Free Tales from the Captain’s Table by Keith R.A. DeCandido

Starfleet as a paper-pusher. And if he resorted to a position in commercial shipping, he would again be taking responsibility for a crew.
    Still, he had to do something , and he couldn’t solicit ideas from those who had abandoned the Stargazer with him. It was too difficult to face them—even Ben Zoma, with whom he had quarreled after he pulled himself together.
    It was Picard’s hope that Wu would have a recommendation for him. If not, he didn’t know where to turn.
     
    Picard was three-quarters of the way to Wu’s colony when he thought of Ensign Jovinelly.
    Even in the twenty-fourth century, some people acted on the basis of superstition. Jovinelly’s compelled her to touch the bronze dedication plaque that hung near the turbolift on the Stargazer ’s bridge.
    As a shuttle specialist working under Lieutenant Chang, she didn’t get up there very often. But when she did, she ran her fingertips over the plaque before she went about her business.
    To bring light into the darkness. Those were the words inscribed there, the burden with which ship and crew were charged.
    Once, Picard asked Jovinelly why she felt so compelled to caress the plaque. She blushed and told him it was for good luck. “But why that?” he asked, his curiosity unsatisfied. “Why that rather than some other artifact on the ship?”
    Jovinelly didn’t have an answer for him.
    Despite her efforts to keep her luck in good supply, it ran out the day the ship was attacked. Hers was one of the bodies they removed from the Stargazer before they fled from the ship in escape craft.
    Picard sat back in his chair and sighed. Instead of bringing light into the darkness, he had allowed the lights of twenty-four of his crew to be extinguished. Quite an accomplishment , he told himself.
    It was then that he saw the red-on-black engine-failure graphic appear on the Nadir ’s operations monitor. That cannot be right , he thought. Frowning, he punched in a code to assure himself that it was a mistake.
    But the computer said it wasn’t.
    His warp engines, considerably smaller than those that had propelled the Stargazer but powerful nonetheless, were in the process of going down—and his impulse engines weren’t far behind. And while there didn’t appear to be any danger of an antimatter containment breach, the Nadir wouldn’t be able to venture much farther on her own steam.
    Not even to the nearest starbase , he thought, much less all the way to Hydra IV .
    Picard swore beneath his breath. He had initiated diagnostic cycles at all the prescribed intervals, and they hadn’t alerted him to any engine malfunctions.
    Working at his console, he dug a little deeper—and found that some of the diagnostic circuits weren’t working either. They had deteriorated, as if something had eaten away at them.
    But what?
    He had barely posed the question when the answer occurred to him: The ion squall . Maybe it hadn’t been as innocuous as it seemed. Or maybe Van Dusen’s people hadn’t done a good enough job insulating the craft from such phenomena.
    Either way, the storm’s energy particles could have gotten into the shuttle and damaged some of her circuitry—and kept Picard in the dark about the state of his engines.
    In fact, the engine problem might have been attributable to the squall as well. If it had penetrated the data conduits, it could just as easily have invaded the plasma manifolds.
    Either way, Picard had a problem. He couldn’t remain in interstellar space—not when his only sources of generated power were running out, and his battery stores were limited. More than likely, he would perish before anyone found him.
    He gauged the distance he was likely to be able to cover before the engines died altogether. Then he called up a map of all the star systems in that range.
    There was only one. But among its seventeen planets was a specimen that had been classified capable of supporting human life, and according to its Federation survey—which had taken