Tales from the Captain's Table Page 6

  “Glad to hear it. Just bring her back in one—” Van Dusen stopped, looking appalled at himself. “—or, um, two months, whenever you’re done on Hydra IV.”

  It was difficult for Picard to make out Van Dusen’s complexion from where he sat, but he was certain the fellow had turned a deep shade of red.

  “Thanks again,” said Picard.

  Activating the thrusters, he brought the shuttle about until it was pointed at the bay doors. When they parted for him, revealing a slice of starry space, he nudged the craft forward.

  Thanks to the transparent, semipermeable barrier stretched across the aperture, Van Dusen didn’t have to worry about the facility losing air. All he had to do was let Picard know when the doors had finished opening.

  “All clear,” he said.

  Applying a little more thrust, Picard sailed into the embrace of the vacuum, allowing the doors to slide closed behind him. As soon as he was clear of the rehab facility, he laid in a course. Then he engaged the Nadir’s refurbished impulse drive and took her to one-quarter light speed.

  The Hydra system wasn’t that far away. At warp two point two, a speed the shuttle could sustain for an extended period, the journey wouldn’t take more than a month.

  It sounded like a long time. But then, it would have taken just as long to wait for a supply ship bound for Hydra. And then he would have had to interact with her captain—a situation he might have enjoyed at a different stage of his life, but didn’t think he would enjoy now.

  After all, captains liked to talk about their ships. And of all subjects in the universe, that was the one Picard was most determined to avoid.

  Seven days out from Van Dusen’s rehab facility, Picard transmitted a subspace message to Elizabeth Wu, letting her know that he was on his way.

  Wu had served as his second officer years earlier, distinguishing herself time and again as perhaps the most dependable member of his command staff. When he first met her, her literal interpretation of Starfleet regs drove his other officers crazy. But in time she learned to ease up in that regard, and she became one of the more popular figures on the ship.

  Picard was surprised when she told him she was thinking about joining her sister Victoria as a researcher at the Federation’s Hydra IV colony. But then, scientific inquiry had been Wu’s first love, and it had loomed larger in her thoughts with each breakthrough reported by her sister.

  The captain too had possessed a passion for science once. In fact, it had nearly derailed his career in Starfleet. However, in his case, it was a love of archaeology rather than arboreal genetics, and it had eventually lost out to his yearning for the stars.

  Finally, Wu had given in to her attraction and asked for a leave of absence. And Picard had granted it. But he had also left the door open for her in case she wished to return. If the life of a research scientist turned out not to be all she imagined, she could always go back to work for him.

  That was nearly nineteen years ago. To his knowledge, Wu had never looked back.

  But Picard had made a point of keeping in touch with her, and she had done the same with him. He served as her conduit for news about her favorite crewmates and she kept him posted on the latest developments in her field, and over time they became even better friends than when they were working side by side.

  Then again, he was no longer compelled to see Wu as a subordinate. She was simply someone for whom he harbored a good deal of affection and respect.

  Which was why Picard was on his way to Hydra IV. Over the years, Wu had become his sounding board, an objective source of wisdom who knew intimately the workings of a starship but no longer had a stake in what went on there.

  He needed that source of wisdom now. He needed it more than he had needed anything in his entire life.

  Noting an unusual blip on one of his monitors, Picard put aside his thoughts and leaned forward to take a closer look. But it was nothing to worry about. Just an ion squall, too small to justify a course change.

  A good thing, he mused. The sooner he reached Hydra IV and Wu, the better.

  It wasn’t until near the end of Picard’s second week on the Nadir that he found himself sitting upright in bed, his breath coming hard, his sheets twisted and dank with perspiration.

  It had happened several times before over the last couple of months. And like those other times, there was an image emblazoned on his mind’s eye.

  An image of a ship.

  She was rust-colored, her long, intrusive bow protruding from what looked like the back of a centrally ridged turtle shell. But it wasn’t only in his dreams that Picard had seen her. He had done so in reality as well.

  Her captain never identified himself, never gave even a hint as to his motive. And no one on the Stargazer could identify his ship, never having seen her like before.

  But she had plenty of firepower. Her first volley tore up the Stargazer’s shields. Her second, which came immediately on the heels of the first, sent the Federation ship lurching sideways and gouged her hull.

  Suddenly, Picard found himself in fiery, smoking chaos. Away from the bridge, it was even worse. A half-dozen decks were hemorrhaging atmosphere into the vacuum.

  And not just atmosphere. On Picard’s viewscreen, there were bodies pinwheeling through space, some of them dead but others still horribly alive.

  His eyes burning with carbon fumes and escaped coolant, Picard had risen from his seat to get a look at his colleagues. But as he did, his foot struck something.

  Looking down, he saw that it was Vigo, his weapons officer. As big as the fellow was, it couldn’t have been anyone else. And there was blood oozing from a blackened gash in his temple.

  Kneeling, Picard had felt Vigo’s thick blue neck for a pulse. There wasn’t any. The weapons officer was lifeless, inert.

  “Picard to sickbay!” he had cried out. “I need a team here on the double!”

