Chapter Text
Part II: The Lady Grey
Today
you were far away,
and I
didn't ask you why.
What could I say?
I was far away.
You just walked away,
and I just watched you.
What could I say?
How close am I
to losing you?
Chapter 1:
Friday, February 3rd, 2243
Malone Road Dormitory, Room 17
Starfleet Engineering Academy
Belfast, Ireland, Earth
The still-quiet streets of Belfast had been a relief after Aberdeen. It wasn't a tangible thing, like a well-worn sweater, but it was comforting nonetheless. It had effectively been Corry's home for almost four years, minus holidays, school breaks and personal leave. He knew the streets, the little shops to get food that wasn't designed to kill your morale, the brick dormitories and the docks. He had grown to love Ireland, despite complaining heartily about the weather, and though Maine was always his first home, Belfast had become his comfortable second.
It hadn't even taken a day for them to fall back into their habits and routines. Some cadets hated leaving home to come back, and some took a good week or two to settle back in, but Corry and Scotty fell right back into their hard-earned rhythm. After waking up in some pain, drinking enough coffee to send an elephant into spasms and working half-heartedly on the schematics for the project, night found them on their respective sides of the room, pursuing their respective relaxation. The next day was basically the same, and since classes didn't start again until the third, it was all to the good.
When classes did start again, it was with the smooth transition of Starfleet. A new year didn't mean much to the top brass, aside from the fact that they had to type a different date into the computers when they filed the paperwork. It was a little more sentimental to the students -- a new year, a new start, a new chance to take a step towards the stars. The senior cadets were usually the most excited, putting in for their positions on whichever ships they wanted to serve with and most of them aiming for the newly commissioned Constitution-class, of course. The best among them would get it, and then it'd go down the line.
Scotty didn't have much to worry about. He was the current valedictorian. He had a choice of anywhere he wanted to go to serve, and already knew what ship he wanted. That was his brass ring.
Corry was still plagued by misgiving about leaving Earth behind to wander the stars. No matter how much he tried to get excited about the prospect of leaving his home planet and exploring the outer reaches of the galaxy, he just couldn't manage to. He was worried about going up there; he got homesick just thinking about it, and even engineers on one of the big ships were knocked off regularly by hostile lifeform attacks, equipment errors, being assigned to landing parties.
Dying was a big problem, but the idea of some subspace message informing his family of his demise was even worse.
So he set his sights closer, and concentrated on the schooner so that he wouldn’t have to dwell on it. They had their schematics in well in time for the deadline, the materials were delivered, the models were built quickly and efficiently, and they were ready to start laying the keel.
The model that they kept in their room was more for looks. It hadn't been built to be used in the actual process, and the cutaways and such were kept in the mold loft in the Harland & Wolff Shipyards, in berth #22. But this was their personal copy of what the schooner would look like, and since it seemed like ninety-nine percent of their free time was spent working on it with the other cadets, they figured that they deserved it.
She was narrow-bodied; slim and with a deeper draft. The foremast stood shorter and the mainmast taller, the fore-and-aft rigged sails simple enough to handle with the minimum number of crew, even taking into account their sheer area. She had a slightly raised quarterdeck (Corry's insistence), a main deck and then the below decks and bilge. It had taken the four members of the design team and three more commandeered cadets from the construction team a week solid, every day for hours, working on her plans -- drawing them by hand like proper shipwrights of old, no less -- and the work had not been in vain.
The name she ended up getting, though, was the direct influence of the cloth used on the model's sails. Having nothing else to work with, Scotty had decided to sacrifice one of his older uniform shirts and so she ended up with gray sails. It hadn't taken long for Corry to start calling her the Lady Grey; first named for her sails, and as an afterthought (for the sake of explaining it to Barrett) for the unwilling nine-day queen. The name stuck; it had a nice sound to it, and it was unanimously decided to keep it for the christening.
"You know, I've thought about it and thought about it," Corry said, tapping his pencil against his temple to emphasize, "and now that we're actually gonna build this thing, we're pretty well-researched, and ready, we still have no clue what to do with her."
"Do? Hopefully set her floatin' an' collect a nice grade for the effort," Scotty replied, sitting on his bunk cross-legged, before going back to scrutinizing the model. "I don't know what else there is to do."
Cor apparently decided to take that as a conversational setup. "There is something: We could finish and then learn how to sail her."
