Captain's Away! Chapter Thirty-Two
"The Void"
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.
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Previously in Captain’s Away!
Yolande and Bertrand Doucette are refugees after escaping the destruction of two space stations in the opening salvos of an interstellar war. Their son, Alain, is missing and presumed dead, for which Yolande blames Bertrand, and their daughter Marie-Josée is comatose for reasons they don’t understand. Yolande and Bertrand have just been rescued by an Akkadian starship called the Beausoleil.
Unbeknownst to them, the mind of their daughter Marie-Josée has been transferred into the body of the captain of the Beausoleil by means of an ancient technology. To save herself, and maybe everyone else, Marie-Josée must pose as the captain of the Beausoleil… and deal with orders that don’t always make sense to her.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“The Void”
The aether slowly insinuated itself into the brains of the crew and passengers of the Beausoleil. This meant anxiety for some, depression for others. One crewman developed physical tics. Another experienced delusions of grandeur (he thought he was an Admiral). For Marie-Josée it meant difficulty concentrating on what Saito was telling her, which even she had to admit sounded important.
“We learned about it in school,” she said. “The Void is the quickest way to get to cat space.”
“They’re called the T’Klee,” Saito told her for the umpteenth time. “What else did they tell you about the Void?”
Marie-Josée thought. “The effects of the aether are greater there.”
“Correct. The same qualities that compress time increase the psychological impact. At least for humans. T’Klee are largely immune to its effects. Some trick of their physiology.”
Marie-Josée cast her mind back to the class that had covered this. “But it’s not considered a problem because of the shielding.”
“Which is fine if your shielding is working properly.”
“Are you telling me our shielding isn’t working properly?”
“We talked about it at our Exec meeting. Remember?”
“Stop testing me. I remember.” She could see he wasn’t buying it. “All right, I wasn’t listening.”
“The shielding is intermittent.”
“What does that mean?”
“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
“What if it isn’t working when we’re in the Void?”
“Depends how bad it is and what’s wrong with it. But it could be bad. Especially if we run into any Realm ships. They have been known to patrol the Void.”
“How bad?”
“We could all go insane.”
“Oh, is that all.” Everyone on board the Beausoleil would experience a potentially lethal version of what she and her family had experienced when the Realm battleship had engaged its aether drive in front of them. Despite the constant, comfortable temperature of her cabin, Marie-Josée shivered. “Let’s do what Raizada said. Stay away from the Void. Take a slower stream.”
“We have to go through the Void.”
“Why?”
“Orders.”
“Why would we follow orders that could get us all killed?”
“We talked about this. This is a military ship. We follow the chain of command. We’re in a war. Playing it safe doesn’t win wars. Sometimes you have to take risks.”
“But it doesn’t make sense just to take any risk.”
“You’re right. We don’t just take any risk. And we mitigate the risks as much as possible. Which is why we’ve got our smartest people working on this problem, including your mother.”
“If anyone can figure it out, she can,” Marie-Josée asserted. “Let’s at least drop the passengers off somewhere before we get there. There’s got to be a place we can do that.”
“We’re deep inside the aether,” Saito said. “There’s no place to drop anyone off. Even if we shifted to normal space there would be no time to find a place to drop them off. They’re going through the Void to Terminus Pericolo with the rest of us.”
“That’s not fair to them! Not after all they’ve been through.” It wasn’t fair to her either. She hadn’t signed up for this. She hadn’t signed up for anything.
“It was your decision to bring them on board. You need to live with that decision. That’s a part of what it means to be captain.”
“I’m only pretending to be the captain,” Marie-Josée reminded him. “I don’t have to live with anything.”
“Yes, you do,” Saito said. “Whether you’re captain or not.”
Marie-Josée knew that to be true. “All right. What do we do?”
“We go to a skeleton crew, put everyone else under. That’s standard protocol for the Void.”
“Why not just let the Beausoleil handle it?”
“Even the Beausoleil isn’t immune. Someone will have to stay awake to make sure the ship herself doesn’t go crazy.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It’s that bad.”
“Why do we have to get to cat space so fast?”
“I told you this before. We need the T’Klee to give us their fleet.”
“I remember, but that’s nuts. Why would they do that? Why would we even ask them to do that?”
“We’ll ask them to do that because those are our orders,” Saito said.
Marie-Josée face palmed herself. “You and your orders.”
Saito raised a hand in the air before she could go on. “We think the Realm is about to invade T’Klee space just like they invaded our space. If the Realm beat the T’Klee, which we think they will, they will acquire the T’Klee fleet. That would be very bad for Akkadia, so we can’t let that happen. That’s why we need the T’Klee to place their fleet under your command and move it immediately to safety.”
Marie-Josée could see the sense in what Saito was saying. Still — “You think the T’Klee would do that? Just give me their fleet?”
“The T’Klee are indebted to Captain Khiboda. She once saved a ship full of T’Klee. You’ll be leveraging that.”
“What else?”
Saito hesitated. “That’s it.”
“What if they say no?”
“They won’t say no.”
“They might say no. What then?”
“Your job is to make them say yes.”
“What if I can’t convince them?”
Saito leaned forward. “Make them say yes and then we won’t have to worry about that.”
Marie-Josée studied Saito. His expression told her nothing. But it would be most unlike him to not have a plan for any eventuality. There was something he wasn’t telling her. “I have a right to know the whole plan.”
“You don’t have any rights. You’re not the captain.”
“I’m doing you a favour.”
“You’re not doing me a favour. You’re doing Akkadia a service.”
“The more I know, the better I can do this.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
She obviously wasn’t going to get any more out of him than that. She would have to be patient. The truth would out eventually. “All right. Fine.”
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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.
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