Chapter Three: The Man Who Knew Too Much
Disclaimer: Just playing here, folks.
"Look out below!"
Montgomery Scott instinctively covered his head with his arms and ducked to the left. A metal spanner clanged on the floor, bounced once, and skidded towards him. He stopped its slide with the toe of his boot.
Engineer Bowman peered over the rail of the catwalk above and gave a sheepish grimace. "Sorry, Mr. Scott."
"You coulda killed me!" Scotty yelled back. "Blasted idiot. Watch what you're doing!"
From the corner of his eye, Scotty saw two ensigns at the main control panel give each other a glance. It wasn't like Scotty never yelled, or never lost his temper, or never called some clumsy oaf an idiot. But even he acknowledged that he was doing it more frequently, maybe all the time.
This crazy star they were parked beside, that was to blame. The poor Enterprise's innards were getting blasted by repeated time continuum waves—or at least, that's what Scotty thought. Mr. Spock and the Captain weren't sure. And Dr. McCoy was leaning towards the notion that the crew was suffering the effects of psychological star dusting, or some such hocus pocus.
Picking up the spanner, Scotty headed to the ladder and made his way up to the catwalk. Engineer Bowman scurried forward, his hand outstretched.
"Be more careful next time," Scotty said, laying the spanner across Bowman's palm.
At once he felt the ship buckle and his feet slipped off the top rung of the ladder. The engineering room became a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors as he fell backwards toward the deck below.
He landed face up, and for an instant he heard the shouts of the crew and the footfalls of someone close by. Then everything went dark and he gave in, reluctantly, to the pull of unconsciousness.
XX
"Uncle Monty, wake up!"
Scotty felt the hot breath of the speaker at his ear. A child's voice, tender and concerned. "Uncle Monty, it's time to wake up!"
With an effort, Scotty opened his eyes. He was staring at the featureless ceiling of a room. Around him he could hear buzzes and rustling noises. Turning his head, he looked into the face of a young boy.
"He's awake!" the boy yelled, apparently to the adults who swam into view behind him.
Scotty's sister Frances leaned down and put her hand on his shoulder.
"Well," she said, "it's about time. I thought you might spend all your shore leave napping."
Scotty sat up. He was in his sister's living area in her flat in Aberdeen. Someone had thrown a blanket over his legs as he lay stretched out on the sofa, but despite that he shivered with cold.
"How long—" he began, but the young boy laughed and tugged on his sleeve.
"I didn't know grown-ups liked naps," he said. "Did you, Mum?"
Frances ruffled the boy's hair. "Aye, a nap now and then is just the ticket."
So this was Fran's boy, Peter, but that didn't make sense. The last time Scotty had seen his sister, she'd just come home with her newborn boy in her arms and Scotty had spent a week with her family, doing duty rocking Peter back to sleep and even changing nappies to give the new parents some relief. Now here was Peter—8 or 9 or 10 already—thin and wiry like his father but with the same auburn hair as Fran. Scotty had been here—what—five months ago? He felt a moment of panic. Were his memories so faulty that he'd lost years of them?
"I need a drink," he said, and the room erupted into laughter.
"Of course you do," Fran said. She motioned to someone behind her and her husband stepped forward with a glass.
Scotty took a tentative sip. "Ah," he said, savoring the smoky silk of good scotch. "What's the special occasion?"
Again everyone laughed, and Fran sat on the sofa beside him. Peter sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet.
"How long are you home for this time?" This from a dark-eyed young woman who perched on a chair across the room. Her words were freighted with an emotion that implied she had more than a casual interest in Scotty. He smiled and nodded.
"That's anyone's guess," he said. He cast about for some understanding of why he was here now, in a time that he could not remember, or which did not yet exist.
The young woman leaned forward. "Let's hope it's longer than last time."
Scotty lifted his glass and offered a silent toast to whatever the woman was implying.
His nephew was suddenly standing in his view. "Uncle Monty, I want to show you my models."
"Well, of course," Scotty said, getting to his feet. The young woman on the chair raised her eyebrows and gave a rueful grin.
"Peter, don't bother your uncle right now," Fran called from the other side of the room, but Scotty waved her away. "It's fine," he said, following his nephew out of the room and down a narrow hallway to a bedroom decorated with a mural of the solar system painted on one wall.
"Here," Peter said, pointing to a cardboard construction hanging over his bed from the ceiling. Cobbled together from paper tubes, a shoebox, and what looked like chopsticks, it was a child's vision of a starship. Peter had colored in a forward view screen, running lights, and phaser docks.
