Tales from the Captain’s Table (9 page)

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

Applying starboard thrusters to fine-tune his course, he headed for the planet in question.

Picard was less than twenty million kilometers from the world’s upper atmosphere when he noted the presence of several small, quick ships in the vicinity. At first, he assumed that they belonged to the species on the planet’s surface.

Then the
Nadir
’s computer identified the ships, matching them with file data. Picard swore vividly under his breath. Skellig raiders—four of them, converging on the shuttle’s position.
No
, he thought, as yet another one registered on his screen.
Five
.

He had run into their kind before. They ran in packs like this one, preying on anyone who possessed something of value and was less than expert at defending it.

Had the
Nadir
been their primary objective, they would have closed with Picard some time ago. More likely, they had entered this system in pursuit of something else. But now that a Starfleet shuttle had fallen into their laps, they would hardly be so foolish as to ignore it.

After all, there were those who would pay dearly for Starfleet technology—even the modest sort to be found in a shuttlecraft. And if there was a dignitary or high-ranking officer inside, he would fetch the Skellig a tidy ransom.

Or so they might think. The truth was that Starfleet didn’t pay ransoms, and never had.

Whatever their motivation, the Skellig came at the shuttle with their weapons pulsing. Green disruptor beams sliced through the void, forcing Picard to weave a precarious path among them.

Even if he had wanted to battle the raiders, he wasn’t in a position to do so—the
Nadir
simply wasn’t equipped for it. His only chance was to dip below the cloud layer obscuring the planet’s surface and find a place to hide.

As Picard made a break for the planet, the Skellig dogged him with bursts of disruptor fire—and scored a tail hit that slammed Picard back in his seat. The
Nadir
’s impulse engine, which was already on its last legs, fizzled out altogether—just as the shuttle entered the mantle of cloud.