Relics - Michael Jan Friedman [5]
The engineer smiled ruefully. “Frankly, sir, I’m not. Under the circumstances … it might not be a bad idea for Captain Scott to remain in the Ops center. As a sort of, er … consultant.”
Armstrong’s facial muscles went taut. It was plain he didn’t like the idea of needing help from a civilian -even one with a half-century’s experience in Starfleet. But if his chief engineer wasn’t objecting, how could he?
“All right,” he acquiesced. “Make yourself at home, Captain Scott.”
“Scotty,” the older man amended. “That’s the name I answer to in an engineering room-and this is pretty near that”
Armstrong looked at him appraisingly. “Scotty it is, then.”
Scott grinned. “Good. Now that we understand each other, let’s get to work.”
Matt Franklin felt a hand on his shoulder. Looking up from his engineering console, he saw Captain Scott peering affably at him from beneath his bushy, gray brows.
“How’s our orbit, lad?”
The ensign nodded, feeling a twinge in his neck-but resolving not to complain about it. Thanks to Scott, who’d dubbed the younger man his personal assistant in their scan of the Dyson Sphere, Franklin was the envy of every nonofficer in the crew. Sure, five straight hours of close analysis had taken their toll on him. But a couple of aches and pains were a small price to pay for an opportunity that might never materialize a second time.
“Fine, sir,” he replied, pointing to the relevant figures in the upper right-hand corner of his screen. “I haven’t had to make a course correction in hours.”
“Good,” said Scott. “Nae that I would’ve expected otherwise; being a perfect sphere, that thing shouldn’t present any magnetic aberrations. But no news is good news, I always say.”
Squeezing the ensign’s shoulder paternally, the older man stalked off to see how the rest of the engineering cadre was doing. Slowly but surely, he seemed to have supplanted Sachs as the individual in charge of the operation-though to Sachs’s credit, he was being a good sport about it.
Just a few days ago, Matt Franklin hadn’t known very much about the man called Montgomery Scott-other than what he had read. The passenger manifest had showed that Scott was a lifetime officer in Starfleet, who had served nearly all fifty-two years of his career on the fabled Enterprise.
He’d boarded the ship as a young engineer under Captain Pike, reached the rank of lieutenant commander under James T. Kirk and remained to train others after his captain was given an admiral’s braid. In the intervening time, he’d been reunited with Kirk and his former Enterprise colleagues on and off, sometimes for years at a time.
All that was in the computer records. All public knowledge.
But now Franklin had had a chance to meet the man behind the career. And he was glad of it. Very glad of it.
Montgomery Scott was the kind of man you met only once in a lifetime. Someone whose capacity for invention seemed almost limitless … whose love for knowledge was so strong, so fierce, it sometimes seemed to be a force of nature.
Didn’t Scott fix those overloaded plasma transfer circuits faster than anyone in the Ops center had believed possible-Lieutenant Sachs included? Without him, they’d still be thinking about approaching the sphere, not hours into the analysis already.
In a way, the man was like the Dyson Sphere itself-an anomaly, an oddity. A gem of rare quality, not to be missed on pain of great regret.
Abruptly, even as Franklin was finishing his thought, the lift doors opened and the captain stormed in. Nor did he look any happier than when he departed.
“Civilians,” Armstrong muttered. “Why did I think they might actually understand? Why did I think they might be willing to tolerate a small delay for the sake of science?” He shook his head as he sat down wearily in his command chair, his voice drifting off into muttered invective.
Suppressing a smile, Franklin turned back to his monitor and scanned yet another portion of the artificial globe. Not that he expected to see much of anything, but—
Wait. His mouth went dry. What was that?
“You’d think we were fooling around