Instead, a few leaders from various parts of Narisia had been secretly s.n.a.t.c.hed up by what Garamet was now convinced was something very like the G.o.ddard's transporters, something she personally had never before experienced. On board what apparently were starships in high orbit, too high for them to be seen from the surface as anything but moving dots of light, these leaders were "given" a series of technological advances that not only helped them to remain leaders but helped them and their heirs to expand their domains until eventually all of Narisia was under their control.

That had been less than three centuries ago. With the help of these off-worlders, these so-called "Wise Ones," generation after generation of the now-hereditary leaders, calling themselves Proctors, had lived in comparative luxury while Narisia itself went from farming and wood fires to ma.s.s production and warp drive in record time. And even now the general population was unaware of the existence of the off-worlders. The only ones who knew were the Proctors and the select few who were involved in developing an understanding of the technological gifts. This included those like Garamet who had been, in effect, a test pilot for Narisia's gift-wrapped s.p.a.ce program.

"And there's no danger any of them will let the secret out," Garamet said, grimacing as her fingers went reflexively to the wound at her temple, now almost invisible as a result of Scotty's clumsy but effective ministrations with a medical tricorder and a few items from the G.o.ddard's first aid kit. "Everyone who gets let in on the secret is also 'given' an implant. You can't see it or feel it but you know it's there. And don't ask me what it does or how it does it. All I know is, until mine was accidentally disabled, the very idea of telling any 'outsiders,' even my own family, about the Wise Ones made me physically sick. Literally! Even thinking about them, never mind talking about them, gave me the shakes. And I was luckier than most. When I was recruited, I learned that my grandmother Balitor had once been a recruit as well, so I at least had someone to talk to now and then."

"I don't suppose you still have the wee thing you extracted?"

Garamet shook her head with a shudder. "Once Wahlkon managed to pry it loose from my skull, we smashed the b.l.o.o.d.y thing and ejected it into s.p.a.ce. But you'll see one soon enough if the Proctors catch us. They'll have new ones implanted in all three of us before we even get taken back to Narisia."

Scotty repressed a disappointed sigh. Garamet's action was understandable, but it would've been a help to have the device to a.n.a.lyze. He might even have been able to recognize the technology. At least then he'd have a better idea of who and what he was up against, who these so-called "Wise Ones" really were. And he could inform Captain Stratton, now twenty hours away, of the situation.

"And you've never seen these 'Wise Ones' yourself?"

They both shook their heads. "No one has, so far as I know," Garamet said and went on to explain that even the Proctors, the people actually taken into the ships, had never actually seen anyone. Each had just found himself in a plain, metal-walled room, being talked to by a disembodied voice. After the voice had explained-without really explaining-why they had chosen to help Narisia in general and these leaders in particular, objects began appearing on the floor in front of them, along with explanations of how to use the objects. When the voice was finished, the leaders found themselves back on Narisia, right where they'd been when they'd been picked up. Only now they had little treasure troves of weapons and other goodies, along with the information needed to eventually manufacture them themselves, a.s.suming they were bright enough to either understand the information or seek out and control people who were bright enough.

The mottled fur on the sides of Garamet's head rippled momentarily, something Scotty had come to recognize as the Narisian equivalent of a shrug. "That went on until about a hundred years ago," she said. "Each new generation of Proctors would get more and more advanced gifts, but then the gifts stopped. So far as I know, no one has heard from the Wise Ones since then. There's been no contact at all. Whoever they are, they must have gotten bored with whatever game they were playing."

"Or they completed their plan for us when they gave us a rudimentary warp drive," Wahlkon said. "Once they did that, we were apparently on our own. Unless," he went on, eying Scotty suspiciously, "they secretly send someone in every so often to take a look and see how we're doing."

Scotty almost laughed at the idea that he could be an agent for such interstellar meddlers, but after a moment he realized, uneasily, that he couldn't guarantee that the off-worlders had not, in fact, been from a Federation world-or at least a world that would someday become a part of the Federation. When the meddling had started, the Federation was in its infancy and the Prime Directive was neither fully defined nor fully accepted. Even so, no one involved in such a ma.s.sive and long-term violation would want to be found out. They would, as the off-worlders had done, keep their ident.i.ties and world of origin a secret. And once they had given Narisia the key to star travel, eventual contact with Federation worlds became virtually inevitable. Hence, the meddlers would have to pull back or have their secret exposed.

