Equinox Read online

  know. So she had made her own policy and always answered, sometimes to the good, other times ... other results.

  But this signal might as well be coming from her own ship-a Starfleet vessel where no Starfleet vessel should be, stranded impossibly far from home, on a constant quest to fulfill her duty to get home.

  "Captain Ransom!... The Equinox!... Under attack! ... assistance!"

  Chilling. She hunched her shoulders. No-relax. The crew was watching.

  Chakotay's shadow fell across her, warm and comforting as always, his wide shoulders bearing so much of her burden that Janeway sometimes enjoyed the temptation to shift it all to him, to have a captain again instead of always being one.

  Around them the security of the starship provided a nest of safety in a hostile quadrant The ship was in arguably good shape after a couple of lucky trades in the past month or so. As the screen struggled to focus before her, she became insecure in her privilege.

  Before her an image crackled, its transmission damaged at the source.

  A captain in trouble, rocking with violence in his command chair, begging for help in a quadrant without a heart.

  "Captain Ransom! The Equinox!... under attack!...

  assistance-"

  A Federation vessel? Not here, not a science ship, at this distance. It had to be a sensor echo or a malfunction. Janeway parted her lips, about to ask for a systems

  check, but Chakotay would already have done that. She held her tongue rather than insult him.

  Instead she looked to her other side, to Seven of Nine. The lovely and terminally stoic young woman was coldly playing the message. Seven glanced at the captain, picked up a nuance, and muted the sound.

  Together they watched the terror on the screen, saw the panicked crew rushing behind their desperate captain as he crumpled into his chair and pressed his shoulders into its backrest, his expression carved with rage as he fired his phaser rifle again and again.

  "Ransom," she murmured. "He was in command of a science vessel. The Equinox..."

  "The distress call was transmitted approximately fourteen hours ago," Seven reported.

  Janeway narrowed her eyes, about to ask the most important question, but Chakotay spared her by answering i t himself. "Three point two light-years."

  That tied it. No echo.

  Janeway's heart jumped, then pounded. Three light-years! She forced her breathing to remain normal. "Try to get a fix on their position."

  Excitement-discovery! Friends! After five years of exile, of alien faces, confined to the halls of their own ship and no other, no equals, no comrades. Five years.

  "What are they doing in the Delta Quadrant?" Again, Chakotay, with the operative question that Janeway preferred to have the answers for, yet did not.

  In her elegant innocence, Seven posed a logical, if naive theory. "Perhaps they're searching for Voyager."

  As her heart kept thundering, Janeway squeezed

  one hand closed, tightly, and willed an outer calm. "The Equinox is a Nova-class ship. It was designed for planetary research, not long-range tactical missions."

  She met Chakotay's eyes. There she read the concerns haunting her. Was this a trick? A lure?

  Beneath his tribal tattoo, Chakotay's eyebrow crooked in silent understanding. He would check that too.

  Without a word, he turned and hurried out of the room, heading for the auxiliary sensors to make a thorough defensive scan. He'd do a thorough job. Soon there would be answers.

  She needed answers. The whole thing sounded wrong. Equinox was strictly an information-gathering ship, no assault capabilities other than basic shields and a few stern-chasers for defense. What was it doing so far away from charted space?

  "Did you know this individual?" Seven asked, always probing, asking the kind of questions most of the crew knew better than to ask their captain at moments like this.

  "Only by reputation," Janeway accommodated, never holding Seven's ignorance against her. "He was an exo-biologist promoted to captain after he made first contact with the Yridians."

  "Species six-two-nine-one," the girl said. "The Collective determined that they were extinct"

  "So did the Federation. Ransom proved otherwise. I always wanted to meet him. Too bad it won't be under better circumstances."

  "I look forward to meeting him as well. And his crew. I wish to expand my knowledge of humanity."

  Glancing at her, Janeway tried not to make too big a deal out of Seven's lingering alienness. The girl was human, but had so long been infected by the cyborg horror that she still acted as much machine as alive.

