Chapter 3: Scotty's tale.
"So let's see," said Scotty, "this was when I was an ensign under Lieutenant Olsen in Engineering. You weren't aboard yet during this incident, Mr. Spock, for which I must say I'm grateful, or what little respect you could have had for me back then would surely have gone out the air-lock…"
"I understand that there is a human tradition of belittling oneself in this kind of narrative, Mr. Scott," interrupted Spock in a firm tone, "but I wish to state that I have certainly never thought of you as anything but a consummate professional, with an admirable dedication to your work."
"Hear, hear," echoed Kirk and raised his glass to the engineer.
"I… well. Well, thank you, Mr. Spock. Well, now, I hope this telling will not then damage that view too severely."
"The Enterprise had been in deep space for six months, and had just come to Devar II, a sprawling metropolis in the Free Planets Alliance. Lofty towers for the rich ones, shacks and mud streets for the poor ones - a right crime, it was. This was before the Devar system joined the Federation, and everyone got schooling and food and reasonable quarters."
"We had shore leave, and Mr. Olsen had forced me to abandon my technical journals and go - oh, you laugh, Admiral, but you'll soon see that this always ends badly… I didn't much care for the idea of the hoity toity art galleries of the aristocrats, and didn't think I could bite my tongue if they started talking about the 'ongoing demonstrations of the unwashed rabble', or the like. So I headed for the shanty town, thinking to meet some more reasonable people, maybe sample some food."
I soon found a lively market, full of fishy and fowly and who-knows-what things for sale, and some houses of, well... possibly quite good repute. I was not in any position to review them. There was also a local version of a casino, and this last was, unfortunately, what drew my attention."
"Now, I think it is very reasonable to forbid gambling for money or goods on 'Fleet ships - but at the time, I thought it was bloody silly to forbid it for shore leave crew. We were there to blow off steam, I figured! After all, what could possibly go wrong?"
"Famous last words, Scotty!" said Uhura, laughing and leaning back in her comfortable chair. "And cursed words as well - you say that, and invariably the sky comes crashing down. That's a well-known law of statistics, Mr. Spock," she added, teasing, when the Vulcan looked like was about to take issue with her statement.
"She's right, Spock," Kirk said.
"Every time, Mr. Spock," Chekov added. "Murufski's probability law, first proven in Russia in 1774."
"And don't even think about suggesting to test it out, Spock, or you'll have to toss salt over your shoulder and run around the block three times," threatened Bones, and the others nodded solemnly.
Spock gave the humans a look which was not, of course, long-suffering, and very pointedly turned his attention back to the grinning Scotsman, who continued.
"Now, the game of the hour was Quag, which, like all good gambling games around the galaxy, is a little bit like poker. In this particular case, poker crossed with a pawn shop. You enter objects, never plain money, and guessing the value of the others' stakes is part of the game. It also happened to be a game that I was very familiar with - I had even come second in a regional school championship when I was a lad. So I sat down at this rickety little table and had them deal me in."
"It was a nice crowd, very willing to share a pipe of something that I decided not to question the legality of. Quick to laughter and cheer. The only exception was this shifty looking fellow, a Ferengi, who kept drumming his hand on his knee, nervous like. He didn't say much though, so I didn't mind him as much as I should have."
"I didn't do too bad the first few rounds - but then, I got an imperial hammer set! Ah, that's one of the best combinations there are. The odds of getting it in the draw is astronomical… and that's when everything went to hell in a handbasket."
"Oh, is this the time when you almost gambled away the Enterprise to the natives? I heard part of that story below decks," exclaimed Chekov excitedly, and then immediately clamped his mouth shut when Bones gave him an exasperated look.
Kirk blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Ah, no lad," said Scotty rather hurriedly, "what a thing to say, no, this is a very different story…"
"You once gambled away the Enterprise?" Kirk asked.
"Let's get you some more bourbon, Jim-boy, and let Scotty get back to the real story," said McCoy, with a charming smile.
"Let's get back to the point where someone gambled away…"
"Jim," said Spock, "it is not a pertinent point, and quite divorced from the current narrative."
"You knew about this? How come I haven't heard about this?"
"Jim," said Bones, firmly, "sometimes you only needed to know what your very competent senior officers told you, in order for you not to throw what we medical professionals call a hissy-fit and make a mountain out of a small mole-hill of, ah, easily cleared up cultural misunderstandings. Now shut up, drink your bourbon, and let Scotty tell the rest of this story!"
Kirk subsided, with a look at Scotty that promised a one-on-one conversation at some later date.
"So what did you lose, Scotty?" Uhura asked, smoothly, "your communicator?"
"Your clothes!" McCoy guessed.
"I think it likely that this narrative will involve your collection of spirits, possibly smuggled Romulan ale", suggested Spock.
Scotty looked aggrieved, "Ach no, people, have you no confidence in my abilities? I didn't lose. I won! - and that's where everything started to go wrong…"
"I won some assorted knick-knacks, a bottle of local spirits, a small Betazoid wind-chime - and also a sturdy metal box, maybe a cubic decimeter in size, off of the Ferengi. The same Ferengi who then excused himself and immediately left. It did occur to me to wonder if he'd somehow rigged the game… But my mandatory time on the surface was up, so I said goodbye to the others and left Delvar with my ill-gotten, (or at least illicit-gotten), winnings."
