Captain's Away! Chapter Twenty-Six

"Acting Captain"

Apr 22, 2025

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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Captain's Away! Master Index

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.

Back to Chapter One

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Acting Captain”

Marie-Josée’s body lay on one of the Beausoleil’s diagnostic benches. The bench was monitoring its vital signs, providing nutrients, shifting its position occasionally to prevent bed sores, and even exercising its muscles. Marie-Josée herself stood beside the bench, looking down at her body. It felt like a dream. You shouldn’t be able to look down at your own body. Marie-Josée reached out and touched the bench’s titanium frame. It felt solid and cold. Real. Much more real than Marie-Josée felt, just then.

“Is it her?” Saito asked.

Javad, Saito, Marie-Josée, and the ever-present Beausoleil were alone in that room in the infirmary and could speak freely.

“It’s me, not her,” Marie-Josée said.

“How do you know for sure?” Saito asked.

Both Javad and the Beausoleil had spent some time convincing Saito that the captain wasn’t the captain, that she was Marie-Josée. They had presented a compelling case based on biometrics and personality traits. Saito appeared to have accepted the evidence, but Marie-Josée suspected that a part of him still believed, or at least hoped, that she was the captain. That, if only she tried hard enough, she would remember. Marie-Josée remembered, all right—a lifetime of being Marie-Josée Doucette. “I just know. So does your ship and this guy.” She meant Javad. “Aside from that you’ll just have to believe me.”

She turned to Javad. He looked even more haggard than the last time she’d seen him. Was he not getting enough sleep? You’d think a corpsman would know better than to burn the candle at both ends. “Why is my body still asleep? If the captain’s in there, shouldn’t she have woken up by now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Just put me back,” Marie-Josée suggested. “Maybe that will fix everything.”

Javad shook his head. “I could try to put you back only to make your situation worse. We could lose the captain for good. I need to continue testing the Field first. I need to know more about it.”

“You were able to put me in this body okay.”

“Case in point,” Javad said. “I wasn’t trying to redirect your consciousness to that body. I was trying to redirect the captain’s consciousness back to its own body. Either the technology failed, or I did something wrong. I don’t want to use it again until I understand what happened. For all we know, I put you in the captain’s body and put the captain somewhere else entirely.”

Marie-Josée stared at her own body in horror as the implications of what Javad had just said sunk in. There could be no one in her body. It could be devoid of a mind. “It’s —I’m—it’s breathing.”

“Your body’s autonomous functions are all working fine,” Javad told her. “Don’t worry. We can keep it alive for as long as we need to. There is some risk of secondary complications, but we have ways of dealing with that. When I do finally redirect you back, you’ll be fine.”

“In the meantime,” Saito said, “you agreed to help. Starting with—”

“I know what I agreed to,” Marie-Josée snapped.

Marie-Josée entered the ship’s small theatre at the appointed hour. Several crew members greeted her respectfully. She did her best to respond in kind but was pretty sure that she came off as forced and stiff. She was feeling stressed. She did not regret agreeing to portray the captain—not if it meant getting her body back—but she regretted agreeing to this. She hated public speaking.

Marie-Josée could see in the dim lighting that the raised seating was filled beyond capacity. This would be all the crew that weren’t on duty or asleep. Her words would be broadcast to the rest of the ship via hologram and recorded for anyone who wanted to see it later.

She made her way to the dais in the centre of the theatre feeling the eyes of everyone on her. The official story was that she’d been on medical leave the past month, recovering in her cabin from an unspecified illness. Something serious from which she was still recovering. Who could say what the crew really knew or believed? The captain’s long absence, her own brief, clumsy encounters with crewmembers, the confrontation on the bridge, and Saito’s ill-advised decision to involve security when she’d fled her cabin had all fuelled speculation that something was amiss.

Saito and Javad had done their best to contain the damage, Javad hinting to well-known rumour mongers that the captain had “experienced an adverse reaction to medication.” Saito had reinforced this narrative at a staff meeting, firmly informing his executive team that although the captain was “feeling much better, she still has a ways to go. But we expect a full recovery.”

Marie-Josée stepped onto the shallow dais. That was all it took to make the chatter in the small theatre subside. This was supposed to be an address from the captain relaying new orders from Akkadian Central Command. It was something that Khiboda did every time the Beausoleil received fresh orders. But it was also an opportunity for Marie-Josée to assure the crew that everything was just peachy now, thank you very much, never mind that, in Marie-Josée’s view, things were decidedly not fine. Not fine with the captain, or Marie-Josée, or much of anything else, really.

“Hello,” she said. “It’s good to see you all.” The acoustics of the theatre were such that she did not require amplification.

Silence. Just a sea of dimly lit faces.

Marie-Josée tried forcing a smile. It didn’t feel right—the captain didn’t smile much, if ever. She let it drop. That felt better, though not by much. My God, it was bad enough giving presentations to classrooms full of fellow students. Speaking to a room full of strangers—adults, no less—while pretending to be their captain was absolutely terrifying. For several seconds she thought she might throw up. The prospect amused her. It would certainly be a spectacular way to start the speech.

She swallowed hard, told herself to get on with it. She’d been over the material many times with Saito. She knew what she had to say. Had it memorized, down cold. It was not the most brilliant speech ever written. It wouldn’t go down in history. But it had one redeeming virtue: it was short.

