Tales from the Captain’s Table (11 page)

As the council had predicted, the Rhitorri’s shields didn’t hold much longer. Perhaps an hour later, power to the emitters petered out, leaving the city undefended.

The Skellig ships were too big to negotiate the narrow spaces between the towers. However, their transporter technology could reach anywhere. And no doubt it would have, except something happened almost immediately after the loss of the city’s shields.

The vents in the Rhitorri’s towers opened and spewed a radioactive white gas, which the breezes spread eagerly from one end of the city to the other. Before long, the air was full of it.

And with so much radiation in the atmosphere, it was impossible for the Skellig to beam their soldiers down to the planet’s surface. Their vessels crisscrossed above the city impatiently like serpents hungering for their prey. But for the moment, at least, it had been denied to them.

Picard watched all this through a window in one of the towers. Unfortunately, his vantage point wasn’t insulated from the radiation. But then, given the Rhitorri’s natural resistance to it, they hadn’t bothered to insulate
any
part of the city.

He didn’t feel any effects from his exposure yet, but he knew he would eventually. Not that it mattered. He had been responsible for so many deaths on the
Stargazer
, what was one more—especially if it was his own?

And in the meantime, he had bought the Rhitorri some time—enough to carry out the second part of their plan. After all, the Skellig hadn’t been turned away altogether. They could still dispatch small craft to round up and capture the insectoids.

Which was why the Rhitorri were descending into a network of tombs below the city, where six generations’ worth of ancestral remains had been ceremoniously laid for safekeeping. According to the council, the Rhitorri had emigrated to this world only twenty years earlier, but they had multiplied at a rate much faster than other species’. In fact, there were only about a hundred of them when they first arrived, and in this city alone they numbered in the thousands.

“Come,” said Ch’sallis, who was standing beside Picard. “The others await us in the tombs.”

The human nodded and followed him out of the windowed chamber.

Picard walked among the living and the dead in the tombs below the Rhitorri city, watching childen and the elderly hunker down amid the burial monuments of their ancestors.

There were civilizations on ancient Earth that had favored internment in underground chambers. Picard had seen a few of them firsthand. They were somber places, cramped and ill-lit and unadorned.

Not so among the Rhitorri. Their tombs were spacious and bright with both torches and artificial light sources, celebrating the dead rather than casting them into shadow. And unlike the stark, half-forgotten graves of Earth’s ancient cultures, the insectoids’ were marked by elegant sculptures and festooned with sprays of fresh-cut flowers.

As the Rhitorri carried blocks of uncut stone to the cavern’s only entrance, hoping to keep the Skellig from forcing their way in, Picard took a moment to examine some of the sculptures. They were beautiful, the pure expressions of artistic souls.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t read the sprightly-looking inscriptions on them. They were rendered in an alien language, and his translator could only work on the spoken word.

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.