What's Past_ The Future Begins (Book 2) - Michael Schuster [18]
No, what he did it for was the chance to meet people. Despite his being more comfortable with machines around him, Scotty still enjoyed the company of others, and he relished the chance of seeing new faces every day. It was too bad that he rarely had time for longer conversations. Usually, he just approached the newcomers and spoke the magic words—“On behalf of the management of the El Dorado Hotel and Vacation Resort, I welcome you to the Engineering Room,” or a variation of that. Only sometimes did he manage to actually involve somebody in a talk that lasted longer than a simple handshake.
Deep down, Montgomery Scott knew he didn’t need to resort to fiddling with machines and engines in order to live a fulfilled life. No, he could just as well do that by interacting with his friends and acquaintances. However, he preferred to keep this part of him a secret. It took a very special person to get past that wall that he’d built for himself, early in his childhood.
His sister, bless her, had been that kind of person, but Clara was long dead. She’d eventually moved to Neu-Stuttgart after the death of Hamish, her first husband, having married a Dr. Hoffmann. Perhaps one day he’d find the time and spirit to travel to Neu-Stuttgart and visit her grave.
Mira Romaine had been another, and she, too, was no longer among the living. Her fate had been one of the first he’d checked up on, after his long-overdue rescue from the pattern buffer.
Belunis had also belonged to this select group of people, who all happened to be female. She had been Scotty’s first friend on Risa, and soon became much more than that. He’d worked closely with her when the situation with the weather control satellites had arisen, and the day after he’d finished the repairs of the control grid, he’d asked her out, in that special way of his. She hadn’t said no.
Then followed five wonderful weeks of love, happiness and…yes, of pleasure. While many people who’d reached his age—in actual years he was long past his prime, even though a bit of transporter trickery was involved—preferred to live a quieter life in certain respects, Montgomery Scott had never been one to shy away from anything that gave him pleasure. It didn’t matter if it was food, drink, music, the love of a wonderful woman; when he opened his heart to something, it was opened wide.
Eating the last bits of Dundee cake, he switched off the computer terminal. Then he walked back to the replicator to recycle both plate and fork. A quick glance at the antique Canopian timepiece on the wall opposite his desk told him that it was still over half an hour until his shift started, but he decided to be there early. He walked over to the sofa, grabbed the maroon uniform that was lying on it, and put it on.
The uniform was replicated, but it was in all possible ways identical to the one he’d worn for over twenty years. True, most of the time he’d just put on the white turtleneck and his favorite engineer’s jacket, but on special occasions he had slipped into his standard uniform.
After dressing he left his bungalow, sealed the entrance by voice command, and began walking toward the imposing pyramid of the El Dorado Hotel and Vacation Resort.
The Engineering Room itself looked just like its real equivalent on an average starship—to the uninitiated eye, at least. A much-decorated chief engineer like Scotty, however, noticed a great number of mistakes and inaccuracies ranging from the placement of the power transfer conduits to the lack of any security measures that would have been standard on any ship of the Fleet. Sure, there was the obligatory railing around the main reactor chamber, but that was about it. Besides, it appeared to only be there for show, not for safety.
There was no need for force fields, as the swirling colors inside the vertical pressure vessel toroid—looking for all the world like a poor man’s version of the warp core he’d used on the refit of the original Enterprise—were not a result of a constant mixing of both matter and antimatter but different