The Solitude of Courage
Joanni sat off to the side of Lt. Commander Samuel’s science station on the bridge of the Eridanus. She did not get in anyone’s way, nor talk to the crew; she sat and waited for word of the rescue party’s return. Silent and still. As still as a statue and contained by her misery. After a full day and night, late the next morning, Lt. Morrison relayed a message from the planet below to Helmsman Wynde (in temporary command) that the rescue party had located the landing party and all were returning. There were casualties: Ambassador Palladin was missing, and one of the security officers was badly injured as was Head Biologist Keller. Joanni sprung up and ran to the lift, heading for the ship’s flight deck, startling those nearest her with her sudden energy after being so long quiescent.
When she got down to the shuttle bay corridor, medical personnel were waiting there by the door with two gurneys, along with Gillis and more security personnel. Once the hangar was properly pressurized, the doors swooshed open and the medical staff rolled in. After a few minutes, the entire party came back through into the corridor, Keller and the security ensign on the gurneys, and Palladin, evidently located at the last minute, walking some distance behind them. Dr. Pissario was at the front with the injured. She saw Joanni and mouthed to her, “It’s all right.” That was all the notice anyone gave to the person standing against the wall, to the individual who had made this rescue possible. The captain strode close to her as the group swooped by her on their way to sickbay, but made no indication he noticed her. As she turned and watched them head down the hallway, she realized that she had returned to her original status of invisible outsider.
Tom Chipman visited his officers and the rest of the rescued crew often in sickbay, and Joanni played her clesig for them as had become her custom, but the captain and the ship’s chief comforter seldom interacted. The severing of the ties that had bound them together seemed irreparable and troubled both of them deeply. After a time, within the comforting cocoon of the ship, however, a fragile, nascent healing began to take place, not just in sickbay, but in the former lovers’ hearts and minds. The captain started to reassess his intransigence, remembering the woman he had lost before: a crew member he had reassigned rather than share his heart and ship. She later died on a fact-finding mission and he never stopped blaming himself; he should have been able to hold her here. Would the same thing happen with this one; would he lose that part of himself again? Eric Matulis was one of the few onboard who understood him and who was able to gently prod him. “You said she wasn’t your type, remember,” he said to him at one point.
”What’s my type?”
“Disposable?”
Chipman shook his head. “She’s not disposable.” He would think of this conversation often when brooding at his desk in his quarters.
Joanni, too, grappled with her emotions. She had begun to view her anger in a different light—one could not force anything when it came to love; her reflection when she stood looking out her made-just-for-her window mocked her insistence on trying. Tom had many conquests; he was a master of his fate. Neither Joanni nor her father, for what it was worth, was able to master their fates: her father’s idiosyncrasies were used as a cover for Commander Nelson’s actions during the Seridan Operation. It was by now a not very secret secret that Nelson, and by obvious extension, ISEA, were trying to confirm the existence of vouronium deposits on Oreana before anyone else so as to secure exclusive rights to them. Neiswender & Nelson were not just two crazy explorers who went AWOL; they were conducting the first tentative steps toward securing that knowledge. And, was she not now herself being used? “You’ve had many conquests, but I’ve had only one master,” she said out loud to no one but the stern reflection in her window.
You’ve had many conquests; I’ve had only one master cycled through her thoughts as Joanni walked toward her office, pausing near the captain’s quarters. This day, she was wearing the bracelets of multi-colored beads of varying sizes that Brennan had given her. These bracelets were gaudy and impractical, but she wore all four of them today, two on each arm, to try to feel better, to cheer herself up and give herself some of that Altruzian IV fortitude (Brennan’s home planet), but they just made her feel cheap. Deputy Ambassador Palladin emerged from around the corner and silently came up behind her. His disappearance and reemergence down on the planet, discovered to be called Pargyson, had never been sufficiently explained to her satisfaction. Joanni had been lost in thought, and when he spoke to her, he startled her out of her reverie. He engaged her in conversation and walked with her as she started again toward her office, taking hold of her arm a little too roughly. When Joanni tried to politely disengage, he tightened his grip and pulled her close. “We’re going to take a little trip,” he told her. An instinctive thrill of terror ran down Joanni’s spine. He hurried her along toward her office, along the corridor where no one, the crew having been ordered to respect her privacy, would normally be found except for herself. Joanni struggled to pull away from his grip; she yelled for help, but in her rising fear she could not summon much strength and her voice did not carry. Palladin put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a patch of transparent tape which he pressed over her mouth, then he took her right hand, her clesig-strumming hand, held it up to her eye level and slowly pulled her thumb backwards until they could both hear it crack.
