Antelope

“You know,” Adam said, “you’re always a little cagey about your past. I know you were in Starfleet for a while, but I don’t know much more about it apart from it’s where you met Shandra.”

Adam, our Engineer and Medical Officer, were enjoying some downtime in a lovely bar on Space Station XVIII. First officer Shandra Stevenson and Captain Buzz Ryan were off negotiating our next salvage jobs; Adam and I hadn’t really spent a lot of quality time together, so Shandra suggested we go have lunch and a few drinks. Orders are orders, what can you do, and here we were.

“Yeah, I don’t talk about it much. I really wanted to be in Starfleet, but once I was there, it didn’t work out. I wound up in Communications, but I’d always wanted Navigation and Operations. So it wasn’t satisfying. I did a stint in Starfleet Marines, which was great, but I wanted to be a flier. So, I left.”

“That’s when Buzz bought the Troll?”

“Well, no. I bounced around a bit and lost touch with him and Shan. Two or three years, maybe. I did a lot of thinking, and I think I grew up a bit. I had a couple of close calls.”

“Close calls?”

Hoo-boy. I signaled the bartender for another whiskey, holding up three fingers. This story would take a little cushioning.

“So, it was actually out on old Space Station III, one of the earlier civilian stations. I’d, uh, I’d gotten a bit down on my luck. I’d wound up in a bar, just looking for–hell, I dunno. A job. Maybe just a friend. I was pretty down on myself. I remember there was a kind of regular crowd of losers there. One old guy, Captain Jed, owned an old tramp freighter, the Antelope. Poor ship was as half-dead as he was, and he basically only flew her enough to make enough money to come back and drown his woes in Andorian gin. Nasty stuff. Another lady, Molly, had been a crack navigator at one point. I actually kind of worshipped her, because she’d flown. But she got out to Regulus way, got hooked in some of the drug clubs there, and lost her license. She washed out, and just kind of hung around bars on the station hoping someone would buy her a drink or a hit.

“Anyway, Space Station III was a dump. They’d didn’t get a lot of traffic, back then, and so they’d shut down half the place between ships. I think we were a week out from one, and I was hoping to get a job as a deckhand or whatever and finally get the hell out of there. I’d basically been sweeping up the bar in exchange for food and booze, and they let me sleep in one of the booths at night. I’m pretty sure Antelope was the only ship in dock that could actually fly at all.

“The station’s red alert went off. We must have gotten hit by something, because the place shook like it was the end of the world. The lights cut out, and there wasn’t much in the way of emergency lighting. The gravity cut out, so we’re all floating around. And we could hear the air pumps die off. Manny, the bartender, started saying prayers. I figured we were goners, and honestly, a part of me was happy about it. At least I wouldn’t be living on that dump of a station anymore, right?” I took a sip of whiskey and steeled myself.

“Jed, of all people, stands up and says, ‘stow it! Head for the Antelope!’ like that was going to save us. ‘You idiots hear that whine? The station reactor’s gone critical with nothing pulling juice and she’s gonna blow! Get the hell to my ship!’

“He wasn’t the only one who had that idea. By the time we got to the dock, bouncing off walls in the dark with no gravity, everyone left living on the station was already there. Nobody said a thing, but they all stared at Jed.

“‘Break out yer suits,’ he said, ‘because it’s got no air, got no heat, and got no gravity, but I can get you all out of here in her hold.’ We didn’t have long; they all started getting into emergency vac-suits and piling into the cargo hold. Antelope was designed to run with a small crew; it was even less fancy than the Troll. There was basically a big box of a cargo hold, a tiny bridge, and the drive systems. ‘She only needs three hands,’ Jed said. ‘Molly, can you navigate?’

“‘Aye,’ she said. I remember the look in her eyes. ‘Who’s crew?’ she asked him.

“‘We only need someone to fly,’ he said. He looked straight at me. ‘I think you’ll do.’

“Literally nobody outside the Marines had ever looked at me with that kind of confidence before, and I started to remember what it felt like with them. I never even thought about saying no. I’d rather than stayed on the station and died, but I was needed again. And he was asking me to fly.

“We had two hundred in the hold, plus Jed, Molly, and me. We slammed off the docking clamps and pushed out just as the reactor blew. Jed pumped the emergency thrusters and his impulse engine, full blast, to get us clear.

“Well, Antelope didn’t have the best inertial dampers, and that was a lot of gees. A lot. I figure six or so. I mean, I blacked out a little. Probably everyone did. But as soon as Molly and I saw him, we knew old Jed wasn’t going to wake up.

“So I took the engineering and helm boards, and Molly took comms and nav. She had the ship yelling a distress beacon on every possible frequency, and we had the operating manual spread out all over the deck. Fortunately, Molly’s mind, even half-melted as it was, was a better ship’s manual than any manual has ever been. She worked at that nav comp like a crazy machine, even with her hands shuddering like grass in a hurricane. She was a sharp lady, and she got us through three warp jumps despite the DTs.

“Antelope’s old drives could only run for a bit at a time, so we had to make those jumps, stop, recalculate, and jump again. We were down to one last jump, which would put us within hailing range of Space Station V. And the alarms went off. It had all been too much for the poor old ship, and her seals had blown out. We were losing all our air. And Jed, curse his soul, only had one vac-suit on the bridge.

“Molly and I looked at each other. She smiled, and pulled a coin out of her pocket. I smiled back, and turned to my board to set the helm on stationkeeping.

“She hit me in the back of the head.

“When I came to, she’d sealed me in the suit. She herself was belted down at her console, her hands fluttering right over the controls. She was still smiling, even through the ice on her face and in her hair.

“She’d left a note on the screen: ‘Here’s the instructions for the last jump,’ it said. ‘And if anyone asks after old Mol, just tell them she finally got clean.’”

A big gulp of whiskey.

“I followed her instructions, and crews from Space Station V towed us in and got everyone off. We’d only lost five people, plus Molly and Jed. And the goddamn people on the station started talking of the ‘Hero of Antelope’s Run.’ I put a stop to that shit, right quick, because Molly and Jed were the heroes, not me. I was just a lunkhead who did what he was told. Molly and Jed, they weren’t out for the glory. They were heroes because they gave without counting the cost.

“It made me realize I could do better. So I got in touch with Buzz and Shan, and the timing was just right. I’ve been flying Troll ever since, and right now, it’s all I want to do.”

I finished my whiskey, turned the glass down on the bar, and stared at it. Adam patted my back, and I’d never been so happy to have a crew and a ship to call home.