"I'm an engineer, not a sailor," Scotty pointed out, not taking his concentration away from the model, squinting a bit at it as he double-checked the standing rigging to make sure it matched the blueprints in the mold loft. Even if the model was just for looks, he didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be accurate.
"Can't be both?"
"I suppose I could, but ye have to remember one vital piece of information, Cor: Once we finish this, it'll be June and less than two months before we ship off. Not much time to learn. Plus, what makes ye think Starfleet would even let us? They're frontin' the bill."
"Welllll, I already know how to sail smaller boats and I’ve been crew on larger ones, and I'll bet fifty credits that there're at least a few other people on the team who can sail.” Corry hummed briefly, the vocal equivalent of a shrug. “I think we can pull it off. I mean, even the higher-ups can't really grudge us a chance to sail what we built."
Scotty finally looked up again, an amused grin crossing his face. "We've not even laid the keel down yet, and ye're already plannin'. Don't count the telerranians before they hatch."
Corry grinned right back. "I'm not. I'm counting chickens."
"Almost the same thing."
"Except one's green and looks like a peacock."
"Aye, but it tastes like-- chicken!"
Corry laughed, shaking his head and laying back on his bunk. "Now there's a saying that's been around since the dawn of time."
"Probably because it's so bloody true. Think about it: Man goes off intae the stars, carryin' the hopes for all mankind. Comes across the first planet he sees, lands, decides to kill himself some wild game, just for a change o' pace. And, since chicken taste happens to be a universal constant, what's it taste like?"
"Chicken!"
"Aye. And that's why we still say that everything tastes like chicken," Scotty said, matter-of-factly, finally setting the model aside and picking up the tentative construction schedule they had worked out earlier. He still wasn't entirely thrilled with the whole process, with how time-consuming it was, but every time he considered complaining he likewise thought about incurring the wrath -- or oddly worse, the disappointment -- of Andrew Corrigan, and decided that it wasn't worth it.
He shook his head, adding, "I don't think we have that much to worry about, though. Four months should be more'n enough, even with our manpower."
"Yep, that it should," Corry said happily, standing up to go to his desk, where the light on his computer monitor blinked that he had a message. "Long as no one mutinies, anyway."
"Eh, we'll make 'em walk the plank or some other such nonsense." Trying to picture that, Scotty grinned. He wouldn't mind building the ship just so he could make someone walk the plank; the complete absurdity of it would be good for a laugh at the very least.
Still, he didn't think anyone was going to mutiny; so far, everyone had taken a liking to the Lady Grey because she was such a break from the norm. Even he didn't outright hate the work he was doing now that he'd gotten past the initial brainstorming and had resigned himself to it. From here, it was more manual labor; making the parts fit the theory, making something that could float and carry herself by the power of wind.
He still would have preferred matter and antimatter, or plasma, or maybe even nuclear power, but wind would have to do. It wasn't like he had a choice in the matter.
The click of the monitor turning off had an odd sound, one that rang a bell in his subconscious and gave him pause from his pirate notions to look up. Then he realized, more instinctively than not, that it wasn't the click that was wrong but something else, something that changed the entire feeling of the room in less than a second, and the look on Corry's face backed it up. "Somethin' wrong?"
Cor blinked a few times, as though he'd forgotten he wasn't alone. "Uh, yeah-- I mean, no. I mean, I've gotta go."
Scotty raised an eyebrow. Eh? Go where? "What is it?"
Corry didn't answer immediately, grabbing his carryon out of his closet and grabbing his clothes from the top drawer, shoving them into the bag without much regard for their welfare. When he finally did think to reply to the question, he only spared a brief glance at his roommate. "My Dad-- something's wrong, I gotta go home."
"Anything ye need?" Quick on the uptake, Scotty already was up and offering Corry's boots to him. Whatever it was that had so completely stunned Cor into this state had to be serious enough to not take too much time with questions of what or why. He could always get those answers later.
"Yeah, get my assignments for me if you can. I'll try'n be back quick as I can be, and if I can't, I'll give you a call." Taking the boots and pulling them on, Corry laced them up quickly and tied them, then stood and grabbed his coat. Not even taking a few seconds to pull it on, he all but dashed out the door.
Scotty followed, perplexed and worried. He hated the idea of sitting by while something not-good was happening, and on an impulse, he called after his roommate as he headed down the steps, "Corry!"
Cor paused a flight down, looking back up. "Yeah?"
"If ye-- I mean, if there's--" Scotty tried, aiming to reassure and falling woefully short of the mark.