"Back on the Enterprise, I went back to my shared quarters. Fortunately, my roommate wasn't due back until the next day, because things very quickly started to go wrong. I was in the shower, when the sonics suddenly gave up on me with a small firework display of fused couplings. The lights were out too, and when I finally found a flashlight, I saw that something had eaten its way out of the metal box! I saw something flash by, and turned just in time to see this small devil of a thing, like a furry lizard about a handsbreadth long, sleek like a miniature panther. It was sitting on the wall, firmly anchored in place by six clawed legs. These claws were clearly sharp enough to slice through the inner wall and damage the circuits. As I watched, the little bugger eyed me contemptuously, and then, nonchalantly, took a bite out of the wall itself! I gave up a shout, lunging after the thing. It scurried towards the door, which of course opened as I got close to it. I followed it outside, but had no chance to keep up."
"The chase was cut short by chief petty officer Holst, who didn't approve of me running around the halls stark naked, and demanded an explanation… Oh, I should have told her, then, of course, but frankly I was too embarrassed about the whole thing - from the gambling, to bringing an unquarantined animal aboard, to chasing it naked through the hallways. I figured that, as long as I found it quickly enough, and no one got hurt, it was almost like the whole thing had never happened… I even told myself that it was a noble 'my mess - my clean-up' matter, but really, I was just being an idiot."
"So I muttered something about a bad dream, apologized profusely, and snuck back to my quarters to do some research. It didn't take me long to figure out what kind of beastie it was - a Ferengian Snatcher. The little devils have razor claws and even more vicious teeth, and for reasons that no one has figured out, they're obsessively attracted to electric fields. They chew up wiring and circuits and whatever else they can find, and drag parts back to their well-hidden hoards. They're real nuisances, but are sacred on several continents on Ferengi Prime, and must be dealt with in accordance with a host of rules and folk lore - most likely why the Ferengi pawned the little nightmare off on me in the game."
"And now it was loose on the ship, and it was, unquestionably, all my fault."
"I set out to find it, as discreetly as I could. It didn't take me long to figure out that a foot chase was out of the question. I was able to track its progress by the number of incident reports of minor malfunctions that started popping up, and volunteered to fix most of them. I almost caught it once, but it bit me and slipped through my fingers like silk."
"There's always a solution to every problem though - and I decided that my solution was bots. This was in Old Man Smith's Fleet, and as you might remember, he was always pushing for automation over organics on the ships. We had a host of bots, from small cleaning bots running around, always getting underfoot (and overhead, and in-your-side, as they ran along the ceilings and walls), to lumbering repair bots stalking the hallways."
Uhura was nodding. "I remember! You always got the impression that they were stalking you. Eerie. And as soon as they got smart enough to actually be useful, they became a security risk - far too easy to hack."
"Yes, well... About that... You'll recall the small cleaning bots - they had little grip arms, and were incredibly fast and not very clever. I decided to reprogram them to find the Snatcher. But I couldn't send the programming out as a centralized command, or I'd be found out in no time. Instead I reprogrammed about two dozen of them manually, to become Snatcher-hunters."
"While I cannot condone such actions, I find that quite a remarkable feat," said Spock, his head tilted. "I assume you used some kind of adaptive programming?"
"Aye, a Werner unsupervised-learning algorithm - it was quite new then, and I was far too impressed by how powerful it was. The bots got the bio-specs on the Snatcher, and then my thought was - and I think you'll see the flaw quite plainly - that they would learn on their own and get better."
Spock nodded thoughtfully. "Yes. I can see how this could become problematic." He raised an eyebrow at Chekov who smiled back. McCoy, clearly fed up with the technical in-joke, made a 'get on with it' gesture to the engineer.
"Well, the bots didn't become better hunters. They had a single Snatcher to find, you see, and when they didn't get enough contact with it, they started broadening the definition of 'Snatcher', seeing other things as potential Snatchers. Plants in the botanical garden. People's feet. And other bots. It didn't take long for there to be a full-on bot-on-bot gang war going on, escalating quickly!"
"Now people started to realize that things were wrong. A single snatcher couldn't do so much damage - but two dozen angry bots was another matter! I had pretty much given up the idea of getting out of this scot-free, but I really wanted to contain the damage before I had to tell someone about it. And the best way to do that…" he paused meaningfully.
Uhura groaned, "Don't tell me. More bots?"
"Of course, lass! I figured that the big repair stompers could easily incapacitate the cleaning bots that I had fiddled with. I was pretty panicked, but I caught two of them and made them into cleaning-bot hunters. Now, I'd learned my lesson about the Werner algorithm, and was much more careful this time, and they actually did pretty okay with their hunt. Soon I was standing in a supply closet in Engineering, knee-deep in a heap of disabled bots… and that's where and how Mr. Olsen caught up with me."
