Tales from the Captain's Table

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  I had to agree. Her sharp ears had detected his approach even though his footfall was so soft that I hadn’t heard a thing. There was a bend in the cave so that our view of the entrance was not perfect, but Soleta hadn’t needed anything save her hearing to guide her.

  Dropping any pretense of not being heard, the remaining Orions conferred just beyond the entranceway in low, angry growls. None of them bothered to drag their fallen comrade away. Obviously they had other matters on their minds, or what passed for their minds.

  “Come out!” one of them called angrily.

  “Oh yes. That is likely to occur,” murmured Soleta.

  “We know there’s only two of you!” came the same voice. “We know you are females!”

  Soleta had been right. The Orions had impressive olfactory prowess, having been able to detect our scents despite the steady rain that should have helped to wash them away.

  “Come out,” continued the Orion, “and we will not harm you!”

  “I suspect,” Soleta noted, “that he is lacking in candor.”

  But then the same speaker said, much to my surprise, “Captain Shelby! You’re worth more alive to us than dead! Don’t do something stupid like stage a fight here that you won’t win!”

  Soleta and I exchanged surprised glances. Well, truthfully, I looked surprised. She just appeared curiously thoughtful. I mouthed, “How the hell…?”

  She shrugged and mouthed back, “Passenger manifest.”

  Of course. Having found the wreckage, they might well have been able to extract information from the computer, even in its battered and broken state. That information would have included the name and rank of the personnel aboard the runabout. Their little stunt about knowing that it was “just us girls” hunkered down in the cave seemed slightly less impressive now.

  We made no reply. What would have been the purpose? It wasn’t as if I was about to surrender to them, and I had little incentive to engage in any sort of give-and-take with Orion pirates. They’d shot us down, for God’s sake. What was there to say to them?

  I ran the mental image of their ship through my head. Based on the size of the ship, I estimated that they probably had a crew complement of anywhere from eight to ten. So they outnumbered us, at most, five-to-one. The problem is, once you’re outnumbered, it almost doesn’t matter by how much once you start getting above three-to-one.

  “No one is going to find you! No one is going to rescue you!” continued our unseen opponent.

  “This is a waste of time!” I heard another voice say. “Let’s just kill them and be done with it!”

  “She can be a valuable hostage!”

  “And what are we supposed to do with her?” snapped the new speaker. “Even if we do hold her up for demands, what do you think the Federation will do? Knuckle under? They will not bargain with us. So we kill her. So what? The Federation will just promote another to take her place.”

  “I wonder if it will be me. I’d be so honored,” Soleta said. Despite the dire circumstances, it was all I could do not to smile at that. It was hard to believe she was able to perceive anything vaguely humorous about the situation.

  “So what do we do? Walk away from opportunity?” asked the first one.

  “I’ll show you what we do….”

  I did not like the sound of that. I liked it even less when a hollow, tink tink sound echoed through the cave, and then I saw it.

  A bomb, rolling right toward us.

  To be specific, it was a thermal grenade. Spherical and about six inches in diameter, the moment it exploded it would flood the cave with enough raw heat to bake the both of us. I could have tried to fire my phaser at it, but the instant any sort of beam came into contact with it, it would detonate…as opposed to our current situation where we have about five seconds to react.

  Soleta was just staring at it, apparently frozen in indecision.

  I didn’t hesitate.

  I launched myself forward, not having the slightest idea as to whether it would work or not, but knowing I had to try. I threw myself flat upon the sphere, smothering it with my body, desperate to shield Soleta from the full intensity of the blast.

  Just as they always said it would, my life flashed before my eyes. Mackenzie Calhoun filled every moment of it, even the parts he hadn’t been around for. My mind just dropped him in there, as if nothing in my life that had transpired when he wasn’t around mattered, and so he might as well have been there for it all.

