* * *
I sat in the lounge of Starbase 74, with a book on the history of the Federation, reading about the people that a few days ago I’d actually been around. I’d chosen this spot to settle in and wait for my new ship, scheduled to arrive sometime that day. Through the bay windows in front of me was the cavernous interior docking compartment of the station. There were several starships berthed inside, undergoing various degrees of repair and maintenance. I was interrupted from my reading by an announcement over the public address system.
“U.S.S. Stargazer arriving Bay 3.” I looked up; after a brief moment, the Stargazer slowly came into view directly in front of the windows. In the pictures I’d seen it had seemed much smaller than it actually was. That was probably due to its squatness. It was much less sleek than the modern starship design. I remembered the ancient American naval officers used to refer to their ships as “tin cans,” and somehow that moniker fit this vessel.
I loved it.
I practically ran back to my quarters, picked up my packed belongings and made my way to Bay 3. I’d spent weeks brushing up on my navigation skills and couldn’t wait to sit at my new station on the bridge. I had very poetic thoughts that I was “plotting the course to my future.” I found myself standing at the doorway to the airlock to Bay 3, pausing dramatically at the control pad that would open the hatch. As I keyed the panel, I said quietly to myself…
“On the other side, destiny awaits…”
The door opened and something hit me. It went splat across my chest, and dropped to the floor. An egg. Somebody had just hit me with an egg. As the slime of the white and yolk slid down my tunic, there were squeals of delighted laughter. I saw two boys—one around twelve, the other a little younger. They seemed to have been waiting for someone to open the airlock door. I stood there stunned. They stuck their tongues out at me and ran off, just as an officer came up from inside the ship.
“Anthony! David! Get back here,” the officer said, but the boys were gone. The officer turned to me. He was in his thirties and had commander bars.
“Lieutenant Jean-Luc Picard,” I said, a little lost. “Reporting for duty.”
“Glad to meet you, Lieutenant, I’m Commander Frank Mazzara,” he said. “I’m the exec. Let’s get you cleaned up, and then I’ll take you to the captain.” He led me into the ship, and I was too confused as to what had just happened to even be aware of my surroundings.
“Who…” I said, “who were those boys?”
“Oh, those are my sons,” he said. “Great kids.”
“They’re on the ship?” I’d never heard of children being allowed on board a starship.
“Yeah,” he said, with genuine enthusiasm. “You will love them once you get to know them.”
About that, he would end up being wrong.
Commander Mazzara took me to my quarters, where I quickly changed into a clean tunic, and then he took me to the captain. Along the way I was able to refocus on where I was. The ship was bigger than Reliant; just on the walk from the airlock to my quarters and then up to the captain’s quarters I saw more crewmen than I served with on my old ship. Mazzara was affable, and filled me in on how the ship ran and what would be expected of me. There were three shifts instead of four, and I would serve on the bridge as second shift flight controller—a great improvement over the graveyard shift on Reliant. I began to relax and regain my enthusiasm for my new position. We reached the captain’s quarters, buzzed the door chime and were ordered in.
The captain’s quarters were larger than Quinn’s on Reliant, but seemed much tighter. Wall space was completely filled with art. There were shelves groaning with books and knick-knacks, as well as stacks of PADDs and piles of papers. Paper had never been used for record keeping in Starfleet, so I couldn’t imagine what it all was. It seemed less a captain’s quarters and more a family attic.
In the center was Captain Laughton, naked except for a towel around his waist, sitting in the chair at his desk, which was piled high with much of the same debris that was spread throughout the room. Laughton was a large man, very overweight by Starfleet standards. Directly in front of him a small space had been cleared for a plate of food: a half-eaten meal of curried chicken with rice, which I identified by the pungent odor. I stood at attention.
“Lieutenant Jean-Luc Picard, reporting for duty, sir.”
“Our new junior flight controller,” Laughton said. “You can stand at ease, Lieutenant, we don’t go in for all that.” That clearly went without saying. “So, the hero of Milika III. Made quite a name for yourself already.” His air was subtly taunting.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, doing my best to ignore his tone.
“We could use a few more heroes around here, right, Mazzara?”
“Yes, sir,” Mazzara said.
“Well, just so you know,” Laughton said, “I like people to pitch in even if it isn’t in their job description. I hope you don’t have a problem with that.”
“No, sir,” I said, having no idea what he meant.
“Good, welcome aboard.” He took a healthy forkful of chicken curry, and as he chewed said: “Mazzara, put him to work.” Laughton fully engaged with his meal as Mazzara led me out.
“The captain’s something else, isn’t he?” Mazzara said, once we were in the corridor. I might have said the same thing, except not with Mazzara’s admiring tone.
Mazzara had to return to duty on the bridge, so he took me with him. As we walked through the corridors, maintenance workers from the station had already begun to stream on board the ship. We would be in spacedock for at least a week for repairs and upgrades.
“Truth be told, the old lady could probably use a month,” Mazzara said. We arrived on the bridge, where the second shift was on duty, and the person sitting in the captain’s chair was a bit troubling.
“Anthony, get out of the chair,” Mazzara said to the older of the two boys who had egged me. “Where’s your brother?”
