Montie Scott was flying free. The wind, cold and bracing, stretched the skin of his face over his young cheekbones, making him grin like a hyena. His hang glider bucked once and then again under the influence of an especially strong gust, reminding him of how weary his arms were.

But he was far from even thinking about a landing. Tired as they were, Scott's arms had plenty of life left in them. And he wasn't about to give up a single, blessed second of the breathtaking view hundreds of meters beneath him.

Great buttresses of gray rock. Long, green sweeps of hillside. Deep, dark cuts in the earth, breathing a scent of mystery that he could fairly smell all the way up here in the clouds.

Away off in the north, there was a steel-gray line of storm clouds bearing down on him. But they wouldn't force him out of the sky either. Experience had taught him that weather from that quarter took a while to arrive.

Freedom. It was better than anything, better than a hundred-year-old scotch, better even than the mournful song of the pipes in the dusky highlands. When one came right down to it, it was freedom that made a man feel alive...

"Captain Scott?"

Suddenly, the craggy, green vistas below him seemed to melt away. Scott blinked once, twice, and saw the long, narrow face of Matt Franklin looming in front of him, his straw-yellow hair plastered tight to his skull in the fashion of the day.

"Huh?" said Scott. It took him a moment more to get his bearings -- to realize that he was in a ship's library, and that there was an active monitor in front of him. And that he'd dozed off.

Unfortunately, he was doing more and more of that these days. And it annoyed the hell out of him.

Ensign Franklin smiled. "Sorry, sir. I didn't mean to disturb your nap."

"I was nae takin' a nap," Scott protested. And then: "What brings ye down here, anyway? Is somethin' wrong?"

Franklin shook his head reassuringly. "Nothing serious, sir. It's just that there's a little problem with the warp drive, and we're going to have to drop down to impulse in a few minutes. The captain thought all the passengers should know -- so you won't be alarmed when you feel the deceleration."

Scott looked at Franklin askance. "A little problem? Are ye certain o' that?"

The ensign nodded, his smile broadening. "Nothing to worry about, sir. Just a slight overload in one of the plasma transfer conduits."

The older man started to get up. "Well, I suppose I could take a look at it..."

Franklin laid a gentle hand on Scott's shoulder. "No need, sir. Really. I know you used to be an engineer yourself, but Lieutenant Sachs has it under control."

Scott's enthusiasm subsided as he noted the firmness in the ensign's eyes. "All right, then," he sighed.

"As long as he feels he can handle it."

In an obvious attempt to change the subject, Franklin pointed to the monitor. "Anything interesting, sir?"

Scott shrugged. "Just an' old text -- very old, in fact. I came across it when I was at the Academy."

The ensign bent closer to the screen to read the title of the thing. "The Laws of Physics," he said out loud.

The older man nodded. "Aye. The Laws o' Physics. Came out shortly after Einstein published his Theory of Relativity. A remarkable book -- if only as a historical artifact. No mention of gravitons, subspace or antimatter." He shook his head. "We've come a long way since the twentieth century, laddie."

Franklin chuckled. "No question about that. Anyway, I'll let you get back to it, sir."

Scott grunted. Truth to tell, he wasn't all that eager to return to the screen. Hell, he'd read the bloody thing about a dozen times already. He practically knew it by heart.

His daydream, on the other hand, had been exciting as all get-out. He'd forgotten how exhilarating it could be to soar over the shaggy hills of his homeland.

"Ensign," he said abruptly, freezing Franklin just shy of the door. The younger man turned around.

"Aye, sir?"

"Have ye ever been hang glidin', Mister Franklin?"

The younger man shook his head -- a little sadly, Scott thought. "No, sir, I haven't." And then: "Have you?"

Scott sat back in his chair. "Since ye ask, yes. Not lately, mind ye. I'm talking forty years ago or more, before I even got accepted at the Academy."

He gestured at a chair not more than a meter away. For a moment, Franklin hesitated, and Scott scowled inwardly.

Ye're a crazy coot, Montgomery Scott. This lad's got things to do on this ship -- important things. An' no time to listen to an old man spin his yarns.

