Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive ^{Beam me up, Scotty.}

Chapter Text

2267

Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.
- Sun Tzu

The single best tool against the Empire wasn't a blade, a bomb or even the finest of technology.

It was, in fact, a toothpick.

The numbers that Scott worked out on the deckplates in his quarters were simple.  The carpet rolled back, and a grease pen in hand, it took him only minutes to work out the numerical values that he needed in order to pass on information to the rebellion.  He never knew, at least not since he had killed his last contact, a mercy-killing, whether or not the information would be found.  Nonetheless, he put it out there, and in the places he knew would most likely be inspected at some point or another by those who knew how to find it.

Most of the time, he was working on program coding; he was better with the mechanical aspects of things, but he had all of the time in the universe to come up with the programming that he would need to make the machines do what he needed them to do, when he needed them to do it.  Picking away at it piece by piece; fifteen years or so, give or take, for this part of things.  He didn't measure time, really.  Only numbers, only mechanics.

His quarters were likely the most secure place on the ship.  No real high technology; the traps he had set were primitive and effective, and couldn't be seen with a tricorder scan from the outside.  Ritualistically, coming back here meant patiently disabling and resetting each one; the trip-wires, the minor chemical-based explosives, everything.

Other than his traps, his quarters were barren.  No worth to him aside the relative safety to work on things.  To walk in, one would see nothing; even under the carpet, after he finished backing up his work, the decks were scrubbed again spotless.

Scott wasn't paranoid.  Where most upper-echelon officers gave in to paranoia (Kirk and his Tantalus field, for instance), he simply knew that if the traps didn't get his enemies, then he himself likely would.  It had been a very long time since someone had gotten close enough to him to actually wound him -- of the scars he still wore, the newest were almost nine years old now.

It was another certainty that if someone did manage to take him out, then he would take everything he knew with him.  No win, but no loss.

Spock was his biggest concern; even then, only an analytical concern.  The new Vulcan captain of the Enterprise had been acting oddly since the switch between universes.  It was unheard of that he would tip any part of his hand by asking McCoy for records with the certainty that it would get back to Scott -- this silent game they'd been playing for five years was conducted entirely on unspoken levels.

Scott wasn't afraid of Spock.  Merely aware of the Vulcan's ability to perceive things that humans wouldn't notice.  There were times when they made brief eye-contact and measured each other from a distance; expressionless, emotionless, calculating.  He never did figure out what Spock had seen that had made him suspicious enough to start searching, but the fact that there was never any move made proved that he had found nothing solid.  Creature of logic.  Unable to trust his own gut instincts, but they were there.

Spock's own logic was what crippled him, really.  And when they measured each other, without any sort of emotional concerns such as fear, Scott knew exactly where Spock's weaknesses were.  Intelligent, extremely intelligent.  But crippled by his own strict adherence to things having to make sense to himself.

Scott double-checked his numbers, though he already knew that they were right.  This was a very simple message, comparatively, than the programming codes that he worked out, encrypted then to his own key, backed up.  His next shore leave, and he would deliver the message.

He existed in this state most of the time; when new intake came aboard, he had no problems playing a wounded wing, drawing some poor fool into chancing a shot at him, then those people who witnessed it would beg to get out.  He kept his staff in that perpetual state of fear, not by sending them to the agony booth, not by screaming at them, or beating on them, but simply by being unpredictable.  Sometimes one might stick around a few months, the longest was four to date, but their own fears and imaginations usually ended up driving them to find some other ship or some other division to escape to.

Sometimes one or two came aboard that weren't tainted by the Empire; good engineers who really wanted to just do their jobs, and those were the only ones that he felt a flicker of regret over.  They were also the ones that needed to be driven out fastest, lest they actually see what it was he'd been slowly doing.

When he was done with his numbers, he took the tricorder he'd made of broken pieces and parts, and the laser scalpel he'd gotten ahold of, and backed it all up...

...to a toothpick.

Notched between the value of 0, two atoms knocked out of the dense wood, and the value of 1, three atoms, was the simple message.  He always made more than one copy; later, on shore leave, he would mark something else that would eventually be looked at with the value now stored on the toothpick.  Numerical simplicity, a fraction that when it was decrypted could pass on an extraordinary amount of knowledge.

If anyone did ever even think to look at the toothpick, and manage to figure out that there was information stored on it, they would have to figure out how to understand it.  But those who needed to know what it said already had those tools.  And they would take that information, and perhaps in weeks or months or years, be able to act on it by saving someone.  Hiding them from the Empire's long-reaching arms.

It was one of the rare times, though, that the message contained didn't have a bearing on the overall movement.  It was, in fact, his silent way of paying back a long-ago mixture of kindness and crime.

It was only a name.

Joanna McCoy