Tales from the Captain’s Table (29 page)

Still, my choice seemed clear. The
Enterprise
was scheduled to depart on its year-long mission in five weeks, and I needed not only to be on it at that time, but to prepare my ship and crew before then. To that end, I had one week to spend on Sentik before starting on the three-and-a-half-day journey back to Starbase Magellan. I’d thought I would utilize that time to help Hana get situated in an assisted-care facility, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen. She was an adult, and though she was in poor physical condition, her mind seemed sharp as ever. I had no right to impress upon Hana my opinions about what would be best for her. She was entitled to make her own decisions about her life, no matter the impact on others.

And really, how much effect would her choices have on me? That was only the third time I’d seen Hana in my forty-four years, and the truth was that I’d spent most of my existence blissfully unaware of the events transpiring in her life. And yet for all of that, leaving her there by herself in her diminished state seemed wrong.

As my stride brought me nearer the failing crops, it occurred to me that the deteriorating forms of the plants provided fitting imagery for Hana’s own condition. I thought of my grandfather, recalling his poetic nature, and how he’d once touched my soul with his words. What would he have wanted me to do in that circumstance, I wondered.

Something cool suddenly struck my cheek, then slid down my face. I held my hand out, palm up, and waited, eventually feeling several other drops fall from the sky. I peered upward, and saw that the clouds had thickened and darkened, threatening a rainstorm. Not wanting to get caught in a downpour, but not wanting to return to Hana’s farmhouse either, I headed instead for the barn, a simple structure not much larger than the cabin.

I passed a stone well along the way, then trotted through a large, open doorway. Inside the unlighted interior of the barn, the smell of hay and animals was strong. Birds clucked at the far end, and I heard a couple of larger beasts moving about in nearby stalls.

I turned and looked back out at the overcast day. The temperature had dropped since I’d first arrived, and my breath formed evanescent puffs of white when I exhaled. The rain grew heavier as I watched. I peered skyward again, and the image of the unbroken cloud cover quickly sent my thoughts back to a similar scene I’d witnessed at a different time, in a different place.

My mind traveled then, from the gray haze of Sentik IV to the miasma enshrouding another world.

I’d first seen the forbidding sight from space. The pall enveloping the planet churned and roiled, a cauldron of bleak shadows. I was piloting one of two warp shuttles, which together were taking a team of seven officers, including myself, to gather critical information from the veiled world. Starfleet Intelligence had uncovered evidence that renegades had established a covert base there, on the cusp of Federation space, and from which they intended to strike at both military and civilian targets. Our mission was to find and infiltrate the compound, obtain data detailing the plans of the renegades and the locations of any other bases, then return that information directly to Starfleet Command.

We neared the planet as stealthily as possible, shutting down the warp drive of each shuttle, employing only passive sensors, and masking our approach by riding the tail of a comet as it fell toward the system’s star. When the burning ball of dust and ice passed as close to our destination as it would get, we flew the shuttles from the cover of the plasma cone. Seeking to reestablish concealment as quickly as possible, we sped toward the clouds, my shuttle closely following behind the first.

The cabin in the shuttle I piloted was quiet during the short journey, the only sounds the hum of the impulse drive and the beeps and chirps of the navigational and helm controls as they responded to my touch. I felt my weight shift as I began our descent, the planet’s natural pull asserting itself over our craft’s inertial dampers. As we soared through the atmosphere and into the thick layer of clouds, the view of the lead shuttle through the forward ports vanished.

Turbulence began to buffet the hull. I adjusted the trim, attempting to compensate, and succeeded briefly. But then the shuttle jolted, as though struck by something solid. The cabin began to tremble, and none of the corrections I tried calmed the movement.

“What’s going on?” I asked the officer—a man named Mike—seated to my left at the primary console. I glanced over to see him operating the sensor panel.

“We’re passing through a column of ash and rock,” he announced after a few seconds. I looked up through the forward viewing ports again, but saw only the dark vapors I’d thought were simply clouds. At the same time, I recalled the mission briefing, which had mentioned the planet’s sporadic but significant geological activity. From habit born of long experience, I reached down and grabbed hold of the strap concealed in the side of my chair, then fixed it across my lap.

“Secure yourself,” I said over my shoulder to Mike and the other two members of the team aboard the shuttle. “I think we’ve come down in the middle of a volcanic eruption.” I sent my hands feverishly across the helm controls, intending to halt our descent and take us into a wide turn, even though that would mean breaking from our planned flight path and parting from the other shuttle. But if it was a volcano below us, I wanted to get clear of the plume.

The bow of the shuttle suddenly lurched upward. I felt the safety strap tighten over my legs as my body threatened to fly from my seat, but I remained in place. I thought I heard somebody cry out in pain behind me, but I had no time to find out who it was. Around me, the cabin grew loud, the sound of the wind extreme as the shuttle hurtled through the air. Something—probably rock ejecta spewed from the volcano—had clearly struck from below, compromising the noise-suppression plating and altering our attitude.

I worked the helm to right the shuttle, easing its nose down onto a level trajectory. Ash and rock pelted the hull, the impacts audible in the cabin, like hailstones beating down on a tin roof. “Give me a direction,” I yelled, raising my voice to be heard. When I received no response, I peered to my left, and saw Mike pulling himself up from the floor and back into his chair, from which he’d doubtless been thrown. “I need the shortest distance to get us clear,” I shouted.

“Working on it,” he called, bending over the console. “Engaging active sensors,” he added, and didn’t wait for authorization from the captain who led our mission. I looked up and stared through the viewports, searching for clear sky somewhere ahead. “I’ve got it,” Mike finally yelled above the din. “Relative bearing: thirty-five degrees.”

