Chapter Three: Lost and Found
Disclaimer: These "missing scenes" are from my imagination only. I make no money here (and not that much from my "real" job!)
As soon as he hears the door buzzer, Scotty opens his eyes.
"I'm asleep!" he shouts across his darkened quarters.
The buzzer sounds again.
With a sigh, Scotty rolls out of bed and stumbles across the room.
"I'm asleep," he says as he palms open the door.
Had been asleep. Now visibly alarmed by the appearance of Commander Spock standing in his doorway, Scotty straightens, feathers the fingers of one hand through his tousled hair, and blinks with a deliberateness that suggests he is forcing himself to be alert.
"You needed to see me, sir?"
Spock's expression is unreadable—even more so than usual—though Scotty has the impression that the first officer is wound as tight as a wire—also more than usual. Well, no wonder, that. Scotty's been monitoring the reports all evening coming out of Headquarters, only handing off the captain's chair to Sulu when he realized he could hardly hold his eyes open.
That was, what, two hours ago? He had fallen into bed exhausted, asleep at once.
Stifling a yawn, he blinks again, waiting for Spock to tell him what he needs from him.
"As you know, Captain Kirk was assigned the position of first officer and Admiral Pike was to assume command of the Enterprise."
Spock's voice doesn't waver but he stops for a moment and looks away. Then something internal seems to shift and he continues.
"Captain Kirk is still at headquarters assisting in the investigation. Captain Abbott was seriously wounded in the attack, putting my transfer to the Bradbury in question. At the moment, I am…between assignments. I believe I can use this time wisely, with your help."
A judder of electricity shakes Scotty awake from his head to his toes. When Spock asks for help, something major is about to happen.
"Of course, sir. Say the word."
"Come with me."
Without looking back, Spock pivots and starts down the corridor toward the lift. Darting back into the room, Scotty snatches up his red overshirt from the chair where he had tossed it and slips it on as he hurries after Spock.
Only when they exit the turbolift and head left to the transporter room instead of right to engineering is Scotty certain that they are going planetside. Good. Watching the news vids and listening to Starfleet chatter for hours has made him restless to see things firsthand.
The transporter officer wordlessly hands Spock a tricorder and holds up a portable scanner to Scotty, confirming what Scotty had suspected: Spock knew he would agree to come.
The confusion surrounding the site of the attack is evident as soon as they materialize on the transporter pad outside the auxiliary building next to Daystrom Conference Center. The earlier rescue crews have been replaced by security officers sifting through the wreckage for evidence. Looking up, Scotty can make out the gaping hole where the conference room had been.
Teams of investigators have already separated the remains of the attack jumpship from the rest of the building debris. Fortunately no one questions Scotty's and Spock's presence as they make their way around the cordoned off section.
The engine from the jumpship is the largest intact portion, but Scotty's scanner shows nothing unusual about it.
"Short-range flitter capabilities," he says, more to himself than for Spock's benefit. "Engine seized up when this—" he points to a chunk of pressform concrete slab and attached wiring—"came through the air intake."
"The captain's handiwork," Spock says. Scotty waits for him to elaborate but he's focused on his tricorder, hovering over a crumpled piece of metal protruding from what looks like a secondary energy source.
"What do you make of this?" Spock says, and Scotty redirects his scanner.
"Dunno," he says. "Looks like a power fluctuator, but I've never seen one like this on a ship this small. You wouldn't need it. The primary activator gives you all the power you need."
"Unless," Spock says, "you are using your ship to do things other than fly."
"I don't take your meaning, sir."
"Transportation, Mr. Scott, comes in many forms."
"Aye," Scotty says, "but what kind of transport—"
And then with the kind of sudden insight that makes his work as an engineer his chosen calling, Scotty knows.
"He had a transporter aboard."
"It would seem so," Spock says. "That would explain why no human remains have been found in the wreckage."
Getting close to the cockpit is more difficult than looking over the engine. Investigators are busy testing for biological artifacts—fingerprints, virus droplets, anything to positively ID the attacker, though at this point, such work is a formality. Even the civilian media is reporting John Harrison as the suspected perpetrator of both the London bombing and the attack on Starfleet Headquarters.
