Chapter 2:

Tuesday, April 18th, 2243
Harland & Wolff Shipyards, Berth #22
Team C Headquarters
Belfast, Ireland, Earth

Even streaked in white and black, charred amidships, she looked like the beginning of something grand.

There was an almost ethereal quality to the Lady Grey, lit in the dimmed lights of the berth, not even half completed. It could have simply been the way the lights reflected off of the fire-suppressant grimed on her frame, or maybe it was the way that the black soot complimented the white, but it gave her an almost ghostly appearance.

It was the first time that the cadets had been allowed back into the shipyards; not just Team C, but the entirety of Barrett’s class.  Even then, there were a number of stipulations from both Starfleet Security and Harland & Wolff’s managers; it was probably a lucky thing, in the end, that they were even given an opportunity to continue the work that they had started.

Scotty was the first one in, pausing just inside the front man-door to palm the sliders to bring the lights up.  Corry stepped in a pace later, looking around and frowning to himself over the mess. There was white powder everywhere, blanketing the tools and mixing with the grays and blacks of ash and soot, but it was a far sight better than boiling smoke. "It'll take forever to clean this up," he said, just taking it all in again.

Somewhere behind them, the rest of Team C was filtering that way from their last classes of the day; Corry wasn’t looking forward to facing them, or the work it was going to take to re-earn both their respect and their trust, but he was incredibly determined to do just that.

He’d had little trouble requesting that his transfer be held off until after he was finished with his engineering classes; it had been so hard to even convince them to transfer him prior to graduation that they were probably breathing a sigh of relief that he was going to at least finish one field of study before jumping to another.

That meant, though, that he had a lot of work ahead of him to even pass the rest of his Year Four engineering classes, to go along with the work it was going to take to repair his friendships, starting with his best friend.

The past few days had been fairly quiet between them -- not too surprisingly -- and if Corry had to step backwards and remember how to be patient, then that was a very small thing to offer.  The important thing was that just like the schooner, the bridge they’d managed to build between them was only a bit damaged and scorched, but still repairable.

Scotty hadn’t answered his lament about the amount of clean-up due; instead, he was scrutinizing the Lady Grey from just inside the door, mouth in a straight line as he scanned the schooner from bow to stern, no doubt making notes in his head about what needed to be done and how; there was only so far notes on a schematic could go.  Corry didn’t interrupt, instead taking another, longer look around--

At least, he was until Scotty grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him along.

Corry allowed himself to be pulled, a little surprised by the role reversal from usual, even as he eyed the schooner himself and made his own mental notes as they walked her length, having to dredge his memory some to bring back what he needed to in order to plan repairs.  Of course, he had researched shipbuilding like he had medicine, with the same sort of intensity but less obsession, and even as he eyed the Lady Grey, that knowledge presented itself.

When they finally stopped, he was still turning the repair ideas over in his mind right up until Scotty gave his arm an insistent shake and he looked up.

And then up.

“Oh,” Corry breathed out, eyes wide, mouth hanging open.

Towering over his head was the mostly-completed bow of the Lady Grey, a graceful upward curve into flared sides; from that angle, her incomplete status wasn’t readily apparent, absent her rigging and bowsprit.  But the lines once sketched on a board were now turned into a tangible reality -- a tangible beauty -- and seeing that, real and solid, was enough that his heart ached from it.

 “She’s beautiful,” he said, eyes stinging, reaching out just to press his fingertips to her stem; the scope of her was enough that it left him breathless.  Because he had been down to the slip while he was trying to transfer, if rarely, but he had never really allowed himself to look at her like this.

“I wonder if they all felt like this,” Scotty said, from beside him, head back as he looked up at her as well. “Shipwrights, I mean.”

“They almost had to.”  Corry looked down at the white left behind on his fingertips from the fire-suppressant, then rubbed them off on his trousers.

A reminder that even in her beauty, she was wounded.

“Be a shame if they didn’t.”  Scotty blew a breath out and brushed a little at the white powder, turning it into a cloud.  “Don’t know how many o’ them had to deal with arson, though.”

Corry felt his own jaw tighten without any permission from his brain at the mention of that; he had speculated some on it with Scotty over the past few days, and both of them had a feeling they knew who the culprits were -- who else would hold a grudge strongly enough to bring it down in blood and ash? -- but knowing it and having proof were two different things.

“Think we’ll be able to finish her in a month and a half?” he asked, firmly dragging his mind away from thoughts of vengeance.

Scotty tipped his head over, eying the schooner; after a long moment of clear calculation, he said, “Maybe. I think it depends on how fast we can get a replacement stockpile o’ lumber and how determined we are.  The cut in hours is gonna put a hurtin’ on us.”

