Equinox Page 3

"What happened?" Chakotay asked.

  Struggling, Tom Paris raised his tricorder and worked it. "Some kind of thermolytic reaction. It desiccated every cell in his body."

  What was left could rival Ramses for ugly. The eyes were gone, sunken back into the shriveled head. Darkened flesh had dried to a crust and peeled back from teeth bared in a grotesque smile. The throat was nothing more than paper skin stretched over cords, drawn drumhead tight and stretched so thin that the veins showed.

  Paris turned toward the other unfortunates but paused to gather his innards. Chakotay paused with him, waiting, having a slightly easier time because he'd listened to his intuitive side and steeled himself for disaster. If the ship looked this bad, what must the crew look like?

  Apparently, though, Paris had entertained higher hopes for a reunion with Starfleet brothers and sisters. Those were now crashing.

  "You all right?" Chakotay asked him quietly.

  Paris drew a ragged breath and pressed his lips against unconcealed nausea. "I thought we'd be able to..." He stopped himself, tempered down his reaction, and shook his head. "Maybe you better give me a little push."

  "Only if you carry me." Rewarding him with a funereal grin, Chakotay took his elbow and accommodated with a nudge. Back to work, even if it was bad work.

  "Commander!" Torres, kneeling at the warp drive's central core.

  Chakotay moved to the core, then stopped to stare. What was that? Several exotic pieces of equipment had been added to the core itself-conduit, injector ports ... almost old-fashioned, like someone had been building a core from scratch in a basement lab. Why would they refit their core?

  "I can't make heads or tails of this injector manifold," B'Elanna Torres told him, frowning into her analytics. "And the dilithium matrix looks like it's been completely redesigned."

  "We'll try to find one of their engineers to help us," Chakotay offered, a bigger promise than he could make good on, if the body to his left was any clue. "In the meantime, see if you can bypass the core."

  She was already involved in dissecting, but managed to toss a late, "Aye, sir," his way after he'd already left.

  Moving on through the lower hall, Chakotay kept his eyes swiveling over the twisted beams and plates and the cables spilled like intestines, his mind racing about what malevolence could have done so very much damage.

  Come on, Tom," he murmured as he stepped by Paris, who had found another unhappy body.

  "This must've been some fight," Paris rasped, failing to find a more creative comment.

  "Anything from outside that could've caused this would also have destroyed the hull," Chakotay mused. "Something invaded the ship and did this from inside."

  "And I'll tell you what-look at these markings. Recognize this?"

  Shining his wrist light to the point Paris indicated, Chakotay endured a moment of true denial.

  "Phaser demarcations," Paris said aloud. "They were shooting full phasers in here. No holds barred. But I can't find markings of any alien weapons' discharges. Just Federation phasers."

  "There's plenty of heat and radiation burns, though," Chakotay said. "Something caused it, and not phasers."

  "Could be energy wash from the damage."

  "It's targeted. Look at the corpses. High concentrations of bums and melting right near where they've each fallen."

  Paris swung his light to the places Chakotay indicated. "That's a relief... at least the crew didn't go space crazy and shoot each other."

  "We know that didn't happen. No phaser does ... that... to a body."

  "Guess I'm not thinking. Sorry again."

  Offering only that funereal smile to encourage a very discouraged crewmate, Chakotay knew there was no real comfort to give and Paris didn't really expect any from him. He started to move again when Paris

  flinched so hard that he crashed sideways into a jumble of wreckage. Chakotay stepped toward him, but his concern was instantly wrenched away from Paris to a faint whimper deep in the pile.

  He aimed his phaser there even before his wrist beacon made it. A flare panel, with its ports blown out, lay at an angle against an induction manifold readout panel. Several other strakes and twisted beams were pulled up into the same shape. Barricade.

  The light sifted across the scorched metal and plasti-form shapes that once had been part of a ship's inner fluidity, yet now were a bumble of salvage, cutting across shadows until it pierced the blown-out ports and ventured inside the barricade. There, the light touched a bruised cheek, a terrorized blue eye. Another eye, thankfully, and a scraggle of filthy blond hair. Uniform... good case of shell shock. He saw that even from out here.