“Don’t know. Said he was going to play in the warp core,” Anthony said, still sitting in the captain’s chair.
“I want you to apologize to Lieutenant Picard,” Mazzara said.
“For what? We didn’t do anything. It was David who threw it…”
“Anthony,” Mazzara said
“It’s fine, no need,” I said. The other bridge officers were watching this, their first impression of me, and I just wanted it to end.
“All right,” Mazzara said. Anthony continued to sit in the captain’s chair, as Mazzara took me around to meet the other officers on the bridge. I wasn’t a parent, but I knew terrible parenting when I saw it.
The next week I threw myself into helping with the ship’s repairs and upgrades, and it quickly became apparent to me the Stargazer was in terrible shape. Some of the systems were very outdated, and regular maintenance had not been performed on everything from the engines to the hull to the coffee cups, so everything felt worn and dilapidated. This went for the crew as well. Lieutenant Christoph Black, who’d been one of the cadets I’d passed in the academy marathon, was a communications officer. One day I joined him for lunch in the ship’s wardroom and asked him tactful questions about Mazzara and his children.
“He’s a single dad,” Black said, “and Laughton wanted him, so this was a condition of him coming on board.” Black was also being politic; neither one of us was going to reveal how we felt about the two boys. He then asked me how I ended up on the Stargazer. I told him I applied for the open position, and the derisiveness of his laugh cut me like a razor.
“Probably should’ve done a little more due diligence,” Black said. I didn’t need to ask him why he thought that.
Finally, it was time to leave spacedock. The ship was scheduled to depart in the middle of my shift. I was at the flight controller station and Mazzara sat in the captain’s chair, in command for this shift. I was nervous; I was about to fly a starship for the first time. Every free minute I’d had I’d practiced in the simulator, but I still wasn�
��t sure I was ready to handle a ship this large with an engine this powerful. Black turned to Mazzara.
“Dock command signaling clear,” he said.
“Inform the captain we’re ready to depart,” Mazzara said.
“Captain acknowledges and is coming to the bridge,” Black said. Mazzara moved from the captain’s chair.
“Conn,” he said to me,3 “Captain might want to take a look at the final maintenance report. Have it ready.” I nodded and went to the science station to get a PADD, then downloaded the report onto it to give the captain. When I finished, I headed back to my chair, only to find someone was in it.
“I’m going to fly the ship,” David said, the younger of the two Mazzara children.
“That’s my job,” I said. I looked for Mazzara, who was nowhere to be found. I assumed he must be in the washroom behind the viewscreen.
“No, it’s my job,” David said. This was a true no-win scenario. I had to get this child out of my chair before the captain arrived, which would be any second. I looked around helplessly, but every bridge officer was avoiding my silent plea. All of them had been veterans of the Stargazer, some if not all had probably been victims of the tyranny of these imps.
“Well,” I said, “how about I let you have a turn when I’m done?”
“It’s my ship, I’ll do what I want.” He spun back and forth in my chair. He knew he had power. Absolute power corrupting absolutely. I was hoping Mazzara would return before Laughton arrived, but I couldn’t risk it. I wanted to tell the spoiled rodent that I would wring his neck if he didn’t get up, but threatening my superior officer’s child seemed ill-advised. I wracked my brain for another plan, and then realized I was over-thinking it. I looked over David’s shoulder to the empty captain’s chair.
“Were you sitting in the captain’s chair?”
“No.”
“Oh,” I said, and walked over to the chair. “I guess finders keepers…” I pretended to reach for something in the chair, and David immediately got up from the conn station and ran over.
“My dad was sitting there, whatever it is it’s mine…”
With a quick step I was back in the conn chair, just as the turbolift doors opened and Laughton strode onto the bridge. David, realizing he’d been fooled, ran back to me.
“Hey, I was sitting there…”
By then, Mazzara was out of the washroom.
“David,” Mazzara said. “Go to our quarters.”
“But I was sitting…”
“Go now,” Mazzara said. He gave a slightly worried glance to Laughton, who didn’t seem interested. David looked me in the eye—I’d made an enemy today. He then shuffled off the bridge.
“All right, Mr. Picard,” Laughton said. “Take us out. And try not to side-swipe the door jamb.” After what I’d just been through, getting to handle the ship seemed a relief. I also decided when I became a captain, children wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near my ship, let alone the bridge.
1 EDITOR’S NOTE: Dom-jot is a game with some similarities to both the ancient games of billiards and pinball.
2 EDITOR’S NOTE: Guramba is Nausicaan slang for male genitalia.
3 EDITOR’S NOTE: Conn is shipboard parlance for the officer manning the flight controller station.
CHAPTER FOUR
“SET COURSE FOR THE NORTH STAR COLONY,” Mazzara said. “Maximum warp.” The order, like many I’d carried out, made little sense, but after four years on this ship I’d learned to accept such things.
“Course set,” I said. “Engaging at warp factor 7.” The ship shook a little as we went into warp; the inertial dampeners were old and always in need of adjustment. We’d just been examining the Kobliad system, a binary star system with one sparsely populated planet. We were about to make contact with its inhabitants when the captain gave the order to change course and go to the North Star colony. This almost certainly didn’t come from Starfleet Command. I knew this because we hadn’t heard from Starfleet in weeks.
