Star Trek The Captain's Table #4: Fire Ship

by Diane Carey

Overview

There's a bar called "The Captain's Table," where those who have commanded mighty vessels of every shape and era can meet, relax, and share a friendly drink or two with others of their calling. Sometimes a brawl may break out but it's all in the family, more or less. Just remember, the first round of drinks is always paid for with a story...even in the Delta Quadrant.

A sudden attack separates Captain Kathryn Janeway from her ship and crew. Soon she is rescued -- but not by Voyager. Alone aboard an alien vessel, Janeway finds herself in the middle of a war she cannot yet understand. She must quickly learn the ways of this new culture and work her way back to captain if she is to protect her new allies from the war that only she knows is coming. Without her ship, all her quick wits and Starfleet experience may not be quite enough to save the Delta Quadrant from war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780671014674
Publisher:	Pocket Books/Star Trek
Publication date:	07/01/1998
Series:	Star Trek: The Captain's Table Series , #4
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 4.24(h) x 0.79(d)

Read an Excerpt

"And just how did you find your way to the Captain's Table?" a stout man in oilskins asked her.

"I smelled fire. And trouble."

"Both bad things at sea. Please go on."

Captain Kathryn Janeway sipped at her brandy, then did as she had been asked.

Maybe it was just cabbage stew. Trouble and cooked cabbage smelled a lot alike.

Dark planets always made me uneasy. Humans had sixth, seventh senses. I'd learned to listen.

"This way," I said with an unnecessary beckon.

"Why that way?"

"I don't know."

The narrow street was wet with recent rain, and there was a sense of steam around us. Dim figures came and went from doorways, cloaked and unspeaking. My mind made something of it, but perhaps the downcast eyes and drawn hoods were due only to the night chill. I hoped so, but...

"Captain?"

Back to work.

I turned, and tripped on a faulty brick in the streetdoors, windows, banners, and signs spun, and so did I. All elbows, a knee -- I tried to catch myself, failed -- and Tom Paris caught me.

A clumsy captain. That's what every crewman wants to see -- his elegant, surefooted, universally competent captain taking a spill on a grimy street.

"Shall we dance, madam?" Paris's college-boy face beamed at me, backlit by a gauzy street lamp.

"Quit grinning, Lieutenant," I snapped. "Starship captains don't trip. And we never dance."

He smiled wider and arranged me on my feet, making me ponder courts-martial for a second or two. "I'm sorry, Captain, I just thought your injuries --"

"They're fine."

Another few steps padded away under our feet before I realized that my mood had completely changed. Caution had blended to intrigue. I could no more turn back than fly.

We were heading down an alley that made me think of Old London's back ways, heading toward a corner and another street. I wanted to get there, but caution boiled up a certain restraint. A few seconds wouldn't matter.

A passerby now looked up and nodded greeting. So other moods had changed too?

"This place feels really familiar," I mentioned.

"I thought I was imagining it," Paris said. "No place in the Delta Quadrant can possibly look familiar to us, unless we double back on our course --"

"-- and we didn't do that," I abbreviated. "This place seems like an old movie to me...a Gothic mystery...one of those stories with the light in the castle tower and the woman in the diaphanous nightgown running across a moor, casting back a fearful glance --"

Paris bumped his head on a hanging sign. "Looks like a western to me."

Casting him a glare, I said, "Lieutenant, let's get a that corner."

"Aye, aye, Captain."

An unexplained thrill ran down my arms as cobblestones kneaded our soles. Holmes, are you hiding there around the corner? Watson? Wet and foggy, yet cowled in city sounds and people's voices muffled behind shutters. There were no horses' hooves or wagon wheels -- this culture was beyond that -- but I found myself listening for a clop and clatter. The smoke-yellow streetlamps were electrical but inadequate. I had a feeling not of neglect but purpose. Just a feeling...nothing but a feeling...

Usually feelings didn't so completely guide me. Usually I depended upon rationality, upon keeping feelings reined hard, for they were inaccurate and undependable. Not how do I feel, but what do I think -- that's what guided me, and so far had kept us all alive. Feelings were too susceptible to fears, and fear was a daily diet on this unending mission. And feelings were too sudden.

Even good feelings had been reined in a long time ago. I enjoyed a few things, but always kept control and never let myself enjoy too much. I never went over the top and forgot where we were and why. This kind of restraint, for a human being -- a human woman -- was unfortunate and even unnatural, but serviceable for me. If I kept my feelings in their place, good and bad, then I could handle the truly awful.

Like these last few days. Truly...

