The Captain's Oath

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “I could wear a hat. Do they wear hats?”

  Diaz shook her head. “Judging from our optical surveillance, Commander, only Nacmorian males cover their heads in public, at least in the dominant culture.”

  “Then I’ll start a fashion trend.”

  “The last thing we want is to call attention to ourselves,” Kirk told her. “We don’t want them discovering us and mistaking us for their attackers.”

  Sherev nodded, her antennae sagging. “Understood, sir.”

  Diaz stepped forward. “Permission to join the landing party, sir?”

  The captain smiled at her. “I was just about to give the order. You know the Nacmorians as well as any of us.” The young science officer struggled to contain her excitement.

  Kirk had to admit that he felt a similar thrill at getting back out in the field. He knew that captains should ideally stay on the bridge and rely on their crews, but he preferred to emulate the example of more hands-on commanders like Garth, Pike, and Wesley. It didn’t sit right with him to order others into dangers he wouldn’t face himself. Especially in a case like this, with the double dangers of the Nacmorians’ unknown cultural pitfalls and the unseen attackers from space.

  As the three officers entered the turbolift, Gary Mitchell gave Kirk a look acknowledging the uncertainty he must have seen on his friend’s face. “I know what you’re thinking,” Mitchell said. “Where’s Investigator Kalamul when we need him?”

  Minerith City, Nacmor

  It was fortunate for the landing party that Nacmorian males commonly wore cowls in public, since said males were totally bald, save for thick, bushy bronze eyebrows. The cowls saved Kirk, Mitchell, and security chief Joshua Hauraki from needing to shave their heads, though McCoy still needed to apply prosthetic pieces to simulate the Nacmorian males’ bulbous foreheads, which apparently housed some sort of pheromonal glands. Kamisha Diaz, the lone woman on the team, had it comparatively easy, for Nacmorian women were closer to the humanoid norm; she only needed to have her tight curls straightened and dyed bronze, and her skin tinted golden-green along with the men’s. The final touch for all four was a pair of uncomfortable scleral contact lenses to match the Nacmorians’ wide, bright gold irises with horizontal slit pupils.

  The four disguised humans beamed down into a vacant alley not far from the military cordon now surrounding the burned-out slum area. They moved out into pedestrian traffic and wended their way indirectly toward the edge of the burned zone, trying to appear no more than idly curious, like passersby momentarily distracted from their business. Kirk noted that the streets, sidewalks, buildings, and storefronts looked not too different from an Earth city of the early twentieth century, allowing for alien writing and architectural nuances, although the smell was more reminiscent of the nineteenth. While the Nacmorians did have internal combustion engines, it appeared that their use was restricted to government and military vehicles; the general citizenry still relied on wagons and carriages pulled by large draft animals resembling a green-feathered hybrid of camel and ostrich. And where an Earth city might have subway entrances spaced along its street corners, instead there were prominently marked bomb shelters—heavy steel domes with open doors leading into dark stairways and guarded by soldiers who nodded respectfully at the passing citizenry.

  As the group made its way around the outskirts of the slum, Kamisha Diaz took what opportunities she could to sneak tricorder scans of the burned-out area, while the three men shielded her hands from the view of the crowd and the military cordon. “Nothing,” she said after a dozen blocks’ worth of this. “I’m reading no chemical, metallurgical, or radiation signatures inconsistent with Nacmorian materials. Some residue consistent with combustion accelerants, but that could easily be fuel for the crude heaters they use.”

  “We need to find out more from the people who’ve been through these attacks,” Kirk said. “It’s risky, but maybe we can question some of the citizenry, if we’re subtle about it.”

  Soon they found a crowd of Nacmorians huddled around a newsstand where a large radio, the glow of its vacuum tubes visible through a ventilation grille, was delivering a news update on the aftermath of the apparent alien attack. Though the announcer offered reassurances that the government was on the case and advisories to remain vigilant, his report provided little in the way of specifics.