  Soleta continued to make no move. Instead she went on staring, but now I was seeing there wasn’t indecision in her face. Rather than that, she looked almost mortified, even slightly annoyed.

  That was gratitude for you. Here I was throwing myself upon the grenade in a desperate bid to save her life, and all she could do was look at me scoldingly. What an ingrate. What a useless…

  It was by that point I realized that the grenade was not detonating. It would have done so by that point, should have done so. I moaned softly, realizing.

  Soleta was ahead of me, and had been the entire time. “Why,” she asked reasonably, “would they simply blow up someone they want to take hostage? Obviously…”

  “They would not. They’d roll in a dud first as a warning that they could kill us if they were so inclined.” I rolled off the grenade, held it up, and turned it over. The firing mechanism had been removed. Clever. After all, they wouldn’t want us to be able to turn around and lob it back out at them. “I do not think,” I said softly, as Soleta came over to me and took the grenade from me, studying it, “that I have ever felt quite so stupid as I do right now.”

  And Soleta looked at me with something as close to incredulity as her personality would allow her to display. “Stupid? Without hesitation you threw yourself upon a destructive device with the intention of saving me. You might label it as ‘misguided,’ perhaps. I, and any other rational being, would call it ‘heroic.’ ”

  I shrugged, slightly mollified, but not by much.

  And then the rough voice of one of the Orions bellowed through the night. “Listen to me!” he called out. “We’re not going to spend forever at this! Grabbing you as a hostage is one thing, but we’re not putting our own necks on the line, and we’re not standing out here forever! Hostages are a dime a dozen, and if we don’t take you, we’ll run into another sometime! The next bomb we lob in there will not be disarmed, I guarantee it!”

  Soleta had her tricorder out and was studying it, glancing every so often in the direction of the Orions.

  “This is your last warning!” called the Orion. “You have one minute to come out of there, slowly and with your hands over your head, or you can take a good long look around you to see what your tomb will look like! And we’ll take what bits of you are left and send you to the Federation with a note attached, boasting of yet another Starfleet officer we killed. It’s your decision!”

  “His bioreadings are remaining consistent and within the norm,” Soleta informed me quietly. “He is not bluffing.”

  “So we die in here,” I said slowly, “or we go out, get captured, be helpless prisoners of the Orions as they do whatever the hell they want to us, and end up either returned to the Federation bereft of pride and possibly parts of our bodies, or we die anyway.”

  “You make it seem a far less attractive choice, put that way.”

  “You know what I say?” I told her, and I held the phaser up and set it for maximum power. “I say we take out a few of them as we go.”

  “You are aware,” she said, “that even if we break through into the open, it is only logical that they have sharpshooters positioned at strategic points above and around us.”

  “Yes. I’m fully aware of that.” I took a deep breath. “What’s the Klingon saying? ‘Today is a good day to die.’”

  She rested a hand on my shoulder and said, “That may well be the case, Captain.” And then, before I knew what was happening, consciousness spun away from me as Soleta added, “But not for you.”

  Ever
ything went black and stayed that way for a time…I didn’t know how long. When I awoke, it was on the floor of the cave, and everything was different. The rain had stopped. Shadows had shifted enough to tell me that dawn was breaking. I could smell the moisture in the air…and more…I smelled death in the air as well.

  I staggered to my feet, my head whirling. The Vulcan nerve pinch. She had dropped me with that damnable nerve technique. I’d always wondered what it would be like to come around from that, and now I knew: My head was splitting and my mouth was dry. It was like a hangover, except without the part about waking up in someone else’s bed and wondering how you got there…which is yet another story for another time.

  I started to call out her name, but instantly kept my mouth shut. There was no telling what to expect. I glanced around and saw that both phasers were gone. I was weaponless. But since time had passed and I wasn’t inside the bowels of an Orion ship, I knew that I wasn’t in enemy hands.

  My legs were stiff, my muscles sore, so it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to proceed with caution. But I did my best, leaning against the wall of the cave, trying to peer around the corner to see what I could see.

