“Did you hear that, Jack?”
“Affirmative,” Crusher said. We watched as Cheva energized and disappeared. Crusher then picked up Ailat and put her in the same spot. The shuttle was suddenly rocked. Someone or something was trying to get in from outside. Crusher braced himself as the craft slid back and forth. “Youlin, you’ve got another one, energize!”
“Can we fire weapons from here? Stun those intruders?”
“We won’t have an exact lock,” Black said. “And if we hit the shuttle, even on the stun setting, it might negatively affect the transport.” We watched Ailat disappear. Crusher was already hauling Vigo out of his seat and bringing him to the transporter.
A gash suddenly appeared on the shuttle wall, which looked to be caused, incredibly, by a knife. It must have been made of a fantastically hard metal. And whoever was wielding it tore through the bulkhead like it was tin.
And then another knife sliced another part of the hull. And another.
“Looks like I’ve got company,” Crusher said, as he dragged Vigo, a head taller than him, achingly slowly. I wanted to get down there and help him, but there would be no use, it would just slow down his escape. So all I could do was watch.
He finally laid Vigo into place. “Youlin, go!” Crusher said, as he stepped away and drew his phaser. The first intruder had now opened a hole in the shuttle revealing his face: a mane of red hair and small tusks around the mouth reminiscent of a Nausicaan but with a wild-eyed fierceness. It cut away an entrance big enough to move through.
Jack fired his phaser, and the creature fell back, only to be replaced by another. Vigo finally energized, and disappeared. Crusher went to the transport area.
“Beam him up!” I said. I watched as two more Chalnoth forced their way into the shuttle. Jack fired again. One went down as the other moved across the craft, slashing his formidable blade across Jack’s neck, just before he disappeared in the transporter beam.
I ran down to the transporter room. A medical team was wheeling out Vigo as I raced inside. Two medics were standing over Jack, who lay on the pad. Blood flowed freely from a laceration that went across his neck and up to the top of his head. The medics worked on closing the gaping wound as I kneeled down beside him.
“Jack,” I said. “We got you…”
He looked up at me, in pleading disbelief. A gurgling sound came from his neck. The medics closed the wound, placed him on a waiting gurney, and hurried out with him. I stayed where I was, kneeling in a wide pool of my friend’s blood.
* * *
“It’s good of you to come,” Beverly said. It was overly formal; she was struggling to hold back her emotions.
“It’s the least I could do,” I said. We walked slowly through the corridor of Starbase 32 heading to the morgue. I had arrived with the Stargazer to bring Jack back to his family. We were withdrawn, both mourning the loss of the most important person in our lives. Jack had died because he was protecting me. He was my friend, my family. I felt a loss that was immeasurable. And yet I knew it was nothing next to the loss Beverly was experiencing.
We entered the morgue and approached the table where Jack’s body lay, covered with a sheet. I knew what was under the sheet. I’d watched as Dr. Ailat, still recovering from her own injuries, worked with her medical team to try and save Jack’s life. The image of my dead friend was branded in my memory. I turned to Beverly.
“You shouldn’t remember him like this.” She looked down at the sheet, stoic.
“It’s important to me,” she said. “I have to face the fact that he’s gone.”
I nodded and reached for the sheet. It seemed to take all my strength to lift it up. Jack lay there, white and still. Beverly took a moment, leaned in, and kissed his forehead. Her tears began. I covered Jack and held her a moment. She forced herself to recover.
“I’ve got to go find Wesley,” she said.
“He doesn’t know?” I said. She shook her head.
I went with her back out into the corridor, and we made our way to one of the station’s schoolrooms. Wesley, now five years old, sat at a table, playing with geometric toys. The teacher in the room had obviously been informed; she ushered the other children to another part of the room as we knelt down next to him.
“Wesley,” Beverly said. “You remember Captain Picard.” He looked at me, unsure. We’d only met a couple of times, and I’d kept my visits short. He held up the geometric toys.
