Tales from the Captain’s Table (32 page)

“How long will we have to wait?” I asked, the importance of our mission reasserting itself in my mind.

Mike held up the tricorder and scanned me. “Probably not more than thirty minutes,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and we lapsed into silence. Around us, the sounds of the forest closed in: water dripping, leaves rustling, branches creaking as trees shifted, birds chirping, other animals scuttling through the canopy far above us. I lowered myself back onto the ground and waited. By degrees, the discomfort I felt in my face diminished.

After a few minutes, Mike asked me an unexpected question. “Are you married, Demora?” he wanted to know.

I blinked. “No, I’m not,” I said with a grin, “except maybe to Starfleet.” I gestured with both hands at the rain forest around us, and to the right side of my face, trying to indicate that I’d obviously do anything Command asked of me. I wondered why Mike would have posed such a question to me, and then I realized the reason. “Are
you
married?” I asked.

Mike looked at me from where he sat on the root that had grown free of the jungle floor. A smile rose on his face like a morning sun peeking over a horizon. “Yeah, I am,” he said brightly. “Eight years now.”

“You’re a lucky man,” I said, and meant it. I also hoped that my statement would hold true for the rest of our mission. So far, it had not exactly gone as planned.

“Yeah,” he said again, and nodded. He was quiet for a moment. Somewhere in the distance, one of the beasts of this world called out, its voice like a bass horn. Then Mike spoke up again. “I’ve also got two sons,” he said. “One of them was born just before we began this mission. I haven’t even met him yet.”

“You will,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly to be convincing. Mike surely knew as well as I did the dangers that lay ahead of us at the renegade base. The volcanic eruption, the weapons strikes on the shuttle, the hard landing, and my encounter with the spider-like creature this morning might only be the beginning of our travails.

“Yeah, I know I will,” Mike agreed. He quieted again, peering into the middle distance for a short time. Then he seemed to gather himself, and said, “Wanna see a picture?”

“Yes,” I answered eagerly, and climbed back up to a sitting position. Mike pulled his tricorder from where it hung about his shoulder, then keyed in what appeared to be a complex control sequence. The device responded with various tones, and then he entered a second code. Finally, he stood up and walked over to where I sat on his bedroll, my legs now folded beneath me. He squatted down and held out the tricorder before me.

On the display, in what looked like a hospital room, a beautiful woman with long, fiery red hair lay in bed. Sitting beside her, his legs hanging down, was an adorable little boy with full, rosy cheeks, and whose bright hair matched her own. A man and a woman, both older, stood to one side of the bed, and two men, also older, stood on the other. In the crook of the red-headed woman’s arm, his face just visible within the blanket wrapped around it, was a newborn baby.

“My wife and my firstborn,” Mike said, pointing. “Those are my parents on the left, and my wife’s on the right.”

“And
that
,” I said, raising my own finger to point at the baby, “is your new son.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, and the wide smile returned to his face.

“You have a beautiful family,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I can’t wait to see them again.”

On that mission, in real life, I’d said nothing after that. I’d just nodded and smiled, and placed what I hoped was a reassuring hand on Mike’s shoulder. But in my dream, I opened my mouth to speak. Asleep in Hana’s cabin on Sentik IV, I fought to keep myself from saying anything, fought to take control of my dream self, but I couldn’t. “You’ll see them again,” I told Mike. “Soon.”

I woke up with a start, propped up on my hands, and with the sensation that I’d just called out in my sleep. It took me a few seconds to orient myself, to recall that I was in my bedroll on the floor of Hana’s cabin, a long distance and a long time from those days in that rain forest with Mike. I listened in the darkness for any sound from Hana’s room, concerned that I might have woken her. Finally, hearing nothing, I lay back down in the bedroll, exhausted.

I tried to push away the images from my dream, but they stayed with me. Not the shuttle crash or the crew’s injuries, not the hideous creature that had attacked me, but Mike sitting in the middle of that jungle, talking about his loved ones, showing me a picture of them. And I remembered envying him for his good fortune at having such a family, and pitying him for having to be away from them.

In my grandmother’s house, I closed my eyes in the darkness, desperate to let go of my emotions and get some rest. But when morning came, I hadn’t slept again at all.

Four weeks after I first arrived on Sentik IV, I prepared to depart. I collected the few items I’d brought from the
Armstrong
to Hana’s cabin, and transported back with them to the shuttle. I charted my course back to Starbase Magellan and the
Enterprise
—back to my
life
—and entered it in the navigational computer. Then I went to bid farewell to Hana.

When I returned to the cabin, it was nearly midday, and I was surprised to see Hana’s door still closed. In the last week, she’d taken to rising later in the morning than she had previously, and also to retiring earlier at night. And in just the past few days, she twice hadn’t bothered changing out of her nightclothes even after she’d risen.

I tapped lightly at her door.

“Demora,” came a whisper from the bedroom, barely audible. I think it was the first time Hana had said my name since we’d first spoken, just after my arrival.

I opened the door and peered inside. Hana lay in bed, and I walked over to stand beside her. When I gazed down at her, I was shocked to see tears pooled in her eyes. It seemed inconceivable to me that Hana would be sad to see me leave.

Before I could say anything, Hana spoke again. “Demora,” she repeated, and a tear spilled from one eye and down her cheek, leaving behind a quicksilver trail. “I need help.” The words still came in a whisper, so low that I wasn’t sure that I’d heard them correctly.

“Hana, you’ll be all right,” I said, not knowing what else to tell her, but also believing the basic truth of my assertion. Hana was old and failing, but she could still get around, no matter how slowly. There was enough food stored in her cabin now—I’d restocked her cupboard both from what I’d cut down in the fields and from the food synthesizer aboard the
Armstrong
—and she seemed strong enough to prepare simple dishes for herself.