  As the report ended and several of the passersby dispersed, a stout, gray-haired woman remained to peruse the newsstand’s wares, shaking her head and tut-tutting. “Terrible,” she said. “Just terrible.”

  Ensign Diaz sidled up to her. “It is, isn’t it? It’s all just so hard to understand. I mean, what do I tell my little brother when he asks me why the people from the sky are attacking us?”

  Kirk traded an impressed look with Mitchell. She’s a natural at this.

  Unfortunately, her gambit bore little fruit. “I know, dear. How frustrating not to have any answers for them. Who can know the minds of creatures from another world? Maybe the government has a theory by now, but they tell us what they choose in their own time.”

  “They want what we have,” the news vendor countered. “Our riches, our food, our energy. We’ve cracked the atom, conquered the world. We took it all from the weaker kind. Now somebody bigger has come to take it from us. It’s the way of things.”

  The old woman threw him a sour look, not seeming pleased by his words. “That’s the real shame. I’d hoped that now the wars were won, we’d at least be able to relax our guard. Go back to the way things were before.”

  “Like what, ma’am?” Diaz asked.

  “Oh, before your time, dear. But there was a day before all the rationing, the compulsory donations, the curfews, the checkpoints. A time when we could live our lives in—” She broke off, reacting to the motor sound of a military vehicle that had just rounded the corner. “Forgive me—I’ve said more than I should. The hazards of aging, I’m afraid.” She hurried off without buying anything.

  Further attempts turned up little more information—just more of the same mix of reactions from a populace chafing under the government’s restrictions and regulations but grateful for the defense the state provided against a terrifying and unknowable foe. But the nature of that alien foe and its agenda remained elusive.

  Finally, Kirk’s communicator beeped, and he led the party into another alley to answer. “Radio intercepts say another alien attack is underway,” Sherev reported from the ship. “In Derostur City, four hundred kilometers southwest of you.”

  “Beam us to that location at once, Sherev,” Kirk said. “We need to see this for ourselves.”

  Derostur City, Nacmor

  When the party arrived in the new city, they heard the blaring of air raid sirens and civil defense announcements advising evacuation to the shelters. From the emptiness of the streets, it seemed most of the citizenry had already acted on the warnings. “The government transmissions say a flight of ships has been detected incoming,” Sherev reported from the ship, “but we’re still reading nothing on sensors. No ships, no power signatures, no exhaust trails, no atmospheric disturbances.”

  This section of Derostur appeared somewhat more prosperous than the Minerith slum district, but the architectural styles were distinctly different and most of the signage was in a different script. “It seems to be an immigrant enclave,” Diaz observed. “Like Little Andoria in San Francisco. I think the language is from the country called Vekudi, on the southern continent.”

  They reached an intersection with what appeared to be the main thoroughfare of the enclave, which had several military vehicles and teams patrolling it. Staying in the shadow of a shop awning, they observed as the soldiers proceeded up the street toward them, stopping to enter the vacant storefronts or apartment buildings on either side of the street. “Are they taking something into those buildings?” Kirk asked.

  Diaz’s tricorder warbled. “Sir—the bundles read as high explosives!”

  Mitchell gasped. “Holy— No wonder we c
ouldn’t detect any ships. There aren’t any aliens—the whole thing is a hoax! By the government!”

  Kirk nodded. “It looks that way. They get everyone into the shelters so they can plant bombs unobserved, then claim the destruction was caused by alien attackers that they then fought off.”

  “But why?” a bewildered Diaz asked.

  “We’ll figure that out later,” Kirk said. “Right now we need to withdraw.”

  “Hey!” A group of soldiers had spotted them. Five burly men and one woman, dressed in blue-gray military fatigues and black helmets, quickly surrounded them. “You’re not supposed to be here, citizens,” the man in the lead said. “You were ordered to report to shelters.”

  “We’re sorry, sir,” Kirk said, keeping his tone conciliatory. “We were unavoidably detained. We were just on our way—”

  “Hold on,” the squad leader said. “You’re not Vekudi. Your accent is northern. What are you doing in Derostur? Where are your papers?”