  He had received an answer from his chief medical officer, but it was too garbled to make out. Apparently, the attack had damaged the intercom system as well.

  And the enemy was coming about in a leisurely loop, preparing for a third and doubtless final strike.

  Picard was compelled to improvise, and quickly. He had learned in his Academy days that an adversary was least prepared for a taste of his own tactics. The enemy had successfully relied on the element of surprise; Picard would do the same.

  Instead of trying to expand the distance between the ships, he had his conn officer wheel and go to warp—but just for the merest fraction of a second. It brought them nose-to-nose with their unsuspecting assailant, closer even than they had been before. Then the Stargazer fired everything she had left in her batteries.

  The enemy’s core must have been compromised, because she went up in a spasm of matter-antimatter fury. The battle, strangely, was over. However, the Stargazer could hardly be declared the winner.

  Her systems were failing one by one, most every deck a sparking, flaming death trap. The death toll was at least twenty. And it was only a matter of time before their warp core breached and they shared the fate of their mysterious attacker.

  So Picard ordered everyone who was still alive to abandon ship. The survivors piled into escape craft with whatever bodies they could find and sliced into the void. Then they watched the Stargazer diminish with distance, her once-proud lines skewed at a sad and lonely angle.

  It took weeks for a rescue vessel to pick them up. By then, the survivors in Picard’s shuttle looked half-dead themselves, all of them having lost friends and comrades.

  But Picard had it worse than any of them. He had to live with the knowledge that those comrades had perished on his watch.

  Earlier in his career, there were those who had questioned his ability to command. At the time, he had believed them misguided. Now he wondered if they hadn’t been possessed of more insight than he had given them credit for.

  Two and a half weeks out from the rehab facility, Picard recalled something that had eluded him since his co
urt-martial.

  Clytemnestra, he thought. Of course.

  It was the name of the cat that had attacked him on the gray cusp of morning as he slept with her mistress. To that point, Picard had believed that she was his friend—the cat, not the woman. Though now that he thought about it, the same could have been said of the woman as well.

  After all, the cat’s mistress—Philipa Louvois—had attacked him with much the same enthusiasm. However, she had done it in the course of a court-martial, where he was forced to sit and listen to her describe the charges leveled at him by Starfleet.

  It was standard operating procedure whenever captains came home without their vessels. Nothing to worry about, Picard had been told. Still, it had torn him up inside.

  In the end, he was exonerated in the eyes of Starfleet. But in his own eyes? That was a different matter entirely.

  He could have done more, Picard told himself over and over again, numbing himself in gin mills where all the customers had scars like his—the kind no one could see. He could have seen the attack coming, he insisted in the confines of his own mind. He could have taken measures to prevent it.

  It was his friend and first officer Gilaad Ben Zoma who finally pulled him out of his downward spiral, or there was no telling how low he might have sunk. However, the questions persisted.

  Could he have done more? Could he have saved his ship?

  As for the deaths of his crewmen—Vigo and Yojaleya and Satran and the others—Picard hadn’t gotten over them. They lingered with him like a bad toothache, a pain that seemed destined to remain with him the rest of his life.

  Somewhere along the line, he decided he didn’t want to go through this a second time. He didn’t want to be responsible for so many lives anymore. The loss of those who had trusted him and depended on him had stripped him of his will to command.

  Ever since he could remember, he had wanted to captain a ship that sailed the stars. He had defied his father to follow that dream. And now it had turned bitter in his mouth, like ashes.

  But what else was he to do with his life? He didn’t think he could stand remaining in Starfleet as a paper-pusher. And if he resorted to a position in commercial shipping, he would again be taking responsibility for a crew.

  Still, he had to do something, and he couldn’t solicit ideas from those who had abandoned the Stargazer with him. It was too difficult to face them—even Ben Zoma, with whom he had quarreled after he pulled himself together.

  It was Picard’s hope that Wu would have a recommendation for him. If not, he didn’t know where to turn.

  Picard was three-quarters of the way to Wu’s colony when he thought of Ensign Jovinelly.

  Even in the twenty-fourth century, some people acted on the basis of superstition. Jovinelly’s compelled her to touch the bronze dedication plaque that hung near the turbolift on the Stargazer’s bridge.

  As a shuttle specialist working under Lieutenant Chang, she didn’t get up there very often. But when she did, she ran her fingertips over the plaque before she went about her business.

  To bring light into the darkness. Those were the words inscribed there, the burden with which ship and crew were charged.

  Once, Picard asked Jovinelly why she felt so compelled to caress the plaque. She blushed and told him it was for good luck. “But why that?” he asked, his curiosity unsatisfied. “Why that rather than some other artifact on the ship?”

  Jovinelly didn’t have an answer for him.

  Despite her efforts to keep her luck in good supply, it ran out the day the ship was attacked. Hers was one of the bodies they removed from the Stargazer before they fled from the ship in escape craft.

  Picard sat back in his chair and sighed. Instead of bringing light into the darkness, he had allowed the lights of twenty-four of his crew to be extinguished. Quite an accomplishment, he told himself.

  It was then that he saw the red-on-black engine-failure graphic appear on the Nadir’s operations monitor. That cannot be right, he thought. Frowning, he punched in a code to assure himself that it was a mistake.