Someone shouted from out of the dark. “It’s good to see you too, Captain!”

At least one person believed that she was the captain. That helped, a bit.

She stepped forward. “I want to tell you about our new orders.”

She didn’t, really. She didn’t give a crap about their new orders. For a moment she thought about saying that, that she didn’t give a crap about them, because it was the truth and she was used to just blurting out the truth. Saito had told her all about the new orders and they didn’t make much sense to her. But she knew she couldn’t say that. It wouldn’t help convince the crew that she was okay. Quite the opposite. She needed to say what she was supposed to say.

If only she could remember what that was.

“I want to tell you about our new orders,” she repeated, hoping that would jog her memory.

She could faintly make out people looking at her expectantly. The silence dragged on. Someone coughed. Saito leaned forward in his seat, staring at her intently.

Panic stirred within Marie-Josée. She began to feel the room close in on her, felt her intellectual capacity dwindle. She was about to be exposed as a fraud. Any second now someone would ask her who she thought she was, talking to people older, smarter, better than she was.

She clutched at straws, said the only thing that came to mind:

“I want—I want to tell you about our new orders.”

Saito placed his head in his hands.

“What about them, Captain?” shouted someone. Marie-Josée couldn’t tell who. She couldn’t read their holographic identification from here. It wouldn’t have mattered. She wouldn’t have known them anyway.

“Are you feeling better, Captain?” someone else shouted.

“Doesn’t sound like it!” someone responded.

She wanted to tell them no. No, I’m not. I am not feeling better, not at all. She wanted to tell them that she thought she might be going crazy. That this was nuts her being there. She was afraid she might start laughing hysterically.

“Yes,” she managed to lie instead. “Yes, I’m feeling better, thanks.”

To her surprise, this produced a light smattering of applause. A reprieve that gave her time to think. Just long enough to remember what she was supposed to say.

“Thank you,” she repeated, as the applause faded away. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then another. She opened her eyes and said, “I’m not actually feeling all that well. Not yet.”

Silence again. It didn’t unnerve her this time. Now she knew what she was going to say.

“And you know what? I don’t have to feel well all the time. I don’t have to pretend to feel well when I don’t. I feel what I feel and if you don’t like it too bad for you.”

Saito shifted in his seat. This wasn’t part of the script they’d rehearsed. It was also more heated than Marie-Josée had intended. Tone it down, she told herself. It wasn’t like she was talking to her mother here. She took another breath and ploughed on before Saito could decide to yank her off the stage.

“And I’ll tell you something else. After what I have to tell you some of you might not feel all that well either.”

Marie-Josée was satisfied to see that provoke some unsettled mumbling. She carried on over it. “These orders I have to tell you about. I went over them with Commander Saito earlier. The bastards have given us lots to do.” That was a surprise—she hadn’t planned on profanity. She didn’t normally swear herself. It had just come out. Felt right, though. In character. “I’m not going to lie to you. What we have to do isn’t going to be easy. But it’s an important job.”

Saito relaxed into his seat. She was back on script now—more or less.

“But it’s gonna be dangerous. Goddamned dangerous.” Okay, that was overdoing it a bit.

“It’s always dangerous!” a woman shouted.

“We’re good at dangerous!” someone else shouted, atop cries of “Isn’t that all we do?” and so on, all of it laced with lively, inventive profanity, making Marie-Josée wonder if the crew always spoke that way in front of the captain or if it was because she’d just given them license to do so.

She could see now, though, that they were on the captain’s side. This crew would have been through a lot with the captain. Too much, maybe. But they weren’t done yet. Not by a long shot. They had more to do, and they couldn’t do it alone. They needed their captain. Instead, all they had was this lousy fraud. Marie-Josée’s heart went out to them. She found that she wanted to give them a captain. She couldn’t give them their real captain, but by God she would give them the best version she could come up with. This was not a crew she wanted to let down.

“We have a mission!” she cried out, suddenly passionate about what she was saying.

“We always have a mission!” people shouted, laughing.

“Yes!” Marie-Josée shouted back. “We always have a mission. But this one’s different. I’m not supposed to tell you much about it. Not yet, anyway. I will when the time is right. But I’m going to tell you what I can because you deserve to know. We’re gonna shift to the aether. Make for Terminus Periculo. To the T’Klee. The cats owe me a favour. I’m going to call it in. I’m going to ask them to help us fight the enemy, because their help might make all the difference. A single, well-armed, well-crewed ship can make a difference. You—we—will make a difference!”

She had no idea what all that meant. Saito hadn’t told her. She waited what she hoped was the right amount of time. “What I need to know is—are you with me?”

The crew were energetic in their enthusiasm. They erupted in cheers. They were with her, despite the danger. Danger that she didn’t have to spell out. Everyone here knew that the T’Klee would just as soon blow them out of space as talk to them.

“Good,” Marie-Josée said. “I knew I could count on you. I can always count on you.”

She left the dais, relieved that it was over, but energized just the same. The last bit had been almost entirely scripted, and she’d rehearsed it many times, she couldn’t have done it otherwise—but she felt like she’d accomplished something. She was still a fake. She didn’t like that part of it, but damn! That had felt good.