  “We . . . left them in our hotel, I’m afraid. We weren’t expecting to travel far, but then in the confusion we got turned around, the sirens and all . . .”

  “Go out on the streets without your papers? No decent citizen would do that. But the resistance would!”

  Kirk saw the squad leader reach for his firearm. He reacted instinctively, grabbing the support pole of the awning with both hands and kicking the soldier in the chest, knocking down both him and the woman behind him. He knew the landing party’s disguises would not hold up to more than cursory inspection, so escape was the only option.

  Lieutenant Hauraki followed his captain’s lead and took a third soldier down with a karate chop, and Mitchell decked another with a roundhouse punch. It created enough of an opening for the foursome to break through the encirclement and run. But as soon as they rounded the corner, a second squad confronted them, and the first squad quickly recovered and came in pursuit. Kirk and the others tried to dodge them, but Diaz was grabbed. She fought against the considerably larger woman who held her, but got a hard slap across the face for her trouble. When Kirk tried to run to her rescue, the first squad leader stepped in front of him and felled him with a blow to the chin.

  As the soldiers dragged Kirk to his feet, he noted with alarm that an edge of his forehead prosthetic was hanging loose into his field of view. Looking at the others, all just as firmly restrained now, he saw that Mitchell’s cowl had come loose, exposing a portion of his hair behind his forehead appliance—and Diaz had lost a contact lens from the slap.

  The squad leader was staring at them in disbelief. Hesitantly, he reached out and yanked the cowl from Kirk’s head, recoiling in shock at the nearly full head of hair thus exposed. Examining the forehead piece, the soldier soon recognized that it was artificial, emboldening him to tear it free. A pair of the soldiers behind him gasped at the pale pinkish flesh thus exposed.

  “Incredible,” the big woman said. “Did we find . . . actual aliens from outer space?”

  “Or something close enough,” the squad leader said. He gave Kirk a self-satisfied smile. “Count yourself lucky, whatever you are. We were going to kill you and leave your bodies to be found in the wreckage. Now I think you may be of much more use to us alive—for now.”

  Nine

  The government has learned that the enemy from outer space has the ability to alter the minds of Nacmorian beings, explaining the rash of insurrectionist activity among formerly respectable professors at Nilostig University. If you see hints of subversive thought or behavior expressed by your neighbors, co-workers, or family, then they may have been infected by alien signals and should be promptly reported to the authorities for their own safety.

  —Nacmorian government broadcast

  U.S.S. Sacagawea

  “We’re still reading their communicator signals inside the government bunker,” Rhenas Sherev reported, leaning forward with her hands on the railing in front of her science station. “But they haven’t moved in over two hours. Given the power readings in the chamber they’re in, I’m guessing it’s some sort of electronics lab. Most likely the equipment has been taken away for study, and the bunker’s too deep for us to differentiate human from Nacmorian life signs in there.” Her nails dug into the railing as she squeezed it angrily. “I still say we should’ve beamed them up at the first sign of trouble.”

  Eshu Adebayo, by contrast, sat calmly in the command chair, which he’d swiveled to face her. “You know what the captain would say. Revealing transporter technology to the Nacmorians would be a massive violation of the Prime Directive.”

  “And revealing alien life wouldn’t? If we leave them there to be examined, dissected—”

  “Starfleet explorers have faced situations like this before, going back to Jonathan Archer,” the first officer said in a calming tone. “I was in a spot like this myself some, hmm, thirty-two years ago. We were undercover on a planet of Iron Age humanoids—my XO, myself, three others—but we were found out and captured by a local monarch. We hadn’t realized that a percentage of their females were telepathic. They saw right through us, read our alienness in our own thoughts. Our knowledge of physics, technology, weapons—if they’d used it, their empire could’ve conquered the world.” He chuckled. “But Commander Shao was able to convince them that she was schizophrenic and had telepathically infected the rest of us with her delusions. They hastened to quarantine us—piled us into a wagon and gave its draft animals a mental command to take us to some sort of leper colony for dangerous telepaths. Once we were alone, we could beam away unobserved. And since they dismissed what they’d read in our minds as delusions, they never attempted to follow up on our scientific knowledge.”

