Captain's Away! Chapter Twenty-Eight
"The Meeting"
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, 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 called the Field. To save herself, and maybe everyone else, Marie-Josée must pose as the captain of the Beausoleil. To the crew of the Beausoleil, something is obviously amiss, but Marie-Josée may be doing a better job impersonating the captain than she thinks.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“The Meeting”
Raizada found the faux-leather chairs in the wardroom problematic. Sometimes, when you shifted position in them, they produced sounds resembling flatulence. This was not good. You did not want your superior officers to think that you were casually passing gas while they pontificated. Worse, the chairs were too comfortable. You sank right into them. In Raizada’s perpetually sleep-deprived state, the chairs, the soft lighting, and the droning of certain jaw-droppingly dull senior officers conspired to make him sleepy. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open. Losing consciousness during a meeting in this room would be career suicide. Probably the chairs were a test, one he was perilously close to failing.
Staying awake would be less of a challenge today, though. This meeting promised to be interesting. It would be the first one for which the captain would be present since her recovery. Word was she was different. Whatever she was suffering from had affected her personality. Raizada had seen more than a few hints of this himself during her recent visit to the bridge, and in her speech earlier that day. He was curious to see her up close. He wanted to know—needed to know — that the captain was okay. Capable of leading them through the aether to T’Klee space and home again.
He sat up straighter when she arrived via the bridge with Commander Saito. Because Raizada was relatively new to these meetings, he didn’t know where the captain usually sat. To his surprise, she sat directly opposite him, rather than at the head of the table. She favoured him with a smile. When the captain smiled it almost never had anything to do with happiness. Usually, it boded ill for the smile’s recipient. Raizada never even considered smiling back. Instead, he recoiled in horror. His mouth dropped open and he scooted backward in his chair. Immediately regretting his reaction, he looked away, but not before glimpsing a frown descend upon the captain’s scarred visage. The frown scared him even more than the smile. Obviously, the captain disapproved of his reaction.
Commander Saito sat at the head of the table, next to the captain. The heads of various departments filed in. Science, engineering, maintenance, security, health, ship services, maybe others. Raizada didn’t know them all, or even what they all did. Now that he’d been promoted, he represented navigation. Although slightly unnerved at present, he was a subject matter expert and quite capable of fielding any questions that came his way. He just hoped the captain didn’t smile or frown at him anymore.
Saito led the meeting. Maybe he always did. He certainly had in the captain’s absence. One odd occurrence near the beginning: the captain was twirling her chair slightly side to side. Raizada himself liked to do that, but it was strange seeing the captain doing it—she was usually so reserved and in control. Even more strange was when Saito put his hand on the arm rest of the captain’s chair to stop her from doing it.
Saito launched into the meeting rather breathlessly. “Hello, everyone. First, I’d like to welcome Captain Khiboda back to these meetings—”
He was interrupted by spontaneous applause. Raizada participated enthusiastically. Damn, it was good to have the captain back, her odd behaviour notwithstanding. With Captain Khiboda in charge, you felt deep in your gut that you might get through all this, might live to see another day. Raizada couldn’t take his eyes off her. Discretely, of course.
The captain smiled again at the applause, but only briefly before assuming her usual slightly menacing expression, the one that didn’t mean that she didn’t like you, or that she was an awful person. Not at all. The one that meant that she cared deeply about you, just not in a warm and fuzzy way. The one that meant business. That meant that you and she were good so long as you meant business too. It was an expression that meant that she cared about your very survival and would do anything to secure it.
When the applause died down, Saito said, “Yes, it is good to have you back, Captain.”
And Raizada was pretty sure that Saito meant it, because he suspected that command rested heavily upon Saito’s shoulders.
“At the captain’s request, I will continue to lead these meetings for the time being,” Saito said.
The captain nodded. “Thank you, Commander.”
Nobody questioned that, or asked about the nature of the captain’s illness, or why Saito was mostly speaking for the captain while she just sat there. This was not a room full of journalists. Nor was it a democracy. This was a chain of command. Everyone in the room respected that, even Raizada, who liked to feign a casual disregard for command, a disregard that vanished utterly in times of crisis, and was gradually disappearing completely as he acquired more authority of his own and began to understand on a gut level why a chain of command existed.
