Tales from the Captain's Table Page 2

  Riker took an experimental sniff of his mug’s contents, and followed it with a tentative sip.

  His eyebrows rose involuntarily. “Betazoid uttaberry wine, and a pretty damned good vintage, too. Funny, but that’s exactly what I was going to order.”

  Rough laughter swelled to a full-throated, and familiar, guffaw at Riker’s immediate right. He turned, and found himself within a meter of another friendly face.

  “Klag!” he said with a huge grin at the captain of the I.K.S. Gorkon.

  “Betazoid wine, Riker?” The Klingon captain chortled. “I had thought you were made of sterner stuff.”

  Smelling the warnog in the mug in front of his old friend, Riker laughed. “I’m pacing myself.”

  The Klingon stared at Riker’s collar. “I see you have at last changed your views regarding your own vessel.”

  Riker nodded. “You’re looking at the new captain of the U.S.S. Titan.”

  Smiling, Klag said, “I did tell you that the glories of your own ship are far superior to the reflected glory of another’s.” Looking quickly at Picard, Klag added, “No offense, Captain Picard.”

  “None taken, Captain Klag,” Picard said with a hoist of his own dresci. “I’d say we starship commanders are a fairly fortunate lot. At least those of us who have survived in the occupation for any substantial length of time. To our absent friends.”

  Picard drank, and Klag followed suit with an agreeable grunt. “Hear, hear,” Riker said, then raised his own cup. The face of his own recently deceased father, as well as those of far too many dead comrades, flashed across his mind’s eye. Tasha Yar. Marla Aster. Susan Lomax. Matthew Barnes, Mwuate Wathiongo, Razka of Sauria, and so many others who died during the recent fighting on Tezwa.

  And Data, who had been among the Enterprise’s most recent casualties.

  So is this what I have to look forward to as Titan’s skipper? he thought, suddenly feeling glum. Decades of regrets, eulogies, solemn speeches—and drinking without my wife.

  Riker set his tankard back on the bar, a bit harder than he’d intended. He came to a decision as he recalled a recent, very hard-learned life lesson. Mere days after receiving his latest promotion, he had learned that there was far more to a captain’s lot in life than grim sobriety.

  “You look like a man who’s ready to pay his tab,” Cap observed with a wry smile.

  “I am, actually.” He turned to Picard. “It’s about my honeymoon. Three weeks on the Opal Sea.”

  “I believe, Captain, that you declared that subject off-limits,” Picard said, his eyebrows aloft with mild surprise.

  Riker smiled. “I changed my mind. Call it captain’s prerogative.”

  “You seem uninjured, Captain Riker,” said Klag in a teasing voice. “It could not have been a terribly successful honeymoon.”

  Well aware of the Klingon belief that a shattered clavicle on the wedding night is a portent of good luck, Riker favored Klag with a lopsided grin. “Maybe my sickbay is just better equipped than yours.”

  Riker noticed that he had become the focus of the intense attention of perhaps a dozen of his fellow skippers. Carefully arranging his thoughts, he considered where best to begin his tale….

  That day started with the mother of all hangovers. I woke up with my hands bound behind me, facedown on moist, slippery wood with a snippet of weird Pelagian music playing over and over in my head. Trouble was, I hadn’t had anything to drink.

  Actually, I ought to back up a few hours and explain how I ended up in the smelly bilge of that rickety old wooden sailing ship in the first place.

  Deanna—my new bride—and I had arrived on Pelagia two days earlier. You may or may not have heard of the place. It’s a Class-M planet dominated by oceans. The only landmasses on the entire globe are chains of volcanic islands, and the weather is damned close to paradise almost from pole to pole, nearly all year long. The planet’s single biggest vacation destination is called the Opal Sea, a place of iridescent green water, golden sandy beaches, and almost uniformly friendly humanoid natives.

  And pirates.

  No kidding. Pirates.

  With wooden ships.

  Into which they sometimes toss hostages that they catch unawares while jogging on their planet’s idyllic golden beaches.

  I admit, I wasn’t as vigilant as I should have been. On the other hand, this was my honeymoon. Bridegrooms usually don’t expect to get clonked over the head at times like this.

