Captain's Away! Chapter Three
"The Northumberland"
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!
It was an ordinary day on board the Akkadian space station Evangeline for the Doucettes and the rest of the station’s ten thousand inhabitants until a Realm battleship attacked the station.
While their space station Evangeline is under attack, the Doucettes wait for their chance to board an escape pod, but they’re last in line, and there may not be enough escape pods.
Chapter Three
“The Northumberland”
“Name,” the uniformed official asked Marie-Josée.
The official was prim and proper and had a pointy little chin. Marie-Josée told her what she wanted to know. So did Marie-Josée’s brother and parents.
“Station of origin?”
“What do you mean?” Yolande asked. “We’re from the Evangeline. Like everyone else here.” She indicated the hundreds of other survivors milling about.
“The Evangeline wasn’t the only station hit in the last couple of days. The Nouvelle-Écosse was destroyed as well.”
The Doucettes absorbed this disturbing news, which the official had delivered as if relating a sports score. Marie-Josée wondered if she might be a robot. Rumours of robots that looked like humans had been around forever. Marie-Josée sometimes wondered whether her mother, father, or brother might be a robot, or if she herself might be a robot without knowing it.
“Station of origin?” the official repeated.
Marie-Josée decided the official was too stupid to be a robot.
“I just told you,” Yolande said. “The Evangeline.”
“Do you have anything to declare?” the official asked.
“Of course not,” Yolande snapped. “We just lost everything. There’s nothing left to declare except for your stupi—”
“Nothing to declare,” Bertrand interrupted, giving his wife a look.
“Is that yours?” the official asked, regarding the robot with an air of disdain, as though it was emitting an unpleasant odour.
“It’s from the Evangeline,” Yolande said. “It doesn’t belong to us personally.”
“Are you licensed, robot?” the official asked.
“Of course,” Sebastian said, projecting holographic credentials in the air before them all.
The official grunted as though disappointed. “Don’t let it wander off.”
“I told you, it’s not—”
“We’ll look after it,” Bertrand said. “What now?”
“There’s no room here on the Northumberland,” the official said. “You’ll have to wait in the Great Hall with the other survivors until one of the other stations can take you in, or you can make your way to Miscouche. But that won’t be for a while because right now all ship traffic has been shut down due to the Realm threat.”
“What if no one takes us in?” Marie-Josée asked.
“Shh,” her mother said. “It won’t come to that.”
“But what if it does?” Marie-Josée insisted.
“Then we make do.”
“How?”
“How about we cross that bridge when we come to it?” Yolande suggested.
Marie-Josée tried to relax. Her mother was right. They had enough to worry about as it was.
It wasn’t as though things could get much worse.
It was awful. There were too many people crammed into the Northumberland’s Great Hall. There wasn’t enough food. There was no privacy at all. There was no place to take a shower. The washrooms were disgusting, and that was if you could even get into one—the lines were excruciatingly long. Marie-Josée had nothing to entertain herself with and only the clothes on her back. Her brother wouldn’t stop pestering her. Making matters worse, the robot Sebastian wouldn’t go away. It was standing nearby looking awkward. Marie-Josée was embarrassed—people might actually think that the robot belonged to them. People might actually think that they liked robots. Marie-Josée didn’t think she could stand one more minute in this horrible place.
“Stop complaining,” her mother told her. “We haven’t even been here fifteen minutes.”
“It feels like years,” Marie-Josée said. “How long do we have to stay here, anyway?”
“Shouldn’t be more than a decade or two,” Bertrand said.
“Ignore your father, dear,” Yolande said. “He knows even less than the rest of us.”
An announcement came over the public address system. Marie-Josée strained to understand it, but it was too reverberant. She couldn’t make out a single word.
“Did you get that?” Yolande asked.
Her husband shook his head. Yolande made a noise of disgust, as if it were Bertrand’s responsibility to understand announcements that nobody else could decipher.
“It said that food will be distributed later,” Sebastian said. “Courtesy of the Northumberland.”
“Oh, that’s good news,” Bertrand said. “I hope there’s coffee.”
Marie-Josée began walking away.
“Where you going?” Alain asked.
“Exploring.”
“Can I come?”
“No. Absolutely not. No way.”
“Take Alain, why don’t you, dear,” Yolande said, with a pointed look. “But be back before the food arrives. You won’t want to miss that.”
Marie-Josée went to her mother. She had enough consideration for Alain’s feelings to lower her voice. “He’s what I want to get away from.”
