Tales from the Captain’s Table (41 page)

Al waved the question away. “I’m not supposed to say. And I’m more interested in getting to the rest of the story as quickly as possible. My quarry,” he said, although with less vigor than he had before, “moves quickly, and while this story is instructive, I do need to get back to the hunt.” He turned to Gold. “So what of the last target of Silver’s revenge, and the last black chip he carried?”

It was a few years later, just after Silver had been promoted to captain but before the ship he was to command had returned from its latest mission. Word of the Mausetite reached Silver through—let’s say a contact in Starfleet Intelligence who was aware of his situation but should most likely not have offered him the information. Nonetheless the information that reached Silver seemed to have divine energy behind it. The Mausetite was already scheduled for execution on yet another unaligned planet. That part was straightforward.

The penal system on the planet, however, had an odd twist to it that played right into Silver’s hands. The right to execute a prisoner was auctioned off by the government. The highest bidder was awarded the privilege of choosing the time and method of the prisoner’s death. The latest bid on the Mausetite was actually quite low, and it was simple for Silver to outbid the only other interested party. Soon he literally had the Mausetite’s life in his hands. All he had to do was comm back the go-ahead, and the Mausetite’s life would end in whatever manner Silver chose.

But the black chip Silver carried still weighed on him, as did the memories of his encounters with his two previous intended targets. A Starfleet captain, even one whose ship was still months out of drydock, had privileges, and passage to the frontier world where the Mausetite was imprisoned was fairly simple to arrange.

Silver found that the prison where the Mausetite was held was a sewer, literally. It doubled as the waste-processing plant for the local city, and the prisoners were forced to wade naked through the waste to retrieve anything the guards thought might be of value—which was then turned over to the guards to sell. After stepping out of the constant stream of waste, the prisoners were hit with high-pressure streams of hot water to clean the waste from them and thrown, still naked, into cells with cold stone floors and nothing else.

It was enough to make Silver begin to pity the man, but the list of his crimes had been sent along with the paperwork surrounding the execution, and the unspeakable things the Mausetite had done since Silver had last encountered him called out for a high level of punishment. While the Federation did not punish even its worst offenders in a way as harsh as this, the Prime Directive certainly gave unaligned planets the right to do so.

Getting an audience with the Mausetite was only a matter of a small payment to the guard captain, who wondered why anyone would want to speak with any of his charges. To Silver’s surprise, the Mausetite remembered him the moment he walked up to the old-fashioned metal bars that made up the front of his cell. He not only knew Silver’s name, he knew the number of credits Silver owed him and demanded them the moment he saw him.

As the Mausetite yelled at him for his money, Silver read inmore detail the list of horrendous crimes the Mausetite had committed, and this list was only what he had done since he got to this particular planet. The number of lives he had damaged or destroyed was impressive, in a horrible way. Silver’s other two assailants had in some way redeemed themselves; either they had changed themselves or they had been changed by circumstances. If the Mausetite had changed at all, he had only gotten worse. On top of which, having him killed or killing him himself was totally legal under the laws of this planet. Silver took out his last black chip and stared at it.

Gold paused, again unintentionally, and the discussion began again. This time the Telspong spoke first: “Kill him.” The others looked at him in surprise. He remained firm. “Kill him, yes, kill him. Not only is it the only way to be certain that others will be safe from him in the future, but he has shown no growth, no repentance. He has not earned forgiveness, so should not be granted it.”

“I thought you preferred not to guess at the endings of stories?” Al said to him.

“That is correct,” the Telspong said, “but then I, too, am imperfect and inconsistent. What a boring place the galaxy would be without imperfection and inconsistency!”

Gold smiled at that.

“I agree with the Telspong here,” the Olexan said. “Kill him. Kill the Mausetite. He has earned his death.”

“Well,” the Boundarian said, clearly hating the prospect of agreeing with the Olexan, “yes, kill him. He is dishonorable and dangerous. There is no other choice.”

“And yet,” Gold said, “Silver found one.”

Silver stared at the Mausetite, who ranted on about Silver’s unpaid debt. Then Silver came to a decision, and felt a weight he had been carrying for years lift from his shoulders. He interrupted the Mausetite’s ranting and said, “I’m here to settle up.”

Fear shrouded the Mausetite’s face.

“No, not for killing me. The debt I owe you, the debt you’ve been ranting about. Here you go.” And Silver tossed the Mausetite’s death papers through the cell’s bars. The papers had cost him just about as much as the amount of his original debt, the one he had been killed for.