  I suppose I was mesmerized by the foamy boundary between the surf and the sand, watching the dawn beginning to brighten the water, when somebody coldcocked me. The pirates must have had someone lying in wait for me at the beach, down by the rocks. I’m still not sure exactly how it happened, but I got hit from behind, judging from the pain I could still feel in the back of my head as I pushed myself up to my knees in the dim, swaying, briny-smelling room that I soon learned was the hold of an honest-to-gods Barbary Coast–style pirate ship.

  My first attempt to get my feet under me sent me sprawling straight to the slick wooden deck, and the noise evidently attracted the attention of a pair of low-ranking pirates. They were male Pelagians, with the same turquoise skin coloration that Deanna and I had adopted for the duration of our stay on—

  “A moment, Will,” Picard said. “You never told me that you and Deanna underwent surgical alterations for your honeymoon trip.”

  Riker tried to react nonchalantly to Picard’s interruption. “It’s a pretty common procedure on Pelagia these days. It helps visitors fit in, and you can have it done on several of the main southern islands, where the tech caps that are enforced on the rest of the planet don’t apply.”

  “I’ve not had the opportunity to visit the place myself,” Picard said. “But I’m familiar with the technological restrictions. They don’t permit any electronics on most of the planet, and limit mechanical and chemical technology to the equivalent of Earth’s Napoleonic Era or earlier.”

  Riker smiled as he recalled the prohibition against food replicators in parts of Paris. “They have a very good reason for it, as it turns out,” he said. “But I’m digressing.”

  “Get up, Fegrr’ep Urr’hilf,” said one of the two pirates in my welcoming committee. “The captain has business with you, heh.”

  Like the freebooters who terrorized the high seas on my home planet around seven centuries ago, these rough, bearded men wore breeches, leather boots, rough shirts—or no shirt—and bandannas. They also fairly bristled with knives, as well as muzzle-loading pistols I recognized from a holodeck pirate scenario I ran a couple of times with Lieutenant Commander Keru, the Enterprise’s stellar-cartographer-turned-security-officer. They almos could have passed for the pirates of the Spanish Main.

  Except for their people’s characteristic turquoise-colored skin.

  “You heard us, Urr’hilf,” said the second pirate. “Captain Torr’ghaff wants to talk to you about collecting the ransom, heh.”

  I figured out quickly that they had mistaken me for somebody else. It was an easy deduction to make, since I didn’t exactly look like myself at the moment. But I hadn’t adopted the name Fegrr’ep Urr’hilf, and had no idea who the hell that was.

  Still, I had to admit that the name had a familiar ring to it. Just as I had to face the fact that this Torr’ghaff, who was evidently my captor, was likely to be pretty unhappy if he were to realize I was somebody other than this Urr’hilf person.

  Better play along, then, I told myself as the two pirates marched me to a ladder and then up onto the ship’s main deck.

  Warm salt spray stung my nose. I squinted into the aquamarine-hued sky, in which the orange sun now stood considerably higher than it had when I’d gone out for my morning jog. Deanna knows I’m gone by now, I thought, figuring maybe three or four hours had passed since my disappearance. She and the others must have mounted a search by now. Surely they’ll—

  “So you could count on Captain Picard to bring the resources of the Enterprise to bear in res
cuing you,” interposed Klag, who then killed off yet another warnog.

  Riker shook his head as he accepted another uttaberry wine from Cap, who had also been listening intently. “Not exactly. At the time, the Enterprise was already where she is right now: in Earth orbit, undergoing repairs at McKinley Station. Deanna and the rest of us came to Pelagia in Captain Picard’s yacht.

  Klag scowled in confusion. “How many people do you humans customarily involve in these ‘honeymoons,’ Riker?”

  “Just two. But Pelagia is becoming a pretty popular Starfleet shore-leave destination. Deanna and I were happy to give some of our shipmates a ride to Pelagia before going off on our own.”

  “Sounds like that was a fortunate decision,” Picard said as Cap handed him a second dresci.

