Tales from the Captain's Table Page 8

  Too bad, thought the archaeologist in him.

  Then, as Picard was turning to join the Rhitorri at the entrance, something on one of the sculptures caught his eye—and held it. It cannot be, he thought, at a loss for an explanation. And yet, there was no mistaking the evidence of his eyes.

  He would have asked someone about it, except he heard cries coming from the direction of the entrance. Apparently, the scouts they had left in the tunnel had arrived—with reports that the Skellig were right behind them.

  Leaving the sculpture and its epitath behind him, Picard removed his phaser from its place on his jacket and hurried to the entrance. Then, taking up a place between two of the Rhitorri, he waited.

  The raiders weren’t long in coming. They filled the tunnel like a flash flood in their hooded protective suits, their pinched, gray features eminently visible through the convex transparencies of their faceplates.

  Picard fired at one of them, dropping him in his tracks. And the Rhitorri on either side of him, huddled behind the wall of stones they had built up, cut down a few more.

  But stones or no stones, the Skellig found their targets as well. And though they were eventually turned back, they took out three times as many Rhitorri as they lost.

  Normally, that wouldn’t have been a problem. However, most Rhitorri weren’t trained in the use of handweapons. As a peaceful trading society, they had seldom had need of them. So it wasn’t just a matter of how many defenders had fallen. It was also a matter of how many could take their places.

  And those were few, Picard had learned. So few, in fact, that they might not withstand even one more such exchange.

  As he came to that realization, his combadge chirped. Cheering inwardly, he answered it.

  “Picard,” said Capshaw, his voice thin and static-ridden, “are…all right?”

  Picard told him that things could be worse. And as briefly as he could, he described his circumstances to his colleague. “How long until you get here, David?”

  “Maybe a…an hour. Can…out till then?”

  Picard smiled a rueful smile. “Have I a choice?”

  As Capshaw signed off, the clatter of boots started coming from the tunnel. Apparently, the Skellig were ready to take another stab at it.

  And Picard, who had been fine until then, began to experience the first effects of his exposure to the radiation. He started feeling cold, weary, nauseated.

  But he didn’t have the luxury of curling up beneath a blanket. Not if he wanted to keep the Skellig at bay.

  A moment later, the raiders stormed the entrance a second time. Picard aimed and fired at them as best he could, though he was hampered by bouts of shivering and muscle cramps.

  Hearing a snapping sound beside him, he saw his neighbor collapse—his chest caved in by a disruptor blast. But it didn’t stop the human. He turned and fired at the Skellig again.

  And again.

  And again, though his physical misery made it harder and harder for him to concentrate on the task at hand. When his vision began to blur, it rendered the problem almost insurmountable.

  But he kept at it. He might lose this fight. He might perish. But it wouldn’t be because he hadn’t tried.

  Time passed like the Seine in winter, slow and choked with ice. The tunnel erupted with keening cries and flashes of phaser fire, then lay still, then erupted again. Skellig loomed and vanished.

  Picard was slumped against the corpse beside him, firing in what he believed was the direction of the raiders, when it occurred to him that something had changed. The sounds of battle were different, it seemed to him. Or had his hearing begun to fail as well?

  Then he felt something on his arm—a Rhitorri hand, slender and black and covered with fine, feathery hair.

  “It’s over,” said the insectoid.

  “Over…?” Picard muttered, fearing the worst.

  A face swam into his purview—not a Rhitorri visage, but that of a human in a Starfleet environmental suit. After a moment or two, he recognized the fellow.

  “David…?” he said.

  “Affirmative,” the human replied. Then, turning to a similarly equipped colleague, he said, “Get him to sickbay—on the double!”

  As Picard was lifted over someone’s shoulder, he took grim satisfaction from the fact that the Skellig had been turned away. Then, at last, he allowed himself to lose consciousness.

  Picard’s convalescence from radiation sickness in the Wyoming’s well-lit sickbay was punctuated by only a few moments of true clarity. However, he took advantage of each one to tell anyone who would listen that he wanted to return to the planet’s surface.

