Equinox Page 12

There's no evidence of superiority. So far they're just flying around and screaming and showing their teeth. Are we never going to step on a bug because a billion years from now it might have a sentient granddaughter? What do we do when we reach the cats and dogs and dolphins? Never hurt one because they squeal and play together and attack in an organized fashion?"

  Janeway slammed both palms down on her desk. "There's going to be a court-martial on this ship, Chakotay. You'll be one of the presiding judges. You'd better divide your empathy from your sense of law and order long enough to remember where you come from. Or have you retreated to your Maquis sensibilities and forgotten about the laws that give us everything we have?"

  "Ransom knows he's up for a court-martial, Captain." Chakotay let his tone ignite. "He knew that all along. When he gets back to Federation space, if he ever does, he faces ruin and disgrace and trial. He knows there's a whole command of officers with your opinion waiting for him, but he was willing to subjugate bis own future so his crew could get home. If we make it back, Ransom's ruined. The same fate might be awaiting us-have you thought of that?"

  The captain turned to frozen rock before him, and indeed it seemed she'd never thought of that. Could it be that she had always dug her decisions so deeply into her sense of regulation and directive that she thought she was justified every single time? Was that how she saved her sanity?

  "He's wrong," she insisted. "You can kill the moose, but you can't kill the natives."

  "Maria says they couldn't tell the difference between the moose and the natives." Seizing his opportunity, Chakotay came to the edge of his chair. "We've bent the Prime Directive. Others might just as easily say we've broken it. From eating grubs to storming strongholds, we've participated in the Delta Quadrant as if we're alive and we're here. Others who haven't been through the same might make the call on us-say we should've destroyed ourselves before we contacted anybody and altered their futures, or that we should've stranded ourselves on some planet and lived out our lives with no chance of influencing anybody else."

  He knew he had something there. As Starfleet officers, they knew about the line in theory, a little in practice, but never to this level. Chakotay struggled, too, as he watched his captain struggle. This was a fire he might himself have to jump into someday, if anything happened to her, and he found himself cruelly intrigued by her not-so-interior battle.

  The ship pulsed around them as if waiting for her answer. Suddenly the hums and thrums of energy that constantly burbled around them rose to a symphonic pitch, matching their heartbeats as if kettledrums were hammering.

  As Janeway stared at him in hurtful challenge, Chakotay pushed on with these thoughts, defending a man he didn't like, explaining actions he found questionable, for the sake of his captain's ability to make a decision he found daunting.

  "When the time came for Ransom to let the other half of his crew die, Ransom couldn't do it How do we know we'll be strong enough? What do we do, Captain, when it's really 'us or them'? Would you die for a whale? Some people would say yes. Fine. Would you let your child die so a whale could live? Five children? Thirty-nine?"

  "These aren't children, Chakotay. These are Starfleet officers. Every one of them understood what they were getting-"

  "So we're all expendable?" he interrupted. "Why are we fighting, then? Are we expendable first? Or last? When do you start fighting, Captain? When do you kill? The ante keeps ratcheting up. We draw the line, and the line moves."

  She stared at him. The words were crushing.

  He was ready to continue, to force her to examine herself and find that answer, but they were cruelly interrupted by Tom Paris' desperate cry from beyond the entrance panels. "Bridge to captain! Defenses are breaking down!"

  "Later," Janeway snapped to him, and plunged for the door. In that instant, everything between them changed. They took refuge in necessity.

  They charged onto the bridge to the punctuation of Harry Kim's panicked report back to Tuvok and Seven, at the defense grid-"I'm picking up spatial fissures! Hundreds of them!"

  Kathryn Janeway was grateful when Chakotay ran immediately to tactical and shoved aside the terrified

  crewman manning the post. She didn't really want him in the middle of the bridge at the command station right now, and she sensed he didn't want to be there. This was one of those moments-after such an altercation between commanding officers-when it was altogether better to have one person in indisputable charge.

  "Looks like they stepped up their attacks," Paris gasped from the helm.