“Now,” Silver said, “the burden of your life is on you, where it should always have been, and no longer on me. They will never let you out of here, you know that. But now you have a decision to make. With those papers, you can live here as long as you want, or die any way and any time you want. Your life is about your choices, not mine. I’m tired of you, and tired of thinking about you.”

Silver turned, ignoring the Mausetite’s screams, and walked out of the prison, feeling lighter than he had in years. On the way out he tossed his last black chip into the waste stream in which the second shift of prisoners was standing chest-deep.

“Pointless!” the Olexan shouted. “You have wasted our time with a story of a man who travels great distances to confront his enemies, and does nothing when he encounters them!”

“I am not so sure,” the Boundarian said. “It seems there is a point to it, but it escapes me. Perhaps it is—” Gold felt his struggle to get the condescension out of his voice. “—a
human
thing.”

The Telspong sighed. “It so often falls to me to provide the moral to a story. That’s a danger of my profession as a philosopher. What the parable our friend the captain has been telling us has a deep meaning, one that—”

“Wait!” the Olexan shouted. “Are you saying that the story we just listened to, on top of being pointless, might never have happened? Might be only a fictional tale?”

“Well, it might or might not be true,” the Telspong answered, “in a factual sense. But its level of factual accuracy is hardly an important matter. There is great truth to be found in nonfactual stories.”

“There certainly is,” the Boundarian agreed.

“Bah!” The Olexan stood up and stomped off toward a table in the back of the room. “My short leave time, spent listening to pointless events that never even happened….”

It was hard to figure out if a Boundarian was smiling, Gold knew, but he would bet his rank this one was.

“Quiet,” Al from the future said. “Quiet, please. After all, this story was meant for me, not for you. And I think I take its meaning. I will reconsider my pursuit of my namesake, and perhaps seek other paths. I thank you for your instruction.”

“No problem,” Gold said, his voice a little hoarse from telling the tale and still taking no water. He checked his chronometer. “Wait another three minutes, and I’ll buy you a drink to go with it.”

“I cannot,” Al said. “I have family/crew whom I have neglected for my pursuit long enough. You have given me a gift, though, and I wish to give you one in return—but without breaking Starfleet temporal regulations that may be difficult.”

Al paused to consider, then smiled and stood up. “I leave you with this. I come from around two hundred years in your future, give or take a few decades. And yet, while I was too intent on my quest to mention it on my arrival, when I saw you sitting here I knew at once that you were Captain David Gold of the
U.S.S. da Vinci.
Two hundred years, give or take, and I knew you
on sight
. You have given me something to think about. Now you think about that.”

His piece apparently said, Al nodded to Gold, to the Telspong, to the Boundarian, and attempted to wave good-bye to the Olexan. And then he took his leave.

When Gold turned back from watching him go, Cap was placing a tall glass of water and a large bowl of matzoh ball soup in front of him. To the side of the soup Cap had already set an over-stuffed pastrami sandwich dripping with mustard. Gold took a long drink of the water, a spoonful of the soup, and a large bite out of the sandwich, then ordered the drinks he had promised the Telspong and the Boundarian and even had a drink sent to the Olexan’s table at the far side of the bar.

The sun had gone down in the Bronx, and Yom Kippur was over for another year.

Shortly after Gold told his
midrash
, Chakotay, Shran, Archer, and Porthos all left the bar. After downing his sandwich, soup, and water—and the Telspong and Boundarian had finished their drinks—Gold too left, his ritual complete.

The Ferengi who had been so interested in Archer’s canine fable started telling his own tale, a boast involving great profit for him and great destitution for his enemies. Across the bar, the Telspong and the Triexian started comparing and contrasting Gold’s and Klag’s stories. And at the bar itself, Prrgghh started telling a story of her own, but only Cap and Lizzy were paying attention. Prrgghh didn’t seem to notice; if she had, Cap suspected that Lizzy wouldn’t be long for the universe.

Soon Demora Sulu came in. She was older than she had been when she entered earlier that day, and older than she had been at the time when she first met Chakotay. Her face betrayed disappointment, as if she was hoping to catch her erstwhile protégé. Cap knew, however, that if they were meant to encounter each other, they would have. Instead, he simply poured her another glass from the same bottle of red wine she’d drunk from earlier that day many years ago.

All in all, Cap decided, it had been a good day. He gave Sulu her drink, and then sat back and waited for the next story….

