Caretaker - L. A. Graf [25]
"Captain, something's out there!"
She turned to face him, recrossing the bridge to lean against the railing below him. "I need a better description than that, Mr. Kim."
"I don't know." But he blurted it, and Paris could see the embarrassed color rise into Kim's face as the ensign hurried to compile enough information for a better reply. "I'm reading...
I'm not sure what I'm reading!"
"Can you get the viewscreen operational?"
"I'm trying. ..."
It sputtered to life with a great roar of static, and Paris whirled to face it as though expecting another attack. Surges and hisses flared across the screen's surface, twining together and apart as the image beyond them fought its way to the foreground. At first, Paris thought it was a city, and that Kim had somehow captured a nearby planet's visual transmission. Then the stars filling the space all around the weird structure gradually faded into view, and Paris realized that what he'd taken for buildings were only the smallest in an eerie collection of struts, arches, and pylons that bristled across the surface of some sort of long, flat orbital structure. Energy pulsed and leapt between the insectoid spires, finally throwing itself out into space where it seared off into distant infinity. Like a lighthouse, Paris thought.
Or a radio signal.
Near the belly of the giant array, a tiny speck of matter glittered in the reflections of the great device's waste light.
Paris only knew it was the Maquis ship by the trail of text at the bottom of the viewscreen, identifying the stolen vessel's registration.
"Captain..." Kim's voice was too quiet, almost numb compared to the chaos around him. "If these sensors are working, we're over seventy thousand light-years from where we were." He looked over at Janeway with an expression too stunned to even be afraid.
"We're on the other side of the galaxy!"
Chapter 6
The other side of the galaxy. Janeway moved carefully away from Paris and the ruined helm, closing her hands on the smoke-stained railing so she could lean on something without showing weakness in front of her crew.
The other side of the galaxy!
They didn't prepare you to hear things like that when they trained you at the Academy. Negotiations, combat, the intricacies of shipboard policies and politics, all the possibilities of starfaring life that a captain could reasonably look forward to--these things had filled the days and nights of Janeway's career, not wild speculation about what procedures to follow when your Ops officer reports you've been transported seventy thousand light-years from home.
So she fell back on the basics. "What about the Maquis ship?"
Kim blinked down at his panel as though the smoke still swirling through the bridge were stinging his eyes. "I'm not reading any life signs on the Maquis ship."
"What about that--" Janeway jerked her chin toward the spiny tangle dominating Voyager's main screen. "--that Array?"
"Our sensors can't penetrate it."
She studied the rhythmic flashes throbbing out from the center of the structure, watching them sparkle off into the distance and vanish.
"Any idea what those pulses coming from it are, Mr. Kim?"
"Massive bursts of radiant energy..." He called up more readings, and Janeway waited as patiently as the current chaos would let her. Down by the viewscreen, Paris had moved Stadi's corpse off to one side and started putting out fires on the helm console. "They seem to be directed toward a nearby G-type star system," Kim reported at last.
"Try hailing the Array," Janeway told him.
The ensign nodded acknowledgment, and Paris looked up from the helm as though waiting for her orders as Janeway made her way around the bridge to push debris away from whatever consoles still functioned. You're not an officer here, she thought with some vehemence. I will not give you even the smallest responsibility under conditions such as this.
But it wasn't a confrontation she intended to have right now.
The chirp of her comm