Equinox Page 5

Why would she want to stay? He could empathize with the way she felt about being comfortable and safe after what she'd been through, but leave her ship? Her captain?

  Without exploring the questions in his mind, he let her off the temporary hook and tapped the lift controls. The door slid open instantly. One to a customer, no waiting.

  He strode in, turned-Gilmore didn't follow him in. She was standing there at the vestibule but looking at the lift as if it were quicksand.

  "Engineering's five decks down," Chakotay told her jovially. "It's a long crawl through the Jefferies tubes." When she mustered her will and stepped in after him, he ordered, "Deck eleven."

  The lift doors closed and they were moving. He kept

  watching her as she struggled to keep her anxiety under some kind of control.

  She saw him watching her, saw the curiosity in his eyes, and ultimately explained, "I haven't set foot in a turbolift in over three months."

  "Claustrophobia?"

  She didn't seem to like the word, but didn't dispute it. "If one of those fissures opened up in here ... where would we take cover?"

  That had been her life, it seemed. Taking cover. He tried to imagine-hiding most of the time, slipping out to rebuild defenses, trying to snatch an hour of sleep, only to waken to that whining sound and an attack by something he still couldn't picture. The whole horror played in Gilmore's expressive eyes, though she was trying to hide it from him, trying to summon what was left of her shredded Starfleetness.

  "We'll be out of here before you know it," he assured. Sounded empty, considering what she'd endured, though he had to try to stem her obviously mounting fear.

  At the worst possible moment, just as the lift started to get a good hum under it and cruise toward deck eleven, a brief hydraulic whine disturbed the flow. Gilmore visibly flinched.

  "It was only a graviton relay," Chakotay said quickly. "Nothing to worry about."

  A tremulous grin disturbed the near-panic in her face. "Do I look worried?"

  The sounds of the lift grew louder. Chakotay had never noticed them before. It actually did whine and

  hum as it got a stride. Gilmore's breath was coming in short sucks. Her hands were clenched. Just a few moments more-

  "Emergency stop!"

  The lift bumped to a halt. Luckily, it was almost at a deck and finished its seating before stopping. An instant later, Gilmore was out in the corridor on deck six.

  When Chakotay got out there, she was trembling freely.

  "If you don't mind," she shivered, "I think I'd rather take the Jefferies tube ..."

  And off she went, as if she knew where it was.

  Chakotay indulged in an inward shrug and stepped after her. "I could use the exercise."

  "I'm sorry if this is awkward for you, Captain Janeway, having both our crews on your ship, two captains, two first officers-"

  Janeway smiled as she walked with Rudy Ransom through the tidy corridors of Voyager and counted her blessings. This was the fourth time he'd apologized for being a problem, getting in the way, stalling their forward progress, you name it.

  "Captain, I keep telling you," Janeway said, "and one of these days you'll figure out that I'm not just being polite, it's nice to have a crowded ship for a change. Besides, it's not that crowded. New faces, new conversations, the reminder that Starfleet is really there and not just a figment of our imaginations-we're all enjoying ourselves. To do something positive for a

  change? I'd go out of my way for this anytime. We all would."

  Ransom shook his head in reverie. "Every time we had an attack, I broadcast a distress signal on a Federation channel. I did it to make the crew feel better just for those last horrible seconds before we died. Every time we thought we'd die... I just wanted the last thing they heard to be their captain's voice calling for assistance from a friendly ship, even if the friendly ship never came. I wanted the last sounds to be words of hope, not just that awful whine and the screams of their shipmates dying in the corners. I never thought anybody would ... actually answer. When Voyager responded," he added after a pause, "I thought I was hallucinating."

  "You didn't act like that," Janeway comforted. "You responded sharply and got us over there. You told us what to do, we expanded our shields, and here you are. I'm amazed you could think so clearly after what you'd been through for so long."

  "You think more clearly, not less." Ransom's voice was suddenly harsh. "Everything gets more clear."

