Part III.

 

February 3rd, 2248
The Horizon Sun

 

There was nowhere to run on the ship, but he tried anyway.

Not in the most literal sense; literally, there was nowhere to run, the Sun was small and cramped, but it didn't matter. It didn't matter, because if he couldn't scramble outside of his own skull, then he could certainly scramble around mad inside of it; a beam of light in a house of mirrors, or something pacing in a cage in some zoo, as though it hadn't seen those same walls and corners countless times before.

Scotty had half-forgotten what it was like to live within moments only; had half-forgotten what it was like to live without any definable past or future, where everything was more about breathing and refusing to die than it was actually living. He hadn't needed to remember it; hadn’t needed to remember the reasons for it, either. He had things he wanted, and lessons hard-learned to look back on, and he had-- had--

Had.

He couldn't really seem to remember now, though, that he ever actually had anything.

It wasn't that he didn't try to remember. Even frantic, scrambling in every direction at once, he tried to slow down and stop and remember. But it didn't work. There was no peace to be had anywhere, not even in his job; he did it and lived it and even in the middle of that was only aware of the job and the desperation. All wrapped into one thing. Maybe even the same thing.

The living world around him only registered with him when it encroached on his space, and he snarled back at it. Otherwise, there was no time, no people, nothing except work and oblivion and sometimes food, and always desperation and defiance. Distilled, those things were everything he was.

After the bulkhead landed on him, all that was left when his shipmates tried to help him was the defiance.

 

 

 

The first sign that something was wrong should have been the red alert, but by then, the crew had heard that klaxon sound so many times that it had lost its impact. But then it was followed by a shipwide shudder, and suddenly it all became real again.

Scotty had been working in a maintenance corridor; still only aware of the world when it dared breach his space, the shudder was enough to snap him back to himself in an instant.

They'd dropped out of warp.

He dropped his tools and took off for main engineering.

The next wasn't a shudder. Something slammed into the Sun, and he hit the hallway bulkhead with his shoulder. Lights flickered. Artificial gravity shifted, pulling, then lightening, before settling again.

"Dammit," he said, under his breath, and then he took off again the moment anything like equilibrium returned.

Something out there was trying to kill them.

The engine room was a disaster. Smoke made it hard to see, and Chalmers was shouting across the room for Thatcher to rewire the backup warp control computer by hand if he had to. Scotty could vaguely hear Perez calling that the safeties on the impulse relays were pushing into the red, and he wasn't even sure he was moving until he was practically on top of Thatcher.

"Move," he ordered, not really giving Thatcher time to do it before he was shouldering his way into that space, getting into the wires himself. The kid looked over for a moment, then moved further out of the way.

"Come on!" Chalmers called out, getting frantic, and Scotty winced at the sight of the computer.

It was fried; they'd taken a bad hit, probably close by, and something had caused a surge through the system. He didn't have time to figure out exactly where, but one thing was certain: They needed to get out of this situation and as fast as possible.

He grabbed hold of the blackened mess and yanked it out from its standardized connection points, barking towards Thatcher, "Get in the cabinet and pull the other wiring harness!"

Thatcher hesitated a second too long, and Perez bellowed across the room, "Move, asshole!"

"Life support's flickering in and out on Deck 2," Chalmers yelled, over the din. "Anyone with a free hand do something about it!"

Thatcher grabbed a hold of the new wiring harness and literally threw it to Scotty, then managed to pull himself together long enough to see what the damage control computer said; he grabbed a tool kit and headed out.

One fire at a time. Life support flickering, provided the hull remained intact and uncompromised, was not the worst thing. The worst thing was that they were working under impulse and maneuvering thrusters only, and they needed warp drive back online post haste.

Scotty wired in the new harness, swiftly, then flipped the safety breaker and managed to boot the system despite a half-blackened and mangled panel. "Backup's online!"

"Still showing no warp!" Chalmers yelled back, after a quick glance up from the impulse control panel.

"We're not going to have impulse in a few minutes, either," Perez replied, calm in the chaos.

The Sun rocked hard again. The lights went out and were replaced by the lower glow of the emergency lamps.

"I've got a plan," Scotty said, pulling his penlight out of his pocket and sliding in to pull the access panel off of the impulse drive control system. Without wasting a second, he scrambled into the access crawl way, calling back, "Perez! Grab me a cable!"

He didn't need to specify what kind; Perez was a fine engineer, and he was certainly good enough to grasp what Scotty was attempting. The cable he grabbed was a high-energy line from the closet, nearly twelve centimeters in diameter, and he halfway crawled over Scotty to be able to hand off one end. "The whole system will blow."