Scotty very much hoped his speculations were wrong, but he feared they were not. Back in his own dim past in the Academy and occasionally since then, he'd heard rumors of various do-gooder groups-often academics with a bent for social science-who wished they were allowed to "guide" fledgling civilizations through critical phases rather than being forced to sit back and watch the newcomers b.u.mble through on their own, making the same sometimes disastrous mistakes that others had already suffered through. Some, it was rumored, had even gone so far as to advocate using primitive worlds as laboratories, nudging various groups of natives this way and that to see which actions had the most desirable results.

And under the right-or wrong!- circ.u.mstances no one was immune to the temptation. Even Jim Kirk and the Enterprise itself had been drawn into violating the Prime Directive by engaging in a primitive arms race with the Klingons on Neural.

Vehemently denying any connection with the off-worlders, Scotty checked the sensors again and was relieved to see that the G.o.ddard was nearing the end of its arc and was approaching the far end of the previous shuttlecraft's warp trail. There was still no hint of the Proctors except for a faint and fading warp trail that was almost obscured by that of the shuttlecraft it had been following.

Racing back along the glaringly obvious warp trail at a hair under warp three, Scotty pushed the G.o.ddard's sensors as far as he could and then pushed them even further by abandoning the standard pattern and focusing them directly ahead like a phaser burst. If the Proctors had already caught up with the shuttlecraft, had immediately figured out the deception, and were even now bearing down on the G.o.ddard's unseeing aft, there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn't push the G.o.ddard any faster than he was already pushing it, and there was certainly no way he could fight back with an essentially weaponless shuttlecraft, warning or no warning. They would either catch him or they wouldn't.

On the other hand, if the sensors could reveal the nature of the abandoned ship ten minutes-or even a single minute-earlier than they would when scanning a normal pattern, it could help. Once the sensors revealed what kind of ship it was and what condition it was in, he could start planning, perhaps even start replicating parts he would need, if the G.o.ddard's replicator had the necessary-and necessarily obsolete-patterns still in its library. An extra minute with that kind of knowledge in his possession could conceivably give him the edge he needed. It could mean the difference between being captured by the Proctors and making a safe rendezvous with the Yandro.

Abruptly, a single line of data appeared on the screen, then another.

At least, Scotty thought as he squinted at the screen, the ship was still there. Almost invisible in the shadow of a kilometer-wide cometary ball of ice and rock and organic compounds, it hadn't been towed away or blasted into sc.r.a.p metal by the Proctors as they'd pa.s.sed by.

And it was a fairly large ship, he saw with relief, though far from big enough to be the Const.i.tution-cla.s.s he'd been hoping for. One of those he could field strip and rea.s.semble blindfolded. But he could do almost as well with any ship of the line of that era, and surely- He blinked, frowning in disbelief as another line appeared on the data screen, then a whole string of them as the sensors locked onto the ship's systems one after another and transmitted the data back to the G.o.ddard.

Then the viewscreen lit up with an image, fuzzy at this distance but unmistakable. Scotty gasped even though the sensor readings had already told him what the image almost certainly would be. He had simply been unable-or unwilling-to believe that the readings were right and that there was no alternative explanation for them.

But the readings had been right and the explanation was the obvious, if near impossible, one. If he'd been startled when he'd first seen the ancient NCC-1951 shuttlecraft, he was dumbfounded now.

The ship was nearly as old as the shuttlecraft it had carried, but it wasn't a Federation starship, Const.i.tution-cla.s.s or otherwise. It wasn't a Federation ship of any type or age. But it was, for him, the next best thing.

It was a vintage Klingon bird-of-prey.

For a long moment, Scotty just stared at the image. If nothing else, it at least explained why the damaged controls in the shuttle had been replaced by what had looked like Klingon subst.i.tutes. But how the two had ever gotten together in the first place...

He turned to Garamet, who was also watching the viewscreen. "Is that the ship you abandoned?" he asked, trying to keep the utter puzzlement out of his voice.