“Maybe I can take an advance on my inheritance and hire people,” Corry mused, only about three-quarters joking.  “On top of recruiting like I’m running for public office, I mean.”

He was heartened to get a half of a laugh out of Scotty, but Scotty didn’t get a chance to reply to that before another voice interrupted: “It might have to come to that.”

The two exchanged a glance, then stepped out from in front of the schooner; closer than either of them expected, Barrett stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, giving no indication whatsoever how long he might have been eavesdropping on them. “I hadn’t ever intended commerce to get involved with this final,” he went on, “but then again, I hadn’t anticipated arson and assault.  If you end up deciding to hire people, Mister Corrigan, I won’t hold it against your team’s grades, though I’ll also have to allow the other teams the same courtesy.”

"Thank you, sir," Scotty replied, neatly, apparently unfazed by the professor’s unexpected presence. "Any word from Security on the saboteurs?"

"None." Barrett shook his head, expression grim. "The footage from the external cameras is missing for that entire block of time and the forensics teams weren’t able to find anything."

"I have a few ideas who it might have been," Corry said, with a slight smirk. "I tried to tell Security, but I don't think they believed me."

"O'Sullivan and his lot." Scotty crossed his arms, nodding. “Only ones we could think of who might’ve had a motive.”

Barrett frowned, looking around for a moment before eying the two cadets again. "You do realize that it won't be acceptable if you decided to take justice into your own hands."

"Us, sir?" Scotty replied, eyebrows up innocently. "Oh, no, sir. We wouldn't do that."

"Not in a million years," Corry added, just as innocently, turning up the charm to be on the safe side. "We have far too much work to do to spend time plotting revenge."

Barrett’s eyebrow went up and he narrowed his eyes at them, apparently knowing better. "Gentlemen, do yourselves a favor and don't even think about it. I'll mention it to Security myself, and perhaps that will prompt them to look further into it, but if you know what's good for you, you'll heed my advice. Theories do not make evidence, and you may find yourselves in more trouble than it's worth." Taking a deep breath, he finished, "Now you'd best get to work; with the restrictions, you've got to make the most of your time."

When the rest of the team arrived, they did indeed get right to work; they only had from 0630 to 2000 now, with the restrictions that the shipyards had placed on the entire class's schedule.

Albright, in all of his quick thinking, had rigged up a pump and the Lady Grey got her first taste of brackish water from the mouth of the River Lagan. Three cadets manned the hose they used to spray off the mess that had caked on her, while Jansson supervised a team of five starting work on recreating the damaged ribs with what little wood they had stashed in the mold loft for templates. The rest were set to work carefully tearing out the damaged ribs and crossbeams under Lewis's watchful eyes.

Scotty and Corry spent most of their time on the comm link; the former because he was still on light-duty status after the fire, and the latter for the sake of haggling the best price for the wood they had to reorder.

"What do you mean, twenty-four credits a board?" Corry asked, doing the best he could not to pace in front of the comm box in the mold loft too much. "We're ordering it in bulk, here!"

"Twenty-four is bulk for that many board feet!" the voice on the other end said. "Since y'all happen to be a bunch of students, though, I might be willin' to take it to twenty-two."

"And if I call Southwest Oak Express, they can give it to me for fifteen." Exchanging a conspiring look with his roommate, Corry put on his best lawyer voice to add, "I might have to wait two more days for my lumber, but it's a more fair price."

"Nobody sells oak for fifteen a board," the other man shot back, though he didn't exactly sound too confident in himself.

"They do if they have their own nursery and farm." Faking a yawn, Cor leaned on the wall beside the box. "I'm in a hurry, though, so you give it to me for eighteen a board, and I'll take it."

"I'm not goin' lower than twenty-two."

"And the best you'll get out of me is eighteen."

"...twenty-one."

"Eighteen and the highest praise we can sing. Great word-of-mouth advertising there."

"How much did y'all say you were orderin' again?"

Corry glanced over at Scotty, who puzzled over it for a moment before grabbing the drawing board and writing down a number, then turning it and showing it. Nodding, Corry tried to sound casual as he said, "We'll need an order of five thousand board feet, cut to--" pausing for the moment it took his roommate to write down the length, he continued, "twenty-five feet each. Just to start."

"Eighteen credits happens to be damn low for quality wood like ours."

"Maybe so, but since we're building a wooden schooner in a historical fashion, we'd be more than willing to tell everyone who provided the wood for such a handsome craft.  She’ll be a novelty, everyone’s gonna want to see her."

There was a long pause on the other end, then finally the salesman came back with a sigh, "Twenty, and free delivery via cargo transporter."