  Fortunately, his friend Capshaw had decided to linger to make sure the Skellig didn’t come back. So when Picard was finally pronounced fit for the rigors of away status, the Wyoming was still in orbit.

  Gratefully, he beamed down to the Rhitorri city, where Councillor Ch’sallis was kind enough to descend to the tombs with him in person. By then, there wasn’t anything the insectoids wouldn’t do for Picard. According to Ch’sallis, the human had single-handedly held off the Skellig until help arrived.

  Picard was certain that it was an exaggeration. Still, he didn’t argue with it.

  By the time he and Ch’sallis arrived at the entrance to the underground cavern, the stones that had fortified the place had been lugged away. The tombs were once more a free and open venue, though—sadly—there were many new ones to mark the deaths of Picard’s fellow defenders.

  “Which one did you wish to see?” asked the councillor.

  Picard frowned as he surveyed the landscape of Rhitorri memorials in the mixed light of fire and excited electrons. “It was in this area,” he said, gesturing to his right.

  They hadn’t gone more than a hundred paces before they found the sculpture in question. Cut into its face in unmistakable Federation Standard were six words: To bring light into the darkness.

  The words that had graced the plaque on the bridge of the Stargazer, expressing an ethic by which Picard had lived more than twenty years of his life. If it was a coincidence, it was a staggeringly unlikely one.

  “Ah, yes,” said Ch’sallis, admiring the inscription. “This is most unusual—the only marker here that is not rendered in our language.”

  “There must be a story behind it,” Picard suggested.

  The councillor’s mandibles clicked. “Indeed. It harks back to the time of our ancestors’ transit, after they had left the oppression of their homeworld and set out in search of a new one. They were still a year from this star system when they realized a warship was in pursuit of them, its mission to bring them back to Rhitorrus.

  “As soon as they realized they were being pursued, our ancestors’ leader—the individual buried here—sent out a distress call. But as the warship narrowed the gap, no one responded to the transmission. And eventually, the oppressors’ vessel caught up with that of our ancestors.

  “She attacked, and our ancestors fought back. But as you have seen, ours is not a violent sect. There was no possibility of our ancestors staving off the warship on their own. They were on the verge of admitting defeat when, miraculously, another vessel appeared on their sensor screens.

  “It was a Federation starship. Our ancestors weren’t privy to the exchange between the Starfleet captain and the commander of the war vessel, so we can only surmise the nature of it. But we know this—the starship came to interpose herself between our ancestors’ vessel and the aggressor.

  “For what seemed like a long time, the warship hung there in space while her commander assessed the situation. Then she moved off—without the prize she had come for. The starship hadn’t fired a single volley, yet she had sent the war vessel scurrying. And our ancestors were saved…you see?”

  Picard nodded.

  “Afterward, the captain of the starship established a communications link with the captain of my ancestors’ transport, to see if anyone required medical attention. Fortunately, no one did.”

>   “That was fortunate,” Picard agreed.

  “Then he and his starship departed. And had he rescued some other pack of fugitives, that might have been the end of it. However, our vessel’s captain was determined not to forget what the Starfleet ship did for them.

  “Alas, in his effort to memorialize the event, he found that his ship’s logs had been damaged in the warship’s attack. They were spotty, incomplete. This,” said Ch’sallis, indicating the saying on the sculpture, “was visible, but not much else. It was displayed on the bulkhead, just behind where the captain of the Starfleet ship stood. Our ancestors didn’t know what it said, but they gathered it had some special significance.”

  “Did they ever learn its meaning?” Picard asked.

  “Years later,” the Rhitorri told him, “the captain of a Tellarite trading vessel was able to translate it for them when he visited this planet.”

  Picard ran his fingers over the incisions in the stone. He imagined that he could feel the dedication of the stonecutter, the fervor with which he had approached his work.

  “To bring light into the darkness…a beautiful sentiment,” said Ch’sallis, “don’t you think?”