That wasn’t all. She also hoped to find Evelyn. If she did manage to find her girlfriend, they would want to console one another and share their stories, and she definitely didn’t want Alain around for that.
“Keep him distracted,” Yolande ordered. “He’s a lot more bothered by all this than he’s letting on.”
“I doubt it,” Marie-Josée muttered, but she did as her mother asked. “Come on, Al. Let’s go.”
“Don’t call me Al,” Alain said. “I hate when people call me Al.”
Marie-Josée smiled smugly. “I know.”
They explored as much of the Northumberland as they could, which wasn’t much, confined as they were to the Great Hall. They butted up against locked doors leading to the rest of the Northumberland where the station’s inhabitants lived, worked and played. Those doors were normally open and were only barred now because of the refugees. Marie-Josée and her brother and her parents and everyone else currently residing in the Great Hall were not residents of the Northumberland. They were survivors. As such they were not unwelcome, but not entirely welcome either.
Nowhere in that limited space did Marie-Josée find Evelyn.
This didn’t necessarily mean anything. The Great Hall was huge and crammed with people. They could just be missing one another. Or Evelyn’s life pod could have been programmed to go to a different space station. Evelyn and their other friends could be safe on any one of the thirty-seven other Akkadian space stations (or thirty-six if what they had been told about the Nouvelle-Écosse was true). Privately, though, Marie-Josée worried that Evelyn and her family hadn’t managed to escape the destruction of the Evangeline. Hadn’t they themselves narrowly escaped an encounter with the Realm battleship?
Feeling glum, Marie-Josée tried to make the most of their time exploring anyway. As annoying as her brother was, she felt good about distracting him this way. They traversed every square inch of the Northumberland’s Great Hall, admiring its faux-marble decks, its swooping arches, its vaulted ceilings, its pillars and columns, all much fancier than those of the Evangeline. They climbed balustraded stairs leading up to the Great Hall’s observation deck, where they peered out enormous windows, admiring the multitude of vessels docked outside the space station, large and small, magnificent and ugly. They wandered amongst their fellow survivors, taking in the stunned looks on their faces, some weeping openly, others clearly angry, a few just bored, while a handful of Northumbrian officials watched over them nervously.
Marie-Josée glimpsed a slightly overweight man in a service uniform jogging across the observation deck, threading his way through the throngs of survivors, wondering idly what he might be up to, until it occurred to her that he was heading in their general direction.
Keen not to get mixed up in whatever trouble might be brewing, she said to Alain, “Let’s go,” and ushered her brother away, at which point the man immediately adjusted course to cut them off. There was no getting away from him.
Ultimately, he stopped directly in front of them. He bent over trying to catch his breath, as though having just run halfway across the Northumberland. His uniform was different than that of the Northumbrian officials. Marie-Josée wondered if he might be from one of the ships they’d just been admiring. He was also rather old if his grey hair and salt and pepper beard were any indication, maybe as much as forty. Watching him standing there with his chest heaving, Marie-Josée worried he might be about to have a heart attack—considering the day she’d been having it wouldn’t have surprised her at all. She wondered what he wanted with her and Alain. Was she not allowed up here on the observation deck? What about everyone else?
To her relief, the man finally recovered sufficiently to speak. “Captain,” he said, between gasps. “I’m so glad I found you in time. I’m so sorry. I can’t explain what happened. But I can fix it. I think.”
Marie-Josée glanced around. There were plenty of other people milling about but the man was clearly addressing her.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“We don’t have a lot of time. I’m going to have to perform the transfer right here and now. The Atul will be here any minute and we all know what that means.”
Marie-Josée had no idea what an Atul was or what it being there any minute might mean. She decided that she ought to get back to her parents as soon as possible. They would know what to do. She tried to step past the man, but he blocked her way. She stepped back and stared up at him. “I think you have me mixed up with someone else.”
He frowned down at her. “Captain?”
Alain was pulling at her. “C’mon! Let’s go!”
Marie-Josée allowed Alain to lead her off. This time the man let her go, and she was relieved when he didn’t follow her, though when she glanced back, she saw that he was staring after her, his forehead creased.
“Who was that guy?” her brother asked.
“Dunno.”
“What a weirdo,” Alain pronounced.
For once, Marie-Josée agreed with her brother.
Help me make this chapter better! What do you think? Let me know in the comments! Don’t be shy. :-)
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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