  Janeway slid into her command chair as the ship trembled noticeably. "Reroute all available power to the shields."

  At the tactical station, Chakotay was now authorized to do that drastic measure. She could hear the clicks and appropriate answering buzzes as he worked and silently thanked him for his efficiency and the support he was giving her now that hadn't been present only seconds ago.

  "They're holding," he said, "but at this rate, it won't be long before the aliens break through."

  "Bridge to Tuvok." Janeway almost didn't hit the comm in time. "We need that security grid!"

  "We're preparing to bring it on-line. Charge the emitters."

  Janeway almost told him they couldn't do that from here, when she realized he had been talking to someone else, Seven or Torres, down there in astrometrics. No, not Seven-she was still on board Equinox, trying to work on that warp core's dilithium matrix.

  Leaving them to their work, she struck the comm again. "Bridge to The Doctor."

  "Sickbay here."

  "Did you find anything?"

  Irritated to a breaking point, she grew instantly impatient when he hesitated with what should've been a yes or no answer.

  "Could you... be more specific?" he asked.

  Could a computer lose its memory?

  Blistering from her encounter with Chakotay and now this new surge of assault, Janeway leaned closer. "Neural patterns, cortical scans-anything that could help us program the universal translator!"

  What a swollen boil it was to state the bloody obvious under these conditions.

  What was taking him so long!

  "Negative," he finally reported. "I couldn't access the Equinox data files. They were encrypted."

  "Keep studying the information we have," she said. "See what you can come up with."

  She stopped short of demanding answers he didn't have yet.

  "Acknowledged," The Doctor responded, almost musically.

  Why did he sound so satisfied? He had no reason to sound as if he liked his job right now.

  "We're going to have to try something drastic," Janeway said, half to herself.

  At tactical, Chakotay looked down at her as if his prediction were already coming true. Generously, though, he didn't point that out in front of the crew. "Ready when you are, Captain," he said. "What do you have in mind?"

  "I don't know yet, but I can't do it dragging another ship like this. Prepare to cut loose the Equinox. Get Seven off as soon as possible."

  "Whether she's finished or not?"

  "No... let's let her finish if possible-why don't you see how much more time she needs?"

  "Aye, aye. Chakotay to Seven of Nine. What's your status?"

  "I've dismantled the antimatter injectors. But I'll need several minutes to neutralize the dilithium matrix."

  "We don't have much time."

  "Understood."

  As the comm clicked off, echoing that rotten word "several" again, Janeway looked up at Chakotay as another heavy assault shuddered through the ship. "Is she alone over there?"

  "Yes," he said, his feet spread apart for balance as he worked. "She's the last Would you like me to send a support team to help her?"

  "No, I just wanted to know if there was anyone else to evacuate. This might have to be fast."

  "She's the last of our crew," he clarified. "Most of the Equinox crew is still over there. They were leading the salvage teams when we arrested Ransom. We just confined them to
their quarters."

  As much as it made sense, Janeway disparaged the idea. "We'll have to get them over here pronto. Bridge to Tuvok, I need that grid!"

  "Aye, Captain, nearly ready."

  "Keep the line open. I want to hear what's going on."

  "Aye, aye. Activate the grid."

  As Janeway listened, and watched the auxiliary monitoring console across the bridge, she heard a surge of energy that gave her a moment's hope. An instant later, though, the energy peaked, whined, and fell off audibly to a buckling ramble.

  "What happened?" Tuvok's voice.

  "/ don't understand." This was Torres, a little distant as her voice came through Tuvok's open combadge channel. "This should be working... I'm running a system-wide diagnostic-"

  As if they had time for that. Janeway silently smoldered. Shouting at them wouldn't speed things up. She turned, and looked at Chakotay, letting the worry show in her eyes which before had been nothing but cold rocks to him.

  "We've got to hold on," she said. 'Take all the power you need. Shut systems down anywhere you can."

  His eyes widened with doubt. "I'll push the envelope."

  The ship shuddered again, a violent punching sensation that came up through the deck under the captain's feet and drilled through her legs and up her spine.