It must have been clear enough, though. Corry flashed a brief, grateful smile. "I know." And with that, he turned and left.
Letting the door slip closed, Scotty frowned to himself and walked back to the dorm room. That was certainly odd -- in less than five whole minutes, something had changed. Something wasn't right. Shaking his head, he closed the door to the room and went back to sit on his bunk, eying the monitor. He could easily get the message, whatever it had been, but that would have been a betrayal, and if there was one thing he wouldn't do it was betray his best friend.
So, he firmly put that thought out of his mind. It was only a matter of time until he found out, and when he did, he was sure that it wouldn't be that bad; worry always made things seem about a million times worse than they actually were.
Feeling a little better with that realization, he pulled the construction schedule back off of his desk, where he'd tossed it to help Corry pack. With the leader gone, the project would fall onto his shoulders as head shipwright, and he sincerely hoped that whatever was wrong would resolve itself in time to turn that responsibility back over. He didn't particularly want to lead; that was why he'd been so miserable in Command School.
It wasn't the leadership that was weighing on his thoughts, though. It took only an hour of jotting down notes on who should work when before he realized that it was something else entirely.
It was too quiet.
After months of being stuck in the same room, good times or no, Scotty had gotten so used to Corry's presence that it was almost eerie to not have him there.
Certainly there were times when one of them was gone, but there was a strange quality to this silence. It was too complete, too heavy; no idle conversation to ignore, no pencil scratching on paper, no clicks on the keyboard, nothing. The other cadets had gone to bed, no doubt, or were keeping quiet, so there wasn't even background noise.
Too quiet. Mentally berating himself for being silly, since he'd only been left there alone for a relatively short period of time, Scotty went back to working on the schedule. It wasn't like he didn't like being left alone; there was no counting the number of times he'd been trying to work on something he considered of major importance only to snap at Corry for breaking his concentration. Once or twice, he'd even chased the other cadet out with a spanner and threats of serious physical harm, which Cor always took with good humor.
After the initial adjustment period -- in fairness, not the easiest time -- they just got good at living together, each edging towards a middle ground and into a comfortable compromise.
That was the way it was. But there was no one to get harmlessly snippy with, and maybe that was the real problem. No one to be annoyed with, no one to get over being annoyed with.
No one to threaten to throw his boots out the window.
"Ye'd think he's been gone a decade, not an hour," Scotty finally said, then blew out a breath; it was sad that he was enough at wit’s end that he was talking to himself like some kind of rocket.
Being worried was what made it so quiet, though. He didn't know what was going on. Worse, though, the best friend he had was facing something, alone, and he couldn't do anything about it; couldn’t help, couldn’t fix things.
Well, sitting there staring absently at the notebook wasn't going to get anything done, and thinking too hard about something that couldn't be changed wouldn't either. Finally deciding that time would tell, Scotty flicked his light off and settled in for bed.
But his thoughts were still an ocean away.
Corry was actually missing for longer than anyone had expected. That alone frazzled Scotty, who was no more accustomed to the quiet days later than he had been after the first hour. So, instead of pacing their room or digging out his old headset for something to listen to, he spent most of the time until curfew down in the shipyards. It was the only place he really could think of that lent some distraction.
It was on the morning of the seventh day that Scotty finally resigned himself that he would have to inform Barrett that he was taking the project over, even if only temporarily. Steeling himself for what he was sure would be a messy situation, he stepped into the hall just as Barrett was wrapping up a class for a few first-years. "I'll expect the essay on Monday. You can either give it to me on tape or on paper, but the formatting should be exact either way. Dismissed."
Waiting for the cadets to filter out, Scotty took a deep breath and approached the professor. "Sir?"
"What can I do for you, Mister Scott?" Barrett asked, glancing up from his desk. "Trouble on the final?"
"No, sir," he answered, taking a few steps closer. "I was-- well, I came by to tell ye that Mister Corrigan's out on personal leave, and I'm takin' over his duties until he returns."
"All right. Anything else?"
"Er-- no, sir, nothin' important."
Barrett smiled slightly, finally giving Scotty his full attention. "I find it hard to believe you'd come over here just to tell me that you're covering for your friend until he gets back. I was informed, you know."
Uh oh. Searching through his mind for an explanation for something so blatantly obvious -- of course he knew that the professor would have been informed Cor was on leave, that's just common sense, good job there forgetting common bloody sense -- Scotty finally settled on a weak, "I... forgot, sir."