  Picard didn’t remember the incident. But then, it had taken place some twenty years earlier, and he and his crew had responded to hundreds of distress calls since.

  But to think that one of them had enabled this city to exist, and its people to flourish in freedom and fulfillment…it was remarkable, to say the least. And it reminded Picard of the good he had done occasionally, which—now that he thought about it—might possibly have outweighed the bad.

  “He was a great man,” said the Rhitorri of his people’s savior. “A great captain.”

  Picard smiled for the first time in months. Perhaps not yet, he reflected. But given time, maybe he will be.

  Elizabeth Shelby

  Captain of the U.S.S. Trident

  Pain Management

  PETER DAVID

  I can still see it, everywhere I look. Still see her mangled and broken body, with blood just everywhere. Everywhere. Her ripped and burned uniform, the holes in her with the bodily fluids seeping out of her by the liter.

  I see it in my mind’s eye when I’m awake, and I see it in my dreams when I’m asleep. Right now I’m sitting here at the Captain’s Table, staring into my empty glass that had once been filled with Orion whiskey…the new illegal beverage of choice, since Romulan ale became legal during the Dominion War. You could pack Orion whiskey into a photon torpedo, blast it at an enemy vessel, and watch it eat through their shielding and hull. I can feel it inside me even now, scorching its way through my chest, plunging down toward the lining of my stomach. Any solid matter I have in my body from an earlier meal will be devoured by it…probably along with whatever internal organ it may be hiding in.

  So anyway, there’s the empty glass, and you’d think my own reflection would be looking back at me. But no. Instead I see her, which may be a bizarre trick of the light, or the Orion whiskey lifting her image directly out of my conscience and plastering it into the glass so it can haunt me.

  You want to hear about it? I mean, you’re sitting there across the table, looking at me with this weird kind of expression that says you don’t know whether to pity me or feel disgust for me. Which is fine because, honest to God, I don’t know which one to feel either.

  My name? Name’s Shelby. No, not that Shelby. I’m the other one, Elizabeth Shelby. Captain Elizabeth Shelby, which of course you probably know, what with this being the Captain’s Table and all. And the thing I’m talking about…that is, what I was just discussing with you…happened just a few months ago.

  We were in a war. You may have heard. No, not that war. The smaller one. The Selelvian/Tholian War. Two races working in concert with each other, and hauling in a few underhanded allies to boot, such as the Orions, to go toe-to-toe with the Federation. Basically the Selelvians tried to take over the Federation with organized mind control, and the Federation—big shock here—was peeved upon discovering that. And the Tholians took the Selelvians’ side, possibly because they were in cahoots with them from the outset, or maybe they just really, really hated the Federation’s collective guts and saw this as an opportunity to make a move against them.

  I swear, to some degree, I haven’t the faintest idea what’s truly at stake or what we’re fighting about. It’s almost as if we’re fighting just to fight. It’s a colossal waste of time and resources. Almost self-indulgent, if you ask me. But no one did, because I don’t get asked things. I, like any good Starfleet commander, go where I’m told and do what I’m told. And I do that at the helm of the good ship Trident, the best damned ship in the fleet. I’m fully aware that other captains will say the same thing about their vessels, but the advantage I have over them is that I’m actually right.

  When I’m not on her…when I’m not standing on her bridge, watching the stars fly past us as we move…it’s painful, you know? Phantom pain, like what you feel when you lose an arm or a leg, and you could swear that it’s hurting you when it’s gone. Same thing. When the Trident’s not there, it’s like a piece of me is gone. But I learn to manage it. To deal with it. You have to; you can go crazy otherwise.

  So the Trident wasn’t gone per se, but she was out of commission. We’d just taken a pounding in an ambush arranged by a Selelvian and an Orion ship, but we’d managed to cut our way out and leave the wreckage of two enemy vessels floating in space behind us. We were barely able to limp to Starbase Bravo and put in for repairs there.

