10.

It was engineering's environmental control console that saved his life.

One moment Scotty was on his knees checking circuits under the panel on the engineering mezzanine; the next, he was deafened by the noise of an explosion on the main deck. He was lifted off the deck and pushed further inside the console interior. Pain seared down his left side, and he felt the scorching heat of flames engulfing the floor below as the entire ship shook.

What the hell was that?

Even as he lay half-stunned, and scared beyond his wildest nightmares, the answer came to him: dilithium rupture. Had to be. Unpredictable. Cataclysmic. And, unless the warp core was jettisoned within the next four minutes, it would mean the obliteration of the Churchill and everyone in it.

Scotty pulled himself out from under the console, yelling with agony as the pain shot up his left leg and side. His left arm didn't hurt at all, which was strange given it was hanging uselessly from his shoulder at a very odd angle. The initial fires had died back as the auto-suppressors had kicked in, and Scotty felt cold, though he was covered in sweat. Staying on his right side, he dragged himself to the edge of the mezzanine and looked out across what was left of the main deck.

The blackened, ragged hole in the dilithium containment chamber confirmed his initial suspicions. Around it, consoles sparked and smoked, accompanied by the incessant bleat of the alert siren. The Captain's voice was sputtering from the damaged comms panel: "..ridge… eering… wha… own there? …. arsh… ? Jeff, wh…"

Help would be on the way, Scotty knew. Beta and Delta shifts would be here any minute, along with the medics…Then he remembered.

The deck was sealed off. It was an emergency contingency, in case of radiation. There would be checks to make and scans to be run by the teams outside before they could override the automatic systems and get in. They would not take long, but in the current situation any delay would be fatal for everyone left on board.

With a groan, Scotty reached down to the second rung down on the mezzanine ladder and, gritting his teeth against the pain, rolled off the edge of the higher platform, catching his weight with his good right arm and then dropping to the deck below. He staggered as he landed, then slipped in something. Blood.

He hadn't been able to see it from above because of the smoke, but there was no mistaking it now. Red-black puddles leaked from the scorched bodies that littered the deck, the coppery smell of the oozing liquid mingling with the unmistakable stench of burnt flesh. He coughed as the lingering smoke hit the back of his throat, and his stomach heaved. Scotty gave up the fight not to vomit, staying on his knees as he retched, then dragged a sleeve across his mouth as he forced himself to ignore the mess and concentrate on getting to the warp core controls. The smoke cleared a little, and he blinked streaming eyes and shook his head as he fought another wave of nausea. He could see now that the consoles down here were all fried.

He would have to do this manually. He'd have to go into the warp-core chamber and engage the emergency ejection switch from there.

Using the console to pull himself to his feet, he aimed himself at the doorway to the warp-core chamber and, as he willed his injured leg to carry him those last few yards, time seemed to telescope. Scotty wasn't sure whether that was due to his own distress and injuries, or whether it was a residual effect of the shattered dilithium's fourth-dimensional fractal. Either way it seemed to take forever to reach the doorway and when he finally dragged himself close enough to start keying in the emergency access code, his movements were sluggish as well as agonizing. Still, he told himself, trying to push the pain aside as he pressed another key, in a few moments it wouldn't matter. If he couldn't reach the manual jettison switch in time, the whole ship would be vapor; if he succeeded, the radiation he'd be exposed to would kill him. But the ship would be safe.

Heather…

His breathing was getting ragged and he felt lightheaded. It was becoming an effort to focus, but all he needed to do now was...

A hand gripped his wrist, pulling his hand away from the panel, and Scotty turned to find the bloodied features of Commander Marsh looking down at him as the Chief guided him gently to the floor. "Oh no you don't, mister. If anyone's going to be a hero around here, it's gonna be me."

"Sir! No...!"

But Marsh had already stepped between Scotty and the doorway, and slapped his hand onto the final 'unlock' key. Scotty could do nothing but look on, helplessly. As the door slid shut behind his Chief, he closed his eyes, and let the pain overwhelm him.