"Of course," she said. "Is there some reason it should not be?"

Scotty shook his head. There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask, but there wasn't time. Later, when they were safely away from the pursuers, would be time enough.

He squinted once again at the sensor readings, now beginning to come in at full speed, revealing more and more detail, filling screen after screen. The warp core, he saw with relief, was sealed and functional, its containment fields at better than ninety percent. And there was no shortage of antimatter. Even the Klingon no-frills version of an environmental control system hadn't deteriorated greatly. It wouldn't keep them comfortable, but at least it would keep them alive while he made whatever repairs proved necessary.

If he could indeed determine quickly enough what repairs were necessary. Unfortunately there were literally thousands of malfunctions that could cause a ship to drop out of warp as precipitously as Garamet said this one had. And only a small percentage of them would show up on a remote sensor scan. Pinpointing the problem would probably require hands-on access to the drive.

But at least he was thoroughly familiar with the ship. He had virtually rebuilt one just like it, the Bounty, which had then transported him, Kirk, McCoy, Uhura, Chekov, and the newly reconst.i.tuted Spock from Vulcan to Earth, after which it had taken them on a round trip through time to the twentieth century to pick up a pair of whales. And this one, the sensor readings showed, obviously had far more working systems than that other one. And whatever repairs he needed to make, he wouldn't have to cope with the sulfurous heat of Vulcan, its great red sun daily turning the ship's interior into an oven. Of most immediate import, however, was the fact that a ship like this could leave Garamet's warp-five bloodhounds in the interstellar dust.

If he could get its drive working soon enough.

Despite a faint shiver that ran up and down his spine as he wondered just how close the Proctors were getting, Scotty for the first time began to feel they might actually all survive this impromptu little adventure.

Five.

SCOTTY WAS finishing his work on the Klingon ship when the idea that could give him back his life exploded in his mind.

It instantly overwhelmed his every other thought, like a nearby supernova blotting out a sky full of normal stars. It hit him just as he slapped the bulkhead panel back into place after bypa.s.sing the last of the burnt-out couplers that routed the helm's commands to the bird-of-prey's computer. He froze for just a moment as his mind, unbidden, began converting the idea into at least the skeleton of a plan. Racing back toward the bridge-no effete luxuries like turbolifts here in Klingon territory-he marveled at his own thickheadedness even as the plan gained further form and substance. How could it have taken so long for such an obvious idea to occur to him? He should have thought of it the moment the Klingon ship appeared on the G.o.ddard's screen like the G.o.dsend it was.

His only excuse was that his mind had been focused totally on what the G.o.ddard's sensors told him needed repair and how he could do the work in the shortest possible time. But now-now that the repairs were completed- If they were indeed completed.

He would know soon enough, he told himself sharply as he careened onto the dimly lit, cavernous bridge, moving faster than he had in years.

Garamet and Wahlkon watched, wide-eyed, as Scotty ran the computer through its paces with the bypa.s.sed couplers and p.r.o.nounced the ship-the Bounty 2, he had just silently christened it-fit for duty. Moments later, a long-range sensor scan showed a ship-presumably the Proctors' warp five bloodhound-following the G.o.ddard's arcing path and nearing the point at which it rejoined the destroyed shuttlecraft's warp trail. Apparently the Proctors' sensors weren't quite as primitive as he had hoped, nor the Proctors as un.o.bservant. They had picked up the G.o.ddard's warp trail and guessed what it meant. Worse, he realized a moment later, they had somehow managed to boost their speed to almost warp six.

But they still would arrive too late to stop him.

If the coupler bypa.s.ses held, if there weren't other problems he hadn't found, if his on-the-fly tune-up, adjusting the matter-antimatter mix to what should be an optimal ratio, had been successful.

Gingerly, hoping he wasn't simply asking too much of the ancient vessel, he routed nearly ninety percent of the output of the antimatter generators to the warp cores. He could feel the deck vibrate beneath his feet as he watched the readouts to see if everything was, if not optimal, at least within acceptable limits.

