Caretaker - L. A. Graf [0]
By: L. A. Graf
Prologue
A roar of scarlet light blasted through the tiny spaceship's bridge, and alarms screamed as if in surprise as the deadly tremor of a direct hit went rattling off down the ship's already battered frame. Chakotay wound his ankles more securely around the base of his pilot's chair to keep from being pitched to the deck, then tapped a rapid sequence on the panel without looking back to see how the rest of his crew fared.
If he looked, he would have to go to them, and there was no place for that just now. A time to fight, a time to mourn, he tried to console himself. Chakotay didn't remember anymore what noble figure in his people's past had first said that. He wondered if that old Indian had ever faced anything quite like this.
The ship's engines stuttered, then barked suddenly into life to spiral them off at an oblique vector.
Another blast of light shattered across the viewscreen dominating Chakotay's vision, and this time he had to grab the console itself as the ship bucked out from under him.
"Direct hit." Tuvok sat his station as easily as he would have on any planetbound installation--unperturbed, unshaken. Skin and hair the color of polished walnut blended the Vulcan into near invisibility under the ship's unnatural darkness. It wasn't as if Chakotay would have seen anything interesting in Tuvok's expression, anyway--Vulcan discipline rendered the alien's face as emotionless as his voice, making him a steady (if uninspiring) companion in such fights.
"Shields at sixty percent..."
"A fuel line has ruptured," Torres's voice added to the litany from somewhere out of Chakotay's sight. "Attempting to compensate..."
This time, Chakotay felt the belly of his ship split open under the force of a torpedo strike too distant to count as a hit, too near to be ignored as a miss. Even so, he couldn't help smiling, just a little, at Torres's roar of frustration as she kicked and pummeled her panel at the back of the craft.
"Dammit!" Her voice fairly dripped with the Klingon anger she'd unwillingly inherited from her mother's contribution to her genes.
"We're barely maintaining impulse. I can't get any more out of it--" Chakotay sensed the next shot coming, easing their craft into a turn he hoped would be fast enough without blowing out their damaged engines.
"Be creative."
Torres exploded a Latino curse in his direction. "How am I supposed to be `creative' with a thirty-nine-year-old rebuilt engine--" "Maquis ship!" The gray, leathern face of a mature Cardassian flashed onto the viewscreen, blotting out the starscape. "This is Gul Evek of the Cardassian Fourth Order. Cut your engines and prepare to sur--" Chakotay interrupted his piloting only long enough to close the comm channel with the heel of his hand.
"Initiating evasive pattern omega..." Something let loose with a crash and whoosh! of flame. Chakotay ducked his head away from the rain of sparks that singed his close-cropped hair, and keyed the sequence. "Mark!"
The ship jerked like a rabid dog, then started to run.
When Chakotay had been a boy only just taking the first steps into what would become the journey of his manhood, he'd traveled out west with his father and uncle, stayed awake for almost three days in woods so very like where his ancestors used to live, and chanted to keep himself brave as his father and uncle tattooed the first lines into his virgin face. Remember, they had told him, what you are made of. Every time you look in a mirror, remember that less than five hundred years ago, the grandfathers who preserved these marks for you stood in woodlands light-years away with their knives and arrows, throwing sticks and shields, and fought a wave of ignorant invaders so that you and other children like you could be born and taught and tattooed in the way of our people for centuries to come. What his father didn't talk about was how, despite the mighty battles waged by Chakotay's forefathers, those ignorant invaders had taken