  “Having so many people present on a honeymoon excursion reminds me of a novel I once read when I was an ensign,” said Klag. “It was a tale of interspecies infidelity that involved an Andorian and a Damiani in a romantic septangle. I think you humans would call it an ‘erotic thriller.’ ”

  “Or a bodice-ripper,” Riker said.

  Picard chuckled. “Or perhaps a bedroom farce.”

  “Set in a very large house,” said Cap.

  “Would it be all right if I continued my pirate story?” Riker said with an exasperated sigh.

  “Please,” Klag said.

  So I had to have faith that Deanna and the others were taking steps to find me. And though I had no way to know when I could expect to see them, I found the thought enormously reassuring.

  Without freeing my hands—they were still bound tightly behind me at the wrists with something that felt like slimy rope—my two pirate escorts hustled me past a group of unsavory crew members who busied themselves swabbing decks and adjusting rigging.

  Shortly afterward, I stood before a man who had to be at least two meters tall, a veritable mountain of hirsute muscle. One side of his face bore an impressive, dragon-shaped deep purple tattoo that made him look even more intimidating. His clothing was a good deal more expensive-looking than that of any of his men, and he was clearly in charge.

  “Captain Torr’ghaff, I presume, heh,” I said.

  Standing tall against an all but infinite backdrop of clear aquamarine skies and gleaming green waters, the pirate chieftain looked me slowly up and down, his dark eyes shielded from the dazzling sun by the wide brim of his long-plumed, purple hat. “Fegrr’ep Urr’hilf. Judging from the music you make in your sound recordings, I had expected you would be taller, neh?”

  “I suppose my height doesn’t come across except in person, heh,” I said, still doing my best to nail the local dialect, which I knew the universal translator in my ear could only approximate.

  “Fair enough,” the pirate leader said, raising a sharp cutl—

  “I wasn’t aware, Riker, that Earth had universal translators during the era of wooden wind boats,” Klag said with a smirk.

  Riker sighed. “The Pelagian authorities have made a few exceptions to their tech caps in the interest of public safety.”

  “Ah. Like the ‘sound recordings’ your pirate captor referenced.”

  “No, actually. Sound recordings are made and exchanged on Pelagia by natural means. Some sort of squid or octopus that reproduces sounds with its tympanic membranes.”

  “They use fish as musical instruments?”

  “Do you want to hear this story or not?”

  Klag raised a hand to signal his assent. “Please, proceed.”

  “I am delighted that you weren’t too badly injured by my welcoming party, Fegrr’ep Urr’hilf,” the brigand leader said, slipping the cutlass back into the scabbard that dangled from his purple, silken sash. “I have been an enthusiastic listener for many years, heh.”

  Fegrr’ep Urr’hilf, I thought, considering once again the stubborn snippet of Pelagian native music that I still couldn’t get out of my head. I finally understood why.

  Urr’hilf was a local musician of some considerable repute. He entertained large crowds on islands and sailing vessels all over the planet. Including at the visitor reception centers located on the main southern islands.

  And I realized that he was supposed to be playing at the very seaside hostelry where Deanna and I had been staying. I had seen his pictures—woodcut engravings and painted portraits, actually—all over the lobby and the lounge.

  This guy had kidnapped me thinking I was Fegrr’ep Urr’hilf. And now that I understood what had happened, I realized that between my beard and my minor surgical alterations, I really did bear a better-than-passing resemblance to Urr’hilf.

  Great, I thought, considering the unpleasant reality of the rope that still bound my wrists behind my back. How pissed off is this guy going to be when he realizes how badly he’s goofed?

  But I had an even more immediate concern than my personal safety.

  “I assume I’m the only hostage you took from the beach today, eh?” I asked Captain Torr’ghaff, taking care to avoid provoking him. Hoping it would make my impersonation of Fegrr’ep Urr’hilf more believable, I tried to appear more than a little frightened.

  “You are correct, heh,” Torr’ghaff said.

  I heaved a sigh of relief. So Deanna is probably safe, I thought. Along with the rest of my shipmates. They’ve got to be planning some sort of rescue, tech restrictions or no tech restrictions.

