed heavily, moved over to his desk, sat, and waved to the other seat, pulling a bottle of something drinkable out of his desk drawer along with two glasses. "Remind me why I keep letting you near my ships, Scotty?" he grumbled as he filled both of them, then pushed one across the desk.
"Because you need a competent engineer to check your team's work," the young man replied, grinning, as he sat and picked up the glass. "And you owe me for that time in San Francisco."
"Are you ever going to let that go?"
"No. Now, about this engine design..."
"Here you go, Kevin," Taylor said, tossing her friend the thing she was holding. The Tinker caught it, inspected it, and grinned.
"A genuine Starfleet laser pistol, circa 2245, original series," he said with immense satisfaction. "That'll go in the middle of the collection. Thanks."
"No problem," she laughed. "He seemed happy to let me have it. Poor guy was in a bad situation."
"Where next?" Randall asked, at the controls of the WCC. Kevin checked his notes.
"I don't have a Peacekeeper pulse pistol yet..."