Equinox Page 6

  Oh ... what an opening line.

  "It is sufficiently pleasing," she responded, perplexed. Seemed like she'd never looked at the ship that way.

  She would if she'd spent the past five years on Equinox.

  "After a week in the Jefferies tube," Lessing commented, "it's paradise. Did you know there are five thousand two hundred and eighteen plasma welds in a standard section of bulkhead?"

  He thought he was making a sad joke, but Seven bluntly said, "Yes."

  A laugh felt good. Lessing was the type who smiled

  easily, and everybody always said he had a nice smile, so he never held back. Lately the smiles had been few, and it felt great to grin freely and mean it, not just make a hollow reassurance of something impossible to a desperate shipmate who needed a lift. He didn't have to do that here. He could laugh and smile, and mean it.

  "I guess you would know," he chuckled. "The Borg are pretty thorough."

  "And humans are ... resilient," she replied.

  He couldn't tell if she meant that as a compliment or not

  "Nothing to it," he joked. "Count a few plasma welds, calculate pi to a hundred places in my head... and imagine I was someplace else. Imagine I was home."

  "Earth," she said. Was that reverie in her eyes? Or mystery?

  "With Mom and Dad... all my sisters ... Just talking about everything and nothing ... being together with them again."

  Briefly he left her, left the sickbay behind in his thoughts, wandered home again. When he'd first seen Seven's face over him, heard her voice and Harry Kim's telling him he was going to live after all, that he still had his legs and a chance to survive, and that they were Starfleet-he'd wallowed briefly in the idea of having been rescued. Really rescued. Somebody had come from the Alpha Quadrant to take them all the way home.

  Then reeling in, finding out that the Voyager was

  trapped here too, digesting the idea that they were alive, but not exactly on their way home ... oh, well, small blessings. He'd learned to live with microscopic ones. He could live with this.

  "Your method was successful," Seven congratulated. "You survived. Impressive, considering the circumstances."

  Her sculpted face and body began to grow fuzzy as his eyes blurred. The hypo. Must've been a sedative. "Don't be too impressed," he muttered. "I don't deserve it."

  How much did she know? He'd told her everything, hadn't he? All about the stasis chamber and the enemy aliens, the experiments, the captain's decision to keep going... she'd understood and been comforting about it. She'd even laughed that he was worried about how they'd all react to the story. Yes, he'd told her.

  Or was it the sedative talking? Was Seven still here?

  "You are to rest," she said. "Good-bye."

  Lessing reached out with the last of his ability to focus and grasped her arm. "Seven ... you saved my life. I hope... you never regret that..."

  As he lowered himself to lie down on the biobed and Seven adjusted his newly healed legs into place so he wouldn't slip off, Lessing watched her beautiful blond hair in its tight twist and thought it looked like the swept tails of those animals they'd been experimenting on. Over and over in his mind he saw those creatures flying, fighting, screaming, their yellow tails sweeping and curled in fear and pain and anger.

  He closed his eyes and dreamed of home, and knew he wasn't there yet.

  Minimal power restored-good. A blip or two of encouraging light where an hour ago there had been dimness and collapse. A few consoles up and running, flashing eagerly, as if they were enjoying getting to do their jobs again, feeling the flush of unruptured energy through repair cables and coils.

  Janeway reconnected two more fusion circuits and nodded with satisfaction. Beside her, Rudy Ransom picked at a station with greatly enhanced familiarity. Oh, a Starfleet engineering panel was a Starfleet panel, meet one, meet them all, but after a few years of personal treatment they started to act individually. Ships got personality just as babies did. They started out cut from the same die, only later to get the little bangs and bumps that set them apart, tiny repairs, stresses, quirks, strengths and weaknesses, each to its own. Ransom treated his ship's circuitry like errant puppies

  responding to his snap, and it worked. Everything he

  did happened ten seconds faster than anything Janeway did. He seemed proud of that, and she let him have it.