The Proctors were two minutes away, their sensors repeatedly scanning the Bounty 2, when the warp engines finally shuddered into life. Hastily, with one eye on the approaching ship, he made one last check to be sure that the G.o.ddard was firmly secured in the cargo bay.

Pointing the Bounty 2 in the general direction of the nearest starbase, a course that would take it nowhere near either the pursuing Proctors or the approaching Yandro, he engaged the warp drive and carefully eased it up to just enough above warp six to keep out of range of the Proctors' weapons. He thought the Klingon shields would hold, but he'd be much happier if he didn't have to put them to the test.

Moving from one station on the bridge to another, checking every readout and status light again and again, Scotty at last decided that the ship, ancient as it was, really was going to hold together. Klingons might be nasty pieces of work, but they did know how to build a st.u.r.dy ship. He wasn't at all sure that a comparable-sized Federation ship, burdened with several tons of whales and water, would have held together during the slingshot run past the sun that had brought the original Bounty back to the twenty-third-century. Even structural integrity fields had their limits.

Boosting the speed to nearly warp seven, Scotty put the Bounty 2 on automatic pilot and returned to the cargo bay and the G.o.ddard and initiated a one-way subs.p.a.ce link with the Yandro. The message he sent was intentionally vague, indicating that the emergency he thought he had fallen into had in reality been little more than a misunderstanding. Everything was under control, he a.s.sured Captain Stratton. The G.o.ddard no longer needed a.s.sistance, and he would submit a full report when the exigencies of his long-delayed but finally-achieved retirement allowed.

Ignoring Stratton's attempts to open a two-way link, Scotty set the G.o.ddard's comm system back to standby and returned to the Klingon bridge, where Garamet and her brother were watching the viewscreen with fascination as the stars streamed past at a rate they had probably never before experienced.

Bracing himself for their reaction, he told them he planned to keep the Bounty 2, going on to explain that he would of course transport them to the nearest starbase or, if they preferred, return them to the Narisian system and, once he'd checked out the Klingon transporters, beam them down to wherever in that system they wanted to go.

To his relief, they didn't seem to be at all troubled by the prospect of losing the Bounty 2 or of being taken to a starbase. Garamet in particular seemed positively thrilled at the thought of seeing firsthand what Scotty's "Federation" was really like, while Wahlkon was apparently happy to go wherever his sister went. Both, however, refused to even consider being returned to Narisia. Garamet had been put automatically on a list of traitors the moment it was discovered that her implant had been damaged and she hadn't reported it. She would already be dead-or at least reimplanted-and Wahlkon either dead or a prisoner if they hadn't had the incredible good luck of having their distress call picked up by Scotty and the G.o.ddard.

Since the off-worlders had vanished generations ago, the various Proctors had gotten even more paranoid and aggressive than before, Garamet explained. Each suspected that one or more of the others had managed to either monopolize the off-worlders' attention or destroy them and steal as much of their technology as possible. As a result, each Proctor had been pushing his own people to not only expand upon the technology they already had but to search the Narisian system and surrounding s.p.a.ce for anything the off-worlders might have left behind.

It was on one of these searches through a particularly dense segment of one of two asteroid belts in the Narisian system that Garamet had stumbled across the derelict Klingon ship, invisible to her ship's sensors until she was nearly on top of it. Unfortunately, a searcher from a different Narisian faction had shown up not long after, and Garamet's ship had ended up colliding with the other ship as both tried to take possession of the prize.

Both ships were disabled by the collision, the other pilot killed. Garamet suffered only a few cuts and bruises, but one of her injuries was a blow to the head, which apparently disabled her implant. In any event, as she tried to repair her ship, thoughts that would have seemed unthinkable only hours earlier began to bubble up in her mind. She even found herself thinking that the secrecy that had surrounded the Wise Ones from the first day they had appeared was totally wrong-headed. And now that they were no longer around to keep all the Narisian factions under at least minimal control, the secrecy and the internecine warfare among the various Proctors had gotten immeasurably worse. As witness what had just happened between her and the other pilot. What was needed, she realized with a start, was for the truth to come out. Before her injuries, such a thought would have triggered a physical illness, forcing her to abandon it.

But there was nothing she could do about it, not in a disabled ship that was capable of communicating only with the Proctors.

