Equinox Page 13

  Two seconds ... three ... there it was!

  A tailed alien, dinosaurian and mythical, surged through the fissure and flew like a fruit bat around the bridge. It rushed at Burke, but then was jolted back by the force field they kept permanently erected on the bridge. Caught, the alien instantly reversed itself like a high diver making a flip, but it hit the other side of the force field that had instantly snapped up.

  Trapped!

  In midair the alien whipped up and down, back and forth, as if its tail were a flag, its extended clawed arms the pole. Screaming hideously, shrieking so high-pitched a sound that it matched its own breakthrough tone.

  Ransom and the others watched together as it thrashed itself to death, striking the force-field grid and electrocuting itself at every hit. Only a few more seconds ...

  When the alien finally suffered a final attack and slithered in a heap to the deck, Ransom felt less for it than he ever had. Finally, the damned slimy things had taken the last bit of humanity from him. Or Janeway had.

  To Michaelson he snapped, "Get that to the lab."

  He swung around as Lessing's console bleeped and the now-helmsman said, "Sir, the engines are up and running!"

  "Set a course for the Alpha Quadrant, maximum warp. Engage."

  "Keep firing!"

  Captain Janeway clung to her chair and focused on a dozen places about the bridge in sequence. The ship was firing freely now on Equinox, whose crew was aboard and had stolen the deflector field generator. If Ransom hadn't been a criminal before, he was one now.

  The alien tone squealed in her ears, deafening her to the rote responses of the crew around her.

  She pushed out of her chair. "Arm yourselves!"

  At his station, Harry Kim was sheeted with sweat. "Fissures are opening, all decks!"

  All-

  Dividing her attention between the bridge and every other deck, Janeway felt her brain boil with determination to defend her ship and crew at any cost. Above her, ragged and glowing bulbs formed and scarlike fissures opened within them, expanding as quickly as an envelope opening. She took aim and fired.

  Then another one opened-and another! Four! Six!

  With her single action, she gave permission for all the others to fire at will.

  Rifts cracked the bridge's atmospheric fabric with alarming randomness now. Phasers fired and aliens shrieked in their rage and murderousness.

  At the center of the bridge, Janeway was the pivot of all the action. She spun and fired, spun and fired, fighting for control to keep from shearing off someone's head in the instantaneous reflex of shooting again and again at targets that just opened up here, there-

  She heard the scream from behind her an instant too late. As she tried to spin, she tripped on the command chair's mounting. She fumbled.

  The alien shriek was millimeters away when she recovered. Before her rushed a demonic face, stretched into the grimace of an unmistakably animalistic predator. As it struck her, she heard a thousand sounds-the alien tone, their shrieking voices, the screams of her crew, the whine of phasers, the pummeling of her own heartbeat, and Chakotay's anguished cry as the alien dive-bomber struck her at full strafing speed.

  "Captain!"

  CHAPTER 10

  "THE SHIELD-GRID IS BACK IN PLACE. THE ALIENS ARE

  staying clear."

  The victory in Max Burke's voice was unadulterated. They'd survived again, but again at a cost. Before, it was always a cost in lives. Today it was a spiritual cost.

  Rudy Ransom kicked aside a bump plate among the litter on his bridge. "Are sensors picking up Voyager?"

  Off his console, Noah Lessing reported, "It looks like they're under attack."

  The report carried a loaded question Should we go back and help?

  Disturbed to the bottom of his guts, Ransom added up his options. They'd come this far. Janeway had pushed him farther over the line.

  "Maintain course," he said.

  Sweating and working to control an inward shudder,

  Max Burke stepped down to his captain's side. "It's too bad we have to leave them."

  "There's not much we can do," Ransom agreed. "We'd be back in the same boat, literally. The shields from one ship can't protect both. We saw that. Janeway had her chance to make a united front. She decided to flash her feathers instead."

  Burke nodded. "It's all right, Rudy. You did the right thing. They wouldn't back us up. At the first disagreement, they took us into custody."

  "If they don't get killed, she might understand us a little more."

