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

place two and a half decades earlier—it was devoid of sentience. It was more than Picard could have hoped for.
    Charting a course for the system in question, he made the necessary helm adjustments. Then he sent out a distress call and hoped for the best.
     
    The Nadir ’s warp engines eventually ground to a halt. However, they were cooperative enough to take Picard to the brink of his target system first.
    It was good timing; he would have had to drop to impulse to enter the system anyway. As he did so, keeping a close watch on the failing sublight drive, his communications monitor began to blink—indicating an incoming transmission.
    Apparently, one of his colleagues had received his distress call and was responding to it. Picard wondered which of them it might be. Minshaya? Capshaw? Nguyen?
    Whoever it was would have smiled at first at the chance to poke fun at him. That, after all, was what happened to captains who placed themselves in need of rescue.
    Then his savior would have remembered what happened to the Stargazer , and he or she would have curbed the impulse to mock him. No one made fun of a man who had lost what Picard had lost. Still, at some point he would have to face their sympathy, and that would be far worse than their ridicule.
    At least Van Dusen had spared him that.
    Tapping a stud, he said, “Picard here.”
    “ Good to hear you’re all right ,” said a familiar voice.
    Capshaw , he thought. “Thank you for responding, David.”
    “ What’s your situation? ”
    “I have reached the outskirts of the system for which I was headed. Warp engines have failed. I still have impulse, but that will go down soon as well.”
    “ Acknowledged. We’ll be there in a— ”
    The rest of Capshaw’s sentence crackled off into unintelligibility. Picard manipulated his comm controls in an attempt to restore the clarity of the link, but he couldn’t. And a moment later, he lost it altogether.
    He sighed. Damn.
    It wasn’t the fault of his equipment, as far as he could tell. Some celestial anomaly, then, interfering with the subspace signal. It didn’t happen often, but it happened.
    Nonetheless, Picard knew that Capshaw was coming for him. He just didn’t know when.
    Sitting back in his seat, he checked his sensors and called up a visual of the world he had identified earlier. It was mostly occluded by cloud cover, making what was underneath a bit of a mystery. For all he knew, it was impenetrable jungle down there, or a maze of savage mountain ranges.
    But he didn’t expect to have to stay there long. A couple of days at most, not including the thirteen or fourteen hours it would take the Nadir to make the journey across intervening space. By then, Capshaw’s ship would certainly have caught up with him.
    Then he saw something else on his sensor readouts—an unmistakable nest of ion trails surrounding the planet in question. But ion trails meant ship traffic. Why would there be so much traffic around an uninhabited world?
    Unless it isn’t uninhabited .
    Activating long-range sensors, Picard scanned the planet. Indeed, it was populated, if only sparsely, by a single species—one the shuttle’s computer couldn’t seem to identify.
    That put an entirely new spin on the situation. Fortunately, the Federation’s noninterference directive wouldn’t loom as an issue—not if those on the planet had taken to space already.
    No , Picard thought, correcting himself. They had come from space. Otherwise, they would have shown up on that Federation survey twenty-five years earlier. So like him, they were relatively new to this world. Colonists, possibly.
    However, Picard couldn’t be sure how they would react to his presence. Not everyone warmed to the idea of an uninvited visitor. Of course, he had the option of contacting the authorities and explaining his plight before he put down, but ultimately he decided against it.
    Better to play it safe , he thought, and keep mum . With a little luck, he would be