Scotty whistled his appreciation. "Good job, laddie. Looks just like the Enterprise."
"It's not the Enterprise," Peter said. He sounded disappointed, or miffed. Scotty pretended to give the ship a closer look.
"Of course," he said. "Now I can tell."
Peter looked mollified. "It's the Reliant," he said. "I'm going to make the Enterprise next."
He moved to the small wooden table beside his bed and picked up a rarity—a real book with actual paper pages. He picked it up and held it in front of his chest like a shield.
"Ships of the Line." Scotty read the title out loud, Peter nodding.
"My favorite birthday present ever," the boy said. "Thank you for sending it to me."
"I did? Oh, I did. What birthday would that be for, now?"
Peter laughed. "My last one, of course!"
"And you'd be how old?"
Peter laughed again. "Next year when I'm 12," he said, "I want flying lessons. Make sure you tell my mum it's okay. She doesn't want me to be a pilot."
An 11-year old nephew, a book he couldn't remember sending—years missing and unaccounted for. Scotty sat down heavily on the bed.
"You okay?"
"Aye, I'm fine. Just….weary.
His eyes were closing of their own accord, the room growing dim.
"You can take a nap in my bed." Peter's voice, wafting in and out like a faulty transmission.
He had to be dreaming, or hallucinating. Or insane. What had Dr. McCoy said at the department heads briefing? That some of the crew had to be sedated and kept in sickbay? Maybe he was there now, unaware.
With a supreme effort he opened his eyes. He was staring again at the same featureless ceiling of the living area of his sister's flat, the same voices of Fran and her family in the background, but this time the face that greeted him was that of a teenager—Peter, obviously, though older and taller.
"Help me up, will you?"
Peter grabbed Scotty's hand and pulled him into a sitting position on the sofa where he had been stretched out.
"You sleep more than anyone I know," Peter said.
"That does seem to be the case these days," Scotty said, running his fingers through his hair. If he wasn't crazy—if he was caught in a series of time loops—perhaps he could rig his communicator to send a signal to where he started. If Lt. Uhura was at communications, she'd understand where he was, and Mr. Spock would understand how to get him home.
He hoped.
He patted his pocket and felt the reassuring weight of his communicator. When he pulled it out, he was relieved that at least the controls were familiar. The metal housing was slick and cool to his touch.
"Oh, can I see it!" Peter filched the communicator before Scotty could protest. "I've always wondered how Starfleet fixed the directional antenna problem." He popped the back from the communicator, removed a thin silicone wafer, and held it up to the light.
"Ionic resonance! That's how you do it!" He reassembled the communicator and handed it back to Scotty. "I've been working on extending the range of my personal devices," Peter said. "I never thought about using an ionic resonance chip. I wonder if I could alter the one in the holovid projector to fit."
"Too much feedback," Scotty said, falling into a patter with his nephew that felt oddly natural. "You could machine a better one from scratch."
He fiddled with the communicator control buttons, looking for any hint of a time distortion wave to piggyback an alert signal on. Nothing.
Peter was watching him intently. "Since when are you interested in engineering?" Scotty said. "I seem to remember your saying you wanted to be a pilot."
Peter's face went blank. "Did I? Maybe when I was a kid. You know, the way all kids want to fly. But I've been pretty set on engineering for a while now."
Scotty tapped the locator button and held the communicator up to his ear, listening for the telltale sound of time wave distortions. Traffic on the local channels was busy—small commercial ships heading to Spacedock requesting a tow, a Starfleet cruiser counting down to a scheduled departure.
The equipment on Spacedock—presuming it was like the Spacedock of his own time—would be far more capable than his handheld communicator in searching for time signatures.
"I need to get there," Scotty said aloud.
"Get where?"
"Spacedock," Scotty said. "I've got a…project that I need to check on. Now, where can I get an orbiter for hire?"
Peter's eyebrows rose in confusion.
From a distant room came Fran's voice. "What are you boys up to in there? Dinner's almost ready."
"Uncle Monty has to leave! He has to go back to the Enterprise!"
"The Enterprise is here?" Scotty felt a wash of surprise and anxiety. Even if he was still posted to the Enterprise, he didn't know who else might be. Would the current captain, or science officer, believe some cockamamie story about traveling from the past—if that was, in fact, what he was doing?
He flipped the communicator open and signaled the ship. A male voice answered.
For the first time, Scotty glanced down at what he was wearing. His clothes were recognizable as a Starfleet uniform, though not like any he'd ever worn. He lifted his hand to his collar and felt the pips of a lieutenant commander.