Peter David
is a prolific author whose career, and continued popularity, spans nearly two decades. He has worked in television, film, books (fiction, nonfiction, and audio), short stories, and comic books, and acquired followings in all of them. Peter has had over fifty novels published, including numerous appearances on the
New York Times
best-seller list. His novels include
Sir Apropos of Nothing
(and its two sequels),
Knight Life
(and its two sequels),
Howling Mad,
and the
Psi-Man
adventure series. He is the co-developer and author of the best-selling
Star Trek: New Frontier
series for Pocket Books, and has written over a dozen other
Trek
novels. He produced the
Babylon 5: Centauri Prime
trilogy of novels, and has also had his short fiction published in such anthologies as
Shock Rock, Shock Rock II, Other-Were
, and
Tales of the Dominion War,
as well as
Asimov’s Science Fiction
and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. Peter has an extensive, and award-winning, comic book résumé, and he has co-edited two short-story anthologies,
The Ultimate Hulk
and
New Frontier: No Limits
. Furthermore, his opinion column “But I Digress…” has been running in the industry trade newspaper
Comic Buyer’s Guide
for over a decade, and in that time has been the paper’s consistently most popular feature and was also collected into a trade paperback edition. Peter is the co-creator, with actor Bill Mumy, of the Cable Ace Award–nominated science-fiction series
Space Cases,
which ran for two seasons on Nickelodeon. He has written several TV scripts for
Babylon 5
and its sequel series
Crusade
and has written several films for Full Moon Entertainment and co-produced two of them. He lives in New York with his wife, Kathleen, and his four children, Shana, Gwen, Ariel, and Caroline.

This is the third
Star Trek
anthology that
Keith R.A. DeCandido
has edited, following 2004’s
Tales of the Dominion War
and 2003’s
No Limits
(in collaboration with Peter David), and he has edited or co-edited more than a dozen other anthologies in the last decade, including the Nebula Award–nominated
Imaginings
. As a writer, his first
Trek
novel,
Diplomatic Implausibility,
was also where he introduced the
I.K.S. Gorkon
and established Klag as its captain. This was later followed by the
I.K.S. Gorkon
series, which consists of three books so far:
A Good Day to Die, Honor Bound
, and
Enemy Territory
. His other
Trek
s include five other novels, two novellas, four short stories, nine eBooks, and a comic-book miniseries, many of which have appeared on various best-seller lists. Keith’s first original novel,
Dragon Precinct
, was published in 2004, and his most recent
Star Trek
novel is a look at the world of
Trek
politics,
Articles of the Federation
. He has also written novels, novelizations, short stories, and nonfiction books in the milieus of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,
Farscape
,
Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda
,
Resident Evil
, Marvel Comics,
Xena
,
Magic: The Gathering
,
Serenity
, and more. Find out too much about Keith at his official Web site at DeCandido.net. Oh, and his story title translates into English as “Brothers and Fathers.”

Michael Jan Friedman
has written nearly forty
Star Trek
books, scripted more than a hundred
Star Trek
comics, and collaborated on what he insists on believing is one of the better episodes of
Star Trek: Voyager
. In the process, he has stung, annoyed, bruised, embarrassed, punctured, censured, seared, vilified, tortured, maimed, and outright killed more sentient beings than any civilized individual would ever want to contemplate. But what really horrifies him is all the bridge consoles he’s destroyed. Let’s face it, there are a lot of interstellar ships in Mike’s books, and they’ve all got bridge consoles. Sometimes a whole bunch of them. It’s just too easy to blow one up in the face of some walk-on character, sending him cannonballing across the deck in a shower of sparks and black smoke, and writing
finis
to his noble existence (not to mention his hopes of getting a
Star Trek
show of his own). Certainly, it’s a lot less work than character development. But bridge consoles perform an entire array of valuable functions. We can’t just go around beating them up. We have to exercise restraint. It is in this spirit that we are proud to make the following announcement about “Darkness,” the first account of Jean-Luc Picard’s adventures in the seven-year period between his captaincy of the
Stargazer
and his captaincy of the
Enterprise
-D: No bridge consoles were destroyed in the making of this story.

“Iron and Sacrifice” marks
David R. George III
’s first return to the character of Demora Sulu since her prominent role in the
New York Times
best-selling
Lost Era
novel
Serpents Among the Ruins
. David’s other contributions to the
Star Trek
universe include the
Deep Space Nine
novels
The 34th Rule
, set during the series, and
Twilight
and
The Dominion: Olympus Descending
, set afterward. He also co-wrote the story for the first-season
Voyager
episode “Prime Factors,” and he will be penning an Original Series trilogy to help celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the show. David firmly believes in Robert Heinlein’s dictum that “Specialization is for insects.” David’s passions (after his wonderful, beautiful wife, Karen) include art, dance, film, theater, travel, reading, baseball, racquetball, mathematics, the English language, cosmology, quantum physics, and, unaccountably, the New York Mets. He loves talking about writing, and chatting with readers and fans, both at conventions and online. He appreciates KeithR.A. DeCandido’s invitation to contribute to this anthology, and hopes one day in his writing to revisit Demora Sulu, as well as John Harriman and the rest of the
Enterprise
-B crew. David is not a doctor, nor does he play one on television.