A demolition team is systematically pulling apart the cockpit and cataloging each section, laying them out on a long worktable like a twisted jigsaw puzzle. Spock walks along one side while Scotty walks down the other, dividing his attention from the scanner to the pieces of duranium and plastic and glass.
If the consequences weren't so dire—if the cause weren't so awful—Scotty would be enjoying himself. More than any other crew member on the Enterprise, Scotty understands how Spock can lose himself in the pleasure of a knotty conundrum. More than once he's overheard someone compare him to the Vulcan when he doggedly sniffed out some gremlin in the machinery.
"Let it go," Keenser told him recently when he couldn't locate the source of a recurring power surge. To be fair, the surge caused no damage and did little more than flicker a single monitor from time to time, but knowing there was something amiss with one of the power couplings drove him to find it, as much for the satisfaction of knowing the answer as anything else.
Stubbornness, some called it. Tenacity, Scotty replied.
As Scotty moves the scanner over bits of broken machinery on the table, he thinks of the last time he and Spock worked this closely on a project. Was it only three weeks ago when the Enterprise had first parked in orbit over Nibiru? Their assignment was simple—a routine scan, that's all. Eavesdrop on the pre-industrial natives, take some seismic readings—ordinary stuff. Boring even.
Until the seismic readings went off the chart and a geosurvey of that blasted supervolcano glaring into the atmosphere like an angry eye meant the captain called a meeting of his officers to discuss their options.
"The volcano sits on a confluence of fault lines at the northern edge of the largest continent," Spock said, directing his attention to the monitor on top of the table in the conference room. "According to our calculations, the geothermal pressures will cause a massive eruption in 42.12 hours."
"Approximately 42.12 hours," Dr. McCoy said as if he were finding fault with Spock's precision, but Scotty knew the doctor better than that. His real irritation was with the situation, with how hopeless it seemed.
"If we can lure the inhabitants out of the area—" Sulu began, but Spock shook his head. "The eruption will destroy most of the surrounding landmass. In addition, the particulate matter ejected into the atmosphere will obscure the sunlight for some time, effectively killing all vegetative life on the planet. Even if the sentient natives survive the initial blast, they will die."
"There has to be something we can do," Captain Kirk said, but again Spock shook his head. Ignoring him, the captain went on. "You said it yourself, Spock. This planet and its people are doomed. There must a habitable planet in this sector we can transfer them to. The population is less than—"
"The Prime Directive disallows such an option. These people live in loose tribal collectives, have no technology more advanced than simple weapons, and speak a language we have not yet deciphered. Even if we could communicate with them, even if we could find a suitable planet for resettlement, their culture would be irreparably altered by our interference."
Sitting next to Scotty, McCoy let out a loud harrumph.
"So we let them die," he huffed. "That's an irreparable alteration, if you ask me."
"You know the proscriptions of the Prime Directive as well as I do," Spock said. "Our options are limited by it."
McCoy started to open his mouth, presumably to argue, but the captain said, "Then let's figure out a work around. Can we somehow minimize the results of the eruption? Or stop it altogether?"
"Our mission is to observe only. Any interference would still violate the Prime Directive," Spock said.
"Not if they don't know we interfered," the captain snapped back. Not true, of course, though no one in the room contradicted him.
Except Spock.
"Their knowledge of our interference is beside the point. Additionally, the odds are high that they would know we interfered. If the inhabitants see us, I calculate the possibility of culture shock for people unaware of space travel to be—"
"Please don't," McCoy said.
"But Mr. Spock's right," Sulu chimed in. "They'd see us if we tried to do anything to the volcano. Assuming we even could do anything to it."
Suddenly Scotty was aware that everyone was looking at him.
"Aye," he said slowly. "If you detonated a warp core inside it, you might stop the natural eruption, but you'd blow the planet up in the process."
Captain Kirk pressed both palms flat on the table in front of him.
"What about something less catastrophic than a warp core breach? Something that just seals the volcano up?"
"Cap it, you mean?" McCoy said skeptically. "Is that even possible?"
Again Scotty felt everyone's eyes on him.