  "I'm impressed," Janeway said. "It took me most of my training to understand what a captain has to do under pressure. I trained for it, studied other captains, other situations ... you never did that, yet you handled the situation when it faced you."

  "I'm a scientist, not a battle captain," Ransom agreed. "Promotion was a surprise for me. When I discovered the Yridians, I was a science officer whose captain was in a coma. I wasn't even technically in

  charge of the mission. If the captain had come out of the coma instead of dying, he'd have gotten the mission credit. Instead, I got it and they gave me a ship of my own. I never expected that."

  "You deserved it. You were the one who traced the Yridians and their living settlements, not your captain."

  "Oh, I deserved that part," he said with a laugh. "But not a whole ship of my own. When they made me a captain, I thought they meant captain of research, not captain of a ship."

  "What were you doing when the Caretaker..."

  "Kidnapped us?"

  He didn't seem as bothered by revisiting the event as Janeway thought he might be, as she sometimes was in the dark hours of off-watch.

  "We were as close to safe space as we could be without sitting on top of a Starbase. We were doing bio-scrapings of a comet-washed asteroid belt. Can you believe it? Simple as putting on your boots! It was a milk run. We were just learning how to fly the Equinox. None of us even knew the ship very well. We learned the hard way."

  Janeway gestured him around a curve toward the as-trometrics lab. "Science ships aren't really built to take the kind of pounding you've been enduring."

  "She's a terrific ship," Ransom quickly defended. "I never knew she could take so much. She never broke down, not critically. Even with her trunks spilled and her electrical guts ripped out, she's still capable of warp speed and shields. Funny... when I first came on

  board her, I didn't really like her very much. I was used to the big Berengaria-class lab barges."

  "Sometimes I think of Voyager," Janeway said, "as an island instead of a ship."

  "Oh, not me. I'm all too aware of being on a ship in the middle of a big empty sea. Equinox has never seemed as secure as an island. That's where you're lucky."

  "Well, now we're all lucky." Janeway offered one more smile before donning her captain-aplomb as they strode into the astrometrics lab.

  Inside, Tuvok, Seven, and Maxwell Burke were at the console, studying graphics of both Voyager and Equinox on the large domescreen. The two ships were flying in formation, as indeed they were in real life, and the computer was duplicating their positions and energy emissions for purposes of analysis.

  Janeway took two seconds to appreciate the loveliness of those graphics. Not only functional, they were beautiful to look upon.

  Seven looked up. "I've run a thermographic analysis of our shields," she reported. Without Janeway's asking, she worked at the enhance controls, and the graphics above changed.

  Dozens of hotpoints appeared and disappeared around the shield sphere that enveloped both ships, each point a crackle of violent en ergy as if something were trying to break through. Janeway realized with a spearing tension that they hadn't beaten off the assault-it was still going on.

  "It revealed multiple stress points," Seven explained.

  "We believe they're the result of alien attempts to infiltrate our vessels."

  Now that that was confirmed, Janeway also noticed a certain orderliness about the flashes of hotspots. They appeared around the ship not in random order, but in a repeated sequence. As
she watched, the sequence changed slightly, then repeated itself over and over again.

  Tuvok stepped closer and indicated the screens. "Each time a fissure opens within a meter of our shields, it weakens them by point three percent."

  Glancing now at the numbers and factors displayed by the lower consoles, Janeway looked up again at the graphic display and felt her whole nervous system go to Red Alert. "At the present rate, we have less than two days to mount a defense."

  She wasn't just stating a fact. She was also throwing out a challenge. Someone would think of something, perhaps herself, perhaps one of the others. It was her job to prod them to think, throw the net out and see what jumped in. If she didn't, eventually the crew would get used to waiting around for her to come up with something. That was part of a captain's job too in a situation like this-stimulate and keep stimulating. Keep their minds on positive action.

  Seven of Nine was the first to speak. She turned to Captain Ransom. "According to your bioscans, the aliens can only survive in our realm for several seconds."