  Behind them, several more of Voyager's technical specialists were at work, resetting and repairing, replacing bent or smashed trunk sites and monitor screens, fingerpads, and crystal displays. There was a heightened sense of purpose even in the low-keyed banter as they spoke to each other.

  Everyone seemed happy, except the Equinox crew.

  They seemed self-conscious, distracted, close-mouthed. That was it... they were the ones who were supposed to be the happiest people around.

  Oh, was that selfish! Janeway chided herself for these thoughts. Expecting others to act as she thought she might? Pretty unfair. She really didn't know what they'd been through. She and Voyager had experienced their logful of horrors, but few of them had sustained for the sheer months on end what Equinox had dealt with. What does that do to people crammed together on a small science ship with limited battle-readiness?

  "I couldn't help but notice," she began, hoping to crinkle the ice a little more with Ransom, "that your crew calls you by your first name."

  He tipped his head in either a nod or a shrug. "When you've spent as much time in the trenches as we have, rank and protocol are luxuries. Besides, we're a long way from Starfleet Command."

  "I know the feeling," she said.

  Did she? As much as he did?

  "You seem to run a tight ship," he commented, attempting to hand back the problem to her. Maybe it was a compliment.

  "We've been known to let our hair down from time to time, but I find that maintaining protocol reminds us of where we came from," she said, "and hopefully where we're going."

  "I'd say it's worked quite well for you."

  Janeway paused. Had he put an emphasis on "for you," or was she imagining it? Suddenly she felt a little self-conscious herself, a little class-guilty about having

  this powerful ship and enough crew to tend it. She'd always felt like the lost lamb, small in a big hostile quadrant, and now she'd stumbled upon a lost chick whom she could easily trample.

  "We've overcome our share of obstacles," she attempted. That sounded wrong the instant she said it. Would he think she was trying to share, or compare? "Warp core breaches, ion storms, a few rounds with the Borg-"

  "Borg? We haven't seen so much as a cube since the day we arrived."

  "Consider yourself lucky." Her eyes crimped in disapproval. That was perfectly heartless. Why wouldn't this conversation go right?

  Ransom didn't seem to take it the way she thought it sounded. "Have you ever run into the Krowtonan Guard?"

  "Never heard of them."

  The other captain paused for a moment, and his shoulders sank. "That's how we spent our first week in the Delta Quadrant. They claimed we'd violated their territory. It was either circumvent their borders and add another six years to our journey ... or maintain course. I gave the order to keep going." His eyes tightened. "I lost thirty-nine. Half my crew."

  Well, that was the end of the what-we've-been-through competition. Janeway's heart skipped as she gazed at him. She couldn't even come close to that one.

  "I'm sorry," she offered warmly.

  Neither the sympathy nor the memory was doing Ransom any good, unless it helped at all to talk to an-

  other captain about it, unburdening himself for the first time to an equal. "We never recovered from that loss," he said. "It changed everything ..."

  He looked at her, but only for a moment. He stopped talking.

  "What do you mean?" Janeway encouraged, hoping he would keep talking, get it over with. Did she have to tell him it was off the record?

  "When I first realized that we'd be traveling through the Delta Quadr
ant for the rest of our lives," he went on, struggling, "I told my crew we had a duty as Starfleet officers to expand our knowledge and uphold our principles. After a couple of years, we started to forget we were explorers. There were times when we nearly forgot we were human beings."

  Offering silent solace for a few moments, Janeway reflected on how hard it must have been to uphold higher principles when just eating was a critical factor. Exploration was a pretty goal, but the starving explore for only one reason.

  "This is a Nova-class science vessel," she comforted, beginning with the painfully obvious and working around to the rest, as if going up a ramp. "Designed for short-term research missions. Minimal weapons ... you can't even go faster than warp eight. Frankly, I don't know how you've done it. You've obviously traveled as far as we have, with much fewer resources."