  "Ensign?" he encouraged.

  The woman shuddered visibly, vulnerable and crushed back into a cove of anxiety. "Who ... ?"

  "I'm Commander Chakotay. U.S.S. Voyager."

  In very slow motion he moved the jagged-edged barricade aside and extended bis hand, then waited for her to take it rather than grasping her before she was ready.

  "But..." Her voice was shattered. "We're the only humans in the Delta Quadrant..."

  Offering her a sad smile, Chakotay said, "That's what we used to think."

  A comforting arm around her shoulders sent a chill

  through her that Chakotay could physically feel running its course.

  "What... what are you ... doing ..."

  "Here? That's a big question. We have a lot of questions for each other," he said as he drew her gently to Paris.

  "Well, what's this?" Paris began, trying to sound upbeat. "A stowaway?"

  "I... I'm... Gilmore. Engineer's mate."

  "Engineering. What luck." Paris gestured back toward the main core deck. "You can tell us something about that refit on your core-"

  "That can wait a few minutes, I think, Tom," Chakotay told him. Paris looked surprised but got the message. Keeping his arm around the terrorized woman, he quietly asked, "How long have you been in the Delta Quadrant?"

  "F-five years, seven months ... two days."

  Chakotay smiled again. "You sound like a Vulcan. Should I check your ears?"

  His reward was a trembling grin. "I keep a diary." Her large eyes crimped sadly and a sob choked her back. "It's not... very nice reading."

  "I'd like to read it anyway," Chakotay offered. "Let's get you to our sickbay."

  Her shoulder suddenly hunched against his ribs. "This isn't real, is it? I'm hallucinating, aren't I? We're losing ... They got in. The shields ... we lost, didn't we? You're not here. I'm dying too. I'm dying! Poor Rudy ... don't tell him I died... don't tell him."

  Tears drained as her eyes crushed closed. Her arms

  hung limp as she sobbed. Chakotay pulled her around to him and handed his phaser to Paris so he could get both arms around the girl. Paris' fair complexion grew russet with empathy as he met Chakotay's sad gaze. They wanted to have arrived a day earlier, to be more than just clean-up detail for this sorry and desperate crew of fellow Starfleeters. This should've been a better story.

  Over the oily fluff of blond scraggle, he gave Paris a little nod. "Keep looking."

  Unencouraged, Paris simply nodded back and moved past him.

  Chakotay ushered the destroyed girl away from her prison barricade, which she had taken to be her tomb. No point letting her see this area until it was cleaned up. Later, much later. She had fought to her last straw, and even that had finally cracked.

  They all had. He could see that, written in the phaser scorch lines all over the ship's pitiful interior.

  Taking her out of the core salon into a passageway at the base of a Jefferies tube, where the bleeps of Torres' tricorder were softened by the sound-absorbing carpet, Chakotay paused and let the girl's racking sobs run their course. He didn't offer any comfort-it would've all been lies. She was destroyed, not stupid.

  Voices? Where was his phaser! He almost called for Paris to come, then he realized that the voices were those of Harry Kim and Seven in the tube's secondary-level access conduit. They must be sea
rching up there. Good idea. If he were going to hide, that's where he'd go.

  Usually-but what was the Equinox crew hiding

  from? That's what determined a good defense, and he saw no sign of the enemy here at all, except for the pure demolition of the ship's guts.

  "Under here!" Harry Kim's sharp shout made Chakotay wish he were up there. He gripped the girl gently and listened.

  Kim again. "Hang on... we're getting you out of here."

  Good. They'd found somebody else alive.

  "I don't... believe ... we've met." A voice Chakotay didn't recognize. Sounded like the man was in pain.

  "Ensign Harry Kim. This is Seven of Nine. I'm going to have to cut him out with a plasma torch. Talk to him. Keep him calm."

  Then Seven's throaty voice, not really very calming, "State your name."

  "Lessing ... Noah. What are you doing on this side of the galaxy?"

  "The answer is complicated."

  "I don't care where you're from... I'm just glad you're here."