  On the port-side monitor, a clear view of Voyager surging along with her nominal shields crackling and compromised bored to the guts of both men. They knew what that felt like. There was a strange and unsatisfying win in seeing Captain Janeway finally having to see what it had been for the Equinox crew.

  Ransom felt his jaw stiffen. "She's only scratched the surface of the Delta Quadrant. Five years seems like a long time, but we're all still fifty years from home. Who's she kidding? This is home. Without the nucleo-genics, that ship is the end of their dreams. How long before her crew starts wanting real lives? Family lives? Futures with a chance for a home instead of crew quarters? A wife or husband instead of a department chief? They're young now, but that won't last."

  "You're always thinking of us, aren't you?" Burke commented. "That's why we'd do anything for you. You're nothing like Janeway."

  A tinge of guilt rammed through Ransom's chest. He

  held up a hand. "No, Max, you're wrong. She's just like me. You saw the way she resists. She just hasn't been to the edge yet. She hasn't figured out that she won't last either. There's no magic youth potion, and she's ten or twenty years older than most of her crew. When will she start wishing for a peaceful retirement and a life of her own?" Ransom grasped the bridge rail and watched the monitor as Voyager's shields flashed in a Halloween display of color and light. "I hope she lives," he said. "She's got a lot to learn."

  A locomotive made of rubber and gel and teeth and claws drove Janeway to the deck. She felt her pelvis, then her shoulder blades slam to the hard carpet as the side of her head scraped the rail's support stanchion. Energy crackled around her body from the contact. Phaser fire grazed her cheek, forcing her to roll to the right. Mocking her on the main screen was a clear view of the Equinox soaring off from under Voyager, rushing away to pursue her own captain's vision of survival.

  As the single instant of attack telescoped and stretched out, she fell off the command chair's platform and down to the lower deck. It saved her life. The alien scraped by, an inch over her, driven off by Chakotay's phaser.

  A burning sensation seared her left cheekbone, leaving her half blind and disoriented. Her skin crimped, her mouth tugged to the left as if stretched. Her neck felt as if it were cracking like scorched plastic. As she constricted her stomach muscles and forced herself up,

  Janeway was faced with the horrid tableau of Chakotay firing again at another alien. The creature who had scraped Janeway now veered into the highest edge of the bridge celling, jackknifed, and struck Chakotay in the back. This time, it didn't miss.

  Paris launched from his helm and fired at it, but too late. Chakotay was already down. The alien skimmed over Chakotay into Janeway's line of fire and Kim's crossfire. It screamed, withered, and sizzled out of existence.

  Chakotay-if it ended this way, without a kind word-

  Now her cheek and neck began to shrivel and turn cold. The burning sensation dried to a crisp ice as she dragged herself to her command chair and pummeled the arm console.

  "Tuvok! Give me tactical control!"

  She did the craziest thing she could think of. Authorize the ship's self-destruct sequence, which shut down all the safeties and allowed her to send a single surge of blinding power to the deflector pulse, giving the shields extra strength. With her head swimming, she forced herself to remember to disengage the self-destruct when the alien tone began to die down and the fissures sealed.

  Two fi
ssures in her periphery collapsed almost instantly. The attack had been beaten back, for the moment at least.

  "Won't hold for long," she murmured. Had she been talking? Saying something else? A faint echo of her own voice implied that she'd been thinking aloud. Now

  that her head began to clear, she stopped doing that and looked around to assess her crew.

  Tousled and sweat-sheeted, Harry Kim pulled toward his station. So did the others.

  Except Paris... he was kneeling beside Chakotay, his face a plaster of worry and crawling revulsion.

  Janeway pushed up a little to see Chakotay's face. Like crumpled paper, one whole side of his skull was vitrified, dark and sunken. Oh, no.

  Empathizing with him, she touched her own wounds. Felt like broken cardboard. Beneath it there was a sizzle of desiccating tissue and fluids. But she was alive. Was he?

  "Bridge to sickbay," Paris choked. "Medical emergency."

  Nothing happened. No answer.

  "Doctor, respond."

  Janeway's hands shook. Why wasn't The Doctor answering? Had the aliens shut down the comm system somehow?