“I’m building a model of the atomic structure of dikironium,” he said. I looked at the toys and realized that he had indeed made them to resemble an atomic diagram. “It’s an element that can only be created in a laboratory.”
“That’s very clever,” I said.
“Wesley,” Beverly said, “I have something to tell you. Dad… is… he’s been hurt. I’m sorry… he died.”
“Did he go to the doctor?”
“He did, but the doctor couldn’t help him.” Beverly was holding back her tears, her arm gently around the little boy’s shoulder.
“Oh,” he said. “Can I finish my model now?”
Beverly smiled and nodded. “Sure,” she said, kissed his forehead.
“Can we stay and watch you?” I said. Wesley nodded, and I sat down with Beverly and watched as he worked on his remarkably complex model.
Later, I said goodbye to Beverly, and told her that if there was anything she needed I hoped she would contact me. But I knew that she wouldn’t; I was an unpleasant reminder of how the man she loved was taken away from her. I had given the orders that led to his death. I expected I would never see her again.
The love I felt for her could never be returned.
I returned to the Stargazer, lost and empty, about to embark on what would be my last mission as its captain.
* * *
“Phasers coming to full charge, sir,” Black said. “Torpedoes armed.”
Smoke was filling the bridge. I stared at the strange wedge-shaped ship on the viewscreen, circling away from us.
“Who are they?” I said to Black, but he had no answer. I couldn’t expect my new first officer to know any more than I did. We had been charting the Maxia Zeta star system, and were near a moon near the seventh planet. We’d passed over a large crater, and then suddenly we were hit. Our adversary must have been lying in wait for us deep inside, shielded from our sensors by the moon’s mineral deposits. Our shields were down, and the first attack took out our impulse drive and shield generator. The second attack destroyed our life-support systems, including fire suppression. Fires broke out on the bridge.
“They’re turning for another pass, sir,” Black said.
“We can’t take another hit, Captain,” Vigo said. It was clear their intention was to destroy us. Sensors indicated they had a weapons lock. I had to fool that lock…
“Set course 7-7, mark 20,” I said. This course would move us to within a few hundred meters of the enemy. It was a risky maneuver, one that would not work against a more experienced captain.
“Ready phasers and lock,” I said. “Stand by on warp 9.” My conn officer, Lieutenant Lee, still relatively new to the job, keyed in the course, despite his obvious confusion about what I was doing. By jumping to warp, we would appear to this enemy ship to be in two places at once; for a brief moment, their weapons lock would be on our former position. I would only have a second…
I watched as the adversary turned full on to face us.
“Engage!” The enemy ship zoomed in; the underside of its hull filled our viewscreen. “Fire!”
Torpedoes and phasers overwhelmed the enemy’s shields and cut through the hull. There was a cascade of explosions, and then it was gone. I considered myself lucky; it was entirely possible that his shields might have held against that attack, and then we’d be finished. As it was, my ship was in deep trouble. “Engineering to Bridge,” Cheva said. After the first attack, we’d lost contact with engineering and I’d sent Cheva down to take stock of the situation. “I can’t get the system back
online, and the fire control teams have more than they can handle. It’s spreading out of control.”
“What about the life-support system?”
“Completely fused, sir, can’t be repaired,” she said. With fires throughout the ship, and a failed life-support system, the air would be gone in a matter of minutes.
“Where’s Scully?” I said.
“Chief Engineer Scully… is dead, sir,” Cheva said. “Killed in the first attack.” I was stunned. Scully had survived so long, Stargazer was more his than mine. And now he was dead, and our ship along with it. A brutal and merciless enemy had just attacked us.
There might be more of them. I had to try to get the crew to safety.
“All hands, abandon ship,” I said, then turned to the bridge crew. “Get to your evacuation stations.”
* * *
I was crammed inside a shuttle with about twenty crewmen. Cheva was at the piloting controls. I took the seat next to her, and watched out the view port as the rest of the shuttles left the bay.
“We’re the last, sir,” Cheva said. “Ready to depart.”