The commander launched into the usual business. Status reports from the various departments around the table and so on. As usual, Raizada’s attention began to wander until he remembered that he too would have to speak, and then, instead of listening to anyone else, he reviewed in his mind what he would have to say. When he was satisfied that he would remember everything, he returned his attention to the meeting in time to hear Lieutenant Commander Chin of engineering speak.
“We’re experiencing problems with our aetherium shields. Nothing critical, but I’d like to get to the bottom of it before it turns into something.”
Raizada raised an eyebrow. Wouldn’t want the shields to fail. Certainly not while traversing the aether.
“What sort of anomaly?” Saito asked.
Lieutenant Commander Chin was a small, well-put-together man. He had a thin moustache and a serious air about him. “Well, that’s the weird thing. It changes. Rights now it’s an intermittent voltage unbalance. Slightly greater than one percent. Turned up in one of our maintenance checks. But yesterday it was something else. Tomorrow it might be something else again.”
“It could turn into something significant,” Saito pointed out, just a hair too passionately in Raizada’s opinion, who was pretty sure that Saito knew next to nothing about the aetherium shields other than what they were for. As far as he knew Saito’s background was weapons systems.
Chin took Saito’s reaction in stride. “I intend to dedicate a resource to it.”
Saito nodded. “Good. Listen, one of the passengers—Yolande Doucette—was a station technologist on board the Evangeline. She may be able to help if you need additional resources for backfill. Please connect with her, assess her ability to help, and conscript her if you think she’s up to it. I’ll leave the details to you.”
“Yes sir,” Chin said.
Saito turned his gaze on Raizada.
Raizada cleared his throat. “Helm continues to respond well to the recent upgrades. We’ve programmed in coordinates for the mission as required. Estimated arrival at Terminus Periculo two days, twelve hours, seventeen minutes.” Now the delicate part. “Of course, that’s going through the Rapids, and we all know what that means. What I was wondering was, I’ve identified another, more sedate stream that would take a few days longer, but—”
“No wondering, Raizada,” Saito said. “You have your orders.”
Raizada had a split second to decide whether to pursue this. Ordinarily he would have shrugged and dropped the matter, but his concerns about this route overrode his fear of the commander and the presence of the captain. “It’s just that—”
“Thank you, Raizada,” Saito said.
And Raizada knew that would be as far as he got.
Saito looked to Lieutenant Pasquale Pineault, seated next to Raizada. Just as the red-haired officer began to speak, the captain said, “I’d like to hear what Sub-Lieutenant Raizada has to say.”
A wave of palpable electricity coursed through the room. Raizada did not know what to do. Saito’s face was a study in conflict. He obviously did not want Raizada to speak. But he couldn’t usurp the captain’s authority. Could he? Authority which, for the last month, had been his and his alone. Finally, Saito sat back in his chair. It made awkward creaking noises that may not entirely have been the chair. “Of course, Captain. Raizada?”
A lot was riding on how Raizada expressed himself over the next few seconds. His career, for one. But more importantly, the lives of everyone on board. “My team and I—we’ve been poring over the charts. Obviously, the Rapids were chosen because of their unique properties. They’re the fastest streams.”
Everyone at the table knew the destination. A dwarf planet called Terminus Periculo harbouring a good portion of the T’Klee fleet. “But there’s another way. Other streams, only recently mapped. They avoid the Rapids altogether.” He sat back, confident that nobody in the room wanted the Beausoleil to brave the Rapids. Not if they didn’t have to. “It would take twice as long to get there but we’d be much more likely to arrive in one piece.”
Raizada was aware that nobody else in the room was looking directly at either him, the commander, or the captain. The only sound was the gentle rumble of the ventilation system.
“Thank you,” Captain Khiboda said. “We’ll think about that. Won’t we, Commander?”
Saito sat forward, all business. “Of course, Captain. Thank you, Raizada. Next up: Communications. What have you got for us, Lieutenant Pineault?”
Raizada let his breath out, relieved. Well, sort of. He’d got his message out, and it hadn’t seemed to precipitate a disaster. Still, he was not entirely sure what had just happened there.
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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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