Captain's Away! Chapter Twenty-Nine
"The Meeting Part Two"
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. Attending a meeting with senior officers, Marie-Josée finds herself in way over her head.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“The Meeting Part Two”
On the outside, Captain Khiboda appeared completely at ease. It was a by-product of her physical appearance. Superbly physically fit, with a harsh, unforgiving visage made worse by that prominent scar running down the left side of her face. Not a mean face; just a hard one, topping a body that appeared at ease wherever it was, whatever it was doing.
The spirit that animated it, though, was a different story.
Marie-Josée had no idea that she came across as calm. She was certain that she appeared completely the opposite. Though it was obvious to everyone present that the captain was not quite herself, they all would have been surprised and maybe even alarmed to learn just how ill-at-ease she felt. She did not know how to be. She did not know how to hold herself. She did not know what expression to wear on her face. She did not know what to say. She did not know anything.
She couldn’t wait for the meeting to be over, yet it went on and on. What the heck were they talking about? She didn’t understand any of it. She hoped to God nobody asked her a question. She lived in fear—complete and utter dread—of somebody exposing her. She hoped it didn’t show on her face. She’d tried smiling at the pilot at the beginning of the meeting only to have him recoil in fear. Why? Because she looked so hideous? Maybe it was the scar. They must all hate her, she looked so ugly. She tried not to make the mistake of smiling again.
Before long she’d worked herself into a complete funk. She couldn’t take just sitting there, listening, doing nothing. So boring! She looked for an opportunity to contribute. She didn’t want the crew to think she’d become a mute. She tried to make sense of what she was hearing. The names of systems meant nothing to her. Staffing problems involving people she didn’t know. Issues so far beyond her ken that people might as well have been speaking a foreign tongue.
Until the pilot spoke up. She remembered him from the bridge. The dashing man. He had seemed friendly then. His holo-tag identified him as Sub-Lieutenant Raizada. What Raizada was saying was at least decipherable. They were heading to T’Klee territory through the aether but to get there they had to pass through streams called the Rapids. Raizada seemed to think that was a bad idea. According to him there was a better way to get there. A safer way. There were civilians on board this ship now. Shouldn’t they try to do things more safely? But Saito shut the guy down before he could even explain. That didn’t seem right to Marie-Josée.
So, she spoke up. “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”
She had expected her voice to sound meek and tentative, the way it might have sounded in her own body. But this body sounded calm. Authoritative. Reasonable, with a soupçon of argue with me at your peril.
Marie-Josée was astute enough to gauge Saito’s reaction. Brief surprise, perhaps even alarm. Assessing options in a fraction of a second. Marie-Josée felt dismay. Probably he had a good reason for not hearing Raizada out. The actual captain would have known that. She was just about to open her mouth to say forget it, when Saito said, “Of course, Captain.”
They heard Raizada out.
What he had to say sounded perfectly reasonable.
When Raizada finished his spiel, Marie-Josée said, “Thank you. We’ll think about that. Won’t we, Commander?”
She was not entirely sure why she added that last bit. It had sounded cheekier than she’d intended. She was not entirely unhappy with it but expected that she’d pay for it later.
After the meeting, back in the captain’s cabin, Saito paced while Javad, leaning against the bulkhead near the kitchenette, looked on. Marie-Josée waited nervously, as usual unaware that on the outside she appeared insufferably calm. She expected Saito to whirl on her in a complete rage. But he didn’t. Instead, when he finally stopped pacing, he seemed reflective. “Why did you ask Raizada to go on?”
Marie-Josée only dimly understood the real reasons herself. It was too complicated to get into. “I wanted to hear what he had to say. It seemed like a good idea to me.”
Saito nodded. “That’s because you don’t have the whole picture. Still, what you did wasn’t bad.”
Marie-Josée felt like a dog that had just been patted on the head. She was simultaneously pleased and irritated.
“It was good that you spoke up. You sounded like yourself.”
Marie-Josée understood what he meant. She had sounded like the captain.
“You encouraged Raizada,” Saito went on. “He doesn’t need more encouragement, he’s cocky enough already, but that’s another story. You were supportive. You were authoritative, even over me. It was good for the crew to see.” Saito was nodding. Marie-Josée wondered whether he was trying to convince himself. “Well done.”
Marie-Josée raised an eyebrow at this second pat on the head. She waited for the other shoe to drop.
Saito pulled a chair up and sat down, facing her. “But it’s clear we need to bring you up to speed on what’s going on or we’ll continue to contradict one another.”
“I had no idea what you guys were talking about in that meeting,” Marie-Josée said. “It was extremely uncomfortable.”
“There’s no way you could have understood,” Javad suggested. “You don’t have any of the context.”
“We’re going to correct that,” Saito said. “I’ll figure out a way to get you up to speed. And let’s limit your exposure to the crew even more.”
“Okay.” Marie-Josée never wanted to suffer through another meeting like that one. “What’s the deal with Raizada? I don’t understand what’s wrong with his idea.”
“He’s not wrong,” Saito said. “What we’re doing, where we’re going is extremely dangerous. But he doesn’t understand the urgency. Two extra days might not seem like much but it could make all the difference in this war. Plus those are our orders. We can’t just change them because they don’t suit us.”
“Why not?”
“They’re our orders for a reason. We may not know the reason but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. If we don’t do what we’re told it could mess up the grand plan.”
“What grand plan?”
“Presumably Command has some grand, over-arching plan for how to win this war. We have to do our part.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Don’t what?”
“Have a grand plan? Or what if the grand plan is stupid?”
Marie-Josée could see that Saito was getting annoyed. That didn’t bother her. She was perfectly serious.
“We have to trust that they have a grand plan and that it’s not stupid.”
“Why?”
“Look,” Saito said testily. “If everyone in the fleet just went around doing what they wanted, where would that get us? I’ll tell you where. It would get us all killed. The Realm would be organized and we would not.”
Marie-Josée could see the sense in that. Still… “Why can’t we just talk to the T’Klee from here instead of going to all this trouble? Why can’t we just use the aethercom?”
Saito and Javad glanced at one another. “There’s more to it than just talking to them.”
Marie-Josée waited. “Well? Aren’t you going to tell me? You just said that from now on you were going to tell me everything.”
“Everything that’s on a need-to-know basis,” Saito said. “And right now, you definitely do not need to know that.”
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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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