  She held back from complimenting him that half his crew mostly survived, realizing how hollow that would

  sound and the counterpart of the favor was very, very sour. Half hadn't

  "I wish I could take all the credit," Ransom handed back. "But we stumbled across a wormhole. M ade a few enhancements to our warp engines ..."

  He stopped with that. She sensed there was more, knew that B'Elanna was having some trouble with the warp core.

  "May I ask you something, captain to captain?" Ransom began after a moment of hesitation. "The Prime Directive. How often have you broken it for the sake of protecting your crew?"

  "Broken it?" The eternal haunting question. "Never," she said before really thinking. "Bent it... on occasion. And even then, it was a difficult choice."

  Now who was holding back?

  "What about you?" she reversed.

  "Oh, I've walked that line once or twice. Nothing serious."

  Somehow it seemed like the conversation was over. They weren't being open anymore. They weren't equals anymore. Something had changed and Janeway wasn't sure what that something was. They were the only two Starfleet captains in the Delta Quadrant. They had to make up new rules as they struck new situations, encountered civilizations that had never even heard of the Federation and had no idea or any care about its influence. The weight of that played hard upon captains who were used to having a certain reputation precede them and a formidable force back them up.

  Ransom effectively changed the subject by a unique

  trick-finishing his work. His familiarity with the quirkish reroutes and jury-rigging deep in the systems quickly untangled what otherwise would've been days of work for Janeway just to diagnose. As he straightened, he said, "There you are ..."

  For an instant she thought he was talking to her, until he stooped and brushed through the rubble, to come up with the ship's commission plaque.

  U.S.S. Equinox. Commission date, officer manifest... a ship's ID tag.

  Captain Ransom wiped the plaque with his bare hand, despite sharp metal shavings and a crackle of residual magnetic charge.

  At the same moment as she was glad he found it, Janeway was crushed by the sadness of seeing that plaque driven to the deck, smeared with leakage and chips, in a situation that kept anyone from picking it up until now. If Voyager hadn't happened to be close enough to hear the distress signal and respond in the nick of time, that plaque would've been lying there as Equinox's crew died around it. There was something pathetic about that. Somehow it bothered her, like a child's grave with no stone.

  "It's a good omen," she offered meagerly. "Let's put it back where it belongs."

  And let's get the rest of us back where we belong. Why does home seem so much farther away today than it did yesterday?

  Two ships, flying together in space, as fleets from Earth had done for centuries, even millennia. Equinox

  and Voyager soared at warp speed-high for one ship, moderate for another-shrouded in the amniotic sac of the starship's shields, under assault the whole way.

  Things were hectic. There was a time limit. People tried to walk and work quietly and calmly, compromised by an underlying sweat and knowledge that time was running out. Those aliens out there, operating on some other spatial plane, were systematically disrupting the starship's strong shields, shields that were already stretched thin by attempting to protect two ships.

  Rudolph Ransom hurried through the guts of the bigger ship with his mind on the smaller one. The contamination in the critical areas of Equinox had staved off analysis of the area efficiently, giving him time to think of what to do. Either he would have a plan ready or time would run out and Voyager would be in the same position he and his crew were when the aliens started breaking through. Then, there wouldn't be any more opportunity for judgment making or room in the arena for challenges between Starfleet personnel. They'd have to work together to survive. He was counting on that.

  He'd driven himself since coming aboard Voyager without having a full meal. Now the ship's EMH had ordered him to report to the mess hall or be fed intravenously. After months of surviving on handfuls here and there, the idea of a square meal was foreign. He would have to get reacclimated to some things gradually. Physical and otherwise.

  But he still had to report to the mess hall. His com-

  badge would log the entry, as keyed to do so by the EMH, and then he would be free to go.

  The mess hall was not, and couldn't be expected to be, crowded. Not while the ships were under siege. People came and went, grabbing small meals to sustain them in their work to support the deflector system. Ransom wasn't surprised to see at least one of his crew here-but he was a little surprised that it was Max Burke. Probably under the same orders to eat.

