Equinox Read online

  PROLOGUE

  "IS IT ALIVE?"

  "I don't care. I'm eating it anyway."

  Sweat mixed with metal shavings grated against the captain's hand as he rubbed the back of his neck. Whatever it was, they were all going to eat it, down to the last dirty crew member still alive on his ship.

  Funny how hunger could make the grotesque palatable.

  He glanced at his first officer. The usually good-looking Max Burke, Casanova of the ship, lounge-lizard extraordinaire, was today a pathetic sight His dark hair was dirty, black eyes sunken with fatigue and hunger, his face shadowed, unshaven. Attention fixed on his bowl, he plowed through the questionables handed him by their exotic Ankari hosts as if his captain's "I don't care" were a direct order to consume. Burke was the last to eat

  He'd been busy until now securing the ship from the last deadly encounter.

  Behind them, Noah Lessing and Maria Gilmore checked a pile of cargo containers and other equipment for harmful emissions. The Ankari didn't have much to spare, but they were willing to offer.

  And who in his right mind would turn down a dinner with big caterpillars who wore suits?

  Across the campfire from the two officers, one of the Ankari waved its idea of a hand.

  "Captain Ransom," the universal translator struggled, "we gift you ritual. You spirit like."

  Accepting a glance from Burke, Ransom paused, then said, "We ritual... appreciate. We thank."

  Burke muttered privately around his mouthful, "You sure we're not the ritual? Maybe they're ... y'know, fattening the-"

  "Shh. Hope not."

  The two puff-faced Ankari who had the job of entertaining the visitors now revealed a device made of a dozen metallic tubes with their tops cut on the diagonal like organ pipes-or was it a device? It could've been a bottle of window cleaner. Inside was a gelatinous liquid that shifted from blue to green.

  "Blast from the past, Rudy," Burke said, attempting a smile. "It's a lava lamp. I always wanted one."

  Ransom also smiled and nodded at the two aliens. "Beautiful. Thank you for showing us."

  The aliens paused, blinked at each other, then seemed-if he read segmented body language right-to shrug. Now they activated the device.

  "Fortune spirit," the Ankari on their right buzzed. "Realm far, you travel bless."

  "Oh, I get it," Burke grumbled, and went back to eating.

  "Very generous of you," Ransom told the aliens.

  The device was blinking now, its colors shifting.

  "Ow!" Burke dropped his plate and covered his ears. An instant later Ransom heard it too-a head-splitting noise, a single tone, as if the highest note on a church organ were stuck on superworship.

  Behind them, the rest of the crew flinched and tried not to react in a negative way despite the howling noise shearing their ears.

  Ransom was about to wave the aliens to stop their "gift"-that it was lovely, more than generous, he and his crew just didn't deserve such a wonder-when a thread-thin black line appeared in midair over the campfire.

  Beside him, Burke flinched. Ransom held him back with a trembling hand. Wait.

  The black line parted as if a scalpel had cleaved it, giving presence to a fissure in the air above them and then to a bulb of phosphorescent blue light. From an inconceivable backstage curtain, a fluid form appeared; free moving and independent, it pierced through the fissure. Green-blue?-with some kind of face, two paws, and a short tail. Built for swimming?

  In his biologist's mind, Ransom instantly analyzed the "spirit." Head at one end, tail at the other, floating upright, clutching hands-was that an opposable thumb? He couldn't tell.

  The hands were knobby-knuckled and in repose. Average skull formation for gravity conditions, so it wasn't space-evolved... but it floated freely in spite of no visible antigrav hovering mechanism.

  Back to the swimming hypothesis?

  Otherworldly and translucent, the moving form slipped over the campfire and bansheed its way to an open place between two trees. There it floated, angelic and perplexing.

  "Is it alive?" Ransom murmured.

  Moving very slowly, Max Burke brought his tricorder around. "I dunno ... but I'm going to eat it anyway ..." The tricorder bleeped softly.

  The alien form flittered with what might be electrical energy-might not.

  "Not a spirit," the first officer finally concluded. "Nucleogenic matter... no-antimatter! High levels radiating right now."