  Ransom nodded. "They're like fish out of water. But they can do a lot of damage in those seconds."

  "Nevertheless," Tuvok picked up, "it is a tactical weakness. Perhaps we can exploit it."

  "What've you got in mind?" Burke asked.

  Janeway looked at him. Somehow the question sounded funny, the way he asked it.

  Seven postulated, "If we can show them that we have the ability to hold them here," she said, "they'll think twice about launching another attack."

  "The question is," Janeway probed, "how do we catch these fish?"

  Would they have an answer? She hadn't gotten much out of Ransom about this problem. Of course, she hadn't pushed him. He was a captain, after all, and she expected him to be forthright with information that would help both their crews. He was, like the rest of his crew, still shell shocked, probably having trouble trusting even other Starfleet personnel. She'd seen plenty of illusions herself since being forced into the Delta Quadrant. It wouldn't be out of line for him to wait awhile, see if what he was experiencing was the real thing, not just an hallucination or an illusion, a trick or a trap. Janeway knew deep inside that she would hold back too, just to see, to be sure.

  Yes, First Officer Burke was communing silently with his captain. They were looking at each other in the way that didn't need words.

  Finally, with some kind of tacit permission from Ransom, Burke offered, "You build a trap."

  So, they did know how to do it.

  "Commander?" Janeway prodded. Keep them talking.

  Burke looked again at Ransom and again received silent license.

  "A multiphasic force field, to be exact," he said, still hesitating. Was he choosing his words carefully? "We wanted to see what we were up against. So we built a small chamber that could keep one of them trapped for several minutes."

  Janeway waited a second to see if there was more, then said, "If we could expand on that technology, we might be able to create a latticework of multiphasic force fields around both ships."

  Stiffening as if waiting for a blade to fall, Burke looked at Ransom. "Rudy?"

  Another of those strange pauses, those wordless communications ... Ransom's tight eyes worked. "If Captain Janeway agrees."

  What an odd thing to say. He knew she wanted an answer, a course of action. Why was he so uncertain?

  "We'll need to examine that stasis chamber," she told him. He knew that too, didn't he? This business of having to state the obvious ...

  This time Ransom didn't look at Burke or the other way around. Both men stared at Janeway and she got the idea they were holding their breath for a moment.

  "I'm afraid that won't be possible," Ransom stated flatly. "It's in our research lab. That section was flooded with thermionic radiation during the last attack. It'll be days before anyone can go in there."

  "The design schematics are in our auxiliary data-core," Burke quickly filled in, offering a fair but not great alternative.

  "I'll see if I can download them," Ransom said before anyone else could speak. "Give me a hand?"

  Janeway followed him out, giving him a chance to lead the way even on her ship. That was all right, he needed it. She was expecting the Equinox crew to have to be here longer than they thought they might, judging by the amount of damage turning up on that ship, and they should be allowed to feel as if Voyager had become their home away from hell.

  He didn't need a hand, either. Nobody needed a hand downloading. What he needed, she supposed, was the company of a peer. Or perhaps it was only that he didn't want to go back to Equinox by himself quite yet. He'd been virtually alone as supreme leader of a team of young scientists, alone in the responsibility for their lives and their survival or witness to their grisly deaths. He'd stood that tide by himself, never breaking down. Max Burke wasn't really a first officer, but he had been shoved up to that position much as Ransom had been shoved into command. That wasn't the same as having a qualified captain as your first officer, which Janeway was privileged to have in Chakotay. She could sleep in confidence that her ship was in experienced hands. Ransom couldn't.

  He and Burke obviously were very close, by nature and by needs, but even that kind of trust didn't replace years of experience running a ship in good times to be prepared for the bad times. The Equinox crew and their officers had been shoved headlong into the bad times. Janeway was happy to be able to give Ransom whatever moral support he needed.

  And yet, he didn't trust her completely. She could sense that. Easily attributed to five years without being able to trust anybody other than his little crew, the lack of forthrightness and those glances of murmuring communication between Ransom and his crew somehow set off alarms in the back of her brain. They were holding back.