  Bravo had just about the best repair facilities in the area, and the CO there is an old friend, Frank Kittinger. Frank, or “Kitt” as I sometimes called him, had been Bravo’s first CO, and had come to see the station as his child. Well…a large, floating child. He’d told me any number of times that when he finally eased himself into retirement—which he suspected would be within the next year or two—his greatest hope was that someone like me would take over for him. I told him I can’t see myself leaving the starship life behind but, hey…you never know where Starfleet’s going to send you.

  There we sat at Bravo, feeling the frustration of inactivity that always dogs you when you’re waylaid and in for repair. And then, the next thing I know, Kittinger is summoning me to his office, telling me he’s got someone who wants to talk to me. So I showed up at the requested time of thirteen hundred hours, and my eyes went wide as saucers when I saw who was standing there.

  “Soleta! My God!” I said. I moved forward as if I was going to hug her, and Soleta just stood there and gave me the strangest look. And if you saw Soleta, you’d know why: the long, elegant, pointed ears, the upswept eyebrows, that telltale expression of quiet superiority…all signals of her Vulcan heritage. I stopped before I got within hugging distance and remembered that I wasn’t likely to get any sort of demonstrative behavior from her, even though I’d known her since the days when we’d served together on the Excalibur. She as science officer, me as second-in-command to my future husband, the inestimable Mackenzie Calhoun. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” I said.

  “There’s no reason that you should have,” she replied. “A scientific conference was held here, to discuss the research that was done on the Beings and their ‘ambrosia.’ As one of those who had a very close association to both, it was felt I would be an ideal speaker on the subject.”

  “Lieutenant Soleta was about to head back to the Excalibur and was wondering if you’d be interested in hitching a ride,” Kittinger said. He had a slightly lascivious look in his eyes, and I knew only too well what was going through his mind. He confirmed it when he added, “After all, I’m sure you miss your husband and wouldn’t mind a brief…conference?”

  I was too annoyed with Kittinger’s remarks to say anything at first, but fortunately I didn’t have to. Soleta stepped in and said, “It is a happy aspect of human nature to be with one’s loved ones…just as it is an unhappy aspect of human nature to act in a smarmy or juvenile manner
about it. How fascinating that the two of you lived up and down to your respective potentials.”

  Kittinger mimed being shot to the heart and, after confirming that the Trident would not be up and running for at least a week, I decided to take Soleta up on her offer. The Excalibur was on active patrol along the border of Thallonian space, since Starfleet was concerned about possible Tholian incursions. Soleta was in a long-range runabout, so the trip back wasn’t expected to take that long. “Thank you, by the way,” I told her as she fired up the runabout’s engines.

  She looked at me curiously. “For what?”

  “For throwing yourself on that stupid grenade of a question that Kittinger said. About me and Mac…”

  “I did not consider it a grand gesture of self-sacrifice,” Soleta replied. “He was acting in a boorish manner, and I criticized him for it. Not much need be said beyond that…although, should it be required that I do throw myself upon a grenade on your behalf, I hope it will be over something of more import than a foolish comment from a foolish coworker.”

  “Same here.”

  As we headed back to the Excalibur, Soleta filled me in on all that had been happening on the ship since my departure. Soleta wasn’t exactly one for eager gossip. Rather than reveling in the details, she simply ascribed equal and unenthused importance to everything. Not for such as Soleta was the excited whisper of “Oh, and you’ll never believe what else happened!” She laid out all the latest juicy bits of business in the same matter-of-fact way that one would be entering information into the captain’s log.

  I knew it was pointless to mention this to her, or ask her to spice things up a bit. I truly didn’t think she’d have the faintest idea what I was asking her to do.

  Matters, however, very quickly moved beyond a litany of the latest doings on the Excalibur.

  We had been in space a bit under an hour, with perhaps another two hours or so to the rendezvous point where the Excalibur was to meet us. Suddenly the proximity alarms on the runabout went off. I jumped, startled, but Soleta was far too controlled to allow even the slightest concern to be displayed. “We have company,” was all she said, studying the readings. “A single vessel, but larger than us, moving in fast to starboard. An Orion raiding ship, if I’m not mistaken.”