Captain's Away! Chapter Seven
The Procedure
Captain’s Away! is a long form, weekly serial. New chapters come out every week (more or less). Comments and suggestions welcome as we go along.
You can find the master index of all the chapters by clicking the orange Captain’s Away Index button below:
Previously in Captain’s Away!
The Doucette family have fled their space station the Evangeline along with a maintenance robot and the station’s other ten thousand inhabitants after the Evangeline is attacked by the Realm. After their escape pod deposits them at another Akkadian space station, the Northumberland, 17-year old Marie-Josée is attacked by a man wearing an Akkadian naval uniform wielding an ancient artefact. The man refers to Marie-Josée as “Captain” before rendering her unconcious.
When Northumberland station is also attacked by the Realm, Yolande Doucette decides to lead her family to the interior of the Northumberland where she believes the station’s specially reinforced Medical Bay may be capable of protecting them, and where she hopes to find medical assistance for her unconscious daughter.
There, the same man who attacked Marie-Josée introduces himself to Yolande and her husband Bertrand as a medical corpsman and offers to help Marie-Josée. Unaware of his connection to her daughter, Yolande lets him examine Marie-Josée. Yolanda quickly decides that he’s a quack, dismisses him, and returns her attention to the rest of the occupants of the Medical Bay just as the Realm attack intensifies.
Chapter Seven
“The Procedure”
The station groaned ominously. People gasped as the deck beneath them shifted detectably. Yolande pitched her voice so that it could be heard throughout as much of the medical bay as possible. “Everyone listen up! We need to seal ourselves off. We need to do it right now.”
Judging by the mystified expressions surrounding her not everyone knew what she was talking about.
“No one here knows how to do that,” a woman said.
Yolande craned her head to see who had spoken. She couldn’t tell; there were too many people crowded around her. “I know how to do it. I’m a—I was a technologist on Evangeline. It’s not hard but you have to do it in the right order.”
“Don’t you need the right credentials?” a well-dressed older gentleman asked, one of the few there seated. He had long white hair and silver spectacles.
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Yolande told him.
“Looks to me like we’re in good hands,” a familiar voice said.
Yolande spun to see Francis Pelrine standing off to the side. The former Akkadian sailor still wore his orange arm band. He favoured Yolande with a crooked grin. Yolande was overjoyed to see a familiar face from the Evangeline.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” she told him.
“It seems a bit extreme,” the older gentleman with the spectacles said. “Probably we should just wait a bit.”
The medical bay exploded into a morass of conflicting opinions.
There was a disturbance in the crowd. “Excuse me—let me through!” A beefy young man elbowed his way out of the throng, provoking expletives as he did so. Yolande’s first impression was one of hair, lots of it, tied up in a ponytail, and an unusually bushy beard on an otherwise youthful face.
“Look,” the young man said, as everyone quieted down. “We all know what happened to the Nouvelle-Écosse and the Evangeline and God only knows how many others. You need to—you need to seal us off right now.”
He wasn’t meeting her eyes, Yolande noticed.
“No,” a female voice said. It was little more than a whisper. “You can’t. Not yet.”
Yolande scanned the crowd. Her eyes lit on a young woman, pale as a ghost, quite obviously with child. “My husband—I don’t know where he is. He was supposed to be here.”
The future flashed before Yolande’s eyes: the lot of them trapped in the emergency bunker with not a single decent doctor aboard, this young woman in labour, Yolande having to deliver the baby herself, botching the whole thing, killing both mother and child, a lifetime of post-traumatic stress—
The Akkadian corpsman Javad stepped forward. “There’s no time. She has to do this now or we’re all dead.”
A chorus of voices echoed the sentiment.
“What’s your name?” Yolande asked the young man with the ponytail and beard, buying time to think.
“Matthieu LeBlanc. I was—I was on the Nouvelle-Écosse right before it was destroyed.”
“And you?” Yolande asked the young woman with child.
“I’m from the Evangeline.”
“I mean your name.”
“Liette.”
“Liette, you should be sitting down. Matthieu, please help her sit down.” She faced the rest of the crowd. “Could somebody please make room for Liette? Somebody not pregnant, maybe?”
She was getting testy. It was hard not to. Testy was her go-to emotion. Still, she was going to need this group of strangers working with her, not against her. Fortunately, nobody seemed to take offense. The spectacled gentleman let Liette take his seat.
“I’ll wait as long as I can,” she told those around her.
“No!” Matthieu said. “You can’t wait! If we—”
Yolande shot him one of her patented looks, honed over a lifetime of exposure to idiots: a concentrated dose of scorn that shut Matthieu up as effectively as a slap in the face.
“I’m going to do the first few steps, though. Just to get a head start. The process takes a while. Northumberland Station.”
The Northumberland’s avatar appeared before Yolande.
“I assume you accept my credentials?”