The comm speaker in the warp containment chamber squawked, and Jeff Marsh knew who would be on the other end of it even before he heard the Captain's voice: "Commander Marsh?" A pause. "Jeff?"

Marsh decided it was too much of an effort to get off his knees. He managed a kind of wave in the direction of the monitor feed, on the off-chance it was still recording, and crawled to his left to press the comm switch on the panel. "Still here, Skip. Just about."

"We're all still here, Jeff – thanks to you. The radiation levels in there are dropping fast, we'll be in to get you…"

Marsh shook his head. "Won't matter." He examined the radiation burns on his hands, and found himself wondering why they didn't hurt as much as the bump on his head where the initial explosion had thrown him against the auxiliary bypass panel. "I'll be dead by the time you can get in here. We both know that."

"Jeff…"

"No, let me finish. It's important. Is Scott okay?"

There was another pause, and Marsh guessed the Captain was consulting someone else, Chandra maybe. After several more seconds of the remaining minutes of his life had ebbed by, the comm crackled again. "Chandra says it's touch and go. He'll do what he can."

"He'd better. Jeez, you think I'd have come in here instead of him if I didn't think he was worth something?"

A chuckle. Kind of forced. "Sure you would. You're too good an officer…"

"Quit with the bullshit, Skip and listen." Marsh shifted his position so that he was sitting with his back propped against the wall by the doorway. "I ever tell you about Mark Finney? Greatest batsman I ever saw. And you know what? He was English." He shook his head, closed his eyes and leaned his head back, remembering the sun, the breeze, and the manicured green of the Melbourne Cricket Ground outfield. "Didn't matter that he was a pommie bastard, or that he was creaming our best bowlers all over the field. He just kind of… magicked the ball where he wanted it to go. It was a privilege to just sit there and watch him. Course, there were other batsmen helping him out at the other end, but nobody really remembers them, same as no-one remembers who batted with Don Bradman back in the 1930s. Because Bradman was a genius, and they weren't. You listening, Skip?"

That crackle again. Someone would have to fix that. "I'm here, Jeff."

"Yeah, well, the point is… if they sold tickets to watch engineers work, Scott would be the one they'd be queuing up to see. Not me." He sighed, coughed, gathered his thoughts again. "Young Scott… he's Don Bradman. Sachin Tendulkar. Mark Finney. I'm the middle-order grafter that no-one will remember."

"That's not true, Jeff. The crew of the Churchill will all have reason to remember you – for the rest of their lives."

Marsh wanted to argue, but couldn't summon the energy. He thought about the MCG again, the cloudless blue sky, the figures in white running between the wickets. It was a beautiful day.

Scotty looked round his new quarters, leaning on Heather for support as he limped slowly around the room checking where all his belongings had been put, and moving an item or two from one shelf to another. "Did ye do all this yerself?" he asked, reaching a chair and lowering himself gingerly onto it. Doctor Chandra had told him he'd been in the stasis chamber for three days, then on a biobed in a medically-induced coma for another two while the worst of his wounds healed. When he'd come to, it was to find the Churchill under tow by an SCE Tug, and Lieutenant Svenson temporarily promoted to Chief Engineer. Seven men and women - the whole of Alpha shift, save one - were dead, including Ensign Stevens, and Chandra had suggested that Scotty might prefer different quarters for the four days it would take them to get to the repair dock at Starbase Five.

"Tal'ia helped some," said Heather, looking around for another chair, finding none, and perching herself on the edge of the bed, "Lieutenant Wesley too, once he'd moved his own stuff out."

Scotty wondered briefly why Wesley had had to play musical rooms, and then realized that the Lieutenant had probably moved into a cabin that had belonged to one of the dead engineers. He shivered, and rubbed his arms. "It's cold in here."

Heather jumped up and went across to the heating dial. "I'll turn this up a little."

He shook his head. "Don't fuss, Heather. It doesn't matter."