"Dunno," he said, looking at Spock. "If we cannae seal it, we might be able to neutralize it somehow."
"Spock?"
"It seems unlikely," he said, turning to the captain. "Revealing our presence to the inhabitants seems inevitable regardless of any action we take concerning the volcano."
"So we just give up! Just let an entire planet die!"
"I did not say that, Doctor," Spock said, a beat slower and softer than before. As Scotty watched, the doctor's face flushed, his inadvertent reminder of the loss of Vulcan echoing in the room.
With a visible effort, Spock went on. "I can go over the geologic data with Mr. Scott, Captain, though I estimate the odds of finding a feasible solution—"
His eyes slid in McCoy's direction.
"—as negligible," he finished.
The captain gave a short nod.
"See what you can do," he said.
The other senior officers left then but Scotty stayed behind to look more closely at the survey data. What made the volcano such a danger was where it was positioned. The substrata that supported it was unstable, straddling several fault lines that lay like a cooling crust on top of a huge reservoir of magma. The tectonic shifts were subsuming one of the continental plates under the others, opening a rift in the molten lake below.
Spock was right. The eruption was inevitable. And soon.
As he read through the report, Scotty could feel Spock watching him. Waiting for him to confirm what Spock had already decided, that any attempt would be useless? And a violation of the Prime Directive to boot?
Probably.
But when Scotty looked up, he caught a fleeting glimpse of something flickering in Spock's expression. Distress, maybe, or worry.
Whatever it was, it was replaced almost immediately with something Scotty recognized.
Tenacity.
"If we could somehow glue those fault lines together, we could stabilize the tectonic shift—" Scotty mused out loud.
"Glue them?"
"I know it sounds crazy, Commander, but if we could find a way—"
"The magma reservoir. If we solidified it, it would hold the fault lines steady. Glue them, so to speak."
Soon the two of them spread PADDs across the conference table and Spock was ordering another shuttle-run over the planet's dark side to double check the seismic activity. In theory, cooling the magma pool would stop the eruption, but finding the means to do so still presented what seemed an insurmountable problem.
For hours they ran simulations. Simple detonations of thermonuclear charges either didn't set up the necessary chain reaction or were so powerful that they ignited the magma pool instead, destroying the planet in one cataclysmic explosion.
Twice someone—Lt. Uhura, perhaps?—brought food trays and beverage pitchers, leaving them silently on the side table while Spock and Scotty ran and reran the numbers, looking for a solution.
Once the captain poked his head in but he had the good sense to look over their shoulders and leave again.
They kept the orbital image of the red planet of Nibiru in the corner of one monitor like a silent rebuke. Waking up from a hastily cadged nap on the floor of his office, Scotty saw Spock staring at it, dark smudges under his eyes, and he knew—as well as anyone could know—that the planet stood in for Vulcan, explaining Spock's willingness to skirt the boundaries of the Prime Directive.
The solution had to be here somewhere, Scotty thought, rejoining Spock at the worktable. If they could find the right balance between outward force and inner resistance—
"A giant ice cube would do the trick," Scotty said, rubbing his bleary eyes. "But I don't think that's going to happen."
From the corner of his eye he saw Spock react, an almost imperceptible shift in his posture.
"Mr. Scott," he said, tapping in numbers on his PADD, "you may have solved our problem."
And that was how they came up with the idea of a cold fusion start using an ion emitter unit. Setting off that sort of reaction in the volcano's core would actually change the physical property of the semi-liquid magma to solid rock, stopping it, as it were, in its tracks, and sealing all of the fault lines together.
Now that they had the idea, Spock and Scotty left the conference room for engineering. The crew were deployed into work groups, some building the detonator, others working on the propulsion mechanism, Scotty and Spock moving between them making adjustments.
"There's still the wee problem of delivery," Scotty said as he machined the hinged box that would contain the reactor. "We cannae beam this in because of the electromagnetic interference. And we cannae just drop it in. Who knows where it would end up."
"Nor can we risk exposing the Enterprise to the native inhabitants," Spock said. Although he was willing to bend the Prime Directive in one way, he was adamant that the inhabitants remain unaware.