  "Now? In the same physical space with matter?" Ransom asked.

  Burke shook his head at what he was reading. He had no answer. Here they were, and there it was.

  "Life form?" he pressed. "Not an illusion?"

  "Seems to be some kind of life," was all Burke would say.

  Swirling merrily through the air around them now, the liquid animal danced like an ocean wave come inland for a visit, then lost dimension and slipped back into its scalpel cut.

  The rift healed clean.

  In his stomach Ransom's unidentified dinner crawled

  around as if he'd forgotten to chew it. At his side Burke reviewed the graceful visitation on his tricorder screen, running analysis after analysis, his black brows flaring higher with every pass.

  The Ankari hosts rocked with pleasure. They were proud of themselves for the show. Ritual, whatever.

  Ransom cleared his throat. "You thank," he managed. "Pretty."

  "Bless pretty voyage," one of them said. "Bless ship Equinox."

  "You thank," he said again. When the two aliens got up and moved away, apparently satisfied that they'd been hospitable, Ransom kept an eye on them but spoke to Burke. "Max... what've you got? Brainwaves? Language? Anything?"

  "It... I don't... does this make sense?" Burke showed him the tricorder readings. "If we could hang on to this for a few minutes ... think of it! Look at the enhancement!"

  "Shh," Ransom halted. "Let's do this by the book."

  "We left the book in the Alpha Quadrant! Rudy, if we could contain this, the power flux-"

  "Shh. Give me a chance to talk to our friends. Keep the crew working. Get that stuff loaded. Let me just talk to them..."

  "It's inside!"

  Over the single-toned whine made by the Ankari cylinder, Maria Gilmore's triumphant cry buzzed fiercely through the research lab aboard U.S.S. Equinox. Her thick blond hair fell forward over her

  shoulder as she leaned closer to the containment chamber's controls.

  The lab was small, dim, and damaged, still stinking of fried electricals from the last time they'd had to fight their way out. Ransom worried that he was getting too used to that stink. If this worked, the cozy old ship would get a heck of a cleanup.

  At first the fluid-creature was passive, exploring the multiphasic containment chamber Gilmore had built. It seemed curious, moving around it in a looping circle to every side, every corner.

  Nearby, Max Burke furiously fed readings into the engineering link computer and the med link. The med link showed no change, but the engineering link flashed and its readings sped too fast to follow. That was one happy computer.

  If Captain Ransom had entertained any doubt that the swimmer was indeed alive, that dissolved in a sudden screech. It realized it was trapped inside the containment chamber. Its green skin darkened to blue, and it began to thrash from side to side, up and down, screaming louder.

  Burke's voice cracked as the containment field spiked. "Something's wrong."

  "Rudy!" Maria Gilmore backed away from the chamber, horrified.

  The creature's cranial membrane parted just as the fissure doorway had. Terrible features broke through the egg-yolk membrane, hideous features recognizable anywhere in the universe as threatening. As they
watched, breathless, the creature imitated everything

  from horns to fangs to feathers as it splashed around the inside of the chamber.

  "Get it out of there," Ransom ordered.

  Burke's whitened hands worked on the controls. The alien cylinder's colors washed, but nothing happened to free the creature trapped inside the chamber.

  Its screaming got louder, its thrashing more desperate.

  "Send it back!" he shouted over the maddening whine.

  "We can't..." But Burke worked faster, his desperation peaking with the creature's. Sweat sheeted his swarthy face, making him look old.

  "Oh, God!" Gilmore's hands clamped over her mouth.

  Inside the chamber, the creature went into some kind of convulsion, heaving its insides out all over the chamber walls until it finally slumped and its shrieking died to a low whine. As they watched, unable to activate the Ankari cylinder to take the creature back as easily as they had brought it here, the creature withered to half its size and began to desiccate before their eyes.

  Nauseated, Maria Gilmore blinked at the chamber she had been so proud moments ago to have built. She clutched her arms to her chest, hands clenched, her expression pitiful.

  Digesting the facts faster, Ransom stepped to the chamber wall and watched the last drying phase of the creature's death. "Max, is it dead?" he asked.