  "Let's hope you get the chance," the captain said simply.

  Seven's large eyes flickered with a brief flash of life. "I've got their coordinates," she offered, taking refuge in data. "Heading two-five-eight, mark twelve."

  A Federation ship broadcasting a distress call! Purpose surged through Janeway such as she hadn't felt in years. This was her real job, the thing she'd been charged to do, the duty for which her oath had been sworn-to protect and defend Federation assets, property, and personnel in space. For five years every decision had been troubling-should she go, should she ignore, should she contact. Always a trick to make the choice to respond.

  But not today! For the first time since they'd been flung away from Federation space and trapped in the Delta Quadrant, there was no doubt about Voyager's charge.

  Her heart started bumping again. She touched the controls, freezing the redundant distress call.

  "Set a course, maximum warp. Go to Red Alert."

  Seven moved away immediately to carry out the order. That was all Janeway had to do-speak, and they would obey. A captain's privilege to offset the burden.

  For the first time since she could remember, she wor-

  ried not for her own crew but for another ship's leader lost in the Delta Quadrant. She peered at the frozen face of the man on the small screen. "Hang on, Captain," she murmured.

  Tense hours linked the frazzled distress call to the first glimpse of a troubled ship on the sensor horizon. All the first-watch officers were here, some who should have been asleep. Word had rocketed through the ship that another Federation vessel-even a Starfleet vessel-had called out in the vast empty night. They'd found a long-lost brother.

  Everyone was here who had an excuse to be on the bridge. Janeway could've cleared the bridge, probably should have, but her own sentimentality stopped her. They deserved a moment like this.

  Only her quietly roiling stomach warned of how quickly things could go sour. Chakotay sat at her side, his hands nervously gripping the chair. He hadn't been able to confirm the bona fides of the distress call or even to pick up definite emission signatures to confirm that this was a Federation ship. It could be a clever fake. He didn't like that. Chakotay wasn't one who really liked flying blind.

  After five years of trouble and strife, Janeway was willing to take the chance of being trapped just to give her crew a taste of their old life-answering a friendly cry for help in the distance as they had all signed up to do. Even if things went wrong, they had had this momentary taste of their old cause.

  Tom Paris had the helm-he'd pulled rank on the

  watch officer. Harry Kim manned his own station. Tuvok on the sensors, B'Elanna Torres at tactical, Seven of Nine manning the science readouts, and Neelix here for no good reason except maybe to recognize his own quadrant's bad guys if this were a trick. Other crew, who were actually supposed to be on this watch, puttered around the bridge's upper deck, pretending they weren't bothered by the invasion from the other watch. Captain's prerogative, they knew, but still...

  Even The Doctor was here, wearing the mobile emitter that allowed his holographic program to roam the ship instead of being confined to sickbay. Janeway had come to like having him around, as if he were a living physician rather than just a particularly quirkish learning hologram.

  Janeway deliberately didn't glance around. That would've made them all self-conscious. Everyone els
e on the ship wanted to be here, too, she knew. Even joy had its limitations.

  "We're approaching the coordinates." Tom Paris' voice had a forced control about it

  'Take us out of warp," she ordered.

  "I've got them!" Kim let it all out 'Two thousand kilometers off the port bow! They're moving at low impulse."

  Janeway frowned. Low impulse?

  "Intercept," she said, then resisted the urge to tell Paris not to move too sharply or a ship Voyager's size could plow over the other one like a bulldozer. "Tuvok, can you get a visual?"

  The forward viewscreen showed only open space,

  but in their minds they could already see the other ship. Everybody had checked the banks. They all knew what a Nova-class ship looked like clamshell primary hull, simple engineering hull, two nacelles, a little squatty. Average.

  Until today. On this particular day, at this hour, the little Equinox had her moment in the sun. She was the nearest handhold to home for the lonely Voyager crew, who almost never got to see their own ship from the outside. Now they could look out into unfriendly space and see a vision of themselves, brushstrokes of home in the form of a familiar design.