Just as I cast off my thoughts as beginning to be a little too Vulcan, I realized the voices we were hearing had gotten notably louder now that Paris and I had rounded the corner. Nothing raucous -- just easier to hear, even delineate individuals. Somebody was having a pleasant time. Down the street, there was a rowdier place somewhere.

There were several doorways, each with some kind of hawker's sign swaying gently over it. When had a breeze come up?

I came to the first door on the left, snuggled into a leathery wooden archway by a good meter, and the heavy aged-oak door was propped open by what looked like an iron bootscraper. There was music, and a heady scent of fire and food. My memories stirred and pushed me toward the door.

"Tavern of some kind." I looked up at the dreary wooden sign and the carved letters.

"The Captain's Table..."

"Sounds nice," Paris commented.

I peered briefly at the faded paint in the shape of four stars in each corner of the sign. "Very nice, Tom. But why is it written in English?"

He eyed the sign again. "English..."

At a table to my right, voices muttered and drew my attention.

"-- two months out of Shanghai when a gale mauled our rudder clean off. We hove to in high seas and sawed planks out of spare spars. For four days we fitted a jury rudder, then piloted with lines and tackles around the Cape."

"Eight thousand miles -- a feat of seamanship wizardry for sure, Captain Moodie."

"A compliment, Charlie, from a man who ran the Bora in a steam launch."

"Oh, yeah, me and Rosie could move mountains, give or take them leeches."

As the two men paused, noticing me, I moved on into the pub, leaving them some privacy.

The wooden door wouldn't open without my shoulder involved. The wood was warm from inside, but dank on its surface from the fingers of fog slipping under the archway. I walked down a short corridor that guided me into a left turn, through a second archway with darkened timber and a whiff of sea rot. As I turned, the Captain's Table tavern opened before me.

A warm smoky cloak wrapped my shoulders and took me by the waist like an old friend's arm at a fireside, coddling me into the clublike environment of a country pub. To my left, there was a piano, but no one was playing. Its rectangled rosewood top sprawled like a morning airfield, reflecting incarnated gaslight from sconces on the paisley-papered wall. Before me was a raft of round tables, at the tables were people. Beings. Mostly men, a few women -- most looked human but there were some aliens -- who sat in wooden armchairs worn to a warm grousefeather brown.

Over there, to the right along the wall was a glossy cherrywood bar with moleskin stools. The age-darkened bar laughed with carved Canterbury Tales-type figures. Over a mirrored backsplash a shelf was crammed with whiskey jugs, ship's decanters, and every manner of bottle. Over the bar and bottles glowered a huge Canadian elk head with a full rack, which threw me for a moment because it was so undeniably of Earth. I looked down at my uniform, expecting to see an English shooting suit. If I looked out a window, would I see hedgerows and pheasants?

I might see England, except that the image would be rippled by the occupant of a majolica bowl on the piano...a lizard? At first I thought it was part of the ceramic design on the bowl, but no, it was a real live gecko, a mottled yellow-green chap with two-thirds of a tail, and he was enjoying feasting on the conch fritters in the bowl. I would've warned somebody that a creature had crawled in, except that several people from a table over there were watching the gecko and commenting on the length of its regrowing tail.

A British pub in the Delta Quadrant with conch fritters and a live-in lizard. Hmm...

Many of the people glanced up -- some nodded, others raised their glasses to me, and still others glanced, then ignored me further. A young man in a cable-knit Irish sweater, with longish ivory hair and a voice like a Druid ghost's, softly greeted me, "Captain."

How did he know?

As I paused and returned his look, I noticed that there was glass crunching under my boot. As the company turned for their own look, a lull in the general movement of the place made me notice what they'd been doing -- that several people were scooping up spilled food and righting toppled glasses and chairs. Here and there someone was nursing a bruised face or a bleeding lip. There'd been a fight.

Then a fellow wearing a maroon knit shirt, with a sailing ship and scrolled lettering embroidered on the left side of the chest, nodded and invited, "Welcome aboard, Captain. Relax. We'll have it all cleaned up in no time."

Beside him, a large creature, with a mirrored medallion on his chest and a set of antlers rivaling the elk's on his head, nodded elegantly as the lamplight played on the hollow bones of his face. He was demonic, yes, but still somehow welcoming. I didn't feel threatened at all. Even my instincts were voiceless.

The embroidery on the shirt didn't really surprise me -- if a planet had water and wind, there was also some sort of sailing vessel. Common sense of function demanded certain designs, just as telling time and traffic control had a certain universal sense that could be counted upon just about everywhere. There were only so many ways to run an intersection.

But the two who had spoken were clearly human and shouldn't have been in the Delta Quadrant at all. My crew and myself were the only humans in the Delta Quadrant.