Nothing seemed to matter. When the Captain had arrived in Sickbay to debrief him - against Chandra's objections - Scotty had had no problem in giving a simple, factual account of exactly what had happened. He felt detached from it all somehow, as though he'd severed all his emotional connections when he'd forced himself past the carnage in engineering towards those doorway controls.

Ignoring his plea not to fuss, Heather rummaged in a drawer and handed him the ski sweater his mother had knitted. "Here, this'll be warmer..."

"I said it doesn't matter!" Scotty snatched the garment from her and threw it across the bed, then wondered why he was so angry about a simple act of kindness. He shook his head in apology. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay." She picked up the sweater, and stood in front of him to drape it over his shoulders. "You want me to go?"

"No." He caught her hands and held them. "Not yet anyway." He ran a thumb over the freckle on her left hand, remembering how and why he'd searched for its owner. Now, even that seemed distant, unreal, as though it had happened to someone else.

"Come here, then." Heather gently pulled him to his feet and maneuvered him to sit on the edge of the bed next to her. "Scotty, I still don't understand what happened. I mean - what the hell is a dilithium rupture anyway?"

He pulled his hands from hers and turned away. "Doctor Chandra tell ye to do this?"

"Do what?"

"Get me to talk about it. Again. I've been over it, and over it!" There he went again with the irrational anger . Why was he doing this to her?

He could feel her fingers comb through his hair as she answered, softly: "Doctor Chandra didn't tell me to do anything. If you don't want to explain it, that's fine. I just never heard of anything like that happening before."

"I'm not surprised." He shifted back toward her a little, bracing his hands on the edge of the bed. "It's incredibly rare. I only know of two, maybe three, ruptures like that in the history of human space travel. Trouble is no-one knows why some crystals are unstable, so we've no idea how to detect them. Cracked crystals are easy to spot, flawed ones too. But the ones that rupture..." He sighed. "They look perfect, or they wouldn't be in a starship engine in the first place. There's a theory that they don't degenerate at the same rate as normal crystals, that maybe instead they absorb energy from the ordinary ones until they can't take any more." With a shrug, he added, "But I'm not a great believer in theories. I've seen too many of them proved wrong." Shaking his head, he lay back across the bed. "Heather, eight people walked into that engine room a week ago, and I'm the only one who came out alive. Why? I mean... why me? And why the hell don't I feel anything?" She reached out a hand and he took it and pulled her down into his arms. "I don't expect ye to answer any of that."

"Just as well," she said, propping herself on his chest to look down into his eyes, "Because all I know for sure right now is that I'm really glad you're here."

"Are ye?" He asked, searching for what he thought he knew would be the truth. He felt so guilty for living. Whatever that truth was, good or bad, he deserved it and he knew Heather would give it to him straight. "Because I'm not so sure I'm glad I'm here."

Heather kissed him softly on his lips and he closed his eyes, fighting back tears that he knew would come if he continued to look at her. He would not cry in front of her. He would not.

"Scotty, I am glad you're still here. And I think under the circumstances your reaction is pretty normal." She paused for a minute as if waiting for a reply. But Scotty continued to listen. He had learned early in their relationship that when Heather spoke, she spoke volumes.

"I don't know anymore than you do why this happened, but it did. Call it fate….or destiny, or whatever. But I think you should roll with it. Feel what you feel right now, sort it out if you can and keep moving forward. When you're ready to grieve, you'll grieve. And if anyone gives you any shit about it…well, tell em to fuck off."

He was surprised to hear his own voice say, "I wish I could forget it ever happened."

"Hey…" She nudged him and he opened his eyes to find her frowning at him. "don't say that. Don't ever say that. You dishonor your friends when you say that."

"Yer right, lass. Stevens…Garibaldi….Woodrow…Marsh-especially Marsh, they all deserve better than that."

Heather smiled and kissed him again. He wanted to kiss her back, but he was tired. So very tired.

Scotty turned on his side into the sanctuary of her arms and slept.