  But the computer said it wasn’t.

  His warp engines, considerably smaller than those that had propelled the Stargazer but powerful nonetheless, were in the process of going down—and his impulse engines weren’t far behind. And while there didn’t appear to be any danger of an antimatter containment breach, the Nadir wouldn’t be able to venture much farther on her own steam.

  Not even to the nearest starbase, he thought, much less all the way to Hydra IV.

  Picard swore beneath his breath. He had initiated diagnostic cycles at all the prescribed intervals, and they hadn’t alerted him to any engine malfunctions.

  Working at his console, he dug a little deeper—and found that some of the diagnostic circuits weren’t working either. They had deteriorated, as if something had eaten away at them.

  But what?

  He had barely posed the question when the answer occurred to him: The ion squall. Maybe it hadn’t been as innocuous as it seemed. Or maybe Van Dusen’s people hadn’t done a good enough job insulating the craft from such phenomena.

  Either way, the storm’s energy particles could have gotten into the shuttle and damaged some of her circuitry—and kept Picard in the dark about the state of his engines.

  In fact, the engine problem might have been attributable to the squall as well. If it had penetrated the data conduits, it could just as easily have invaded the plasma manifolds.

  Either way, Picard had a problem. He couldn’t remain in interstellar space—not when his only sources of generated power were running out, and his battery stores were limited. More than likely, he would perish before anyone found him.

  He gauged the distance he was likely to be able to cover before the engines died altogether. Then he called up a map of all the star systems in that range.

  There was only one. But among its seventeen planets was a specimen that had been classified capable of supporting human life, and according to its Federation survey—which had taken place two and a half decades earlier—it was devoid of sentience. It was more than Picard could have hoped for.

  Charting a course for the system in question, he made the necessary helm adjustments. Then he sent out a distress call and hoped for the best.

  The Nadir’s warp engines eventually ground to a halt. However, they were cooperative enough to take Picard to the brink of his target system first.

  It was good timing; he would have had to drop to impulse to enter the system anyway. As he did so, keeping a close watch on the failing sublight drive, his communications monitor began to blink—indicating an incoming transmission.

  Apparently, one of his colleagues had received his distress call and was responding to it. Picard wondered which of them it might be. Minshaya? Capshaw? Nguyen?

  Whoever it was would have smiled at first at the chance to poke fun at him. That, after all, was what happened to captains who placed themselves in need of rescue.

  Then his savior would have remembered what happened to the Stargazer, and he or she would have curbed the impulse to mock him. No one made fun of a man who had lost what Picard had lost. Still, at some point he would have to face their sympathy, and that would be far worse than their ridicule.

  At least Van Dusen had spared him that.

  Tapping a stud, he said, “Picard here.”

  “Good to hear you’re all right,” said a familiar voice.

  Capshaw, he thought. “Thank you for responding, David.”

  “What’s your situation?”

  “I have reached the outskirts of the system for which I was headed. Warp engines have failed. I still have impulse, but that will go down soon as well.”

  “Acknowledged. We’ll be there in a—”

  The rest of Capshaw’s sentence crackled off into unintelligibility. Picard manipulated his comm controls in an attempt to restore the clarity of the link, but he couldn’t. And a moment later, he lost it altogether.

  He sighe
d. Damn.

  It wasn’t the fault of his equipment, as far as he could tell. Some celestial anomaly, then, interfering with the subspace signal. It didn’t happen often, but it happened.

  Nonetheless, Picard knew that Capshaw was coming for him. He just didn’t know when.

  Sitting back in his seat, he checked his sensors and called up a visual of the world he had identified earlier. It was mostly occluded by cloud cover, making what was underneath a bit of a mystery. For all he knew, it was impenetrable jungle down there, or a maze of savage mountain ranges.

  But he didn’t expect to have to stay there long. A couple of days at most, not including the thirteen or fourteen hours it would take the Nadir to make the journey across intervening space. By then, Capshaw’s ship would certainly have caught up with him.

  Then he saw something else on his sensor readouts—an unmistakable nest of ion trails surrounding the planet in question. But ion trails meant ship traffic. Why would there be so much traffic around an uninhabited world?

  Unless it isn’t uninhabited.

  Activating long-range sensors, Picard scanned the planet. Indeed, it was populated, if only sparsely, by a single species—one the shuttle’s computer couldn’t seem to identify.

  That put an entirely new spin on the situation. Fortunately, the Federation’s noninterference directive wouldn’t loom as an issue—not if those on the planet had taken to space already.

  No, Picard thought, correcting himself. They had come from space. Otherwise, they would have shown up on that Federation survey twenty-five years earlier. So like him, they were relatively new to this world. Colonists, possibly.

  However, Picard couldn’t be sure how they would react to his presence. Not everyone warmed to the idea of an uninvited visitor. Of course, he had the option of contacting the authorities and explaining his plight before he put down, but ultimately he decided against it.

  Better to play it safe, he thought, and keep mum. With a little luck, he would be able to land his craft and hide until help arrived. He frowned bitterly. After all, I have been so lucky until now.