But the ensign surprised him. Crossing the room, he grabbed the proffered chair, turned it around and straddled it.

If the lad wasn't genuinely interested, Scott mused, he sure didn't let on to it. Either way, Scott was grateful.

"Ye see," he began, "I was born and reared in Scotland -- as if ye couldnae tell. And my uncle -- on my mother's side, that is -- was a hang glider from way back..."

Twenty minutes later, Scott was still regaling the younger man with tales of his airborne exploits. But he didn't realize it until he happened to glance at the digital timekeeper at the bottom left of his monitor.

"Damn," he breathed. "I've kept ye a mite longer than I meant to."

Franklin grinned. "That's all right. I'm off-duty."

Ah. Well, that explained why he hadn't made tracks yet.

"And besides," said the ensign, "I'm really enjoying myself." He leaned forward over the backrest of his chair. "But what I'd really like to hear about is the Enterprise. You know -- what it was like to be on the most famous vessel in the fleet."

Scott grinned back. "What it was like?" He shook his head. "It's hard to describe, actually. I mean, what we did is in the computer records -- the missions we carried out, the civilizations we visited. But what it was like... that had more to do with the men and women who served alongside me. And o' course, the ship herself."

"Captain Kirk?" Franklin prodded.

"Finest man I ever met, bar none. The finest commanding officer, the finest friend. And a fair hand with the ladies, to boot."

"Commander Spock?"

Scott chuckled. "Like any other Vulcan -- but more so. If ye're in the jaws o' hell, and ye can only choose one man to pull ye out... Spock's that man."

"Dr. McCoy?"

"A real crabapple... until ye get to know him, and then ye'd walk through fire for him. Saved my life more times than I've got fingers and toes."

Scott took a breath of memory, savored it and let it out. Those were the days, all right. There were adventures before and since that time and some fond remembrances from those times as well. But the Enterprise...

"Captain Scott?"

He'd almost forgotten that Franklin was sitting in front of him. "Aye, lad?"

"This is going to sound funny, but..."

"Spit it out, Ensign. No need to mince words with me."

Franklin straightened, a little surprised by the sudden authority in Scott's voice. "Well, sir, pardon me for saying so, but--"

"Ye're mincin' words again, laddie."

Finally, it came out: "You don't seem like the type to be headed for the Norpin Five colony, sir. I mean, I've served on this transport for more than a year now, and I've seen my share of retirees. And somehow, you just don't fit the bill."

"Ahh." Scott dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. "It's nice o' ye to say so, Mr. Franklin. But ye're wrong -- dead wrong. I've worked my fingers to the bone on Starfleet's behalf for four decades and more. No one's earned a peaceful retirement more than Montgomery Scott has. And no one's looking forward to it more, either. In fact--"

Suddenly, he felt a shudder in the deck plates below his feet. "We're droppin' out o' warp," he judged.

The ensign nodded. "Probably not for long, though."

Scott looked at him. "Because Lieutenant Sachs has everything under control."

Franklin nodded again. "That's what he said, sir."

The older man tapped his fingers on his armrest. And then, unable to contain himself any longer, he got to his feet.

"I dinnae care what Lieutenant Sachs said. I was tinkerin' with warp engines before he was old enough to walk. An' I'll be damned if I dinnae at least take a look at what's goin' on down there."

The ensign shrugged as he got to his feet as well. He had a look of mock resignation about him. "I tried to stop you, sir. But you were just too insistent."

"Ye're bloody right I was," said Scott, heading for the exit and the corridor outside.

Captain James Armstrong sat in his command chair, scanning the starfields ahead of the Jenolen courtesy of his forward viewscreen, but he wasn't exactly thrilled to be there. He'd envisioned better things when he applied for admission to Starfleet Academy some twenty years ago.

It wasn't fair, he mused. He'd studied as diligently as anyone else. He'd worked hard, scoring high in every phase of cadet training. He'd held up his end of the bargain.

Sure, he'd flubbed the Kobayashi Maru test -- but so had everyone else. Only one man in the annals of the Academy had beaten the no-win scenario, and that had been decades earlier.