  Frightened of commitment? Afraid that if they got too familiar with the Voyager crew they wouldn't be able to go back to their own ship, as regulations demanded?

  No, that couldn't be it. They knew they'd have to go back. She thought she would want to go back if the situation were reversed and she had a miraculous chance to secure her damaged ship.

  Was this fair? Fixing all her own reactions to other people? Maybe they felt something completely different. It had been so long since she'd been in a fleet... even a fleet of two. She hardly remembered how to feel.

  Tune, time. They all needed time to adjust. All these feelings and suspicions would even out. Janeway determined to make sure they evened out. Regulations would do that, protocol, routine, the command structure. Those forces would eventually take over and smooth out all the problems. Do things by the book, follow the rules, give and follow orders, report to superiors, improvise when necessary, but fall back on Starfleet motions and methods.

  That would save them all. They were not just two isolated ships popping around deep space. They were

  United Federation of Planets representatives on the far frontier, Starfleet officers and crew members to the last one, and they had a big book to fall back upon. That's what would save them, and would eventually bond them to each other.

  Time. Tune. Regulations, a sense of identity, a sense of purpose beyond just survival, and lots of time.

  Did they have it?

  CHAPTER

  5

  FUNNY HOW THINGS COULD BE. A GREAT CHANCE AT A CA-reer, science, and get paid for it, a rank, and a captain to take care of all the problems. One day, scraping asteroids, the next day fight for your life seventy thousand light-years from home. One day, dying in a conduit, can't feel the legs anymore, and today ...

  Noah Lessing drew a sustaining lungful of air and leaned on the Voyager's doctor program, putting weight on legs he was sure were gone for good.

  'Try putting a little more of your weight on it," The Doctor instructed.

  Lessing realized he was holding back, afraid to believe that he could walk again. He thought he had been putting weight on. Leaning forward more, he pressed down on his newly fused right leg.

  "Go ahead
," The Doctor encouraged.

  One step ... two ...

  "Good. Any pain?"

  "Just a little," Lessing said. It might have been a lot of pain, but he couldn't judge anymore between a little and a lot. He'd taught himself to ignore what he couldn't change, even if it killed him.

  He was about to take another step when the sickbay door opened and that miracle of nature and mechanics strode in-Seven of Nine.

  "My Angel of Mercy!" Lessing greeted.

  "I came to check on your damage," she said emotion-lessly. "It's less than I expected."

  "Your doctor's something of a miracle worker-" Just as he said it, his left leg folded and he stumbled. He'd have fallen if The Doctor hadn't been holding him.

  "That's enough for now," The Doctor said. "Seven?"

  She stepped in and took Lessing's other side. She was far more firm and solid than the hologram, strangely.

  "I had to rebuild the lower spine and both femurs," The Doctor went on. "With some rest and physical therapy, he'll be good as new."

  Lessing resisted an urge to comment on how different The Doctor's attitude was than the same program on Equinox. Their ship's surgeon had died in the first week after they'd been hurled out of the Alpha Quadrant. They'd been treated by a notably cold hologram ever since. The counterpart on Voyager seemed happier, even satisfied that his treatments worked, and troubled when they didn't. He'd

  suffered over Lessing's pelvis and legs almost as much as Lessing had.

  Has he let himself be steered back to the nearest biobed and found it a distinct delight to be able to sit instead of lying down. He gazed in mute appreciation at Seven and surveyed the landscape. The Doctor pressed a hypospray into Lessing's arm, distracting him for a moment, and when he turned again Seven was on her way out.

  "Seven!" he called. "I didn't hear a Red Alert... where are you going so fast?"

  Seven looked at The Doctor, who said, "You may stay for a few minutes." To Lessing, he added, "Then, rest."

  Good. He was leaving them alone.

  Lessing could think of plenty worse fates than being alone with an artist's dream like this.

  "Beautiful ship you've got here," he said.