  Burke indulged in a hopeless sigh. "Yeah. Something about the multiphasics. Those membranes can't take it.

  If we could've held it here just a couple of minutes, the nucleogenics might... might..."

  When his voice faded off, Ransom looked at him. Burke was peering into his screen.

  "Max?" Ransom prodded. "Come on, give."

  Parting his lips to speak, Burke was only able to offer a panting excitement that brought back the sweat beads on his forehead. "Rudy-it's still here!" He held a hand toward the monitor as if pointing out a window. "The enhancement properties are lingering!" Fiercely he swiveled to his captain. "Let me test the remains! Give me the authorization for autopsy!"

  "What if it's sentient?" Gilmore protested.

  "That doesn't matter now!" Burke reacted to an argument not yet made. "It's dead, Maria. Rudy, it's dead-"

  "And there's no information so far that it's intelligent," Ransom agreed. "We tried everything. It was like trying to communicate with a cat."

  Burke slipped from his chair and stood up. "There's a time limit here."

  Effectively prodded, Ranso m nodded.

  "Do it."

  As Burke rushed to his work on the bubbling corpse, Ransom turned to Maria Gilmore, quaking at his side.

  "If you're lost at sea, you eat fish," he told her. "If this is what we think it is, then we've got a ticket out of the Delta Quadrant. Paroled... from a mighty long sentence."

  CHAPTER 1

  OR A SENTENCE TO BROIL IN HELL.

  Science vessel, mouth of hell... explain the difference.

  His vision blurred from a scalp wound on his forehead, Captain Ransom gripped the arms of his command chair and endured another shattering energy punch on his ship's shields. In his periphery he saw sparks blow forward from some unfortunate console behind him, but he didn't turn to look. Uncontainable free-roaming energy fractured the deflectors again.

  He murmured an encouragement to the ship. Despite constant punishment, tough old Equinox was still standing up to the torture of unseen attack time after time. If only there were another ship to shoot at-a solid target would be so much easier for him and the crew to understand, to focus upon.

  Red Alert flashed relentlessly. He kept meaning to turn it off. They were almost always at Red Alert these days. The flashing didn't help. They were beyond panic.

  The ship, too, was in electrical panic, as if it actually knew. Racing along at high warp while under siege, the sturdy science vessel heaved itself forward on a spatial plane, spitting and clawing its way along while her shields sparkled in destruction's grip.

  Rudy Ransom was dully aware of the crew members around him rushing from station to station, covered with grime, frayed to the last nerve ending, every one of them doing double duty every day-John Bowler, Dotty Chang, Ed Regis. There was Max Burke, of course, doing his best to fill the shoes of exec, even though his specialty was tactical, and he hadn't been ready for promotion. Some promotion ...

  Ransom winced in empathy as Burke tripped on a peeled-back piece of hull plating, his foot snagged in a dent. Chunks of debris swung on frayed cables from the ceiling, unrepaired, not even cut out of the way. Exposed circuitry sizzled brutishly. Scorched bulkheads smoked and smelled. Ransom sniffed, hoping for a molecule of fresh air. Dreams, dreams.

  Staying in his chair, Ransom resisted the urge to help Burke to his feet. The crew didn't need to feel more helpless than they already were.

  Burke staggered up and plunged to the nearest monitor. "Shields at twenty-nine percent!"

  'Twenty-nine down, or down to twenty-nine percent left?" Ransom asked.

  Burke's face was a blot of white against the dark bridge. "Down to twenty-nine percent! They're breaking through!"

  The back of Ransom's hand swept a dribble of blood out of his eye. It was hot, gluey. "Let them."

  Through a gush of brown smoke, Burke looked at him. "Sir?"

  'Take the shields off line and recharge the emitters. That'll bring them back to full power."

  Burke digested the idea, but hesitated. "The charging cycle takes forty-five seconds. We'll be vulnerable."

  "We'll be dead if we don't get those shields back up." Ransom glanced around at the whole bridge crew, meeting eyes with as many as possible. "Arm yourselves."