Like the other cadets, Armstrong had hoped for adventure, for the excitement of discovery. He'd looked forward to plumbing the depths of the unknown. What he'd gotten was a transport vessel, whose only mission was to ferry Federation citizens from one world to another.

Where was the justice in that?

Here he was pushing forty, his wavy, light-brown hair graying at the temples, and all his old classmates had passed him by. Lustig was in the command chair on the Hood, Barrymore on the Lexington, DeCampo on the newly commissioned Excalibur -- every last one of them a success.

Except for him.

And why? He couldn't say. Bad luck, maybe. A failure to be in the right place at the right time.

Sighing, he looked about his operations center -- a cramped complex, which on a larger ship would have been at least three and possibly four separate facilities. This wasn't just his command center, where he sat daily, bemoaning his fate as he stared unimpressed at the viewscreen. It was also the place that housed the Jenolen's warp-drive access -- a crowded array of engineering consoles manned by a crowded array of engineers -- and a modest, two-man transporter platform.

On the Potemkin, where he'd served as ensign, the transporter room alone was bigger than this. Hell, the closets were bigger than this.

"Ready to drop out of warp," announced tall, dark-haired Ben Sachs from his position behind the main engineering console. There were two other engineers working alongside him -- the full complement of Ops center personnel.

Again, Armstrong had occasion to reflect on the inequities of his situation. On the Potemkin, there'd been a crew of more than four hundred. On the Jenolen, all he had were thirty-six -- and he could probably have made due with even fewer in a pinch.

"Go ahead, Lieutenant," he told Sachs. "As we discussed, we'll proceed at full impulse while we effect repairs."

"Aye, sir," said his chief engineer -- in a vaguely annoyed tone, Armstrong thought. There'd been no need to remind Sachs about maintaining impulse power; they'd only talked about it a few minutes ago.

Unfortunately, the captain wasn't required to give a whole lot of orders on the transport ship Jenolen -- and sometimes he felt that he had to say something.

The vessel vibrated slightly as its warp bubble dissipated and it re-entered relativistic space. Armstrong grunted. He could almost have wished that something had gone wrong -- that alarms were going off all over the place, and that it was up to his quick, resourceful mind to get them out of a situation no starship captain had ever faced before.

Not that he wished to endanger anyone -- particularly the bunch of older folks headed for Norpin Five. But just once, he wanted to feel like a real commanding officer.

"Sir?" said Sachs, interrupting Armstrong's reverie.

"Yes, Lieutenant?" He turned to his chief engineer.

The man looked perplexed. "We're picking up a considerable amount of gravimetric interference," he noted.

His curiosity aroused, the captain got up and crossed the Ops center to stand at Sachs's side. "Gravimetric interference?" he echoed.

The engineer nodded. "And I think I've pinpointed the source of it."

"Can you give me a visual?" asked the captain.

Sachs consulted his monitors. "Yes," he said. "I believe I can."

A moment later, the image on the viewscreen changed from that of a gently flowing river of stars to something a good deal more ominous. What Armstrong and his engineers saw was a dark, featureless ball, one that would have been difficult indeed to discern with the naked eye if not for the stars it displaced. It almost completely filled the dimensions of the screen.

Now it was the captain's turn to be annoyed. "I didn't ask for maximum magnification, Ben. Don't anticipate."

Sachs turned to him, his heavy brows raised in indignant response. "I didn't, sir. This is the lowest magnification setting we've got."

The lowest...? But for the sphere to fill the viewscreen at that kind of distance...!

"My god," said Armstrong. "Is that thing as big as I think it is?"

The engineering chief nodded soberly. "Nearly the size of Earth's orbit around Sol."

The captain was in awe as he took a couple of steps toward the screen. It wasn't listed on any of his navigational charts.

Suddenly, a grin crossed his face. It had been a long time since he'd grinned this way; it felt strange and wonderful.

"Any idea what it is, Captain?" asked Sachs.

"None," said Armstrong. But inwardly, he knew exactly what it was...

His ticket to a real command.

As the turbolift doors opened, Scott got a view of the Jenolen's operations center. Strangely, everyone seemed to be standing around, staring open-mouthed at the viewscreen.