"It's not just that," Scotty said, trying not to let his weariness show. "This ash in the atmosphere is already starting to gum up all our intake valves. I hate to think what will happen if we try to maintain a low orbit over that beastie for any amount of time."
The captain, not surprisingly, was the one who came up with the idea to put the Enterprise in the Niburuan ocean, doing double duty hiding from the planet's inhabitants and protecting the ship from atmospheric contamination. Even as Scotty blustered that it was crazy, that it had never been tried, he could see from the cant of the captain's head, the set of his jaw, that his mind was made up.
"My poor bairns," Scotty moaned later as he tracked Sulu's navigation feed, watching the atmospheric and gravity sensors as the ship disappeared beneath the surface of the sea.
He protested even louder when the captain—and then Mr. Spock, insisting that his Vulcan physiology was hardier than a human's—made plans to modify an exosuit and take a drop line from a shuttle into the bottom of the volcano.
"If you aren't incinerated, man," Scotty blustered when Spock asked him to modify the temperature controls in the suit, "the shuttle won't be able to take the heat. There's no guarantee you'll make it out alive."
"As you indicated," Spock said, silencing Scotty with a look as much as with his words, "we cannot beam the device in, nor can we drop it. Someone must deliver and detonate it in person. That person is me."
Spock's words crashed on Scotty's ears with a finality that brooked no discussion. With a reluctant nod of his head, he started listing the equipment he would need to double the cooling coils inside the exosuit.
Naturally everything fell apart.
Not one to be squeamish about breaking rules when necessary, Scotty nevertheless understood Spock's tenacity later when he refused rescue. For one heartstopping moment on the bridge Scotty knew Spock was going to die—and knew that for all Spock's insistence that the Prime Directive was the reason behind his sacrifice, other darker forces drove him, too, with a depth of grief and guilt that no one on the bridge could quite understand, not even the lieutenant standing there, her hand to her mouth in horror.
And then the captain refused to let it happen.
In the end the extra cooling coils had helped spare the Commander's life. Certainly the drop line and the shuttle had failed as Scotty had predicted.
And the Enterprise had shown itself to the inhabitants, as Spock had warned.
The Prime Directive broken. The planet saved.
And now this. Kirk's command uncertain, Spock transferred.
Scotty sets those thoughts aside and focuses on the puzzle at hand.
A sharp-edged rectangle of black and silver metal catches his attention. Waving the scanner over it, he frowns.
"Something of interest, Mr. Scott?"
"I'm not sure, sir. It looks like the controls for a transporter, but not a conventional one."
As Spock looks on, Scotty sets down the scanner and picks up the rectangular object. A control panel for sure, the telltale circuitry and toggles not a surprise. What is a surprise is the extra relay wired into what would have been the power source. Despite the warm morning, Scotty shivers.
"Bloody hell!"
"Mr. Scott?"
"Sorry, sir, but this was supposed to be secure! It's my bloody equation!"
"Equation?"
"Look. This control panel isn't just for any transporter. It's for a transwarp transporter. You know why that technology is heavily classified? Because if it is ever refined, ever expanded, no one is safe. A hostile force could simply beam into the middle of your party with no advance warning. Starships would become obsolete. Space travel as we know it would be over."
Spock shifts slightly and says, "Transwarp beaming remains a theory only, Mr. Scott. The stresses on molecular cohesion, the difficulty controlling the directional locator, the power induction—"
"It's possible, sir! I know! I've, uh, done it before."
Spock's already intense gaze becomes more so.
"The captain and I both did. When we transported aboard the Enterprise from Delta Vega."
"As I recall," Spock says wryly, "you almost died doing so."
Scotty runs his finger along the inside of his collar.
"Almost," he says. "That problem with the directional locator you mentioned."
He points down at the control panel.
"This is definitely a transwarp transporter control. Someone in Starfleet is using my equation. Well," Scotty says, darting a glance at Spock, "your equation. Aye, yours. You catch my drift."
The look of dawning comprehension spreads over Spock's face.
"Then contacting the captain is imperative," he says. "Whoever used this could be anywhere."
A/N: So…if Spock Prime hadn't given Scotty the transwarp equation, would Scotty have discovered it on his own? Time travel conundrum.
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