  Those two words, horrible and hated, doomed them to the next few minutes. He never said, "Red Alert" anymore. He said, "Arm yourselves."

  Crew members stepped quickly around and over the blast-curled machinery and circuit guts spread across the deck, grabbing phaser rifles and hand phasers that hadn't seen the inside of a weapons locker in months. Burke struck a button on the console where he leaned. The "Arm yourselves" button for the lower decks.

  Give them all a few seconds. Hold back. Hold on. Ransom himself stood up and shouldered his own rifle. So few people were on the bridge anymore ... he worried about the crew down in engineering.

  Only five people down there right now. When would they get a chance to sleep again?

  His chest constricted at the responsibility. He was

  batting about sixtyforty with this kind of order, wild chance, daring risk. Not too good. Bad odds.

  When everyone he could see was ready, armed and alert, he counted off five more seconds on behalf of the lower decks, then sharply ordered, "Drop shields!"

  Burke struck his controls.

  Shields down. Ransom read that in Burke's stance as the first officer worked with his left hand while holding a phaser in his right. Everyone held still, except for heads swiveling, eyes flashing, chests heaving.

  The dissonant otherworld frequency began as softly as a mosquito's whine, then speared up to an eye-popping squeal. Louder, louder! Invasion!

  "Recharge cycle?" Ransom asked, keeping his eyes moving.

  "Thirty seconds!"

  Would they beat it?

  What a way of life. This was like being caught in a spider's web, being able to rush from thread to thread, only to be caught on each one, to face breaking away again, to get caught again, and the spider didn't like them.

  The crew swept their weapon muzzles in short arcs, trying to keep each other out of the lines of fire. The otherworldly whine screwed their feet to the deck, hammering their skulls from inside. From his position in the middle of the bridge, Captain Ransom was the first to see the hideous inevitability.

  "There!" He swept his phaser rifle clear of Burke's head, aimed at an opening fissure in midair near the ceiling. The rip expanded as the captain aimed. Sweat

  squished between his hand and the phaser grip as he opened fire.

  Burke ducked out of the way as half the re
maining ceiling crashed to the deck where he'd been standing. While the fissure opened, Ransom kept firing at it, consumed with frustration as he saw another glowing ragged-edged fissure open behind Burke, and a third behind Chang.

  The noise, louder now! Combined whining from three fissures, enough to drive a man to screaming. The phasers-more whining, howling added to the unnatural scream of the alien invaders-and bright, blinding heat rays demolishing everything they touched. Phasers on kill, scoring the interior of the bridge. They'd lost a crew member last week in sweeping friendly fire.

  All around Ransom, the crew swung to fire again and again at the bulblike fissures opening above them. Not enough time. Burke, over there, still frantically working-

  "Time!" Ransom demanded.

  'Ten seconds!"

  More screaming, but this time it was the panicked horror of human screams that rang with such poignance on the captain's human ears. This sound, by far, was more ghastly than the shriek of the alien invaders. Here they came!

  Through the rifts, racing with demonic speed, the translucent, slug-tailed aliens batted around the bridge. Two, three-Ransom lost count almost instantly. The aliens entered a blindingly fast holding pattern for enough moments to notice, then split up.

  Each one targeted a human. Wildly, Ransom squeezed the rifle's firing pad. The phasers squealed, harder and hotter. The overhead formation of wraiths broke. Green haze flashed around the bridge, distorting the crew's senses like strobe lights in a bar.

  Attack!

  CHAPTER

  2

  "WE'VE GOT A DISTRESS SIGNAL, CAPTAIN."

  "Isolate."

  "You're not going to believe this. I don't believe it-"

  "Well, Chakotay, let me see it and we'll decide later to believe it or not."

  Even through her own calm words, Kathryn Janeway caught a hint of nervousness. She knew what he saw, and she didn't believe it either. Federation distress frequency, here! Sixty thousand light-years from Federation space. Was someone baiting them?

  The Starship Voyager had answered plenty of distress calls in the past five years, a tricky and haunting decision in itself for the captain of a powerful ship. Was it interfering to answer a call for help in a quadrant where the Federation had no authority? She didn't