I rotated that a couple of times in my mind until I finally didn't believe it at all. Most of these people looked very human indeed, though quite a range of types -- not unusual for a tavern in a spacelane, in a populated sector with civilized pockets.

"My crew was a mixture of types from all over," someone was saying -- a young man's voice, but without the flippancy of youth. I looked at the nearest table and saw several people listening intently to a small-boned young man in a blue jacket with red facing running down the chest. His white neckerchief was loosened, and though he seemed relaxed, he also seemed troubled by his own story.

"The ship wasn't even ours. It was a converted merchant man on loan to us. Many of her timbers had rot in them, and though we possessed forty guns, several of those were inoperative. It was in the afternoon that the enemy closed on us, and the breeze was fading. We would soon be outmatched and crippled. On our last move, the enemy's sprit caught our mizzen shrouds --"

"Oh, my," someone uttered, and half the company shuddered with empathy.

The young man nodded somewhat cheerily at this. "Yes, but I lashed it there. Why not? I thought my ship would sink otherwise, and I wanted to fight! So I lashed up to something that would keep me afloat. My enemy's ship."

The table's company laughed in awed appreciation. I nudged a little nearer to keep listening.

"And I got it, by God, I got it," he said, shaking his head in reverie of a rugged moment. "Their shots passed straight through the timbers of our gun deck as if going through a straw mattress. They invited me to surrender before action became a slaughter. They had this odd conception that we didn't have it in us to establish ourselves as a power with which to reckon. But I'd hardly begun. I turned and simply told them such. My crew was so enthused that my riflemen in the tops dispatched the enemy's helmsmen one by one, and then a brisk fellow of mine vaulted the yards and dropped a grenade into the enemy's magazine. Such a roar! Their sails were lit afire!"

"And you were still made off to them?" the fellow in the maroon shirt asked.

I stopped moving forward because I was now listening to the dark-eyed young officer in the blue coat with red facings.

"Oh, yes," he answered. "If they sank, they would drag us down. I had only three guns left, but might as well keep shooting. But the other captain's ship was a goner and he soon struck. Serapis's crewmen were well thankful to offboard their vessel, you might well understand. A sinking wreck is bad enough, but a sinking and burning wreck soon becomes legend. We unlashed, and off we limped. Our entire gun deck was gone."

An unfamiliar alien standing nearby asked, "So you won? Or you lost?"

The officer craned around for a glance at the question, saw that this creature might be someone who wouldn't or shouldn't already know the answer, and offered, "My opponent's ship was a brand-new warship. Mine was a half-rotted old merchant. My ship sank shortly after his, but his was the costlier loss and we denied the enemy domination of vital commerce and supply lanes."

The young captain took a sip from a horn-shaped mug that looked like pewter. He sank back a bit in his chair and stared at the tabletop, seeing something quite else. "I heard later that the other captain had been made a knight for that action. I told my men that if I ever met him again, by God, I'd make him a lord!"

Everyone laughed again -- and so did I -- and somebody, a woman, commented, "You're a brat, John."

The young man nodded. "Oh, thank you."

Someone else said, "That's a pretty fair story. Too short, though."

"It seemed rather lengthy at the time. I'll be longer winded from now on."

"Do that. Short stories are for musers, not doers."

For a moment the conversation died down and I heard other things. Faint music from somewhere, but not from the piano...Dueling pistols on a wall plaque, castle torchères, coach lamps, and railroad lanterns, a shelf with little unmatched stone gargoyles, a huge Black Forest cuckoo clock with a trumpeting elk carved on top of flared oak leaves and big pulls in the shapes of pine cones, devil-may-care patrons huddled around the tables like provocateurs in a novel, and a large silver samovar that needed polishing -- this place boggled the mind with unexperienced memories. Was I hearing the groan of oak branches and waves against a seawall? The mutter of robber barons plotting in a back room? It was all seductively Victorian, and I felt right at home.

In a fireplace burned real wood, and somehow from it came the earthy aroma of autumn leaves like my grandfather had heaped up and burned outside the big farmhouse every October. He hadn't been a farmer, but he had a good time pretending.

Keeping my voice down, I turned my face just enough to speak over my shoulder to Paris. "This place looks like the Orient Express stopped at a Scottish pub in the Adirondacks. This isn't like Earth, Tom...this is Earth." He didn't respond, so I added, "I wonder if there's a back door to home. Somebody here has been to the Alpha Quadrant. Maybe they can show us their shortcut. Give me your tricorder."

I put my hand out, still looking around the pub, but Paris didn't give me his tricorder. Irritated that he could be so stupefied, I swung around to snap him out of it and found that he wasn't behind me anymore.