  There were large feet in evidence, attached to an equally large body that was prone. That was the one that Soleta had killed earlier, but then I could see others as well. At least two more, lying there unmoving. Some sort of insects were buzzing around them, and more were coming by the minute.

  I drew closer, closer. One of them had a weapon still gripped in his paw, a huge-barreled, fearsome-looking blaster of some sort. Hardly possessing the sophistication of a phaser, but it would blow a hole through you just as easily as anything else. I pried his gun from his cold, dead fingers. It was incredibly heavy. I didn’t even bother trying to pick up a second, because it required two hands just to hold the one I’d salvaged.

  Stepping carefully around the bodies, I made my way out of the cave, squinting against the daylight.

  More bodies. More Orions.

  And Soleta.

  She lay there in the open, staring up at the sun. Her arms lay flat, her hands open, a phaser resting in each palm. She was covered with green blood…her own. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of wounds she’d sustained.

  I jumped, thinking that out the corner of my eye, I’d seen an Orion. And I had, but he wasn’t moving. He was on an upper ridge, slumped forward, and there was another near him, and yet another off in a corner. All dead. And more Orions, having ringed the immediate area, all blown to hell and gone.

  I realized what had happened. Soleta had come charging out of there, phasers blasting. She had sustained various hits from the Orions, but that hadn’t stopped her as she’d mowed through them, made it into the open, targeted and fired upon the sharpshooters and snipers that she’d correctly intuited would be there. Whether she’d depended upon her own heightened senses or her tricorder, I couldn’t say.

  They’d wounded her, and she kept coming. They’d killed her and yet she hadn’t allowed the mortal hits to stop her as she picked them off one by one. I could see it in my mind’s eye, and for some reason it was all in painfully slow motion, blasts tearing the air around her, ripping through her, and she simply would not be stopped.

  I knelt next to her and moaned in grief as I looked down at her lifeless eyes.

  An instant later I let out a very un-Starfleet shriek as those lifeless eyes shifted every so slightly and gazed straight at me.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed, “oh my God. Soleta…are you…can you talk…?”

  She breathed two words then, and I had to strain to hear them, but I was able to make them out.

  “No…pain…” she whispered.

  For a moment I had no idea what to do. Moving her seemed unthinkable. But I couldn’t just leave her there. Nor could I just sit and wait around to see what would happen next.

  The tricorder lay near her and, miraculously, was undamaged. Quickly I used it to do a sensor scan of the area and within seconds had located the whereabouts of the Orion vessel. I dropped the heavy blaster, picked up both phasers, attached both of them to my belt, and then crouched and picked up Soleta. She tried to shake her head, and the words “Leave me” rattled in her throat, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Instead I lifted her up and then slung her over one shoulder. Despite the fact that not a single muscle in her body was functional, she felt as if she weighed nothing. I couldn’t help but worry that it was because she’d lost just about every bit of blood she’d had.

  I staggered through the forest, almost slipping several times in the mud, monitoring the tricorder to make sure that we remained on track. Several times I was convinced that Soleta had breathed her last, but just when I thought she was gone, she would murmur those two words again—“No pain”—and I knew that, for a little while longer, she was with me.

  I made it to a clearing and there, big as life, was the Orion vessel. Gently I laid Soleta down and put a finger to my lips, indicating that I didn’t want her to speak. The hatch was open and slowly I made my way into the ship.

  The hatch opened right up onto the bridge, and I could see immediately that the controls were so simple that I could have operated them before I’d finished my first year at the Academy. There was plunder, for lack of a better term, all over the place, scattered around heedlessly.

  But the slovenliness of their living situation wasn’t of consequence to me. Rather the biggest problem I had to deal with at that moment was the general smell of the place, which was almost enough to make me retch. Just as I felt the few remaining contents of my stomach begin to roil in protest, an Orion strode forward from the rear of the ship, whistling aimlessly, hitching up his pants in such a way as to indicate he’d just emerged from the facilities.

