What's Past_ The Future Begins (Book 2) - Michael Schuster [7]
“Hermat lass?” asked Andrews quizzically.
“Well, she was a lad, too, I suppose,” Scotty acknowledged. “I try not to dwell on that. Anyway, she told me I needed to get back to doin’ what I was good at, and her words hit home. So I signed up at Starfleet Academy for some courses to get me up to speed with all the new technology, and soon enough, Morgan took me on as chief construction engineer of the Honorius, one of two Sovereign-class starships being built at Starbase 12.”
“That was the original designation of the new Enterprise, wasn’t it?” asked Vantimor.
“Aye, lassie,” said Scotty. “The Enterprise-D crashed on Veridian a few months after I joined the project, and so Starfleet redesignated the Honorius in her honor. I served as her chief engineer on her maiden voyage, and after helpin’ Morgan with her sister ship, the new Bozeman, I signed on to the Sovereign as chief engineer for a couple of years, where I worked on testin’ new technologies for implementation on other Sovereign s. Once that was up, Bill Ross asked me to take over the Engineerin’ Corps, and so here I am.”
Aye, and it’s not really where you want to be at all, is it?
He drowned that thought with another swig of Andorian ale.
Tried to, more like. He didn’t succeed. Involuntarily, he thought back to the conversation Nechayev and he had had in the admiral’s ready room. At the start of it, she’d been pleasant and friendly, but her demeanor had changed quickly, giving Scotty the impression that it might have been just an act.
“Captain Scott,” Nechayev had begun, “you know as well as I do that you have not stepped foot in your office at Headquarters for the last three months.”
“I’ve been busy,” Scotty had said defensively. He had been wracking his brains for what he knew of Nechayev. Not much. She was way up there in Starfleet Command—almost as high as you could be, really—but he had only met her once before, during the Amargosa crisis, and that had only been for a brief time. He was woefully uninformed beyond the fact that she was the one who had been at the forefront of the Cardassian negotiations and the mess in the Demilitarized Zone that had followed. “When your man Dramar caught up with me, I was just on my way to my office. I’d been helping the repair teams in San Francisco.”
“Which is very admirable and fully understandable,” Nechayev had acknowledged. “But before that you and Admiral McCoy were on the Hudson conducting a monthlong inspection tour, I believe?”
“It needed to be done,” Scotty had said, still defensive. He had not expected to have his job performance evaluated on the Gorkon.
“Certainly,” Nechayev had said. “But almost anyone in the S.C.E. would have been qualified to carry out the task. It didn’t exactly require superb engineering prowess to look at a couple of facilities.”
Actually, it had ended up requiring quite a bit of skill on Scotty’s part when the Hudson had been forced to make an emergency landing on Bakrii, but he didn’t think the admiral would appreciate him pointing that out. “Well, it doesn’t require ‘superb engineerin’ prowess’ to manage the S.C.E. either. Commander Leland T. Lynch is perfectly capable of doin’ the job.”
“It’s not his job, though, is it?” Nechayev had said. “When Admiral Ross asked you to take over for Harriman, I think he expected you to do the work. Not your assistant.”
Truth be told, Scotty hadn’t really wanted to assume the position of liaison between Command and the Corps of Engineers. But when his tour on the U.S.S. Sovereign had come to an end, Scotty hadn’t had anything lined up. He’d been thinking of retiring again. While he had enjoyed the time he’d spent constructing the Enterprise-E with people who understood his plight, his subsequent time on the Sovereign had made him feel like a relic once more. The crew of the ship, from Captain Sanders down to Chaplain Blackwell, had treated him like a curiosity. A revered and respected curiosity, granted, but still a curiosity.