  The first shape they saw with their naked eyes, though, wasn't the lines of Starfleet engineering. Instead it was an energy bulb fractured with blue and white demolition. Full shields, under assault.

  Janeway leaned forward in her chair, squinting.

  Now she could see the ship itself, veering toward Voyager on a Z-plane.

  "They're heavily damaged," Tuvok reported, not nearly as Vulcan-stiff as usual. "Multiple hull breeches ... warp drive is off-line-"

  "What's happening to their shields?" Neelix interrupted.

  "They're being disrupted," Torres answered, reading her engineering monitor, "by some kind of energy surges."

  A simple statement, but to Janeway it said much more. Disruption meant assault. Surges of energy were different from shots or sabotage. It meant there was an unseen force acting upon the other ship. She was glad

  Voyager had maintained Red Alert, all shields and precautions on-line. No visible enemy didn't mean no enemy.

  "Weapons fire?" Paris asked.

  Tuvok shook his head, even though Paris wasn't watching him. "There are no other ships in the vicinity."

  "We're in hailing range," Kim reported tensely. Janeway could tell he was an instant from hailing them himself.

  "Open a channel," she told him. He already had it open. All right, then. "This is Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation Starship Voyager. We're responding to your-"

  "Voyager! You've got to extend your shields around our ship! Match the emitter frequency!"

  Making one attempt at confirmation, Janeway asked, "Are you under attack?"

  "Shields! Quickly!"

  No hello, no formality, no nuthin. Save my ship.

  She knew that tone.

  "Do it."

  Now the crew had something to do. Paris had to maneuver the starship directly above the science vessel to make full use of the shield dome. On the viewscreen they could see the shape of Equinox, about half the size of Voyager, engulfed in the fracturing bulb of her own shields. Tuvok had to gauge and calculate the assault in order to modulate the starship's shields to repel the level of attacking energy. Torres worked to reroute necessary power to the grid. Kim made sure the way be-

  fore them was clear of meteoritic obstacles or gas clouds that would only make things harder.

  Chakotay kept a close watch on the detail monitors at his chair's access, while Janeway watched the overall scene. Neelix sent his best good wishes across the gulf of space.

  "We're in position," Paris reported.

  Tuvok, at the same time, said, "I'm matching their shield frequency."

  Janeway ticked off the seconds. She could order them to work faster, but why? Her ears were ringing. Anticipation? A midshipman's reaction. She tried to get control over it, but the whine only got worse.

  Behind her, then, The Doctor's voice, talking to someone else on the upper deck-"Do you hear something?"

  That was no ringing in the ears. Malfunction?

  Janeway spun around, but Seven was already working the problem.

  "Interspatial fissures are opening on decks ten, six... and one!"

  Janeway turned again. "Tuvok!"

  He didn't look up or respond at all. His large hands played on the controls with swift intensity. That was his way of responding.

  The shields' activation lights blinked red, orange, then went to green. On the monitors around the bridge, schematics of the Voyager's deflectors engulfing the Equinox as well as the starship made a big theoretical bulb in space. The attack was forced back by the starship's considerable power-whatever the attack was.

  "Shields are holding," Tuvok told them.

  "The fissures?" Chakotay asked, implying that he might be seeing something on the detail monitors that Janeway couldn't see on the large screen.

  She was glad he was here.

  "No sign of them," Seven answered.

  After a moment of relief for all, Janeway pressed forward. "Voyager to Ransom. Captain?"

  Her chest constricted. No response. Not a flicker. Had she failed before her rescue mission had even begun?

  "Assemble rescue teams. Secure the Equinox. Tuvok, you're with me."

  She spoke on the run toward the turbolift. If they thought she was worried, frightened, anxious-okay, so they knew her better than she liked.

  The others followed her. Chakotay, Tones, Paris, Neelix, Seven, Kim, all rushing to collect tricorders, wrist beacons, hand phasers, and a medikit. The on-watch crew filtered back to their positions, allowing the primary crew to be the away team. Janeway was glad it happened to work out that way this time. She wanted her primary team to experience whatever was coming and to back her up if it went wrong.