“No,” Hana said, looking up at me with a wounded expression. “I won’t be all right. I…I need help.”

Suddenly, I understood that Hana’s tears were not for me, but for herself. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “What do you need?”

“I can’t get up,” she said, and now tears slid down both sides of her face. She wept, I realized, because she thought that she could no longer take care of herself.

“Hana,” I said, “I can bring your breakfast to you here. We can prop you up against the pillows, and you can eat in bed. You don’t need to get up.”

“I need to go out back,” she said, the very act of having to ask for such help obviously a terrible embarrassment for her.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I can use my shuttle’s transporter to—”

“No,” she pleaded.

“Well then,” I said, considering how else I might be able to assist Hana. “I guess I can rig something up, bring it in here for—”

“No,” she interrupted again, beseeching me. “Please…not yet, Demora.”

“All right,” I said. I leaned in over the bed and took hold of Hana, sliding one hand around her back and placing the other on her arm. I felt her recoil automatically from my touch, her flimsy body tensing, but then she relaxed her muscles. With great care, I helped her to the edge of the bed, and then up onto her feet. Her body seemed no heavier than if it had been made of paper.

It took us a long time to move out of her bedroom, through the back door, and over to the outhouse, but we eventually made it. Afterward, I walked her back into the cabin and headed for the table, where I intended to sit her down. But Hana told me that she wasn’t strong enough, and that she’d rather go back to bed, if I wouldn’t mind bringing her breakfast there. I did as she asked.

After we’d both eaten—she in her bed, and me at the table in the main room—I told Hana that I needed to visit the shuttle, and that I’d be back in a few minutes. I didn’t know if she realized that I’d been scheduled to leave Sentik that day, but it was clear that if I did, she would not be able to survive on her own.

As I activated the transporter recall, I had no idea what I was going to do.

I sat at the
Armstrong
’s primary console, staring at it as though an answer might suddenly materialize there. On the navigational display, I saw the course I’d plotted that would take me back to Starbase Magellan, the
Enterprise
, and my crew. On the communications console, I saw the indicators that told me the system was ready to record and transmit a message.

Sitting motionless for a long time, I reviewed the impossible choice I had to make. Leave Hana—my grandmother—alone here on Sentik, unable to take care of herself; relocate her against her will, and in so doing, risk the journey killing her; or—

“Or what?” I asked myself aloud. Was I supposed to forgo living my own life in favor of somebody at the end of theirs? Somebody who’d never shown me even the slightest amount of love?

I continued staring at the shuttle’s primary console, until in my mind it morphed into something else, into a control panel I’d once seen half a quadrant away from Sentik IV. It sat in the middle of the renegade base, in the middle of the immense rain forest, on a forbidden world.

For the third time since I’d arrived at Hana’s, my memories took me back to that mission.

I verified the download of data from the renegades’ computer system to my tricorder, the transfer rate blinking in green numerals across the panel display. Our basic mission had been to obtain details of the renegades’ impending operations, and to identify the locations of any additional bases that might exist, but what I’d found in their comp system was much more than that. Once we delivered the information to Starfleet Command, they would be able to shut down the entire operation.

As I waited for the volumes of data to download, I worked the console into which I’d patched my tricorder, and from which I’d burrowed into the base’s computer network. Sitting in the small room that housed a power substation, I reconfigured the display and brought up the information most vital to Starfleet Command. Reviewing it, I understood that the admirals’ suspicions had wildly underestimated the scope of the renegades’ strategy. Without the intelligence I had uncovered, the Federation would soon find itself at grave and possibly irreversible risk.

Abruptly, an alarm sounded, and a moment later, a male voice emerged form the comm system. “
Intruder alert, intruder alert
,” it said. “
Perimeter breach in section thirty-one alpha
.” I studied the data transfer, expecting it to be interrupted at any second, but the bits continued to flow.

Behind me, I heard the room’s lone door glide open. “Demora,” Mike called. “They’ve found us. We’ve got to get out of here.” For the moment, I ignored him, and instead concentrated on bringing up a schematic of the base. “Demora!”

“It’s not us,” I declared. “We’re not in section thirty-one alpha.”

“That could be a code,” Mike said. “They might—”

“No,” I told him, tapping into the comm system in the base’s command center. I grabbed a small silver speaker sitting on the panel and lifted it to my ear. I listened as one of the renegades ordered the prisoners brought to him. “No, it’s not us,” I said again to Mike. “They’ve got one of the other teams. Maybe both of them.”

“Then they’ll be looking for us soon,” he asserted. “How much longer before you’ve got what we need?”

I threw down the speaker, sending it skittering across the panel, and checked the status monitor. “Sixty seconds,” I said.

“I hope we’ve got that long,” Mike said earnestly, and exited the power substation, obviously to resume standing guard for me.

Mike and I had arrived at the base on our fourth day hiking through the jungle. Theoretically, the captain and his partner should have arrived there before we did, since they’d taken a more direct route, but we’d received no signal that they’d succeeded in the mission. The third team also could have arrived before us, but again, we’d received no such signal. And so it had fallen upon us to find a way inside in order to retrieve the data Starfleet Command needed.

As Mike and I had reconnoitered the base perimeter, happenstance had provided us a chance. Very close to where we hid in the jungle, a renegade guard had exited the compound, for no reason we could determine. Gambling that we weren’t walking into a trap, we pounced, incapacitating the guard and hauling him back to the access hatch. Quickly, we utilized his hand and retina prints to breach the base’s biometric safety measures. From there, it had been a short trip to the room with the computer interface.