Tales from the Captain’s Table (7 page)

Then a satisfied grin split his bewhiskered face. “Very well. I will not harm the woman, heh. In three days, we will reach our stronghold on Terriveyt Island. You will perform there for a large crowd, heh.” It was clear to me that he meant a large
paying
crowd. “I will even supply all the instruments and costumes you will need to mount your show.”

Three days,
I thought. That would almost surely give Commander Keru ample time to get Deanna and me out of here. Though exactly how he would do it under the watchful eye of the Pelagian authorities, and without transporters, I had no clear idea.

“All right,” I said.

Still grinning, Torr’ghaff turned to leave. But I wasn’t finished with him.

“But I have one additional condition, eh?”

He sighed, then faced me again. “Oh, yes. You want all the sweets served backstage to be of a particular color, neh?”

I shook my head. “I think it might be best not to be fussy about that, under the circumstances.”

“Wise,” he said, nodding.

“But I want the woman to be on the stage with me. Unharmed, neh.”

He nodded, a light of understanding flickering in his eyes. His grin became a leer. “Ah. You wish to serenade her before the audience. And later…”

I wanted to grab his tongue and pull it out by the roots. Instead, I did my best to copy his leer. “Exactly.”

“Agreed! Please my men with your music, Urr’hilf, and I guarantee you a night of pleasure afterward, heh. And should your people refuse to pay the ransom, I promise to spare you all possible pain when I have you diced and thrown overboard—along with the false pirate queen.”

He exited, and the door slammed shut with the finality of a tomb.

Now all I had to do was fake my way through a long live set of music I had mostly never heard before, authored by a musician I knew nothing about, using an instrument I really didn’t even know how to play. No problem.

Thank whatever gods watch over drunks, little children, and former first officers from ships named
Enterprise
for the Pelagian tympanic squids.

Thanks to the popularity of Fegrr’ep Urr’hilf among Torr’ghaff’s crew—and the lousy soundproofing aboard his ship—I got to hear a great deal of Urr’hilf’s organically recorded repertoire. By the time the ship made landfall three days later, I was beginning to think I might actually have half a chance of pulling this off.

“You okay?” I whispered to Deanna as five cutlass-and-pistol-wielding Pelagian pirates walked us side by side down a gangplank and onto the dilapidated docks that lined an island marina. Once again, the orange sun stood high in the sky. That sun had set three times and risen twice since I had last seen her.

“I’ve been through worse,” she looked drawn and pale, the once neat, close-cropped rows of her new Pelagian hairstyle now looking disheveled. But she no longer seemed loopy. The indigenous alcohol must have finally worn off.

“Torture?” I asked quietly, fearing the worst.

“I suppose that’s debatable. Torr’ghaff has been withholding chocolate. On Betazed, that’s considered a basic violation of humanoid rights and the laws of warfare.”

I was glad her sense of humor hadn’t suffered.

We were separated a few minutes later, as we reached a large amphitheater that had been built right alongside the docks. I presumed that Deanna had been taken to some sort of green room, to await the start of the concert.

Hordes of Pelagians—all of them outlaws and pirates, judging from their mode of dress—were already lining up and entering the bowl-shaped, open-air concert hall, and I could hear the voices of what sounded like thousands more already inside. Had our captors somehow used their tympanic squids to get advance word of this concert to the island? Regardless, Torr’ghaff obviously stood to make a fortune, assuming my performance was well received. I didn’t want to think about what might happen if it wasn’t.

I was escorted directly to a large, richly appointed dressing room. I
was
a celebrity, after all.

The first thing I noticed was the costume. A big, awkward, fake-jewel-encrusted suit almost entirely covered in large yellow and orange feathers, obviously the plumage of some human-size Pelagian tropical bird. I put it on, hoping my musical mimicry would be more convincing if I at least looked the part—

“Actually, Will, birds that derive from island habitats usually don’t grow to such large sizes,” Picard said in a quietly chiding tone.

Riker’s only response was a pleading look.

“Sorry,” Picard said. “Continue.”

The concert itself began that afternoon, and went better than I expected—at least at first. Torr’ghaff had left an instrument with me down in the ship’s hold, and I’d spent the better part of three days not only listening to a good chunk of Urr’hilf’s hit parade, but also determining that the fingerings of his chosen instrument weren’t all that different from those of the trombone. It was too bad the thing didn’t have a slide, but you can’t have everything.

With Deanna lounging on a settee that Torr’ghaff’s men had placed on the wooden stage beside me—she displayed what even I thought was a very convincing “adoring female fan” expression—I got through the first couple of numbers without a lot of flubs.

But those tunes were the
easy
ones. By the third number, maybe ten minutes into the set, I knew was floundering, and I could hear enough murmuring out in the bleachers to tell me that the audience was quickly becoming aware that something wasn’t right. Deanna continued to do her best to dispel that by maintaining an expression of sustained uncritical admiration.

But as Thaddius “Old Iron Boots” Riker once said, “you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.” There was only so much even Deanna could do. It was up to me and my performance to keep these bloodthirsty pirates from booing and then rioting.

And I knew I was failing, even as I lapsed into a rendition of “Stardust,” an old jazz standard from Earth. I hoped the crowd would accept it as one of Urr’hilf’s new, experimental compositions.

Nope. As though thinking with one mind, the pirates who composed the audience—apparently thousands of them—rose from their benches. They surged toward the stage, trampling one another in their rage, which got them het up even further.

I dropped my instrument on the settee beside Deanna, and helped her to her feet. “We have to get out of here,” I said, shedding the cumbersome, feather-and-jewel-covered jacket.