My fingers moved rapidly across the helm controls, sending the shuttle onto that course. I was grateful that our nearest exit from the plume lay before us, and not behind. I gazed through the viewports again and waited, hoping that nothing else would strike us before we made it into open sky.

Seconds passed…one, two, five, ten…and then at last the murk fell away. At once, the flight of the shuttle settled down, though with the noise-suppression plating no longer intact, it remained loud in the cabin. Smoke and clouds still covered the sky above us, and soot and smoldering pieces of volcanic rock continued to rain down, but we’d escaped the furor of the eruption itself. Below, the great green expanse of the planet spread out before us.

“We’re out of it,” I called back to the others. I quickly resumed our descent, visually searching for the first shuttle.

“Oh no,” I heard Mike say, and before I could ask him anything, I spied the cause of his exclamation: a corkscrew of black smoke rose in front of us, different from the clouds and ash through which we’d been passing. I followed it down to its source, and saw far below us the other shuttle spinning out of control, flames streaking out of its aft section. “The other shuttle’s been hit,” Mike yelled. “It’s going down.” He called out its altitude, and then: “Twenty seconds until it hits the planet surface.”

I felt a presence step up beside me, to one of the starboard panels. “Targeting transporter,” I heard the captain say. Through the viewports, I saw a flare of light emerge from the first shuttle, brighter than the fires already consuming it. Two seconds later, a fractured warp nacelle pinwheeled toward us. I banked our shuttle hard to port, and we plunged past the broken engine structure, missing it by the narrowest of margins.

“Ten seconds,” Mike called.

To my right, the captain said something, but I couldn’t make out his words above the noise of the wind. Another sound suddenly grew in the cabin, though, even as Mike continued his countdown. Hearing the familiar whine of the transporter, I couldn’t help but turn and peer back toward the small platform in the aft section of the shuttle. I felt enormous relief as three forms materialized there, all of them moving.

Spinning back to my console, I was just in time to see a fireball blaze into existence amid the greenery of the massive rain forest below us. “The shuttle’s down,” Mike reported.

Again, I felt a presence beside me. “Land us as quickly as possible,” the captain said in my ear. “I don’t care where. We can’t take the chance that the active sensors, the explosion, or the transporter have given us away.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I worked the helm controls, pointing the shuttle’s bow down at a steep angle, at the same time taking us into a tight turn. We would spiral down to the planet while maintaining as narrow a flight profile as possible.

As we turned, the volcano came into view. The massive mountain rose high into the air, a dark, dense column of smoke, ash, and rock exploding from it and obscuring its peak. Farther below, rivers of glowing lava streamed from rents in the slopes and flowed downward.

For a moment, an eerie calm settled over the noisy cabin. I heard a moan behind me, and guessed that one of the crew members of the first shuttle had suffered injuries when their craft had been struck by the volcanic debris. I could only hope that they hadn’t been hurt too badly.

“How much time until we land?” the captain asked.

I checked the altimeter, but before I could reply, Mike suddenly yelled once more. “I’m reading weapons fire.”

I acted even before the captain called for evasive maneuvers, but too late. A bolt of energy hammered into the shuttle, and I felt grateful that we’d powered down the warp drive after reaching the system. Still, the shuttle sheared from its course, and I worked to bring the helm back under my control. As I did so, a second energy blast sliced past the bow, missing us by only meters.

“I’ve got a read on the source of the weapons fire,” Mike reported.

“Aim phasers,” the captain ordered.

“I’m reading just one battery on the ground,” Mike continued. “Coordinates are—”

Another energy burst slammed into the shuttle, and then another. The cabin shuddered, and an overload surged through the engineering circuits. I saw the result on the readouts as the generator spiked and shut down.

The shuttle dropped a thousand meters in just seconds.

The backup engaged automatically, throttling up and braking our rate of descent.

Again, the captain spoke from a position beside me. “Crash us,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Keep the shuttle as intact as possible, but make it look as though we’ve been blasted out of the sky, before we really are blasted out of the sky.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, even as I searched through my years of experience at the helm for the best possible method of complying with the captain’s orders. At that moment, a burst of coherent blue light streaked past the viewports, and an instant later, another shot pounded into the hull. My readouts showed a power surge course through the circuitry again, and the transporter went down.

“Brace yourselves,” I yelled to the others. I tensed my own body, and positioned one of my hands at the antigrav controls. I desperately hoped that the plan I’d extemporized would work.

Then I cut the main power, and the shuttle fell from the sky.

As I stood in the doorway of Hana’s barn, peering out at the rain and thinking back to that mission, I realized that I couldn’t simply leave Sentik IV. For the assignment to thwart the renegades, I’d been asked to step away for a brief time from my regular Starfleet duties in order to take part in the dangerous, potentially deadly reconnaissance, all in the name of the greater good. Although the parallels were hardly exact, I saw a similar set of circumstances with respect to Hana’s situation.

While she hadn’t asked me to look after her, somebody else—Rosenzweig—had, and I had to wonder if, given the chance, my father would have done so too. In order to stay on Sentik, I would have to take a few more weeks away from the
Enterprise
and the preparations for its upcoming voyage, but Xintal—Commander Xintal Linojj, my executive officer—was more than capable enough to step in for me. Spending time with Hana might be uncomfortable and unsatisfying, maybe even difficult, but I’d obviously experienced far worse things during my lifetime. As I saw it, a greater good was involved there too: Hana’s need for care might not have been as dramatic as the need for Starfleet to protect the Federation from terrorists, but it was a real cause nonetheless, and one that I had the power to serve.