  "Hold on," she murmured.

  "Captain!" Harry Kim shouted. "I'm reading phaser fire on deck nine! Crew quarters!"

  "Security, seal off deck nine!" Ghastly awareness rushed through Janeway's guts. Ransom. Doing what Chakotay implied he might-anything Janeway herself might do in this situation. But how?

  On the upper deck, Chakotay called over the thrum of attack. "Shields are weakening! Eighty-four percent!"

  "Tuvok to bridge. The field generator is off-line. Its power couplings were disengaged."

  Torres' voice sounded in the deep background. "Someone reconfigured the internal sensors so we couldn't detect it!"

  Janeway leaned forward and shouted at the monsters in the mirror.

  "Whatever it takes, get that grid on-line!"

  CHAPTER

  9

  ARMED AND DANGEROUS. GRIPPING THE PHASER RIFLE he'd taken from one of the unconscious security guards outside the crew quarters, Rudy Ransom led his handful of crew down the Voyager's corridor, pleased at their skill with ignoring the rumbling and shaking that ravaged the ship.

  Unlike the Voyager crew, who were disoriented every time the ship wracked, his own team rushed right through it. This had become their normal habitat.

  Luckily they were all here, held in the same astound-ingly comfortable and clean crew's quarters-Burke, Gilmore, Lessing, Morrow, Nash, Tassoni, and Sofin.

  "You broke us out just in time," he said over his shoulder to their doctor. "How are you moving around outside of sickbay?"

  "This device on my arm is a mobile emitter," the

  doctor explained as he jogged. "Evidently they acquired it from someone they encountered in the Delta Quadrant."

  "It figures," Ransom complained. "They've had a lot more luck than we have. Lessing, keep up, kid!"

  "Right behind you, sir!"

  "It'll take them days to untangle that field generator. Now Miss Janeway will be getting a taste of what we've been through. I hope she chokes on it. Max, where's the rest of the crew?"

  "They're all being held on Equinox, Rudy. At least, they were last I heard."

  "We've got to get off the ship."

  From behind, the doctor called, "I re-routed transporter control to a panel in the next junction. We can-"

  Phaser fire threw a grid of blistering light bands across their path. Security guards!

  Ransom shoved Gilmore down an adjoining corridor, then lay down a blanket of covering fire. "Doctor! Lead them off! Meet us back on Equinox!"

  "Aye, aye. I'll ditch the emitter and meet you on board."

  "Go!"

  As the doctor rushed down the corridor, the two security guards took the bait and followed him, apparently not recognizing him in the flash and dust of phaser fire. Good. Ransom had bet on that.

  Continuing to lay down fire, he gestured the others around the corner.

  "They've sealed off the deck!" Burke said.

  "Don't worry."

  Ransom stopped at the wall junction panel and worked it.

  "We're getting out of here. When we beam on board, Max and I will go straight to the bridge. Maria, you'll have to go to engineering and stun that Borg girl before she gets a report that we've escaped. How fast can you move?"

  "You can beam me directly there, Rudy. Just divide the transporter focus."

  "You set the beam."

  "Aye, sir."

  "Let's go."

  They rushed into the transporter room, a little adjunct chamber that wasn't the main transporter room. Luckily, Starfleet had standardized long ago and the minimum number of pads for any secondary transporter room was now eight-to handle large emergencies, under the assumption that adjunct transporters had to be used only in times of crisis.

  Just enough.

  "Set the controls, Maria."

  Ransom motioned the others to take position on the pads while he turned back to the door panel and used his phaser rifle to fry the locking mechanism.

  Now it'd take a torch to get in. Perfect.

  "I've set it to automatic, split beam." Maria worked the panel and spoke over the next thrum of attack. "Their shields are down-forty percent!"

  "Doesn't give us much time," Max commented. An old story for them.

  "Everybody stay where you are," Maria said. "There's no second chance. They've detected the unauthorized transport... they're trying to block it. I'm bypassing the Ops controls! Now or never!"

  She jumped up onto the only empty pad and drew her phaser.