  Torr’ghaff walked slowly around me and my pirate escorts, evidently scrutinizing me carefully. Had the difference between my height and Urr’hilf’s that he had mentioned before really given me away?

  “You aren’t dressed the way I expected either, neh,” he said finally.

  I shrugged. “I don’t wear my stage outfits while running on the beach, heh” was all I could think of to say.

  He seemed to consider this for what felt like an eternity—time always stretches when both your arms are tied behind your back and a man who carries a lot of cutlery seems to be considering carving you into chum and throwing you into the ocean—before shrugging.

  “You’d better hope your people deliver a ransom far richer than you appear to rate just now, eh?” he said at length. The cutthroats flanking me laughed. One of them half-hummed and half-brayed a discordant melody that I assumed to be one of Urr’hilf’s.

  “Captain!” shouted a voice from almost directly overhead. “A ship! Heading right for us!”

  Everyone who stood on the pirate ship’s gently swaying deck or crawled in its rigging, perhaps two dozen nasty pieces of work in all, turned toward where the man in the crow’s nest pointed.

  Approaching far more quickly than should have been possible for a wooden sailing ship, especially on such a calm day, was a three-masted wooden frigate, her turquoise-skinned Pelagian crew visibly busy on the top deck positioning and loading cannons. Hoisted over the mainsail was a skull-headed banner, which I took to be the local equivalent of the Jolly Roger.

  As the frigate heaved to, I began to make out some of her markings. I was surprised to see that they weren’t written in Pelagian. They were in English.

  The ship alongside us was the Enterprise.

  “Forgive my interruption, Riker, but I believe you told us that the Enterprise was in drydock, light-years away from Pelagia.”

  Before Riker could answer, he saw a look of sudden comprehension dawning on Picard’s face. “Of course. The holodeck program I’d saved from the Enterprise-D . It was on the Calypso II’s computer.”

  Riker nodded, grinning. “I guessed that was the work of Commander Keru, the Enterprise’s former stellar cartographer. He had more experience with holographic imaging than anyone else who’d come with us to Pelagia. He also had spent a fair amount of time during his two tours of duty on the Enterprise running pirate holodeck scenarios. I learned later that once Deanna had discovered I was missing, she rounded up the troops and ordered Keru to outfit the Calypso II’s hull with dozens of small holoemitters. Keru found the wooden frigate simulation program in the yacht’s memory banks, an
d used it as a rough-and-ready disguise.”

  “I’m impressed,” Klag said. “Not at the holographic trickery—any fool of an engineer could do that—no, I am taken with such blatant violation of Pelagian law.”

  Riker glanced at Picard. His silent stare felt like an accusation.

  Then Riker looked into his glass. “Exigent circumstances.”

  “Or barroom blarney?” offered Cap, evidently trying to be helpful.

  “If you prefer to think so,” Riker said, content to let the others form their own opinions about that. “But regardless, violations like this one are far more serious if one gets caught.”

  Klag chortled. “True.”

  Picard’s hard stare softened into a grin. “Anyhow…?”

  “Anyhow,” Riker said, and continued.

  The other ship very quickly drew to within grappling distance, as though propelled by supernatural forces.

  And she was, at least from the perspective of the locals. Canvas sails were no match for the maneuvering thrusters of a Sovereign-class starship’s captain’s yacht. As I watched the large, mustachioed Pelagian freebooter who stood on the deck of the wooden Enterprise, twirling a grappling line over his head—I recognized him only then as our Trill security officer Ranul Keru—I hoped that Deanna and the rest of my rescuers were using whatever energy was necessary to keep their power usage shielded from the monitoring stations on the main southern islands.

  They’ve got to be doing that, I realized. After all, they might simply have flown into orbit and beamed me directly to safety. But had they done that, the Pelagian authorities would have detected it—and the Federation would have suddenly found itself embroiled in an embarrassing diplomatic incident.

  I also realized that the yacht’s crew probably couldn’t use the transporter even if they had wanted to; using their shields to avoid detection by the authorities would have used far too much power for that to be possible.

  So we’re reduced to an old-fashioned battle on the high seas, I thought just before Captain Torr’ghaff surprised me by slicing the ropes that had bound my wrists behind me.