"Forgot," Barrett echoed, smiling a patient, if not perhaps amused, smile. "You once rattled off the entire list of specifications for the Constitution -class starships from memory to me. I don't exactly see you as the forgetful type."
"A lot on my mind?" Scotty imagined a hole, six feet deep. "The Lady Grey, sir, she takes up a lot o' time."
"Lady Grey, eh? Apparently you've taken to shipbuilding better than Mister Corrigan thought you would." Barrett was clearly not ready to let this drop. "So tell me, cadet, how do you feel about being the head of this project?"
Make that ten-- no, twenty feet. Just to be consistent with the measuring. Scotty knotted his hands behind his back for the sake of not fidgeting. "Well enough, I suppose. Sir."
"Your transcripts say you were booted out of Command School," Barrett mused, leaning on the podium and crossing his arms. "They didn't specify exactly why, but they hedged something along the lines of ‘difficulty adjusting to a command position.’"
"Aye, sir," Scotty answered, dutifully. Did everyone know about that? "I think I make a better engineer, sir."
Barrett smiled again, a little more reassuring this time. "I'll agree with that. So, now you're effectively commanding a crew of nineteen on a project you didn't agree with, your friend is gone for all intents and purposes, and you're starting to lose your memory. About right?"
"Aye, sir." Railroaded right into that one, he was.
"Then here's the prize question: How do you really feel about all of this?"
Scotty blinked once or twice. He knew damn well how he felt, but he didn't pause to think someone actually might be concerned about that when he was doing all right with his coursework, with the project, with just about every quantifiable metric. "Feel, sir?"
"Feel," Barrett chuckled. "Go ahead, no one's going to bite your head off for being human, unless by some chance you happen to be Vulcan."
"No, sir," Scotty answered, with a wry grin. He certainly wasn't unemotional, not even by the most liberal standards. Pulling himself back from the moronic mental image of himself with pointed ears and eyebrows, he finally calmed down a little. "I suppose-- well, worried, for one. And put upon."
"Put upon because of your schooner, I take it?"
"Aye, sir."
Looking up at the ceiling, Barrett smiled to himself. After a moment, he looked back at the cadet. "Here's something I want you to think about, and put it somewhere that faulty memory of yours won't discard it: You feel like you're somehow being asked to do something you don't think is important, or act in some way contradictory from what you see yourself as. But," he said, before any protests could be voiced, "that's the nature of wind, Mister Scott. You can work with it or you can fight against it-- but no matter how much you might not like it, you can't change it."
He left behind a very baffled cadet when he walked out.
Scotty was still chewing on that when he went back to the shipyards that evening. Sure, it was some sort of great moral that was supposed to make his entire life make sense, some brilliant insight to be gleaned about destiny, the winds of fate or something else, but he didn't believe in destiny.
A man made their own destiny, and if it couldn't be changed, then what was the point of trying?
Damn Barrett for putting something philosophical in a brain meant to work with the technical. Now that would probably be the first thing that came to mind whenever someone started questioning what they would do with their life, and he'd just parrot it back to them even if he didn't believe it.
He scoffed at that thought, irritated by the mere possibility. Like hell he would.
Unlocking the door to the indoor berth, he stepped in and hit the lighting control. The panels in the walls lit, the panels in the ceiling lit, and the Lady Grey's keel became visible. Well, the start on her keel; it wasn't finished yet, and wouldn't be for at least several more days. Looking at what would be the backbone of the oddest project he'd ever worked on, Scotty tried hard to find some feeling of attachment for the wood and lead.
It didn't shock him when he didn't find anything more than a weary resignation that this is what was going to be eating away at his time for the next several months.
It was chilly in there, but then, considering the size of the place, that wasn't too surprising. Professor Barrett had been kind enough to arrange for an indoor berth to build the ship in; the only concession he would make historically. The whole room was nearly two hundred feet long, supported by duradium beams that arched the tall ceiling. The massive doors at the end led to the ramp, which in turn led into the mouth of the River Lagan, and from there into Belfast Lough.
Closing the door with a sigh that seemed amplified in the long, tall berth, Scotty started up the stairs to the mold loft, which at least had some space heaters to help take the edge off. Maybe there would be something to do there to distract him from philosophy, from worrying about Corry, from life in general, too.