“I do, Yolande Doucette,” the Northumberland said. “The Evangeline transferred your credentials to me before it was lost.”
Yolande wondered if the Northumberland felt anything over the loss of its sister station. She quickly dismissed the notion. Of course not. It wasn’t as though the station was actually alive.
She began directing the Northumberland to fire up the auxiliary power, set the latches, take the first steps to segregate the mechanical intelligence, and so on. The Northumberland knew how to do all this but needed someone with the proper authority to direct it and make the myriad decisions required along the way. And sometimes physical hands were necessary to adjust the equipment involved, if no robots were available.
Yolande found it difficult to concentrate. Much of her brain was still wondering what was wrong with Marie-Josée. Still, she successfully negotiated the process to the final stage. Only a few steps remained.
“Any sign of your husband?” she asked Liette.
Liette shook her head.
Matthieu paced nervously in the limited space. Behind him, the quack Javad hovered near a monitor wall featuring a live feed of the Northumberland from about a kilometre out, fed by one of several cameras floating outside the station. Yolande wondered whether the service uniform really belonged to Javad or if he had stolen it. If so, he had gotten lucky—the uniform fit him perfectly, as though tailored. And he wasn’t exactly a generic size.
“Northumberland, where’s Liette’s husband?” she asked the station.
“Liette is not a citizen,” the Northumberland said. “I have no record of either her or her husband. As such I can’t discern his whereabouts.”
Yolande avoided looking at Liette. “Anybody else on their way here that we should wait for?”
“No,” the Northumberland said simply. “In fact, I recommend that you finish the procedure immediately.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
No sooner had she asked that than the station rumbled again, and the lights flickered off and on. The crowd cried out in alarm. Yolande glanced at the monitor wall. The view showed nothing untoward—probably the Realm battleship was attacking the other side of the station.
“For God’s sake!” Matthieu shouted at her. “What are you waiting for? Do it!”
Liette regarded Yolande imploringly from her seat.
Yolande’s heart wasn’t made of stone. But she had to balance the fate of this woman’s husband—who might never find his way to the medical bay—with the fate of everyone else present. “Liette, I’m sorry. We don’t know what’s going on out there. I can’t risk waiting any longer.”
Liette was on her feet. Colour had returned to her cheeks. “No! Not yet. Just a bit longer!”
“If she doesn’t do this, we’ll all die,” Matthieu lectured her, still pacing. “Let’s go. Let’s do it!”
“How long do we have?” Yolande asked the Northumberland.
“There are several variables,” the avatar said calmly. “Five minutes, I would say.”
Yolande glanced at Bertrand, who nodded. At his side, Francis Pelrine did too.
Yolande made up her mind. “Okay, let’s finish it. Everyone—make sure you’re within the yellow lines.”
Broad yellow lines painted on the deck, bulkhead and overhead of the medical bay indicated which portions of the bay constituted the emergency bunker. Not all the bay was included—just the large U shaped-waiting room and the diagnostic rooms, washrooms, a kitchenette, and a smattering of equipment closets, all located in the centre of the U.
“Make sure you don’t stand on any of the lines,” Yolande warned. “Not unless you want to be chopped in two.”
The mass of people jostled one another as they did their best to comply. Everyone except Liette, who rushed at Yolande. “No—just another couple of minutes. He’s on his way—I know it.”
“Northumberland,” Yolande began.
Francis and Bertrand held Liette back as Yolande recited instructions. The further along Yolande got the more hysterical Liette became. It didn’t matter. Yolande finished the procedure.
A buzzer sounded obnoxiously in the distance.
“There’s a problem,” the Northumberland said.
“Oh, thank God!” Liette almost collapsed with relief. Francis and Bertrand led her back to her seat and sat her down.
“What do you mean there’s a problem?” Matthieu asked. He was starting to look a little wild-eyed. “There can’t be a problem. It’s got to work!”
Around them, the station rattled and moaned like a living thing. This time the motion never entirely subsided. A chorus of voices arose around Yolande as the mood in the bay tilted perilously close to panic.
Speaking loudly, Yolande said, “Everyone calm down. It’s probably something simple. A faulty latch somewhere.”
The voices subsided.
“I just need to go see what’s wrong.” The station creaked eerily, a sound she had never heard before. It made her blood run cold. She could almost physically feel everyone pinning their hopes on her. “Why don’t I just go do that right now?”
She fled before anyone could respond.
Help me make this chapter better! What do you think? Let me know in the comments! Don’t all comment at once! :-)
This has been an installment of the ongoing serial Captain’s Away! A Strange Dimensions book.
Also by Joe Mahoney: A Time and a Place
An unlikely hero travels to other worlds and times to save a boy who does not want to be saved in this unique and imaginative adventure, by turns comic and tragic.
Follow Joe Mahoney and Donovan Street Press Inc. on: Goodreads, Bluesky, Threads, Mastadon, Facebook, and Instagram