“Make it so,” I said. I’d never used that phrase before; it had belonged to Captain Quinn, my first commander. It took me only a little while to understand why.
We flew out of the ship, and joined a string of shuttlecraft and escape pods, all moving in formation away from Stargazer; a flotilla, limping away from our dead home. I had sent a distress signal to Starfleet before we evacuated, laying out the course our ships would be taking. The crew was under strict orders to maintain radio silence on their shuttles and escape pods. I knew it was a futile gesture—if an enemy ship was nearby and looking for us, they would find us long before help from Starfleet arrived.
Ailat and her medical team were on three medical shuttles tending to the injured. We’d had twenty-three deaths in the attack—I made sure Black kept a record. If we were to survive I had to inform their families. Was it my fault they were dead? I couldn’t let myself think about that, I had to make sure I concentrated on the survival of the rest of the crew. I focused on protocol: I had to mark the time and date that I’d left the ship. A captain abandoning his vessel was an act Starfleet would scrutinize.
I looked back at the old lady, wrecked and lifeless. A fount of so many memories: Laughton, Mazzara and his children… becoming a captain, Walker and Jack coming on board… Beverly…
I couldn’t let myself get lost in sentiment. I had work to do. I opened the log. That’s when I noticed the date.
I remembered the first time I heard Captain Quinn say, “Make it so”: he was giving me the order to save the ambassador on Milika III. That had imprinted on me as the defining moment of my career. Unconsciously, I must have known abandoning my own ship was one, too. I looked at the date again.
July 13, 2355.
My 50th birthday. And I’d just lost everything.
1 EDITOR’S NOTE: The ancestor was John Sedgwick, born in Cornwall Hollow, Connecticut, who served as a general in the Union Army, and was killed at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in 1864. Upon viewing the placement of Confederate sharpshooters, his famous last words were “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“THIS COURT-MARTIAL IS NOW IN SESSION,” Admiral Milano said. Six other officers, captains and admirals, joined him on the court-martial board. I sat opposite their table in courtroom #3 of the Bormenus Building, headquarters of the JAG1 at Starfleet Command. The clerk, on a nod from Milano, activated the computer, and the familiar female voice read the charges against me.
“Charge: Culpable Negligence and Dereliction of Duty. Specifications: In that on stardate 33994.5, by such negligence and dereliction of duty, Captain Picard, Jean-Luc, did cause both loss of life and destruction of U.S.S. Stargazer, NCC-2893…”
I sat with my defense counsel in a bit of a daze. Across from us was the prosecutor. The whole event was surreal. Only two months ago I was still in space, limping along with shuttles and escape pods with the remainder of my Stargazer crew. We had been traveling for weeks when we were rescued by the hospital ship U.S.S. Caine. They saw to our needs; Dr. Ailat had done a superb job keeping the wounded alive, but many of them needed further treatment. The rest of us were suffering from fatigue and post-traumatic stress.
We arrived back at Earth, the Caine moored in the orbital dockyard. I received word to report to Starfleet Headquarters to give a debriefing. As I was leaving the ship, I found many of the survivors of the Stargazer crowded in the corridor by the airlock. At the front of the pack were Cheva, Ailat, Vigo and Black.
“Everything all right?” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Black said. “The crew and I just wanted to say goodbye.”
I realized, as they must have, that, given the vicissitudes of the service, it was quite possible I might never see them again.
“I hope we can serve together again,” Cheva said.
“I hope so, too,” I said. I then turned to the crowd.
“We owe you our lives,” Vigo said.
“Oh, no,” I said. “We all owe our lives to that ship who protected us longer than anyone ever expected her to, and the crew who sacrificed their lives so that we could survive. And now, it’s up to us to keep the memory of our fellow crewmen, and the old lady herself, alive by continuing to serve as you all have done, and as they did, with integrity and distinction.”
“Hear, hear!” Black shouted, and the rest joined in, cheering and applauding. I smiled at them all, and waved goodbye, wondering when I’d see them again. It turned out for some, it was sooner than I could imagine.