  Aware of Janeway's eyes upon them, Tom Paris glanced at her, then motioned to Ensign Rogers on the lower deck. "Ensign ..."

  Clutched by grief and guilt, Janeway couldn't voice her gratitude at his effort to get help for Chakotay. All she could focus upon was her first officer, lying there after saving her life, still distant after saving her soul.

  As Paris and Rogers carried Chakotay to the lift, out of her line of sight, the captain gripped the arms of her command chair, struggling to steady herself. Until now

  she hadn't realized fully what Chakotay was talking about before.

  He was right. Deep in her heart she had always known that Ransom's level of desperation could come to Voyager if they got a little less lucky. She'd heard too many Donner Party stories to think it could never happen to her. Some turned to cannibalism, and some let themselves die first. She knew, in this epiphanic moment, that she might have the cannibal in her.

  Cannibals eat the dead. How long before she would be willing to make somebody dead?

  Around her in the air hung the stink of blowtorched aliens, the drifted leavings of their fluids and skin incinerated by phaser fire. Her phaser, her crew's. She'd made the aliens dead so she and hers could live.

  So many things could yet go wrong-when would she be forced over the line? She had to stop him, stop Ransom, before she got to the line.

  "Casualty reports are coming in," Harry Kim struggled. "Two dead ... thirteen wounded ... and we took heavy damage to the engines."

  Janeway forced her rattled brain to process his words. "The Equinox?"

  "They have gone to warp," Tuvok reported from somewhere.

  "Any sign of nucleogenic particles?"

  "No."

  "Then they haven't engaged their 'enhanced' warp drive yet. Keep looking for-"

  The universe parted again and the tonal shriek re-

  turned. The crew braced again, drew weapons again, the worst was here again.

  "Stabilize the shields! Double shield the bridge, Tuvok. If we don't have a command center, we don't have a ship. Phasers!"

  Two more bulbous fissures opened overhead. She braced her legs and started shooting, firing directly into the globes as if going after a tumor with a scalpel laser.

  Tuvok worked furiously, nursing the shields until the whine of invasion fell away again.

  "Captain," Harry Kim began, his black hair flopped into his eyes, "that sound... it's registering as patterned."

  As he squinted at the analysis screens, Janeway asked, "That shriek? You think it's something more than just a shriek?"

  "I'm slowing it down on the sonograph. It's got a definite pattern about it."

  "Does it repeat?"

  "Yes, parts of it repeat. It's got inflections, though. Could it be a language? Should I run it through the linguistics banks?"

  "Ransom said he tried that. Why don't you try running it through all the other banks. Maybe something in the system will recognize it on a free search."

  "Aye, Captain."

  Janeway crossed the bridge on shuddering legs, grasping anything she could hold with her free hand, to support herself. "We can't go on like this. We'll cut up our own ship with these phasers if we have to keep firing inside. Can you reinforce the shields with a plasma transfer?"

  "You must go to sickbay, Captain," Tuvok told her strictly. "Your injuries are severe."

  "No, I'm staying here."

  For a surreal moment, he actually stopped working and faced her, offering a body-language ultimatum. "Report to sickbay, Captain. You must survive those wounds for all our sakes. Commander Chakotay may be dead by now. The loss of both our commanding officers would be a critical blow in this situation. Go to sickbay. I will take the bridge."

  Janeway backed off a step. "Damned Vulcan. Looking out for me by pretending you're looking out for yourself. Do you think I'll fall for that?"

  He nodded once. "I could knock you to the deck as a head start."

  A hurtful smile cracked her vitrified facial muscles. "Make sure everyone keeps a hand weapon that's fully charged at all times."

  "Aye, aye."

  "I'll be back."

  "Of course."

  "Thank you."

  "My pleasure."

  Commander Chakotay may be dead by now.

  It was a long way to sickbay at Red Alert and under attack. All around her, crew members rushed through the corridors, armed with weapons, carrying repair kits, med kits, rifle-charge packets, and wounded shipmates. They all met Janeway's eyes, and she felt bad about the terror in their faces at the sight of her. She knew she should be on the bridge with a whole face. Instead, she

  was wraithing about the lower decks, half desiccated, hauling her phaser rifle with both hands, looking like some kind of shredded monster from the bowels of mythology. She was giving them one of those nightmares that keeps coming back.

