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

able to land his craft and hide until help arrived. He frowned bitterly. After all, I have been so lucky until now .
    Applying starboard thrusters to fine-tune his course, he headed for the planet in question.
     
    Picard was less than twenty million kilometers from the world’s upper atmosphere when he noted the presence of several small, quick ships in the vicinity. At first, he assumed that they belonged to the species on the planet’s surface.
    Then the Nadir ’s computer identified the ships, matching them with file data. Picard swore vividly under his breath. Skellig raiders—four of them, converging on the shuttle’s position. No , he thought, as yet another one registered on his screen. Five .
    He had run into their kind before. They ran in packs like this one, preying on anyone who possessed something of value and was less than expert at defending it.
    Had the Nadir been their primary objective, they would have closed with Picard some time ago. More likely, they had entered this system in pursuit of something else. But now that a Starfleet shuttle had fallen into their laps, they would hardly be so foolish as to ignore it.
    After all, there were those who would pay dearly for Starfleet technology—even the modest sort to be found in a shuttlecraft. And if there was a dignitary or high-ranking officer inside, he would fetch the Skellig a tidy ransom.
    Or so they might think. The truth was that Starfleet didn’t pay ransoms, and never had.
    Whatever their motivation, the Skellig came at the shuttle with their weapons pulsing. Green disruptor beams sliced through the void, forcing Picard to weave a precarious path among them.
    Even if he had wanted to battle the raiders, he wasn’t in a position to do so—the Nadir simply wasn’t equipped for it. His only chance was to dip below the cloud layer obscuring the planet’s surface and find a place to hide.
    As Picard made a break for the planet, the Skellig dogged him with bursts of disruptor fire—and scored a tail hit that slammed Picard back in his seat. The Nadir ’s impulse engine, which was already on its last legs, fizzled out altogether—just as the shuttle entered the mantle of cloud.
    Unfortunately, it couldn’t conceal the Nadir —not when the Skellig had sensors with which to track their prey. All the clouds did was blind Picard, whose own sensors had gone down at the same time as his impulse engine.
    Just a few minutes earlier, Picard had intended to seek an effective hiding place for his craft—somewhere far from the planet’s population centers. Now, screaming through the upper atmosphere with nothing but thrusters left—and those with limited life in them—all he could reasonably hope for was to survive the impact of what would certainly be a crash landing.
    After what seemed like a long time, the Nadir was still plunging through the cloud layer, unable to find the underside of it. Fearing that it would reach all the way to the ground, Picard activated the thrusters—only to have the dense, gray vapors suddenly tear away from his observation port, revealing a rapidly approaching forest of immense orange-leafed trees.
    Using what was left of his thruster capability, Picard tried to pull the shuttle’s nose up, achieve as oblique a descent as possible. But gravity wouldn’t let him have his way. It sent the Nadir rumbling through a network of thick, hard-cracking branches.
    Picard was jerked out of his seat and sent sprawling across the one beside it. Then the lights in the cabin flickered and he was thrown back the other way. And that was the last thing he knew before the darkness descended.
     
    When Picard came to, he was stretched across the awkwardly tilted deck of the shuttle, a terrible ache in one of his temples. But he was alive, and felt fortunate to be so.
    Rolling over onto his back, he took stock of his situation. He seemed to be uninjured except for a few bruises and abrasions. However, he couldn’t say the same for the