Corry sighed heavily himself, before letting it remain quiet for rather a long moment. Then, putting on a slightly defeated tone, he finally gave in. "All right, it's a deal. I'll have the credits sent to your accounts receivable in four hours, you'll have the coordinates for transport, and that wood had better be here by tomorrow morning." Thumbing the off button, he grinned. "How was that?"

"Less'n what we paid for our first stock," Scotty admitted. "We'll have to do all of our own cuttin' and trimmin', but with a little good luck--" He shrugged. "Who knows?"

"Eh, we'll be fine."

"Speakin' o' wood, though, who the hell is Southwest Oak Express?"

"I dunno," Corry said, lightly, shrugging back as he pulled out his notepad with the comm codes for the rest of the businesses they needed to contact. "Apparently, neither did he."

Scotty chuckled, shaking his head with a slight, wry smile. "If ye happen to get everyone down, we might not be too far over budget."

Corry keyed in the next set of codes, sparing a glance at Scotty to ask, "How much do we have left?"

"After this? Probably close to thirty-thousand. We might get more thanks to the sabotage, but it won't be too much, I have a feelin’."

"Guess we'll just have to be frugal." Cor leaned back on the wall as the comm connected. "Iron Works Intergalactic? Yeah, I'd like to speak to your manager in charge of sales..."

So ended the first day of work on the schooner Lady Grey after her brush with fire. Scotty didn't want to leave, not this early, not so soon after he'd gotten there. What he really wanted to do was some actual physical work on her, but he wasn't quite back to normal himself yet.

Not physically, still prone to the occasional cough, and-- honestly, not quite emotionally, either.

He knew the general mood of the team was all on a bend towards vengeance of some sort; knew, too, that every last one of them had the same suspects in mind that he and Corry did.  He wasn’t quite sure yet, though, how he felt about it all himself; angry, aye, but even that felt muffled and filtered through a kind of exhaustion.

Though, he definitely felt a stab of anxiety at leaving the slip behind as the shipyards shut down; even though he knew that the chances of the saboteurs coming back to finish the job were close to nonexistent now that everyone was being watched so much more closely, it still felt entirely too possible.

“She’ll be all right,” Corry said, tone on the reassuring side, breaking into his thoughts and pulling his attention away from Berth #22.

“Aye, I know.  Logically, anyway.”  Scotty shook his head at himself and headed down the wide boulevard which ran down the center of Harland & Wolff’s shipyards, and back towards the dorms.

Cor kept pace with him; the past few days had been a strange, half-familiar dance between them, a callback to when they only barely knew one another and Corry spent most of his time in cheerful, unrelenting attempts to make friends and Scotty spent most of his time rebuffing said attempts.  Whenever Scotty thought back on those times, he mostly remembered the persistent invitations to go out drinking, the constant joking -- appropriately timed or not -- and the very constant language corrections.

But-- sometimes he remembered the other moments, too; times when Cor would show up to their tutoring sessions bringing along a thermos of coffee or a sandwich for him.  Or when he’d invite himself along to walk with Scotty back to the barracks, even though he had a dorm room of his own, apparently just for the sake of chatting some more.  Or that one time he mother-henned Scotty after Starfleet’s annual vaccination clinic had laid him low.

Just-- moments, in retrospect, of kindness.

Scotty hadn’t even given them overly much thought at the time. And eventually, he gave in to the constant invitations, went drinking with Cor and some of the other cadets from their class (including Jerry and Joe), had a surprising amount of fun, and he started returning those moments of kindness, too.  He’d take his turn to bring coffee or tea or dinner; by the time Cor had declared that they were going to be roommates, that sort of mutual thoughtfulness had become a habit.  His social life got a thousand times more complicated -- namely, he gained one -- but he didn’t regret it.

“You’re about a thousand parsecs thattaway,” Corry said, as they walked, well behind the rest of the workers leaving the yard. “You okay?”

“Aye, I’m fine,” Scotty answered, rubbing at his brow for a moment before folding his hands behind his back again automatically. “A bit tired, maybe.  Not sure what to do between now and curfew, since we can’t be here.”

Corry nodded, then shook his head. “You still look tired.  Might be an idea just to turn in early tonight, catch up on your rest so you can get cleared as fit for duty.”

The paramedic had done a handy job patching him up, and he’d gotten out of the trip to the infirmary that night, but that hadn’t saved Scotty having to eventually report there so they could give him clearance to return to active duty status.  Even if active duty currently only consisted of attending classes, studying for finals, writing papers and building a schooner, he still was beholden to Starfleet protocol and he’d automatically been pulled off duty when he’d been assaulted.