The mold loft had taken on the nature of a hide-out for the cadets who worked there. There were a few pinups on the walls, most of them of leggy humans with a come-hither look. There was a cooler pushed against the wall by the drafting table, and Scotty took a wee bit of juvenile amusement in thinking about how much contraband they had locked up there. A few bottles of hard liquor under the ice, a hand phaser that someone had 'borrowed' from the security division just because they could in the desk, Jansson's dirty magazines-- one good raid in there would have them all demerited to oblivion.
But then, they were left mostly to their own devices, off campus and in charge. He hadn't had quite as much trouble taking over command as he thought he would; his main problem was worrying about the person he'd taken command from. He'd tried to call Corry's house in Maine and didn't get an answer, which chewed at him to no end, and he'd stopped by their room between classes to see if any messages had been left.
So when he first heard Corry's voice, it was with some disbelief. Needless to say, he got over it quickly.
"Hey, chief."
"Cor! Where've ye been? And what happened?" Scotty stopped himself before he could ask fifty more questions. He didn't realize how relieved he was, even, until he let that breath out.
"Johns Hopkins and a good scare," Corry said, closing the loft door before sitting down behind one of the draft tables and rubbing at his eyes, wearily. "I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to tell you before now; been a hectic week."
"Eh, I made do." Not in any great hurry to explain how much of that time had been spent fretting about it, Scotty leaned against the wall and crossed his arms, giving his roommate his undivided attention. "Though I'm damn curious, to tell ye the truth."
"Well, lemme see." Closing his eyes, Corry tipped his head back, taking a moment to reply, "Dad was out there on a project; this time, he was with a team who was putting a set of steering thrusters on an asteroid almost entirely made of ruthenium. It was pretty routine, they were going to get it so it could be guided to a processing station."
"Aye, makes sense."
"So they get the thrusters fitted when this dust storm comes in. They made it underground safe, and the asteroid was pretty stable. Well, Dad had a microbreach in his EV suit; nothing serious, he sealed it off without a problem before the emergency sensors even sealed off that section of the suit." Taking a deep breath, Cor plowed on, "But-- this storm was carrying something, some kind of bacteria or something from god only knows where, and it got into the air circulation system. Next thing Dad knows, he can't breathe right, he's coughing and choking for air, and they have to bring a ship into this mess, emergency transport him out."
Scotty frowned at that; he knew on some level that this conversation wouldn’t be going the way it was if Cor’s father was dead , but he was also very aware that Corry didn’t seem all that relieved right now, either. "He's all right-- right?"
"Yes and no." Corry winced. "They got him stabilized, but every time they took the respirator off, he started choking again. They warped him back here; even had him transferred to the Valley Forge to get here faster. When I left, he was already back and in the hospital."
Definitely not good. Echoing the wince, Scotty made himself ask the next question, "Did they find anything?"
"They gave him a full blood transfusion, shot him up with all kinds of antibiotics; he can breathe okay now, but they don't know if it'll get better, or if he'll slip back into whatever reaction it caused. Right now, they're just doing all kinda tests." Leaning forward and balancing his elbows on his knees, Corry went back to rubbing his eyes. He looked tried out, and frustrated and torn. "He’s been in quarantine. Mom can't even hold his hand."
Scotty finally willed himself to sit down, even though some desire to do something to help made his bones itch. It was a relief to have a reason for the silence, though; a good reason for Cor not to waste time calling, and a good reason to worry himself. He had liked Cor's Dad, even though he hadn't had much a chance to talk to him over the break, what with being too busy chasing after Rachel.
But it was never particularly right when something bad happened to good people; it went against the most basic fabric of everything decent in the universe. "If there's anything I can do, just tell me."
"Been doing pretty good so far," Corry offered, smiling as well as he could apparently muster. "Looks like you have a good start on the Grey's keel."
"Aye. It's a pain, though. We mis-cut the boards on Sunday, had to re-cut everything; apparently they didn't understand it was in yards and not meters," Scotty said, somewhat glad to have changed subjects. "It's a royal pain, tryin' to work with old-style measurin'."
"Blame Barrett." Cor stood up, trying to stifle a yawn and failing. "Well, I think I'm gonna turn in."
Scotty shrugged, grabbing his coat from where it hung on a peg in the wall. "I'll walk with ye; have yer assignments on yer desk, but that can wait till tomorrow." Besides, it was nice to have someone to talk to again, and he'd missed Corry more than he would have admitted, even to himself.
Corry made his way down the steps to the main floor, chuckling dryly, "Maybe I'll switch careers and become a medical student." Opening the door and stepping out into the mist, he waited for his roommate to catch up. "Seems to be all that's on my mind, now."