"Paris?" I called back toward the hooded entrance, but he didn't come out. I went to the archway and looked down the musky corridor to the street door, but he wasn't there.

I turned into the pub again and looked around, taking more care to check each person, each being. A pale-haired man, very thin and not tall, stood at the bar, dominating a group of others who were listening to him. His dark uniform coat, lathered with ribbons and medals, had a high collar and tails, and the right sleeve with its thick cuff was pinned up to the coat's chest -- that arm was missing at the shoulder. He certainly wasn't Lieutenant Paris, and neither were any of those around him.

Down the bar a stool or two were some men in naval pilot coats and sea boots. I found myself surfing the walls for a portal back in time, and way off in space.

I looked up a set of worn wooden stairs with a spindled railing, but there was no sign of Paris.

Had he gone back to the street? Why would he?

I turned to go out, but someone caught my arm. I looked -- a young man, human, five feet eleven, if I reckoned right...and if I was Kathryn Janeway, that was a United States Marine uniform. A captain. A flier. He smiled, and there was a very slight gap between his front teeth that gave a homey appearance to his narrow face, with its green eyes slightly downturned at the outside corners.

"Have a seat with us, Captain?" The Marine turned, not letting go of my arm, to a group of people at one of the larger tables, and he gestured to the nearest man. "Josiah, make room for the lady."

"Actually, I've lost track of my crewmate --"

"That's how it works at the Captain's Table," the woman said. "Don't fret over it. He'll be fine."

Annoyed, I peered at her briefly, pausing in the middle of a dozen thoughts and wondering if she were really a captain, as everyone here seemed to be. She wore a simple turtle-necked knit sweater, olive green, with three little crew pins on the collar, too small to read from here. She was unremarkable looking, average in most ways, yet self-satisfied, and had a bemused confidence behind her eyes that said she'd crewed a few voyages. Beside her was a pleasant-faced Vulcan, which pummeled the lingering theory that I was imagining the Alpha Quadrant elements. He had typically Vulcan dark hair, but swept to one side instead of straight across the forehead, and he wore a flare-shouldered velvet robe with a couple of rectangular brooches. Whether rank or ceremony, I couldn't tell. He motioned for me to take the chair they cleared, and the woman in the olive sweater nudged a little birch canoe full of walnuts toward me, showing a flesh-colored fingerless glove on her right hand. Looked like an old injury, but it didn't seem to bother her.

The man called Josiah, older and more grizzled than most others in the knot of patrons at this table, was now standing and offering me his chair. "Right here, madam."

Smoldering aroma of burning leaves...the musky scent of old wood...the comforting nods and touches of the people around me, the music, the elk head, the paisley wallpaper...I felt so much at home that I lowered into the chair in spite of having a crewman now missing.

"...and that, my friends, is how I come to be sitting here with you, sipping this excellent brandy."

Standing over Janeway, the man called Josiah turned toward the bar and called, "Cap! Shake the reefs out, man! Let's have those mugs here while there's still a beard on the waves!"

She had no idea what that meant, but she liked the sound of it. Her hand didn't go through the table, at least. She lowered herself cautiously because she felt there was still the chance another part of her would go through the chair.

A tall man with white breeches and a double-breasted blue jacket left the clique around the one-armed man at the bar and approached our table. He had a deep voice, uncooperative dark hair, and he was irritatingly proper in his manner. "Captain, welcome to our little secret," he said. "Care for a game of whist?"

"Not right now...Captain," she said, daring the obvious while she tried to place his jacket in time and came up with about 1830. Maybe earlier. Noncommittally she added, "Just getting the feel of the place."

"It takes a moment for the logical mind," this tall man said, and pulled another chair up to the table for himself, tapping a set of playing cards on the table, then leaving the stack alone. Nobody else seemed to want to play cards right now, and he didn't seem willing to push.

"There's record of places like this," Janeway mused. "That planet in the Omicron Delta region...people see what they feel like seeing. Relive fond memories, great victories --"

"-- or make new ones," the Vulcan said. Now the cloud of dimness rose a little more before her eyes, and she noticed that under the sleeveless velvet and satin panels of his ceremonial robe he was wearing a red pullover shirt with a black collar and gold slashes on the cuffs. It looked familiar...

In the flood of familiarity and comfort here, she dismissed the nagging hint.

The man who wanted to play cards sat rod-straight opposite her -- how could he be sitting and still be standing? -- and in the fingers of yellowish lamplight she could now see that his uniform was weathered, even frayed at the shoulders, and there was a little hole on one lapel. This didn't bother the others at the table or short him any of their respect as they turned to him while he spoke, and that told me something about him. So she listened too.