And then when he had gone to get clearance, two days ago, they had taken one look at the paramedic’s records, done a series of their own scans, and then told him he was only cleared for light duty; that his level of fatigue was unacceptable and that he would remain on light duty until they determined that he was sufficiently rested and recovered.

It stuck in his craw something fierce, that, but he didn’t have any recourse but to obey it; even if he could have ignored the medical orders, he couldn’t ignore Cor leaning on him over it, so it was just easier to try to rest and pretend that it felt like it was making any notable difference.

That business -- resting, recovering -- was made a bit harder by the number of times he found himself back in the slip, in the dark, in the smoke; whenever things were quiet long enough, that was where his mind went back to, and repetition didn’t seem to dull the memory’s fangs any.

Scotty was an old hand at not letting himself think too hard about things that left scars, but this one was proving persistent in a manner he’d not had to deal with in a hell of a long time.

It wasn’t quite the same, though, either; he didn’t feel any fear over it, exactly.  Aside from the possible loss of the Lady Grey, anyway.  The echoes of desperation, aye; the every-cell-alight need to move, to answer the instinct that manifested like a death wail in his head.  But-- not fear, quite.

Something else.  Something he wasn’t very well-equipped to work out, unfortunately.

He must’ve gotten lost in his own head for awhile again, because the next thing he noticed, they were out on the Queen’s Quay, having left behind the shipyards; it was a path Scotty had walked so often in the past several months that there had been no thought attached to it.

“All right, you’re definitely not here right now,” Corry was saying, catching him by the shoulder and stopping them both, which was right about when Scotty realized he was about to walk face-first into one of the light posts on the walkway.  Cor’s eyebrows were drawn together as he asked, “So, where are you?”

He’d gotten pretty used to having his expression scrutinized like a roadmap since they’d met, but that didn’t mean Scotty always was willing to allow it; he just gently pushed Cor’s hand off and started walking again, neatly weaving around the pole he’d almost gotten too friendly with. “I don’t know.  Nowhere, in particular.”  He gestured at his head, a flick of the fingers. “Just-- the fire.  When I’ll be allowed to work again.  That sort o’ nonsense.”

Corry followed after a moment, falling back into step.  “Anything you wanna talk about?”

Scotty shook his head.  “Not really.  It’s nothin’ too bad, anyway.”  He knew the subject change was pretty unforgivably blunt, but he made it unrepentantly: “I wonder where we can find ourselves a saboteur.”

"I don't know. I think he's rooming in the Stranmills Road Dormitory."  Corry shrugged, looking up at the sky, letting that subject change go without comment.

“He wasn’t the only one, though.  But I can’t remember how many I saw; I just know it was no less’n three.”

“I think it was four.  At least, that was how many I remember seeing when I crossed the bridge; they were going the other way.”

That tracked.  Scotty frowned as he tried to piece it all back together again; so much of it was just in fragments.  At the time, it had stopped mattering quickly to him who had tried to take his head off because his ship was in danger.  In retrospect, it still didn’t matter overly much, aside as a clue.  “Someone shouted, but I don’t remember whether the voice was familiar or not.  Wasna the same person who swung the pipe, though.”

There really weren’t a lot of physical clues to be taken from it.  Certainly not enough to hold up as real evidence anyway.  And Scotty wasn’t even sure how they’d go about getting evidence; he was good at tracking down mechanical faults, but investigating crimes was outwith his skills. 

He just shook his head again. “I don’t know.  I think the only recourse we might have’ll be playin’ at espionage.”

“That could be fun,” Corry said, a smirk stealing across his face.  “Then, once we know for sure, we can make ‘em walk the plank.”

Completely despite his mindstate -- or lack of -- Scotty huffed at that in amusement.  “A regular pair o’ pirates, then?”

“Ayuh,” Corry said, before stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe I can be Blackbeard…”

Scotty managed to bite back the almost-by-now-reflexive giggle at the ayuh; still, it was the first time in awhile now that something had him even wanting to laugh like that.  Instead, he made a long show of eying Corry’s blond head, one eye closed.  “Aye, that’s a right good idea.”

“I’m a little limited on options,” Cor answered, grinning back.  “Besides, we can’t all have really cool names like you, Wolf .”

“Hey, I earned that one fair and square.”

Corry snorted back.  “I personally think it should be something like pup.  Or cub.  Or mutt.  But if you insist.”

Scotty rolled his eyes with as much force as he could, reaching over and giving Corry a mild, sideways shove, just enough to get the point across. “Ye’re such a bastard.”

Cor looked almost content as he hop-stepped to keep his balance and replied to that old barb with a smile. “I know.”