Laughton had crafted his image at Starfleet as a great explorer. In the first part of his career on the Stargazer he’d catalogued a record number of new worlds for a shipmaster. He was now living off that reputation, and had been for some time. He was still making new discoveries, charting new systems, meeting new species, but not nearly as rapidly. However, the Stargazer’s age and condition meant it had little use anywhere else, so even if the reports of new systems were down to a trickle, the Admiralty still felt it was getting its “money’s worth” from the old bucket.
But because they gave him such a long leash, Laughton took ridiculous privileges. The current situation was a perfect example: one more day and we could’ve finished the survey of the Kobliad system, but instead, we were heading off at high warp for some unknown reason that was almost certainly frivolous. Whatever it was, we would have to turn around and come right back to finish the survey. It was inefficient, indulgent, and an infuriating waste of time and resources. And it would invariably involve me doing something I didn’t want to do. As he mentioned on my first day, Laughton liked officers to “pitch in” outside their job description.
When we reached colony a few days later, I got a call from the captain to come to his quarters.
“I need you to take a shuttle to the surface,” Laughton said. He was in a bathrobe, which was better than the towel. “You’re to pick up a piece of equipment from a man in the main city; I’ll give you his contact information. You’ll pay for the equipment with one of our power converters.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “What kind of equipment am I picking up?”
“You’ll find out when you get there,” he said. “Oh, also, have someone come in here and take out this desk.”
So he bought a new desk.
This was his modus operandi; he was a collector and spent all his free time scouring subspace marketplaces for things that struck his fancy. It wasn’t just his quarters that were filled with his acquisitions: storage spaces all over the ship were stocked with objets d’art, books, furniture, and rare documents. Now he found a desk he wanted and had taken his ship and crew away from its duties to pick it up. He could just have it beamed into the cargo bay, but in his mind that would be too conspicuous. Somehow, by tasking me with this, he thought only I would know about it, not taking into account all the people I would have to deal with on the way. But I’d learned there was no point in trying to explain this to him.
I took the information from him and went to engineering. The chief engineer, Lieutenant Commander Scully, a large, usually affable man, looked annoyed when I asked him for a power converter.
“They don’t grow on trees, son,” he said.
“The captain…”
“All right, all right…” he said and walked off to retrieve one. He handed it over, and I then went to the shuttle bay and informed the bridge that I was taking a shuttle to the surface on orders from the captain. Nobody questioned anything, no one asked for any more detail. They all knew what was going on.
I took the shuttle down to the surface. The North Star colony (not to be confused with Polaris, the “North Star” in the Earth’s nighttime sky) was a pleasant throwback. Some time in the 19th century on Earth a wagon train had been abducted by aliens called the Skagaran, who used the humans for slaves on this planet. Eventually the humans rose up and took over the planet, and when they were rediscovered in the 22nd century by the first starship Enterprise, they’d built an entire town that looked like it was from the 19th-century North American West, complete with horses and buggies and gunslingers. It still exists to this day, but now with many modern conveniences.
I landed at the starport and then made my way to the address the captain had given me. It was a small adobe-like home. I knocked on the door. A hunched, wizened old man named MacReady answered.
“I’m here from the Stargazer,” I said. I gave him the power converter. The old man nodded and led me into his home.
He was a woodworker, and the whole house was set up a
s a workshop. The old man gestured toward a wooden desk. It was quite stunning, polished dark wood, and very large. Troublingly large. Larger than any desk I’d ever seen on a starship.
I took out my tricorder and did a quick scan of its measurements; it wouldn’t even fit through a turbolift’s doors. Again, there would be no point in trying to explain this to the captain, so I just decided to get it back to the ship and deal with it there.
“Do you have an anti-grav unit?” I said. The old man shook his head, then handed me four pieces of wood attached as a square, with wheels on the bottom. It appeared to be a primitive device called a “dolly,” used to move heavy objects. With some difficulty, I got the desk up on the dolly, and slowly pushed it out the door and down the street, back to the starport. It was a difficult trek, as the desk was much larger than the dolly, and it took some effort to keep it balanced as I pushed. I used my time on this excursion to ponder, as I often did, how I might extricate myself from this ship, but every attempt I made to get transferred was denied by the captain. He seemed to understand that he was getting in my way, which is why the previous year he had promoted me to lieutenant commander. The new rank did nothing to help me haul this giant piece of wood.
I finally reached the shuttle, and realized I had another problem: there was no hatch on the shuttle big enough for the desk. The only solution seemed to be to beam it up, but I wasn’t going to do that. A few weeks earlier, the captain had me on a similar errand to pick up a statue of Kahless, the ancient Klingon leader. The most efficient way to get it back on the ship was to transport it, but when he found out that’s what I did he was furious and threatened to demote me. Black had quietly explained to me that transporter logs were very detailed, and Laughton didn’t want an official record of all the cargo he was bringing up. I didn’t want to risk his ire again, so I had to come up with another plan.
STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JEAN-LUC PICARD Page 10