"This place has a mystical characteristic that newcomers find boggling," he said. "Certainly I did. I took the better part of the next voyage to dismiss the Captain's Table to a bad bottle."

"Magic comes hard to the organized mind," the Vulcan said.

Janeway looked at him, a little amazed. Vulcans didn't buy into mysticism any more than she did. Janeway saw in his expression that she was right -- he was much more amused than serious. The woman in the olive sweater smiled and nudged the Vulcan as if he were being naughty. What an unlikely couple. They obviously knew each other very well, and she got the idea they always sat together.

"I don't believe in magic," Janeway told them. "There's obviously some bizarre science at work here. I've seen --"

The dark-haired officer's thick brows came down. "You call this science, Your Ladyship?"

She paused, waiting for a laugh at his calling her that, but nobody did laugh. Not even a chuckle. She sensed the lack of humor was something about him more than something about her.

"Once upon a time," she answered, "people thought fire was of the gods. We thought the stars were heaven. Then we made fire for ourselves and went to the stars. We learned there's no true alchemy, no 'magic' that can't be mastered eventually, but just science we haven't figured out yet." She glanced around again and sighed. "It's funny...I don't really want to figure this out. It looks like Earth, but...it's an Earth I'd make up myself. And that can't be real."

"Real enough, Captain," another voice interrupted. It was the elegant officer with the tailed coat and the medals and the missing arm. He now turned from the clique at the bar, most of whom followed him as he approached our table. "The competent commander takes events as they come and acts upon the dictates of duty."

"Duty often fails to proclaim its requisites before the crucial moment, Your Lordship," the Vulcan said.

The woman in the sweater grimaced and chided, "That's it -- lip off to a historic luminary. Brilliant."

"It's 'an' historic," he dashed back fluidly. "Like 'an' horse."

"Or 'an horse's ass.'" The woman looked at me again. "Don't try to figure it out all at once. You'll just end up sitting in a comer making sock monkeys."

The Vulcan made one elegant nod. "I have seven myself."

Janeway squinted at him. Was this all a show by some benevolent traveling theater group?

"I think the captain should tell her first story right now," the woman went on, looking at me again. "No point wading through hot air we've already heard, right? Dive, dive, dive --"

"Perhaps," the Vulcan said to his cocky tablemate, "you would like to regale us with one of your tales of grand heroism. The time you sat on the barkentine's deck at dawn, cracking thirty dozen eggs for the crew's breakfast and feeding the drippings to the ship's cat. Or the time you fell off the trader's quarterdeck step while carrying a can of varnish --"

"They were defining moments," the woman nipped.

Janeway was about to politely decline the invitation to relive one of the many tense and disturbing incidents that had happened to her and her ship since the accident that had dropped them in the Delta Quadrant, when yet another blast of incongruity appeared at the entry arch.

Pushing to her feet, Janeway hissed, "That's a Cardassian!"

Her arms were clutched from both sides and she was pulled back into my chair.

"A Cardassian captain," the Vulcan said. "All captains are given entry here."

Trying to get the pulse of this place, she buried what she really wanted to say and instead pointed out, "That can be its own kind of problem. It's one thing to club with other captains. It's something else to ask captains to club with those who have attacked our people and killed our shipmates."

They all fell silent at her words. They eyed the Cardassian just as Janeway did. Had each of them seen an enemy captain in this place? Had that been the cause of the bar fight they were now pushing out of the way?

The fact that they didn't argue with her was revealing. They were captains. Loyalties, emotions, and a sense of purpose tended to run deep among those who had held in their charge the lives of others, in such intimate conditions as a vessel. And more, many here must have defended innocents from various aggressors -- Janeway saw that in their eyes right now and heard it in their silence. None of them wanted to tell her she was wrong.

Given entry, he had said. Not were welcome.

Suddenly Janeway thought this place a lot more interesting.

"Did you get another command, Captain Jones?" the Vulcan asked the man who had told the story.

"Yes," John said, and his gaze fell to his own hands cupped around his mug. "Yes...but one is most definitely not the same as another."

"That's hard on the heart, I know, John," the woman said to the man who had told the tale. "To move on to another ship after the one you love is destroyed."

Janeway added, "Somehow we find it in ourselves to move on if we have to."

"Have you 'had to,' Captain?" the Vulcan asked, his hazel eyes gleaming almost mischievously.

Janeway nodded.

"Go ahead," John invited, pushing a frothing mug toward her as several were delivered to the table. "Tell your tale."

Copyright © 1998 by Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.