Holding her hand, I moved with her toward the wings. A trio of burly pirates blocked our way, their blades extended. We turned toward the other side of the stage. Captain Torr’ghaff and another three armed pirates stood in our path, murder in their eyes.

“Now would be a really good time for an emergency beam-out,” Deanna said.

The angry shriek of the crowd crescendoed as the first of the pirates reached the stage and hauled themselves up onto it.

“Looks like we’re in for a real fight, Arr’ghenn,” I said.

I saw that even Torr’ghaff himself—who must have been pretty angry about his big, profitable concert event falling apart—was drawing a bead on us with his pistol. Shouting a warning to Deanna, I pulled her down behind what little cover the settee provided. Chunks of wood and brass and fabric flew as a metal projectile almost parted Deanna’s hair.

We needed to get the hell out of there. But we needed weapons even more.

I turned toward the stage just in time to see the first of the enraged audience members come barreling toward me. Like a lot of the Pelagian pirates, he was a nasty piece of work, and stood a good head taller than I did. Glancing at the settee, I saw the
klap’paspech,
which Torr’ghaff had perforated with his gun. I grabbed it.

The approaching pirate didn’t use a lot of science when he swung his cutlass. I stepped in close after his first slash missed, then slammed him across the temple with my broken instrument. Dropping its shattered pieces, I then grabbed the man’s arm and let his own momentum carry him over my back and onto the stage, which he struck like a cannonball. A second man behind him soon went down, thanks to a decidedly sobered-up Deanna.

A moment later, she and I were armed both with blades and with muzzle-loading handguns. But considering what we were up against, they might as well have been brooms and feather dusters.

“Don’t go easy on them,” I told her. “They’re a lot tougher than they look.”

She looked at me like I was a complete idiot. “Thanks, Will. And to think I was just going to give them a stern talking-to.”

We were facing a veritable army of snarling, bloodthirsty nasties that would have made Blackbeard wet himself. For the first time since we’d come to Pelagia, I began to really believe that we were about to die.

As we became completely surrounded by dozens of armed and angry men, I felt Deanna’s mind reach out to mine, apparently to comfort me during our last moments.

That’s when the end of the world happened.

But if a comet really
had
chosen that moment to slam into the center of the Opal Sea, I probably wouldn’t have had time to wonder what could have made such a damned loud noise.

I turned then, and saw it.

The prow of the
Enterprise
—the wooden one, not the duranium one—was suddenly plowing directly through the wall of the amphitheater that faced the docks. Bodies were scattering in all directions as the ship continued to move forward amid a great creaking and groaning of timbers and beams and pier planking and shattering bleachers and convincingly splintering holographic wood. The air was scorched by angry shouts and screams.

Keru’s audacity impressed and appalled me all at the same time. Crashing into an amphitheater filled with concertgoers—even
pirate
concertgoers—wasn’t exactly a by-the-book Starfleet tactic.

But if the person doing it had done some research—and discovered just how hard it really is to actually hurt a Pelagian—then what would have been an act of sheer brutality anywhere else had become instead a feat of tactical genius here on the Opal Sea.

The most important thing at the moment was that everyone in the place seemed to have forgotten us, at least for a moment. “Let’s go!” I shouted to Deanna, grabbing her hand.

We ran flat-out across the stage toward the wooden ship, just as it slammed into the apron with a thud that shook the building from rafters to root cellar.

I cast a quick glance at the beams overhead, which were vibrating like banjo strings.
This place is going to come right down on top of us,
I thought.
Wonderful.

As we approached the side of the disguised
Calypso II
, several of the unsavory audience members began to form a disorganized skirmish line between us and our escape. I could see Chief Tongetti standing on the prow above them, readying a rope ladder for us, though he couldn’t lower it without inviting the wrong people aboard.

Her cutlass raised defensively, Deanna looked toward me with a stunned expression. She obviously had no desire to kill anyone, and just as obviously was not aware of the “Small Spirits” that made that particular issue a nonproblem.

I raised my own blade and pistol. “Have at ’em,
Imzadi.
They heal real quick.”

Blades crashed into each other. Fortunately for us, drunkenness and surprise had acted in our favor this time, allowing us to fight our way to the ship—and Tongetti’s rope ladder—just before the
Enterprise
made an apparently magical retreat back toward the docks, breaking for the green, sun-dappled expanse of the Opal Sea that lay beyond.

“Welcome aboard, sir,” said Commander Keru as Deanna and I pulled ourselves over the holographic railings. Terriveyt Island, and all the cutthroats thereon, was rapidly falling away from us as the
Calypso II
skimmed along the ocean surface, powered by her heavily shielded maneuvering thrusters.

“I wonder how many thousands of pairs of Pelagian eyeballs saw what you just did, Mr. Keru,” I said as we made our way belowdecks, and into the yacht’s real—that is to say, its twenty-fourth-century—interior.

“Almost everybody back there is a criminal of some sort or other,” Keru said. “Somehow I don’t think they’ll be making any reports to the duly instituted legal authorities. Which, I might add, I have taken
great
pains to evade myself.”

“All in all, that sounds better than being carved into chum by pirates,” Deanna said.

“My thoughts exactly,” said the big Trill, a self-satisfied grin on his bearded face as he placed us on a leisurely course back to one of the visitor-friendly, tech-unrestricted islands. With any luck at all, we could make landfall undetected sometime after dark.

And then get back to our interrupted honeymoon.

But for the next several hours, Deanna and I would be aboard the yacht we’d borrowed, in the company of the colleagues who had saved our lives. I wondered if we could persuade them to give us an hour or so worth of privacy in the aft compartment. Even if that meant ordering them all to cram themselves into the cockpit. Rank, after all, hath its privileges.