  A simple rescue mission, a Starfleet vessel. She hungered to be there.

  The shields were holding. What could go wrong?

  CHAPTER

  3

  COMMANDER CHAKOTAY LED THE AUXILIARY TEAM DOWN into the secondary hull of the science vessel, directly into the engine room. Somewhere above, the captain was picking her way through to the primary hull, heading for the bridge. They'd had to beam in down here, then split up. The Equinox's primary hull had taken so much damage that they couldn't even find a beam-in point that wasn't so damaged that the sensors couldn't read the integrity of life support. Beam into a vacuum and you'll feel pretty silly at that last nanosecond before you die.

  Beaming in-it seemed so ordinary in practice, yet today as Chakotay's body reintegrated and he could see again, there was only a hellish dimness to look upon and the whole beaming process made his skin crawl. A nightmarish tunnel laid out before him, overlaid with

  shadows and pulsed by the low thrum of drained power trying to come back on-line. It took him a moment to orient himself. The companionway to the warp core.

  The shattered corridor might as well have been aboard Voyager, except that it was a little narrower. Chakotay found himself disconcerted to see this variant of his own ship so critically wrecked. This was the fate they had struggled against for five years, somehow keeping the starship through luck and pluck from looking like this.

  All around him crushed and blasted electrical trunks lay open like forgotten surgery, several still snapping from their latest trial. The deck itself creaked under his feet, its structural bolts compromised by stress from the outer sections. Hull breaches hissed here and there. Not big ones, but troubling to see. This was a ship in trouble-Chakotay knew even instinctively-punctuated by the smell of leakage and burning circuits. The darkness itself cloyed at his shoulders, a cold cloak for a Starfleet officer to wear on a Starfleet ship. This was heavy damage, not just the damage of one assault. Sniggering guilt came over him that the Equinox crew had gone through this torment all alone out here. No, it didn't make any sense.

  He led the way in. Behind him, Torres, Paris, Neelix, and Kim wer
e tight-throated and silent. They too could see the plaintive echo of themselves and their own ship in this tunnel of horrors.

  As he stepped carefully, tripping twice, shining his wrist beacon garishly through the wreckage, Chakotay raced through a sudden recollection of raiding a junk-

  yard when he was twelve. He'd climbed the wrong pile and been trapped under a crushed runabout hulk. The yard's Rottweiler found him and barked until somebody came. Beating back images of losing a foot to a big dog, he picked his way forward. His beacon wobbled as he fielded a shiver through his arms and back.

  It was cold! But only in the first corridor section. As he moved into the main engineering area, a curtain of cloying heat descended. The ship's atmospheric controls had gone wacky, completely confused.

  Over there, the warp core throbbed at low ebb. Not enough power. At least it wasn't breached. Chakotay flinched inwardly as his beacon fell on something that wasn't crushed or crumpled machinery-a human body.

  Dead. No life sign at all. Barely read as organic. Why?

  He glanced behind him. "Split up. Neelix, the crew's quarters. Harry, Seven... check the tubes and conduits."

  Nobody could even muster an aye, aye. He heard their careful footsteps angle off and tap away, occasionally encouraging something to crinkle or crash or clunk.

  Behind him, Tom Paris pressed a little closer than necessary when Chakotay had to pause to move a wrecked insulator plate. "Sorry," Paris murmured, dry-throated. He didn't move back very much, though.

  Chakotay found B'Elanna Torres in the dimness. "See if you can bring the main power on-line. Tom, stay with me."

  Steeling herself in the spooky darkness, Torres headed through the ravagement to the warp core, seeming relieved to have something to do that didn't involve these bodies lying around. That was Chakotay's job.

  He picked his way to the nearest fallen crew member. All his senses told him the effort was empty, but even in death he thought he'd want somebody to check, to touch him one more time, just as a futile gesture.

  But this one-as the beacon fell across the face and shoulders, he didn't want to touch it. Beside him, Paris shivered.