  Ransom shouldered his rifle. "Next stop, the Equinox!"

  "Janeway to Seven of Nine! Seven! Respond!"

  "Just ignore them. What've we got, Max?"

  "Maria must've knocked out that girl," Max Burke said as he and Ransom plunged onto their bridge. Burke took tactical immediately. "I'm getting ignition on the warp core, just like we need ..."

  "The rest of you, take any post you can run," Ransom ordered, distributing his crew. "Lessing, unlock all the crew quarters and get everyone else to posts, then take the helm. Let's man our ship, boys."

  "Aye, aye, Rudy!"

  "Damn!" Burke acted as if he'd burned his fingers on the tactical board.

  Ransom cranked around. "What is it?"

  The ship shook violently, stress points actually cracking. Automatic sealant hissed furiously between the inner and outer strakes of the bulkheads.

  "B'Elanna's erected a security matrix. I can't get a lock on the field generator!"

  'Try overriding the command codes," Ransom told him. "Consider yourself authorized."

  "I know what to do," Burke said with a crow of vie-

  tory. "It's a triquadric algorithm. A trick I learned from an old friend."

  "Just do it, don't explain it."

  "The shields are falling," Michaelson called from the science monitors. "Roughly eighty seconds left."

  Like all of them, he was dulled to the frantic nature of these events.

  Ransom considered that an advantage. Janeway's crew would still be shaken, frightened, freaked. His wasn't.

  "Janeway's hailing us, Rudy," Lessing informed with ironic cheer.

  "Put her through, what the hell."

  In a loud blast of alarms, klaxons, and shouts, Janeway's tight features appeared on the main screen Ransom dropped deeper into his command chair to square off with her.

  No greeting, no nothing.

  "If you don't stop what you're doing, we'll both be destroyed!"

  "What's my alternative? Thirty years in your brig?"

  Another shake bolted through the ships bonded by a single set of shields.

  "I'll open fire if I have to," Janeway threatened predictably.

  "We've been through worse."
Ransom knuckled his chair controls, cutting off the comm system.

  There was no point arguing further, no good way to defend himself. She couldn't understand, he knew that. She was doing what she thought she had to do, and so was he. That argument could never resolve itself.

  Scholars and admirals had already spent decades trying to hammer out that particular piece of ore. He and Janeway would not today form it into anything useful.

  "She's firing on us!" Lessing shouted.

  Ransom turned sharply. "Max!"

  "Stand by!" Burke stayed admirably calm and tapped his controls one at a time, not like playing a piano with all fingers. He had to get it right the first try. "Okay, BLT. Remember this trick?"

  He tapped a final button.

  "Where is it?" Ransom asked, swiveling.

  "Up there," Burke answered, pointing to a graphic monitor on the upper bridge. It scrolled to show a schematic of the Voyager's astrometrics lab. As they watched, the graphic of the field generator flashed and blinked out.

  'Transport complete." Burke's voice was loaded with quiet satisfaction. "We've got it."

  To Lessing, Ransom ordered, "Get us out of here."

  "I can't! Warp drive is down!"

  "Bridge to Maria, report!"

  "One of their crew tried to dismantle the antimatter injectors! Repairs are underway!"

  "What about the field generator?" he asked Max.

  "I'm integrating it now. The generator's in place ... I'm bringing the grid on-line!"

  To Ransom, his crew sounded excited, but somehow controlled. Purpose could do that. They now had their purpose back, crisp and focused.

  This was good. They needed this. They had been accepted but not understood on Voyager. This was better.

  Their own ship, their own shipmates, and souls that had come to terms with what they had to do to survive.

  The alien tone invaded his ears, familiar now and supercharged with challenge. They were breaking through.

  Ransom picked up his phaser and glanced around to be sure the others were armed.

  To Burke, he made the critical call of the moment "It's now or never!"

  The tone grew louder, louder still.

  "Hold your fire!" Ransom ordered as a spatial fissure opened like some grotesque birth going on near the ceiling. The crew was braced but did as he ordered them.