Award-winning author
Christie Golden
has written twenty-six novels and seventeen short stories in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She is best known for her tie-in work, although she has written several original novels. Among her credits are the first book in the
Ravenloft
line,
Vampire of the Mists
, a
Star Trek
Original Series hardcover
The Last Roundup
, several
Voyager
novels including the recent best-selling relaunch of the series,
Homecoming
and
The Farther Shore
, and short stories for
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and
Angel
anthologies. Two more books in the
Voyager
relaunch,
Spirit Walk
Book 1:
Old Wounds
and Book 2:
Enemy of My Enemy
, were released in November and December of 2004. In 1999, Golden’s novel
A.D. 999
, written under the pen name of Jadrien Bell, won the Colorado Author’s League Top Hand Award for Best Genre Novel. Christie launched a brand-new fantasy series entitled
The Final Dance
through Luna Books, a major new fantasy imprint. The first book in the series is entitled
On Fire’s Wings
and was published in trade paperback in July of 2004. Look for the second in the series,
In Stone’s Clasp
, in September 2005. She invites readers to visit her Web site at www.christiegolden.com.

Heather Jarman
lives a Peter Parker—like suburban existence; few of her fellow soccer moms could fathom that the mild-mannered woman behind the wheel of the minivan might be a writer of
Star Trek
fiction and harbor a deep, abiding love for hobbits, the Hubble Telescope, and blue-skinned Andorians. Heather’s recent contributions to the world of
Star Trek
fiction include
Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Book 1:
Andor: Paradigm
and a short story (co-authored with Jeffrey Lang) in the critically acclaimed anthology
Tales of the Dominion War
. In 2005, her creative efforts will be part of Pocket Books’ celebration of
Voyager
’s tenth anniversary. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and four daughters.

Andy Mangels
is the co-author of several
Star Trek
novels, eBooks, short stories, and comic books, as well as a trio of
Roswell
novels, all co-written with Michael A. Martin. Flying solo, he is the best-selling author of many entertainment books, including
Animation on DVD: The Ultimate Guide
and
Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Characters,
as well as a significant number of entries in
The Super-hero Book.
He has written hundreds of articles for entertainment and lifestyle magazines and newspapers in the United States, England, and Italy. He has also written licensed material based on properties from many film studios and Microsoft, and his comic-book work has been published by DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and many others. He was the editor of the award-winning
Gay Comics
anthology for eight years. Andy is a national award-winning activist in the Gay community, and has raised thousands of dollars for charities over the years. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his long-term partner, Don Hood, their dog, Bela, and their chosen son, Paul Smalley. Visit his Web site at www.andymangels.com.

Michael A. Martin
’s solo short fiction has appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. He has also co-authored (with Andy Mangels) several
Star Trek
novels (including
Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Book 2:
Trill: Unjoined
;
Titan
Books 1–2;
Star Trek The Lost Era: The Sundered
;
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Mission: Gamma
Book 3:
Cathedral
;
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Section 31: Rogue
); two
Star Trek: S.C.E.
eBooks (
Ishtar Rising
Books 1–2); stories in the
Prophecy and Change
and
Tales of the Dominion War
anthologies; and three novels based on the
Roswell
television series. Back in the twentieth century, Martin was the regular co-writer (also with Andy) of Marvel’s
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
monthly comic-book series, and has written for Atlas Editions’
Star Trek Universe
subscription card series,
Star Trek Monthly, Dreamwatch,
Grolier Books, Wildstorm, Visible Ink Press, and Gareth Stevens, Inc., for whom he has penned several
World Almanac Library of the States
nonfiction books for young readers. He lives with his wife, Jenny, and their two sons in Portland, Oregon.

John J. Ordover
, former executive editor of the
Star Trek
fiction line for Pocket Books and co-developer of the Captain’s Table concept (with Dean Wesley Smith), the
Star Trek: New Frontier
series (with Peter David), and the
Star Trek: S.C.E.
series (with KeithR.A. DeCandido), is the happy husband of Carol Greenburg and the proud father of Arren Isaac Ordover. Ordover is currently the editor-in-chief of Phobos Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Dean Wesley Smith
, the co-developer of the Captain’s Table concept, has published over seventy novels and a hundred short stories under varied names. He has written novels in every
Star Trek
series, including the first original
Voyager
novel, the first original
Enterprise
novel, and the first
S.C.E.
eBook. He currently edits
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
, now in its eighth year.