"Aye, I know," Scotty replied, balanced on his elbows. The Sun shuddered, and both of them had to pause for a second before moving again. "Connect up the other end to the bypass, and tell the Chief he needs to buy us as many seconds as he can."

Perez nodded, backing out. In the background, amidst the madness, Scotty could hear Chalmers almost hit the roof with incredulity at this plan. But there was no way to survive this by staying still. Scotty didn't need to see the scanners, see their enemy. He just knew it. The fact that they were still intact, though, suggested that they were probably just caught in the crossfire.

Either way, they needed to get out.

He quickly wired the cable in, then backed out, pulling his light out of his teeth. "Ready!"

"This is gonna get us killed," Chalmers replied, but he was already rerouting control from the warp computer to the impulse computer. "Call the bridge and tell them we'll have warp for maybe ten seconds at the outside."

No one ever got the chance. Something exploded into an arc flash, bright and loud like lightning.

Chalmers didn't have time to even scream before he'd been sent flying to land in a messy heap. A rattle of something like gunfire cascaded through the crawl-ways behind the wall that Scotty had just been in. Perez managed to throw himself clear of his panel in the nick of time.

The Sun was adrift.

"Get him outta here," Scotty said, after a split second where he considered all possible options and came to one inevitable conclusion.

"You can't be serious," Perez replied, grasping it only a moment later, as Scotty was heading for the panel that had just fried their chief like that wiring harness had been.

Scott snatched up a small piece of debris along the way and then dropped it on the panel; when it didn't react, he crouched and eyed the insides, squinting against the visual distortion left over from the arc flash.

If there was anything left working in the damn thing, they might live.

"Will ye just do it and not quibble with me?" he asked, as he switched the control circuits over to backup and ran a quick check to make sure the panel was functioning, even if only barely, before darting to grab another length of the same type of cable that he'd used to bridge the first connection and dive back into the crawlway.

"You'll be dead," Perez replied, bluntly.

Scotty answered, even as he moved, "If I don't, we'll all be dead."

He didn't wait to argue with Perez any further, just started rewiring the connections to bypass the blown safeties. From one end to the other. The Sun rocked harder; Scotty couldn't work any faster than he was, but that was fast.

Maybe even fast enough.

When he came back out, Perez had gotten Chalmers to the door. "Still alive," he said, voice hoarse.

Scotty only glanced over on the way back to the panel.  "Go, because he probably won't be if this goes bad."

Perez looked torn. But after a precious few seconds, where it seemed almost eerily quiet even with the chaos, he nodded and dragged the chief out of the blackened engine room.

For just a moment, Scotty was well aware of being alone; for just a second, in the smoke and chaos, he felt like he was drowning.

But this time, there was no one there to hold his head above the water.

 

 

 

The captain had desperately been trying to maneuver them out of the range of battle on impulse only; the two frigates that danced outside with four D7s did their best to protect the cargo carrier caught in the crossfire. They'd been knocked out of warp by the spatial distortion caused by the firefight; what was only a skirmish to the more powerful ships was catastrophic to the Sun.

Then a disruptor blast that had probably been intended for a frigate hit them starboard and knocked the drive controls out completely. And then, unable to handle the demands, the impulse safeties had blown.

The sole medic aboard had been trying to deal with the multitude of injuries. The supercargos and ops staff lent as much of a hand as they could. The engineering staff, severely undermanned, just tried to get them out.

In the end, it came down to Scotty.

He overrode the safeties that had blown and sent direct power through the system; warp and impulse control both routed right through the same cables, drawing from their main reactors, far too much power for the system to survive for more than a few seconds. But it was a few seconds that allowed the Sun to jump to Warp 1. To maybe get her out of battle range.

The makeshift connections blew; raw power superheated the air, expanding it in the access behind the wall. The remaining wiring inside the computer melted, the bulkheads bulged and started to give, though they held until the heat was shunted to vent out.

A brief moment of speed, of utter chaos, of destruction, then the ship was cast adrift to float dead in space, with minimal life support and no maneuvering at all, just laboring, unguided engines operating outside their safety margins but taking them nowhere.

By the time that was over, so fast that human thought almost couldn't comprehend it, Scotty was on the floor of the devastated engine room. He was just beginning the process of picking himself up off the decking, dazed and half-deaf and feeling the heat and smelling the smoke, a piece of shrapnel from an exploded computer buried in the muscle of his right shoulder. He didn't even know what made him look up.

The bulkhead yawned down towards him.

And even though he had no time to get out of the way, he tried anyway with a defiant growl that was cut mercilessly short.