The humans were laughing by now, and Scotty sported a sheepish grin. Spock reflected that this could hardly have been the Scotsman's sentiment at the time of the story, nor were the others likely to react with such gaiety if one of their current cadets had done something similar. But clearly once enough time had passed, a new perspective might be allowed - water under the bridge, as the Doctor would say, or maybe letting bygones be bygones. He always found it difficult to forgive his own past mistakes - but it was possible that there was something beneficial to this group sharing of failings…
"He dragged the whole story out of me, and then he started shouting. I don't think he stopped for breath for the next several hours, even as he worked side by side with me to fix each and every bot. I didn't know there were that many different ways of saying stupid in Standard, though he did have to veer off into Klingon at times. He was pretty impressed with the reprogramming I'd done, though, and I think that was the only thing that kept me from being thrown out an airlock. Finally, as I, miserable and well-scolded, sat tinkering with the last bot, he added insult to injury by catching the damned Snatcher in three minutes, by an ingenious method. You'll never guess how!"
"He put out a saucer of Ferengi milk, or somesuch?" Suggested Chekov.
Scotty blinked. He opened his mouth and closed it again, and then said, flabbergasted, "now, how on Earth would you know that, lad?" This sent the other humans into paroxysms of laughter.
"Scotty, it's what anyone else would have tried!" Uhura finally managed to get out, tears of laughter on her face.
Scotty looked at Spock helplessly, but even the Vulcan had a tell-tale glitter in his eyes. He nodded. "It is methodologically very similar to how escaped sehlat cubs are regularly captured on Vulcan, Mr. Scott."
Scotty finally smiled ruefully and scratched his neck. "Well, ah… Maybe I am too caught up in my technical world, sometimes."
"Something that has on occasion saved tens of thousands of lives, Scotty," Kirk said, trying unsuccessfully to get his laughter under control, "we wouldn't want you any other way."
"What happened then, Mr. Scott," asked Chekov.
"Well, I got a reprimand, of course, and quite well deserved. Another scolding from the captain, which I'll never forget, and a punishment to match the havoc I'd created. You've heard of people joking about cleaning decks with toothbrushes? I had to go over all of Engineering for stray Snatcher hairs with a small sonic vacuum. It took me three weeks. And then, Mr. Olsen banished me from Engineering for two months, before he finally took pity on me and brought me back. Two months of bridge gamma-shift duty. I've never been so miserable.
"Hold on a minute," Kirk interrupted, "bridge duty as a punishment?"
"Well, yes. I mean... It's not that the bridge isn't important, of course. During a crisis, like an attack, it could arguably be said to be the very heart of the ship, and then someone more senior would have replaced me..."
"Arguably?"
"I meant definitely. Definitely. But the rest of the time, you see..."
"So when there isn't a crisis, the bridge isn't particularly important?" Kirk's voice was deceptively mild.
Scotty squirmed. "No, no! A lot of important work is done on the bridge, all the time. Talking to people. Eh… Course changes. And…", he felt like a cadet having a blackout during a test. "Mr. Spock does star charts," he came up with. "Well, I guess that can be done from the Astro-lab too, but there are so many other things. Important things."
"...Important... Things…" Kirk said slowly, gaze locked with the Engineer, who was opening and closing his mouth, searching for words. The others were grinning.
"Admiral…"
"Scotty, I think for you, not so much with the talking right now." Said McCoy, "I have a feeling that anything you say is just going to make this worse. I prescribe alcohol."
He filled the prescription, and Kirk finally let the engineer go with a smile.
"Oh, she's as much yours as she was mine, Scotty - as much as she belongs and belonged to any one of us. For you engineers, the heart of the Enterprise was always Engineering - pumping out the life blood that kept her flying." His voice deepened, and he looked around the room, a serious tone to his voice and smile. "For others, her heart will be other places. Or other things. Or people…", he met each of their gazes, reaffirming the bond that had made family out of them, through the ship, and the idea that ship had stood for.
It was Bones that finally broke the silence with a carefully measured grumble, "There you go, Jim, destroying the festive mood. I say we're not nearly drunk enough for emotional speeches yet. We should stick to remembering stupidity and youthful naiveté!"
"Well then," responded Kirk, "I believe you owe us a story, Bones!" The others agreed loudly, and after a few minutes of protest, McCoy threw up his hands in surrender.
"Oh, alright. But I maintain I never agreed to any such thing. And if you," he jabbed his finger at Spock "ever so much as hint about what I'm about to tell you after tonight, I'll make a mistake with your next allergy meds and give you Tennyan Giggling Sickness."
"Spock will behave" assured Kirk. Spock only raised a noncommittal eyebrow, a glint in his eye. "Now come on, Doctor! Tell us about the beads and rattles."
With a last suspicious look at Spock, McCoy harrumphed and then got started…
Author's note: Next up is the doctor! Then Uhura, Chekov, Sulu and finally Spock. Sulu got written in because I got some very nice suggestions for his tale from you guys.
A huge thank-you to my wonderful beta readers for this story – DelJewell and WeirdLittleStories. I'm learning so much from them.
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