  Through the tube Chakotay could hear a plasma torch sizzle to work. He resisted the urge to climb up there and help. They could handle it, he knew, and there was hardly enough room up there for another person to go banging around.

  "Do me a favor," Lessing murmured. "See if my legs are still there ... I haven't felt them in two days."

  Chakotay winced and held his breath as the girl sniffed and began to recover against him. Please let the man's legs be there.

  "Your limbs are intact," Seven said then, bluntly. At least it was the right answer.

  "Thanks..."

  "Seven, give me a hand over here," Kim asked then, and Chakotay got that feeling again that he should be up there.

  "You will be alone for a moment," Seven's gravelly tone thrummed down the tube. "Do not be frightened."

  Lessing's voice was weak but carried a thread of hope. 'Too late for that."

  There was a crash of fallen debris back in the main section. Paris rummaging around, probably. How many more crew were holed up in cubbies all over this pathetic ship? And the uglier question-how many were lying desiccated, mummified by whatever force had invaded the ship?

  He wondered how the other search parties were doing. Neelix leading a security team to the crew's quarters. The captain... heading for the bridge. What would she find there? His chest constricted with concern. He knew what she dearly wanted to find and what it might mean to her to have come so close to rescuing another Starfleet ship, to finally be the big sister to other desperate Federation waifs, to do the job a starship is really meant to do rather than just race through space on a thinly veiled hope to get home.

  Where was the rest of this ship's crew? There should be nearly a hundred people here. They couldn't all be hiding. They couldn't all be dead, could they? Stacked in coffinless indignity in the hold by their pitiful shipmates?

  He rejected the hideous image. They were here somewhere. But where? And where was the enemy?

  Another dead one. Horribly disfigured. Teeth cracked, yellowed, offering a grotesque grin beneath dried eye sockets. Each one desiccated Kathryn Janeway's smoldering hopes a little more, and a little more.

  Not all of the corpses were fully desiccated. Some bore the marks of partial mummification, others just flakes of destroyed skin tissue, as if they'd been sprayed with acid. Just as dead, though.

  Her dreams of flying in like the avenging angel shriveled with each new discovery. She hadn't found a single living person yet. They weren't in the corridors or turbolifts.

  Please, Chakotay, be having better luck.

  And what a nightmare these corridors were. Whole door panels were blown completely off, lying smashed, cut in half, bent, crumpled, like the tons of other debris made of disembodied beams, ceiling panels, access hatches, trunk lids, and electrical guts. Much of it still hissed and fritzed, trying to keep doing whatever job it had done in life.

  In life...

  Behind her, Tuvok hadn't said a word, not a single word, since they'd left the secondary hull. That worried her. Stoicly he had followed as she led the way through the dark ship's neck, through the primary hull without the benefit of turbolifts, and finally up through the lift

  tube toward the bridge. Even when he stepped forward to help her pry open the lift doors that led to the bridge, Tuvok still spoke not at all.

  Janeway's mind divided between the Equinox's crew and her own. What were they all feeling? How awful was it to have the chance to rescue fellow Starfleet officers and have it turn out like this... and those like Tuvok, who left friends and family, even children, back home- for him this was a riveting slice of pure fact. He was the father of five. One child for each year he had been missing in action. Five years, and the Delta Quadrant was still unkind. Were they looking at their own fate?

  She was glad Tuvok had the sense not to converse. She had nothing to say. Not yet.

  The lift door squawked and actually cracked, its molecular structure somehow destabilized. Together, the captain and Tuvok stepped onto the bridge, weapons and lights first. Tuvok swept the bridge briefly with his naked eyes, then holstered his phaser and brought his tricorder up for a scan. When he cleared the area, he glanced at Janeway and gave her tacit permission to enter. At least he wasn't scanning any hostile life forms or deadly emissions. She didn't want to ask if he was picking up any life signs at all or if this was another killing field. She would see for herself. Some things were better found in person.

  Someone coughed. Alive! She plowed forward, knocking her knees on wreckage, nearly stumbled, recovered, and forced herself on. Tuvok was so close behind as to come up to her side in a step. He went immediately toward the cough and got there first.