In the end, after days of futile attempts to repair her own ship, she boarded the Klingon ship, still functional according to her ship's surviving sensors, and was eventually able to decipher enough of its controls to get its impulse drive working and, eventually, its warp drive as well.

But it all took time, too much time for the impatient Proctors, and when her superior contacted her, she was unable to conceal the fact that her implant was no longer functional. She was instantly ordered back to Narisia, of course, and when some hesitation was detected in her answers, her brother was threatened. If she didn't return immediately, she was told harshly, he would be the one to suffer. With the Klingon ship, however, she was able to get to Wahlkon before the Proctor's people and pick him up. She hadn't yet figured out how to operate the Klingon weapons systems, so she could only flee. And then the ship had blown the couplers and dropped out of warp drive, leaving Garamet and Wahlkon with only the shuttlecraft.

They had been sending out distress signals blindly, hoping they might somehow attract the attention of the off-worlders, the Wise Ones whose ships they still a.s.sumed the bird-of-prey and the shuttlecraft to be. And that was where Scotty and the G.o.ddard had come in.

Neither Garamet nor Wahlkon had any idea what either a Federation shuttlecraft or a Klingon bird-of-prey was, let alone how one had ended up inside the other, abandoned in the Narisian system. Scotty was equally at a loss to explain the latter, though he did have hopes of eventually accessing the Klingon logs. His immediate concern, however, was not where the bird-of-prey had been or what it had done. His only interest, now that he had control of the ship, was what it would be doing.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard's eyebrows inched upward in mild surprise as Captain Montgomery Scott's smiling face appeared on the Enterprise main viewscreen.

"Captain Scott," he said, returning a modest version of the smile, "this is an unexpected pleasure. To what do we owe the honor of your return?"

"You remember suggesting I might want to try playing engineering catch-up? Well, if the offer of the use of the Enterprise data banks is still open, I wouldn't mind getting started. At least I'll know just how much catching up I'll need to do."

"Of course, Captain Scott. You're always welcome. Should I a.s.sume retirement didn't entirely agree with you?" Scott, Picard suspected, was, like himself, not one to appreciate the virtues of prolonged inactivity.

"You could say that, although you may have heard I haven't been entirely idle."

Picard nodded. He'd wondered if Scott would mention any of the reports that had been circulating through Starfleet. "Captain Stratton did file a report on a... false alarm, shall we say? He also made mention of a detailed report you indicated was forthcoming, as did the commander of Starbase- "

"Aye, and you'll have them. But if you'd like the short version...?"

"If you please, Mr. Scott."

Scotty hesitated, as if he'd been expecting-or at least hoping for-a different answer, but then he pulled in a breath and launched into a bare-bones account of how he'd encountered two aliens and what he had learned from them. "Whoever these Wise Ones were," he finished, "they obviously violated the Prime Directive. But it all ended generations ago."

"And you think it was someone from the Federation?"

Scotty shrugged broadly. "I cannot say 'tis impossible, especially with the Federation shuttlecraft they had. Do you have any record of the ship it came from? NCC-1951?"

"Mr. Data?"

Picard's android second officer spoke without hesitation. "NCC-1951, Captain, the Antares-cla.s.s science vessel Senzig. It vanished at approximately the same time the Jenolen was lost. It was on its way to investigate an anomaly that, according to recent speculations, may have been related to an uncharted Borg Transwarp Conduit. There is no record of its having ever been found, nor of any survivors."

Picard frowned. "Someone obviously found it. But we're unlikely to ever learn the truth at this late date. Any extensive investigation in the Narisian system could only compound the violation."

"Aye, Captain. If what they told me is true, very few Narisians know the so-called Wise Ones even exist, just the leaders and the people working directly with them. Everyone else thinks that all the scientific advances of the last two hundred years were made by the Narisians themselves. To discover instead that the inventions were virtually all given to them, as if they were helpless bairns..." Scotty's voice trailed off suggestively.