  Burke, though, was sitting down in front of a sailor's traditional square meal, though he did seem to be only picking. Ransom strode up behind him and pressed his shoulder. "I thought I'd find you here."

  Burke glanced at him. "How could I resist? After two years on emergency rations ..."

  "Don't get too comfortable." Ransom didn't sit, leaning instead on the chair behind him. When Max's shoulders slumped in understanding, his hands suddenly clenched, Ransom lowered his voice and said, "If Janeway's any indication, these people will never understand."

  "They're going to find out eventually."

  "Not if we keep them out of the research lab. And away from the warp core injectors. Be careful what you say around their crew. And that includes old girlfriends."

  A tacit warning, yes, yet very serious. For a captain to interfere in the relationships of his crew was one of the most delicate lines a commander could stride.

  Janeway, he guessed, would agree. She seemed to run her ship with very little personal involvement

  among the crew members. Despite having been locked in the Delta Quadrant with virtually no hope of fanning out into more human society, it would've been normal and expected for people on the ship to start pairing up. Ransom hadn't seen much evidence of that so far. Maybe they were all holding back. Or Janeway had managed to lower a veil of deceptive hopes for them, convincing them they really could get back just by going fast.

  They couldn't. Ransom knew that Warp eight or warp twelve, it didn't matter. The distance between here and the Alpha Quadrant still swallowed an entire normal lifetime. If they did get back by just flying, the survivors would be old men and women-without families, without homes, with no stakes-whose relatives had all but forgotten them, whose children had grown up without them and gone off to build their own lives. Their ships would be out of date, obsolete, backward, relics. Only their information about the Delta Quadrant would be worth anything; and the fact was that if space couldn't be bent, then it didn't matter. The Alpha citizens couldn't come back and forth fast enough to make any bond between the quadrants. If distance could not be surmounted, then time would beat them. So what was the information worth? Nothing. Going home by going straight was useless, hopeless. Pointless. Janeway was fooling herself and her crew.

  A sagging sensation cloyed Ransom as he moved away from Max before those thoughts popped out. He took a big chunk of food from his first offi
cer's plate, popped it in his mouth, said, "Not bad," by means of a

  farewell, and headed out of the mess hall. He didn't like leaving Max with that posture, that defeated and fearful slump, worried that all this comfort would be critically temporary. But if they stayed and talked...

  He didn't like the closeness of strangers. The crew was enjoying meeting new friends, but for a captain it was different. Janeway wasn't going to be the comrade he'd hoped for. He couldn't expect her to be. She ran a completely different kind of ship, one with different formative experiences over the past five years. Eventually she might be forced to understand, if things went the way Ransom expected. Too late, though. And he didn't have time to be her conditioner.

  "Rudy!"

  Halfway back down the corridor, Ransom discovered with some tension that Max had followed him out Neither wanted to be seen talking secretly by any more others than absolutely necessary. Funny-though half the size, Equinox had provided more privacy. Of course, on Equinox, they hadn't had to talk much after a while. They only had two jobs. Defend and propel. No chitchat No philosophy class.

  "We can't talk here, Max," Ransom aborted as his first officer fell out of his jog.

  "We have to talk somewhere." Burke lowered his voice. "I don't think they're the type to have security recordings all over the ship. They don't have any reason to. Please-I'm not sure what to do."

  "All right, all right" Though he did not stop walking, Ransom slowed down.

  Now that he had permission to speak, Burke fell dis-

  turbingly silent. Unable to leave his first officer with that question What should I do? pending, Ransom plunged into it.

  "I've skimmed her logs. She's done more than bend the rules. She's openly and with deliberation participated in the Delta Quadrant Answering a distress call is arguably against the rules. To hear some strict interpretations, even existing in somebody else's territory is against the rules! How can we deal with that in our situation? Nobody's ever been in our situation before. Starfleet didn't make any rules to cover this. The Federation Council never gave it a thought The only other commander who has a clue what it's like to be this lost is Janeway. And she hasn't visited the edge yet."