  “Entertaining as always, Eshu, but this is different. They’re medically advanced enough to prove our team is alien. They can study our equipment and learn from it. Beaming the team out right away would’ve just left them with a mystery they couldn’t solve. Now they have all the evidence they need to figure it out. Evidence including our team’s bodies. You’ve heard the broadcasts. These people have little regard for the lives of their enemies.”

  “I thought the situation was just as helpless back then, Rhenas, but my commanding officer found an option I hadn’t considered. You know Jim better than I do. Do you have any reason to doubt he can find a way out of this?”

  Adebayo’s warm, dark eyes held hers, and the calm within them helped cool her own fires. She sighed. “He’s always been more disciplined than I am. I guess I should try to learn from his example.”

  “Yes. Instead of arguing for an option no longer available, try to predict what the captain might do, so that we can be ready to assist when the chance arises.”

  “ ‘When,’ Commander? You have a lot of faith in such a young captain.”

  “He wouldn’t be a captain at his age if he weren’t something special. And sooner or later, all of us old hands need to admit that it’s time for fresher, more flexible minds to take the lead.” He smiled. “Which includes yours as well, Rhen. So get thinking.”

  Nacmorian government bunker, outside Derostur

  The first few hours of the landing party’s captivity were the most unpleasant. The Nacmorians stripped them naked, sprayed them with hoses, and scrubbed them down until their golden-green skin dye wore off, then subjected them to invasive medical examinations and took enough x-ray images that they might need hyronalin treatment if and when they returned to the ship. Interrogators asked them a litany of questions that only Kamisha Diaz could understand even partially, since their communicators and tricorders had been taken away along with their hand phasers, and thus they had no translation capability beyond the junior science officer’s linguistic talents.

  In time, though, the four humans were given back their Nacmorian clothing (minus the men’s cowls, apparently deemed redundant for males with scalp hair) and escorted to a sizable dining hall with a well-appointed table. At the head of the table sat an aged, jowly, bareheaded Nacmorian male dressed in a pseud
omilitary suit adorned with ornate epaulets and piping. He lifted his bulky frame from his seat with some effort, and Kirk noted that he wore one of the landing party’s communicators on a chain around his neck. The unit’s lid was shut, but the status lights visible through its grille indicated that the translation function was active.

  “Ah, greetings, greetings,” the man said. “I am Ultimate Premier Ribaul, the leader of Nacmor. I apologize for the way you have been treated, but it was necessary to confirm that you were what you appeared to be. Now that we are certain, however, it changes everything.” He gestured to the seats around the table. “Please, be seated and enjoy our hospitality. You are honored guests to our world.”

  Kirk affected a bewildered look. He turned to the others, mugging in shock, and they quickly caught on and followed his lead. “I’m sorry,” he told Ribaul. “ ‘To our world’? What exactly do you think we are?”

  “Oh, there’s no need to pretend, my friends. You are the answer to our prayers. You have come to us from outer space, just when we need you the most.”

  After another moment’s shocked staring, Kirk broke out laughing, and the others followed suit. Mitchell, always a poor actor, laughed a little too loudly until Diaz nudged his shin with her foot.

  “From outer space?” Kirk echoed in a disbelieving tone. “Oh, I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding, Premier. I can understand how you might think we were the ones responsible for these horrible attacks, but I assure you we’re nothing of the kind.” He glanced toward the seat he’d been offered, and at Ribaul’s nod, he tentatively took it; again, the other three followed suit.

  “You see,” Kirk went on, glancing down at the table, “we . . . our family . . . have a rare genetic condition. Our land is very remote and isolated, so you’ve probably never heard of it. When we must travel beyond our tribe, we wear prosthetics to hide our . . . our deformity.” He avoided meeting the premier’s eyes.