"Remember," Ensign Franklin whispered. "I tried to talk you out of it."

"That you did," agreed the older man. But he was already craning his neck to see what everyone was so fascinated by.

It was a perfect ball hanging in space. Not a planet, but something artificial. Walking over to the nearest unoccupied engineering console, he activated it.

And saw what had the crew so intrigued. According to the numbers displayed alongside the sphere's digitized image in the console, the bloody thing was twice the size of the Sol system -- and then some.

"Composition?" asked Captain Armstrong, a stocky fellow who had greeted Scott personally when the older man boarded the ship. Armstrong hadn't seemed to like his job very much -- until now.

"Carbon-neutronium," responded Sachs, the engineer. "That means our sensors can't penetrate the surface. Too bad." He straightened to his full height, which made him nearly a head taller than the captain. "It would have been nice to know what's going on in there."

Armstrong frowned thoughtfully. "Then let's survey what's on the outside as closely as possible. And before we're done, if we're lucky, we'll at least be able to venture a guess as to what's inside."

"Aye," said Scott. "Though ye'll want to approach 'er with caution, lad. Ye never know what her makers might've had up their sleeves."

The captain must not have known Scott was there until he spoke -- because when he turned to face the older man, he seemed surprised by his presence. Immediately, his eyes sought Franklin, who just shrugged helplessly.

Finding Scott again, he said: "To what do I owe the pleasure, Captain?"

In other words, thought Scott, what the devil are you doing here? He put on his most casual air.

"I thought ye might need my help," he replied plainly. And then, with a gesture to the viewscreen: "And now I'm sure of it."

Armstrong's gaze locked onto Scott's. "We can handle ourselves just fine," said the captain. "As Mr. Franklin no doubt informed you."

"Aye," said the older man. "He informed me, all right. But that was before ye ran into a Dyson Sphere."

That got Armstrong's attention. "A Dy... I beg your pardon?"

"A Dyson Sphere," Scott repeated. And in fifty words or less, he described the theory behind such a construct. "O' course," he finished, "I cannae guarantee it's what I think it is. But it's certainly got all the earmarks of it."

"I see," said the captain. He glanced at Lieutenant Sachs. "You're familiar with such a thing?"

The engineer smiled ruefully. "Frankly, sir, I'm not. Under the circumstances... it might not be a bad idea for Captain Scott to remain in the Ops center. As a sort of, er... consultant."

Armstrong's facial muscles went taut. It was plain he didn't like the idea of needing help from a civilian -- even one with a half-century's experience in Starfleet. But if his chief engineer wasn't objecting, how could he?

"All right," he acquiesced. "Make yourself at home, Captain Scott."

"Scotty," the older man amended. "That's the name I answer to in an engineering room -- and this is pretty near that."

Armstrong looked at him appraisingly. "Scotty it is, then."

Scott grinned. "Good. Now that we understand each other, let's get to work."

Matt Franklin felt a hand on his shoulder. Looking up from his engineering console, he saw Captain Scott peering affably at him from beneath his bushy, gray brows.

"How's our orbit, lad?"

The ensign nodded, feeling a twinge in his neck -- but resolving not to complain about it. Thanks to Scott, who'd dubbed the younger man his personal assistant in their scan of the Dyson Sphere, Franklin was the envy of every nonofficer in the crew. Sure, five straight hours of close analysis had taken their toll on him. But a couple of aches and pains were a small price to pay for an opportunity that might never materialize a second time.

"Fine, sir," he replied, pointing to the relevant figures in the upper right-hand corner of his screen. "I haven't had to make a course correction in hours."

"Good," said Scott. "Nae that I would've expected otherwise; being a perfect sphere, that thing shouldn't present any magnetic aberrations. But no news is good news, I always say."

Squeezing the ensign's shoulder paternally, the older man stalked off to see how the rest of the engineering cadre was doing. Slowly but surely, he seemed to have supplanted Sachs as the individual in charge of the operation -- though to Sachs's credit, he was being a good sport about it.

Just a few days ago, Matt Franklin hadn't known very much about the man called Montgomery Scott -- other than what he had read. The passenger manifest had showed that Scott was a lifetime officer in Starfleet, who had served nearly all fifty-two years of his career on the fabled Enterprise.