  An officer... lieutenant, slumped over a console, just stirring back to consciousness. Sweat filmed the pasty face, but the dark eyes blinked with comprehension as the officer drew a hand across h is face and stirred back to awareness of his surroundings. He blinked into Tuvok's light as if beyond shock, even at the sight of survival.

  The captain...

  Janeway lengthened her stride and vectored to the command chair. Captain Ransom-he looked dead. There was no pretty way to say it His face was stony, frozen in a grimace, a clotted gash over his left eye, shoulders hunched, hands gripping his command chair's arms. A spent phaser rifle lay at his feet and a piece of ceiling brace had fallen across his legs. Might have been the thing that saved his life.

  From what?

  Anticipating the clammy chill of death as she touched his arm, Janeway flinched as the captain's eyes slitted open. He wasn't dead! Half alive, maybe, but this was something at least.

  She touched his shoulder, then the side of his face as his head lolled. Alive... his eyes flickered at her touch.

  "My crew?" Though ragged, his voice was strong with concern, even defiance. He actually wasn't done fighting.

  "You took heavy casualties," Janeway reported, cloaking her own shattering spirit with protocol's cold efficiency. "We're treating the survivors."

  Please don't ask about the dead ones.

  "Who attacked you?" she asked, before he had the chance to think about the nonsurvivors.

  "We don't know," he garbled. "We can't communicate with them. They've been attacking us for weeks..."

  Pressing down on the chair's arms, he shoved himself to a better position, then instantly faltered and hardened with pain.

  "Easy," Janeway said.

  "I've got to secure the ship ..."

  "Leave that to us."

  She attached a sedative marker to the side of his neck, but he roused more and swiped it off. "Treat me here," he protested. "I'm not leaving my bridge."

  Warmly, Janeway smiled at his heartrending loyalty. She understood. What would she want someone to say to her?

  "I can't pull rank on you, Captain," she said quietly, as if she'd known him for years. "But you're in no condition to put up a fight."

  He blinked again, his eyes focusing briefly on the command pips at her co
llar. Four of them. Another captain. The sight seemed to ease him.

  "So tell me," he managed, "how's Earth?"

  Uh-oh.

  Should she lie to him? Let him get a night's sleep before she told him the truth?

  "I wish I could say," she admitted.

  Ransom's eyes blinked and stayed open this time. Hope and faith and his estimation of what he was worth to the Federation all took a bad blow as he real-

  ized what she meant. "You weren't sent here... to find us?"

  "I'm afraid not," Janeway said. Might as well get it over with. "We've been stranded in the Delta Quadrant for five years. We were pulled here against our will by an alien known as the Care-"

  "Caretaker."

  Captain Ransom sunk in his chair, comprehending the new weight upon them both.

  Janeway's heart sank at his expression. She slipped her hands under his arms and got a grip on him to lift him to his feet. "We'll compare notes later. Let's get you to Voyager."

  "Rudy? Are you alive? It's not a dream?"

  "Max ... I thought they finally got you."

  Captain Ransom slumped back in his diagnostic bed, but he reached across the short gap to the other bed and managed to catch Max Burke's wrist. Burke moved a little and found his captain's hand. Back from the dead. Suck blood now? Sleep in a coffin?

  They already had been.

  Ransom's legs were numb, but he could feel his toes through lingering mental and physical shock and the weakness of near starvation. Another slip through the noose just before it broke his neck. What about the others?

  "How many alive?" he asked bluntly, raising his head with a struggle.

  The Voyager's doctor scanned him with perfunctory disinterest but seemed a little bothered by the question.

  Strange-an Emergency Medical Hologram shouldn't be bothered by anything at all.

  "Your crew suffered many injuries, Captain Ransom," The Doctor said. "We're treating them all." He paused, adjusted something on Ransom's treatment, then followed through on the question he couldn't avoid. "Captain Janeway will speak to you about your survivors."

  His stomach cramping, Ransom squeezed Max Burke's hand, got a limited response, then let go of the grip. It would hurt only after another minute or two.