  Then she stumbled on her own nightmare-a dead alien lying in her ship's companionway vestibule, decimated, gray, mottled. Not a phaser kill... someone had been desperate enough to spray coolant on this one to kill it. A hideous way to go. She wondered if her poor crew member had lived after inhaling the coolant spray.

  So much horror. Anger rose in her for the ghastliness of the open universe and for Rudy Ransom, who had brought it down upon them all.

  "Captain!"

  Neelix rushed to her, in his usual state of overreacting. This time it was a notable freakish concern. He was holding The Doctor's mobile emitter. How did he get that?

  "I found this in the corridor on deck nine! You might want to take it to sickbay."

  Though she took the emitter from nun, she said nothing. Her eyes were still fixed on the dead creature. All she could do was hold it and stare. She watched its bizarre journey to the meat locker, her mind barely registering how crazy things had to be for Neelix to be giving her comments that closely resembled orders. He didn't even wait to see if she were indeed headed to sickbay or somewhere more important. In fact, he was already gone.

  Sickbay was the other end of the nightmare. The deck was littered with wounded, lying on blankets, crumpled in corners, waiting for biobeds. Tom Paris was hovering over Chakotay, who had the privilege of a biobed, naturally. Paris seemed shaken, fighting for control, irritated and drawn out.

  "Any sign of The Doc?" he asked her without formality.

  "I've got him right here," Janeway said. Crossing immediately to a console, she placed the emitter on an activation pad and keyed the controls. Zip-instant physician.

  "Please state the nature of your medical emergency." The Doctor blinked, looked around at the nature of the wounds and the sheer numbers of wounded, and added, "Don't bother."

  "Start with Chakotay," Paris ordered harshly.

  Janeway watched, noting the oddest thing-for just an instant, The Doctor didn't seem to know which one of the wounded was Chakotay. Only when Paris sai
d, "I've stabilized him, but he's got internal injuries," did the holo-doc focus on the man Paris was standing beside.

  The captain followed him to Chakotay's side, her stomach turning at the sight of her half-withered first officer-her friend, her confidant and life support. "We found your emitter on deck nine," she told The Doctor, implying that she wanted an explanation.

  He worked on Chakotay swiftly, with the efficiency of a computer, of course, pressing a hypo to the first officer's neck, then his chest. "I was taken hostage by the

  Equinox crew," he said. "I deactivated myself to escape." He paused, then asked, "Did you stop them?"

  "No," Janeway blistered.

  Chakotay moaned, drawing all their attention. Janeway and Paris leaned in with concern.

  "I'd ask for a status report," he groaned, "but I'm not sure I want to hear it..."

  His voice-to Janeway it sounded like church bells.

  "You sound terrible," Paris uttered, his relief unshielded.

  "Harry's analyzing the sound we've been hearing," Janeway told him, bluntly implying that near-mummification was no excuse for lying down on the job. "He thinks it's some form of communication."

  Chakotay tried to raise his head, but instantly weakened. "As soon as I get out of sickbay, I'll... lend him a hand... I once figured out how to speak with a Ter-rellian Seapod... this couldn't be that much harder..."

  At the idea of distractions from her new purpose in life, Janeway stiffened. "We should all be focusing our efforts on finding the Equinox."

  Through the hollow gourd of his partly destroyed face, Chakotay's eyes searched for reason in that goal. "First things first... we've got to stop these attacks."

  There was more, but he didn't speak it. Don't we? Captain?

  "Our enemies aren't the aliens," Janeway coldly said. "They're the humans on board the Equinox. It's crucial that you don't-"

  The alien tone interrupted her as if it were following

  her around the ship. She drew her weapon, Paris grabbed for his, and even the wounded on the deck huddled and raised their phasers. Chakotay managed to put bis hand on his own phaser at his belt.

  By then, the sound had faded.

  "Tuvok's working the grid," Janeway said with quiet gratitude. "Shields are holding, but they won't forever. Chakotay-"