* * *
I had been told to report to Admiral Quinn’s office. I was looking forward to seeing him. He was now in charge of Starfleet’s Operational Support Services. When I arrived in his office, he wasn’t alone.
“Jean-Luc, good to see you,” Quinn said. “Glad you made it back in one piece.” He then turned to introduce me to his guest. I was too stunned upon seeing her to tell him we’d already met. “This is Commander Phillipa Louvois of the Judge Advocate General.”
I hadn’t seen her in over 25 years. Her hair was short, but other than that she looked much the same as she did at the academy. I was filled with a nostalgic affection for that more innocent time. I walked over to greet her and was met with a metaphoric wall of ice.
“Captain Picard and I know each other from the Academy,” she said. She couldn’t have been clearer if she’d been a telepath: Quinn wasn’t to know about our former relationship. I held back; I could certainly respect her position.
“Nice to see you again, Commander,” I said. If Quinn picked up on anything between us, he didn’t let on. He made a gesture for me to sit down. I took the chair next to Phillipa as Quinn went back behind his desk.
“Captain,” he said, “the commander has informed me that the Judge Advocate General is convening a court-martial regarding your loss of the Stargazer.”
“On what charge?” I said.
“There is no charge as of yet,” Phillipa said. “It’s routine. A court-martial is standard procedure when a ship is lost. My preliminary findings don’t indicate any other charges. As of yet.”
“Your preliminary findings?”
“I am prosecuting this case, yes,” she said. “Someone in my office will be contacting you to serve as your defense counsel. Now, I hope you’ll excuse me, I have another appointment.” Phillipa got up and left the room.
“Jean-Luc,” Quinn said, “I’ve read your report. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. She’s just doing her job.”
I thought about telling him about our past, and that I thought she was pursuing an old grudge, but that seemed silly, and I couldn’t tell him without it looking like I was unfairly trying to impugn her motives. So I let it lie.
Admiral Quinn invited me to join him for dinner, but I declined. I was assigned quarters in San Francisco and went back there that evening to think about my situation. A cou
rt martial? I hadn’t even considered that was a possibility. I’d been mourning the crew that had died and the ship I’d lost. And now I found myself concerned about Phillipa. We’d had a brief romance, I wondered if that would affect her prosecution of my case. Would it lead her to be vindictive? I couldn’t imagine that it would.
My brooding was interrupted by the doorbell. I went to answer it and found a Starfleet lieutenant commander in his thirties. He was overweight, balding, and somehow familiar. He carried a briefcase.
“Hello, Captain Picard,” he said.
“Hello,” I said. I felt I knew him, but I couldn’t figure out from where. He saw my confusion.
“My apologies, sir,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Commander Anthony Mazzara. I look a lot different than when we last met.”
A strange surprise. I hadn’t seen him since he left the Stargazer when he was 17. Between seeing Phillipa in Quinn’s office and now Anthony showing up at my door, it felt like an aphorism about chickens returning to roost was appropriate. I had a fair amount of questions about what he was doing there, but I had too many things on my mind at that moment to indulge my curiosity.
“Anthony,” I said, “it’s nice to see you, but you’re really catching me at a bad time…”
“I’m sorry again, sir,” he said. “This isn’t a social visit. I’ve been assigned as your defense counsel by the JAG office.”
“You’ve been assigned…”
“Yes, I’m sorry no one informed you,” he said. “May I come in?”
In a bit of a daze, I gestured for him to come inside. This felt like a terrible practical joke, but there was no one alive who would know to play it. With little choice, I joined him at the table.
“You’re a lawyer?”
“Yes, sir, I’ve been in the JAG corps for seven years. I’ll do my best to help you.”
I knew Phillipa, and I knew him; I thought she would eat him alive.
“Seems like quite a coincidence, you getting assigned to me.”
“Truth be told,” he said, “when I heard you were being court-martialed, I asked to be made defense counsel.”
STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JEAN-LUC PICARD Page 21