"Uh, Lt. Commander Scott here," he said into the communicator. "I need transport to the ship."
"Yes, sir," the male voice answered. "Just one to beam up?"
"Oh, please, let me go with you!" Peter said. "You said next time you were home you'd give me the tour. I promise to stay out of your way." He searched Scotty's face with the same intensity he'd shown with the communicator.
"Another time, maybe," Scotty said. "I don't know when I'll be coming back."
"All the more reason to let me go now," Peter said. His face was flushed, his eagerness palpable.
A bad idea, no doubt, but Scotty could never refuse his nephew anything.
He blinked once, twice, to clear his head. What was he thinking? His nephew was a baby he hardly knew.
And yet he felt as comfortable with the young man standing in front of him as if he had known him for years.
"Very well," he said, "but don't be bothering anyone with your questions and commentary."
Peter's grin was infectious.
"Two to beam up," Scott said, and at once he felt the almost imperceptible tingle of the transporter.
Only instead of resolving just as quickly into a view of the transporter room on the Enterprise, Scotty was suddenly in the engine room, the air acrid with smoke, the sounds of moans all around him. On the deck at his feet was Peter, a young man in his twenties, perhaps, wearing white coveralls smeared with blood. As tenderly as he could, he knelt down and slid his arms underneath him and then stood up, carrying his nephew like a baby. Peter's breath rattled with every step Scotty took.
And there was Captain Kirk, visibly older, visibly shaken, listening as Scotty said, "He stayed at his post when the other trainees ran."
Words that came from nowhere or from some dark place in the universe—he blinked back tears and tried to remember why he'd said them.
His knees gave way and he started to fall forward. Peter slipped from his arms and Scotty called out as his vision went black.
For a moment he was suspended in time and space, unaware of his surroundings.
Then his feet were firmly on the ground once more and he opened his eyes. He was standing in a dimly lit room beside a stasis tube. Several other uniformed officers were with him, one checking the seal on the tube and another calling out numbers from the controls.
"That's the last one, Sir," Peter said, smartly outfitted in a red engineering shirt. He handed Scotty a digital clipboard. Glancing down, Scotty saw a list of names, presumably the people in the stasis tubes.
Khan Noonien Singh.
The name on the tube matched the first name on the digital list. Frost had already formed along the edges of the view plate, but Scotty could see the features of the man inside.
Imperious. Deceptive. Dangerous.
Scotty shivered. Ridiculous to feel such aversion for a stranger.
He turned to hand the digital pad back to Peter and found himself staring up at the concerned face of Engineer Bowman.
"Don't move, Sir," Bowman said. "Dr. McCoy is on his way."
A heavy weight—Bowman's hand—pressed him back down when he tried to sit up.
"You took a bad fall," Bowman said, apologizing for keeping Scotty immobile on the deck. "You shouldn't get up until the doctor checks you out."
"How long—"
"Just a few seconds," Bowman said. His attention swiveled to something behind him and he stood up and moved away. Dr. McCoy swam into view, his tricorder waving over Scotty's chest.
"Well, you didn't break anything. And you can thank that hard head of yours that you don't have a concussion. Still, I want you to take a break for a day. Catch up on your sleep, stay in your quarters and keep quiet."
Scotty could see McCoy's mouth moving and could hear his words, but their meaning seemed remote and irrelevant. He needed to talk to the captain and Spock, had to tell them that the star was sending them through swirls and quirks of time. As long as the Enterprise was in orbit, they'd continue to skip along this time distortion like a stone across the surface of a lake.
With an effort, he sat upright. "I need to go—"
"Didn't you hear what I said? You don't need anything but rest." He motioned behind Scotty's back and two medics took him by the arms and helped him to his feet.
"But I need—" he said as the medics steadied him and propelled him down the passageway to his quarters. Before he knew it he was in his bunk, his eyes closing, as images flashed like a crazy kaleidoscope in his brain—images of a nephew he loved as dearly as his own son, a nephew he hardly knew, a nephew who died heroically, tragically on the Enterprise or who was still asleep soundly in his crib in Aberdeen—as sound asleep as the frozen man slumbering in a tube in a darkened room.
Author's note: Fans of TOS will recognize Peter Preston, Scotty's nephew who died when Khan, after commandeering the Reliant, attacked the Enterprise in The Wrath of Khan. In this chapter, I've tried to suggest that Peter's future might be different in this new reality, just as the other characters are living different lives.
Thanks to everyone who is reading and following and reviewing this story. I'm sorry for the tardy update. Future chapters are in my brain, but finding time to put them on paper, so to speak, can be a challenge! Wish me luck!