Captain's Away! Chapter Sixteen
"Performance Time"
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!
Marie-Josée’s parents, Yolande and Bertrand Doucette, are trapped in an emergency bunker floating aimlessly in space with thirty-five other survivors. Her brother, Alain, is missing and presumed dead. But although Marie-Josée’s body is unconscious and in the emergency bunker with her parents, another part of her is having an entirely different experience.
Unaware of the tragedy that has befallen the space station Northumberland and her parents and brother, Marie-Josée’s mind has awoken elsewhere: on board a starship called the Beausoleil where she’s being addressed as “Captain” by a man named Commander Saito. Deeply concerned about his captain’s state-of-mind, Commander Saito confines the person he thinks is his captain to her cabin. A few hours after the bridge crew witness the destruction of the Northumberland, Navigator Raizada arrives on the bridge for his shift bereft of sleep and anxious about a possible confrontation with the Realm Battleship the Atul. Meanwhile, Marie-Josée continues to languish in the captain’s cabin…
Chapter Sixteen
“Performance Time”
Marie-Josée finally fell asleep, but she didn’t sleep for long.
When she awoke, she was instantly aware that nothing had changed. She was still trapped in the same nightmare, stuck in someone else’s body, someone else’s life.
She broke into a cold sweat, which threatened to become a full-blown panic attack. But she got mad and gritted her teeth and punched her bed with a balled-up fist and stood up and yelled something that her mother might have yelled: “The hell with this!”
No match for her mood, the panic receded.
She told herself that she had three choices: she could go crazy, or she could do nothing, or she could deal with this.
She opted to deal with it.
It was a completely insane situation, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a solution. If what Saito had told her was true, then there was technology on this ship that could turn her back into herself. She had to find it. Learn it. And then she could go home.
Well, not home. Back to herself then. To her family. Her parents weren’t dead. They couldn’t be. That was a lie. She didn’t understand why Saito had said that, but that was the least of what she didn’t understand about this situation.
She tried the door. It was locked. “Ship. Open the door.”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” the Beausoleil said, without materializing. “I cannot open the door.”
Of course—Saito didn’t want his captain wandering the passageways not knowing anything or anyone, like a crazy person. Which meant that there was only one way out of this situation. One way to get free rein of the ship:
She had to become the captain.
Which meant learning how to be the captain. She wouldn’t be able to fake it forever, or even for long, but it didn’t matter. She only had to fake it long enough to get access to that technology.
She scanned the cabin. There were clues to the captain’s life. Pictures. She needed to figure out who the people in the pictures were. She could do so via the ship’s interface. Maybe, courtesy of the Beausoleil, she could call up the captain’s personal information. Study it. Memorize it.
“Ship,” she said.
“Yes, Captain.” This time the ship’s avatar materialized before her employing the form it had used earlier: a middle-aged woman in a service uniform with no evident rank.
Marie-Josée thought the ship looked friendly, understanding that she may have chosen her appearance for that very reason. Probably she assumed different avatars for different occasions, like the Evangeline had.
“What’s your name?” Marie-Josée asked.
“I am the Beausoleil, as you well know.”
“Oh. Right. What exactly are you?”
“I am an Akkadian Marauder Class Starship, which you also know. What are you really asking, Captain?”
Marie-Josée was slightly alarmed. She was used to benign station avatars that just did your bidding, within reason. This was a military ship—probably avatars worked differently on such vessels. What would happen if the Beausoleil figured out that she wasn’t really the captain? Might she arrange for her to be locked up permanently? If so, then she’d never get back to her own body. Never see her family again. She needed to be more careful.
“I’m the one asking the questions here.” The sort of thing a real captain might say, she figured.
“Of course, Captain.”
Good.
She needed to relax. No reason why she couldn’t listen to some music while she learned to be the captain.
“Play Shostakovich,” she instructed the ship.
Instead of what she expected, music featuring an ancient piano started playing.
“Not that,” Marie-Josée said. “I said Shostakovich.”
The music switched to simpler, boppier music. Marie-Josée almost smiled. Her favourite band must have named themselves after some ancient composer. Of course, this was a clue. The captain must like that older, boring stuff. If she was going to pretend to be the captain, maybe that’s what she should be listening to.
Nah.
“Show me the captain’s—I mean—my profile.”
Marie-Josée half-expected the ship not to comply. But the Beausoleil must have accepted her identity as the captain, based, perhaps, on her physical profile, cross-referencing her irises with her fingerprints, her speech patterns, and other tell-tale physical identifiers.
The information she requested appeared in the air before her.
“Beausoleil, I’m going to ask you some questions. I already know the answer to these questions but I’m going to ask them anyway, for reasons of my own.”
“Of course, Captain. It’s your prerogative to ask me anything you like.”
“Good. Do I have any brothers or sisters?”
The Beausoleil clasped her holographic hands in front of herself. “You have an adopted brother.”
Marie-Josée noticed that the Beausoleil was wearing a ring in the shape of a bird’s head on the third finger of her left hand. The Evangeline had worn a ring there as well, in the shape of a dove, indicating which class of space station it belonged to. The Beausoleil’s bird ring—not a dove, an eagle, maybe? —almost certainly meant something similar. Glancing at her own hand (or rather, the captain’s hand) she saw that she was wearing an identical ring.
Images of a fit-looking man with short-cropped brown hair appeared in the air before her. The images depicted him rock climbing, sail-boarding, boxing, and so on.
“Luc Khiboda is a Sergeant in the Akkadian Special Forces,” the Beausoleil said. “Currently stationed on the Brunswick, he is forty-six years old and—”
“What about parents?”
“Your genetic parents were killed during the last robot rebellion of aught eight shortly after you were born.”
“Robots killed them?” Marie-Josée wasn’t surprised. She had never liked robots. It was well known that the bloodless creatures could turn on you in an instant. Sounded like that’s what had happened here.
“No. Human soldiers killed them during the uprising. It was an accident.”
“Oh.”
“You were adopted and raised by Brigitte and Pierre Khiboda on board the Chicoutimi. Brigitte passed away four years ago. Pierre never remarried. His last known address is the Chicoutimi.”
Marie-Josée spent the next several hours perusing the life of Captain Jane Khiboda in this manner, memorizing as much information as she could, especially anything that might come up in casual conversation. She was especially interested in information that provided insight into her activities over the last few months. She discovered that Captain Khiboda spent most of her time on the bridge, in the ship’s gym, or in her cabin. She appeared to be a solitary creature, interested in physical fitness and privacy when not in command.
Marie-Josée herself was a bookish girl. A gym might as well have been an alien planet. How would she fake that? Examining the captain’s body, Marie-Josée saw that it was rock hard, lean and muscular, not an ounce of fat on it. The medical technology of the Beausoleil had kept it well preserved waiting for the captain to return to it. She was still a bit stiff, though, especially after sitting for the last few hours. A few clumsy calisthenics loosened her up quickly enough.
There was a mirror in the washroom. Staring at her face—the captain’s face—Marie-Josée tried to glean some sense of the woman’s personality. Three words came to mind: resting bitch face. The ugly scar down the left side, from the eye to the corner of her lip, didn’t help. It didn’t strike Marie-Josée as a mean face, though: just tough. And there was something sad about the eyes. Which could be just her imagination—or maybe Marie-Josée’s own eyes peaking through.
Help me make this chapter better! What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
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
"Her favourite band must have named themselves after some ancient composer." Specifically, a Russian composer whose non-conformist music and attitude alarmed the Communist society of his time...