He'd boarded the ship as a young engineer under Captain Pike, reached the rank of lieutenant commander under James T. Kirk and remained to train others after his captain was given an admiral's braid. In the intervening time, he'd been reunited with Kirk and his former Enterprise colleagues on and off, sometimes for years at a time.

All that was in the computer records. All public knowledge.

But now Franklin had had a chance to meet the man behind the career. And he was glad of it. Very glad of it.

Montgomery Scott was the kind of man you met only once in a lifetime. Someone whose capacity for invention seemed almost limitless... whose love for knowledge was so strong, so fierce, it sometimes seemed to be a force of nature.

Didn't Scott fix those overloaded plasma transfer circuits faster than anyone in the Ops center had believed possible -- Lieutenant Sachs included? Without him, they'd still be thinking about approaching the sphere, not hours into the analysis already.

In a way, the man was like the Dyson Sphere itself -- an anomaly, an oddity. A gem of rare quality, not to be missed on pain of great regret.

Abruptly, even as Franklin was finishing his thought, the lift doors opened and the captain stormed in. Nor did he look any happier than when he departed.

"Civilians," Armstrong muttered. "Why did I think they might actually understand? Why did I think they might be willing to tolerate a small delay for the sake of science?" He shook his head as he sat down wearily in his command chair, his voice drifting off into muttered invective.

Suppressing a smile, Franklin turned back to his monitor and scanned yet another portion of the artificial globe. Not that he expected to see much of anything, but--

Wait. His mouth went dry. What was that?

"You'd think we were fooling around out here," said Armstrong, his voice rising to an audible level again. "You'd think we were wasting time, not making one of the great scientific discoveries of our--"

"Captain?"

It took Franklin a moment to realize that it was he who had spoken up, interrupting the captain's soliloquy and drawing everyone's attention. He swallowed uncomfortably, his mouth drier than ever.

"Yes, Ensign?" asked Armstrong.

"Sir," Franklin went on, "I've found something that looks like a communications antenna."

Scott was by his side in an instant. "Aye," he confirmed. "So it does, lad." He made some adjustments in the scope of the scan. "And look -- here's another. And a third. No -- four. Four o' them." Turning to the captain, he said: "They look intact, too. I wouldn't be surprised if they were in working order."

A smile spread over Armstrong's face, making him look like a man who'd just gotten his heart's desire. He nodded.

"Then by all means," he said, "let's open hailing frequencies."

At one of the other engineering consoles, Communications Officer Kinski followed the captain's orders.

"Hailing frequencies opened," he confirmed.

They waited. No response.

Looks were exchanged between crew members... between Captain Armstrong and Mr. Sachs... between Franklin himself and Captain Scott. The sense of expectation was almost suffocating.

And still no reply from the Dyson Sphere.

"Try again," said Armstrong, his voice a little more subdued.

"Trying," reported Kinksi.

Again, there was that expectant silence. It stretched on for too long. Franklin shook his head, disappointed.

"Damn," said the captain.

"Ye can say that again," Scott sympathized. "Fer a moment there, I really thought we might be able to raise them."

"Maybe we're giving up too soon," Sachs offered. "The fact that they're not answering doesn't mean that they can't -- or that they won't. Maybe they're just being cautious."

Scott sighed. "I dinnae think so, Lieutenant. Call it a sixth sense if ye will, but I'll bet ye a bottle o' scotch that if ye hailed from now till doomsday, ye'd have no more luck than ye're havin' now. Plain and simple, there's nobody in there."

"He's right," Armstrong joined in. "Anybody who's got the technology to build a Dyson Sphere has nothing to fear from us. If there were sentient beings inside that sphere, we'd have heard from them by now."

How could they be so sure? Franklin looked from Scott to Armstrong and back to Scott. How could they know beyond a doubt?

The ensign had barely finished the thought when the deck lurched beneath him and he went sprawling across it. He felt someone lifting him up as someone else spat out a question.

A second later, still a third person cried out the answer: "The power coils, sir! They've blown!"