Brennan Vela was a good and loyal friend. She understood Joanni’s romantic woes and had come up to her office to cheer her up by dishing the latest gossip. She better than anyone knew that the disdain Joanni felt for Palladin was second only to what she felt toward Gillis, so when she saw them standing together—too close together—in the corridor in front of her, she instinctively hung back, leaning her hands against the wall, listening. She heard the rise in conversation, the scuffling, and a throttled, muffled scream. She poked her head forward and saw the deputy ambassador half-walk, half-drag her friend around the corner. Chipman’s quarters were only a few doors back, and she ran to his door, bursting in and throwing herself into the chair across from where he was sitting at his desk, swallowing air before saying, fairly calmly given the circumstances, “Palladin’s doing something to Joanni; he’s got her; he’s hurting her. You’ve got to help.” Chipman wasted no time questioning her; they both ran out into the hallway.
“Where is he? Where’d they go?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Split up. Go that way,” And Chipman ran down the corridor toward the lift.
Matt Thornby was due on night duty shortly and was heading toward the library. He sometimes took the long way around at this time of night because it brought him closer to Joanni’s private room, and there were not generally a lot of crew out and about at this time. He could accidentally run into her and perhaps chat without suffering knowing looks from other passersby. This time, however, he was late and therefore taking the direct route. Walking at a fast clip, he was coming up on a couple ahead of him. He quickly realized it was Joanni being hustled along by Deputy Ambassador Palladin; his object of desire seemingly upset, something wrong with her voice. He could heard Palladin instruct her to keep moving: “I told you, we’re going on a little trip,” the ambassador said to her. “Shorter for you, longer for me. I’m going home; you’re going nowhere.”
‘What the hell?’ Matt thought, breaking into a trot. He caught up with the two of them at the lift doors just as they were closing, in time to make out a muffled ‘hangar deck’ command. Thornby ran to the nearest intercom and threw himself at it, pounding the button, shouting “Emergency, emergency! Shuttle deck!” on shipwide frequency. Then he flung himself after them. Entering the hangar deck, he was just in time to see Palladin drag Joanni toward a waiting shuttlecraft. It was the last thing he saw, as the ambassador, well armed, turned around and sent a fatal laser beam his way. The young ensign crumpled to the floor. Palladin had been ready for such a situation, his plan was well formulated. Once he got the girl shackled inside the craft, he would run back and depressurize the deck and then return and take off, heading back toward his home planet of Pargyson. No one would be able to enter the shuttle bay until it was pressurized again, and by then, he would be well on his way. Joanni would go missing, ISEA would be blamed, and the treaty would not be signed. He had it all worked out in his mind.
Yes, he had it all worked out, the ambassador told his struggling prey. He would push her out of the shuttle and return to his home planet after years well spent as a spy within ISEA. Without her there would be no treaty. The avian barrier she had been so mesmerized by (and had fought so valiantly to save, railing against her captain’s orders) had been under Pargysonian control, created to prevent intruders from going to Oreana to establish a claim to mining rights. Eventually, the Pargysonians would take over that planet—the Oreanians were a silly bunch of reeds blowing in the wind. In fact, according to Pargysonian legend, it was someone from Pargyson who originally stole their stupid precious clesig so many eons ago.
With one last furious effort, fueled by her hatred of him and how he had attacked everything dear to her, Joanni tried to push herself free of him. Palladin twisted both her arms painfully, with such force that it broke all four of her bracelets at once, the beads clattering onto and bouncing off the deck. The effect was equivalent to dumping a large drum of marbles onto a floor, and the two of them lost their balance and fell to the ground, Joanni landing awkwardly on her wrist in the process. At that moment, the captain ran through the door, ducking a laser ray sent out by Palladin. There was a momentary standoff between the two men as it was too dangerous for Chipman to try to shoot into the rolling mass on the floor. Chipman aimed a shot above their heads instead, distracting Palladin enough to be able to charge forward, fall onto the ambassador’s arm, and wrestle his weapon out of his hand. He took the butt of Palladin’s laser gun and gave him a blow across his head that knocked him out. He pulled Joanni into a sitting position to separate her from her now unconscious assailant. It was only then that they saw Ensign Thornby.
Security appeared, along with Brennan. Chipman ordered them to take Palladin to the brig and Brennan to page Dr. Pissario. When the doctor arrived, she and the captain walked over to Thornby. Pissaro declared him dead. Joanni was in shock: she stood there shaking, looking at Matt Thornby’s body lying on the deck, but she would not go near him.
“He’s gone . . . my fault, my fault,” she kept whispering. The captain walked over to her and put his arms around her, steadying her. At first, he did not realize her thumb was broken or her wrist sprained. He tightened his grip on her, swaying her gently back and forth, speaking to her and in a way to himself, “All these experiences, the happy thoughts, the good memories will live in your heart and your mind, and you’ll carry them with you; you’ll carry him with you.”
She raised her face up to him, “I don’t want to forget him. I don’t want to forget you. I’m losing people, they’re slipping away . . . ”
Somewhere deep from within the captain’s own anguish rose the need to comfort her. “You won’t,” he told her. “You won’t forget. Your memories will grace this troubled world.”
Image: Only you. Source: Detail from “Don't Forget Me (valentine)” by Joseph Mansell. England. 1845-50. Bequest of Paul E. Pearson. Art Institute of Chicago. Edited by J. Weigley.