  He glanced up, saw me, gasped, and before he could even reach for his weapon, I shot him. He was blasted back off his feet and slammed against the far wall. He slid to the ground, his chest still smoking, and I wasted no time in pitching him off the ship. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but I suspected dead, and I didn’t care in either event.

  Quickly I checked the rest of the ship to make sure he’d been the only one left on guard. Such was the case, as it turned out, and quickly I brought Soleta in and rested her in one of the chairs. I switched on the homing beacon I’d brought out of the cave, closed the hatch, fired up the engines, and in minutes had us in space.

  Setting the autoguidance system for Bravo, since we were still closer to there than to the Excalibur rendezvous point, I rummaged around until I found what I’d hoped I would—a Federation medical kit. I had no idea where they might have stolen it from and, at the moment, I wasn’t in a position to care. I moved toward Soleta, fully expecting to find that she had died during takeoff. But no. How she was clinging to life, I could not even begin to guess. It seemed there wasn’t a square inch of her uniform that wasn’t soaked in blood, and I realized I was now covered with it as well, having carried her.

  “No…pain,” she whispered yet again.

  “You’re not feeling any pain?” I asked gently, tending to her wounds as best I could with the materials at hand.

  From somewhere deep within her, she found the strength to answer the question. “Oh, no…pain…is there. I am…managing it. Ignoring it. That is how…one deals…with pain. You do not let…it get the best…of you. Do…whatever…it takes…”

  Then, having exhausted herself in replying to me, she allowed her head to sag back in the chair. Her eyes closed and only the tricorder, and the barest rising and falling of her chest, told me that she still lived.

  It seemed an endless time until we got back to Bravo Station and, naturally, the first thing that happened was that they were ready to blow us to bits on sight. Fortunately enough the com system was functioning, so my own messages—combined with the fact that we had an emergency beacon on board that was sending out a distress signal—convinced them of our identity.

  As I guided the ship into a landing bay, I turned
to Soleta and, even though I didn’t know if she could hear me or not, said “Hang on…we’re almost there.”

  “Don’t…tell them…”

  Her voice was rattling once more, and I said, “What? Don’t tell…?”

  “Don’t tell them…you knew,” she said. “They’ll…crucify you…don’t tell them…swear you’ll say…you didn’t know…swear it…on your life…on Mac’s life…”

  “Soleta, what…?”

  “Swear it!” she spat out, and blood was oozing from between her lips, her body trembling with urgency.

  “All right! I swear it! I swear!” I told her, not having the faintest idea what we were talking about.

  She let out a sigh of what could only be relief, and her head sagged once more.

  A medical team was rushed to the landing bay when we came in, and even these hardened veterans gasped in shock upon seeing their latest patient. “No pain,” Soleta was murmuring, as if it had become her own personal mantra. They whisked her away while I headed up to the CO’s office to tell him what had happened. Kittinger shook his head several times in the narrative, and told me how lucky I’d been, and how heroic Soleta had been. I agreed with both sentiments, and said that I wanted to go down to the sickbay to be with her.

  “No,” Kittinger said firmly. “Captain, I don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror lately, but you look like three miles of bad road. Go back to the quarters you had here, and shower, and change, and rest. I’ll have fresh clothes brought to you. Get yourself together. Soleta is in the best hands right now, and there’s nothing you can do for her. So go take care of yourself right now. That’s an order.”

  I nodded reluctantly, but resolved to do what he said as fast as possible so that I could get back down to her. I returned to the quarters, showered, changed, and lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, just for a minute. The next thing I knew I was being woken up from a sound slumber by an urgent chiming at the door.

  “Come,” I said, sitting up and trying to smooth my hair, which had dried into uncontrolled disarray.

  Kittinger entered, and he looked deadly serious.