Caretaker - L. A. Graf [21]
Janeway moved a few steps closer to the monstrous image, as though she might yet see something the ship's computers couldn't tell them.
"Analysis."
"Some kind of polarized magnetic variation," Kim reported.
Cavit leaned over the rail from next to the tactical station.
"We might be able to disperse it with a graviton particle field."
Janeway nodded without turning to him. "Do it."
Cavit hurried to wave the security officer away from the panel as the captain announced, "Red alert," and touched a hand to Stadi's shoulder.
"Move us away from it, Lieutenant."
"New heading," the pilot confirmed.
"Four-one-mark-one-eight-zero."
"Initiating graviton field," Cavit chimed in, and Paris felt the whole ship tremble as the first officer launched the powerful burst on its way.
Unlike the advancing displacement anomaly, there was no visual track to follow as the graviton field swelled out beyond the bow of the ship and met up with the onrushing enemy. Paris thought he glimpsed a quick flutter in the displacement wave's integrity at about the point when he knew it and the field would likely cross paths. But it wasn't a clear or distinctive image, and an instant later he heard Kim announce nervously, "The graviton field had no effect," and knew he must have imagined the breach.
His heart started to thunder inside him.
"Full impulse," Janeway commanded.
Stadi obeyed without acknowledgment, the ship humming with power as she brought it about. Paris wished suddenly, emphatically, for a station at which to sit, some way to be useful, to help.
Kim remained glued to his readouts. "The wave will intercept us in twenty seconds..."
"Can we go to warp?"
Stadi shook her head, still frantically working her controls.
"Not until we clear the plasma field, Captain."
"... eight seconds..."
Clearing the space in two swift strides, Janeway slapped at the intercom on the arm of her command chair. "Brace for impact!"
"... three..."
The captain's voice still echoed in the decks below them as the hand of God seized hold of the ship and flung it into the void.
* Stadi swallowed a scream as the very fabric of her reality splintered into a hundred unique cries of desperation and pain.
She hunched over the conn, fighting for control of her mind now that control of the ship was impossible. Personal discipline must come first, a voice from far in her past told her gently.
After this, all other things will follow.
But how could one find peace when the empathy that bound a Betazoid so strongly to her crewmates was twisted back against her as a torture?
All her early fears about close contact with the mentally powerful but untrained human race crashed over her in a horrifying wave of regret.
"How can you stand it?" she'd asked her aunt. She remembered being small, and reed-flat, not yet having come into the womanhood that would give her full understanding of the control her aunt seemed to wear so effortlessly, like a comfortable robe.
"All their thinking, all their feeling, all the time!"
Aunt Shenzi had lived with humans for longer than Stadi had even been alive at this time. A government worker of some sort, whose interactions with the human-run Federation kept her locked away on Earth for sometimes years at a time. "It isn't all the time," she told Stadi. "Only when they feel about something very strongly."
From what little Stadi had seen, with humans that was almost always.
"But don't they take away your self?" Stadi had protested. "Crisa says humans push their emotions all over you, until you can only feel what they feel, and none of what you really are." Crisa was seventeen, and had been to a Federation reception the year before where all of the young Starfleet ensigns had asked her to dance.
"Crisa isn't exactly a model of personal shielding,"