Picard nodded again, this time with a slight grimace. "It could be traumatic for the Narisian psyche, certainly. I don't envy whoever will have to decide how to handle the situation when and if the Narisians do establish contact with the Federation. But such matters are not the responsibility of Starfleet captains, particularly not of retired ones. Although," he added with the barest trace of a smile, "this particular retired captain might consider expediting his official report of the incident. A thorough account, made before one's memory begins to play its inevitable tricks, could be of considerable help to whoever does eventually inherit the problem."

Scotty's smile froze for a moment but then widened as he shrugged. "Aye, Captain, you'll have it in your computer before I come aboard."

"Excellent, Mr. Scott. I look forward to your arrival, as I know Commander La Forge does as well."

Scotty let out a sigh of relief as the link to the Enterprise was broken. He was simply not accustomed to lying, even by omission, and it made him uneasy despite all the good intentions in the galaxy. All in all, though, it had gone as well as could be expected and far better than he had feared. He of course hadn't mentioned the existence of the Bounty 2, and Picard hadn't, for whatever reason, questioned him about how he had covered the distance from Narisia to the Enterprise's current coordinates in the G.o.ddard, which he still had not been able to push much past warp three. He'd been prepared to trot out as a last resort a story about how he had hitched a ride part way on the unnamed ship of a somewhat shady interstellar trader, a twenty-fourth-century equivalent of tribble mogul Cyrano Jones, but he was mighty relieved it hadn't been necessary. He was even more relieved that Garamet and her brother had apparently followed his instructions and had deleted the Bounty 2 from their accounts as well.

With any luck at all, he could get what he needed from the Enterprise and be gone before anyone decided to ask him any really tough questions.

By then it would be too late. He'd be back on the Bounty 2, and no one could stop him from doing what he had realized he had to do.

He hoped.

Six.

SCOTTY FROWNED as a soft, chiming sound announced someone was at the door of the guest quarters to which Picard and La Forge had escorted him less than twenty-four hours earlier.

"Come in," he called, hastily blanking the screen of the terminal he was working at.

For a long moment nothing happened, but finally the door slid open with a barely audible hiss. His eyes widened as he saw the woman standing in the corridor, a Mona Lisa smile on her chocolate-brown face, a bottle of Saurian brandy in one hand. Guinan, she had called herself more than three-quarters of a century ago on Earth. And she still seemed to glide rather than walk, he realized as she crossed the threshold in a floor-length gown not unlike the one she had worn then. As the other gown had, this one only contributed to the illusion that she could defy gravity.

If it was an illusion, Scotty thought sharply as he watched her come to a stop in the middle of the room and turn toward him, her oddly regal features showing not the slightest sign of the pa.s.sage of three quarters of a century.

"I'm older than I look, Mr. Scott," she said, her eyes now smiling as well as her lips.

"Aye, I would say so. Unless you managed to skip over a few decades the way I did."

She shook her head minutely. "No, although there have been some I wouldn't have minded skipping. Not the last few, however, since I joined Captain Picard here on the Enterprise."

"You were here when they found me on the Jenolen, then?"

"I was. I thought of offering you another sip of Saurian brandy, to make up for the synthehol you found so objectionable when you first visited Ten-Forward. However, the situation soon became a bit hectic, as you may recall. And then you were on your way." She held up the scimitar-shaped bottle. "But now you're back, and the Saurian brandy never left."

As it had seventy-odd years ago, his mouth almost watered at the sight, but this time he shook his head. "I appreciate the thought, la.s.sie," he said regretfully, "but when you're tryin' to make sense out of the last seventy-five years of Starfleet engineering advances, you'd best keep a clear head if you don't want to sink like a stone."

The woman shrugged, the motion as subdued as her smile. "Then accept it as my gift. Have a celebratory sip when you've made enough sense for one day." She paused and glanced at the blank terminal screen as she set the brandy next to it. "Are you making good progress?"

"As good as can be expected, I imagine. Do you understand such matters?"

"Only at a layman's level."

Scotty gave her what he hoped was a suitably rueful smile. "The last seventy-five years have almost turned me into a layman. I've a lot of catching up to do."

For a long moment she said nothing, her eyes fixed on his as if searching for something. There had been, he realized uneasily, a similar look about her in that Glasgow bar just before she'd disappeared into the night, just before he'd met the unfortunate Matt Franklin.