Caretaker - L. A. Graf [76]
* Janeway waved Paris to move alongside her as the sickbay doors hissed shut behind them. Already the bridge felt irritatingly distant, and she resented the time it would take her to move from here to there.
Sometimes she wished intraship beaming weren't so risky and inconvenient.
"It's too dangerous to send you back to the planet right now," she told Neelix and Kes over one shoulder. They had to run to keep up with her quick jog, but Janeway didn't feel inclined to check her stride, even when Tuvok and Kim hurried up from behind to join them. "I suggest you get to quarters."
Neelix won himself some points by stopping immediately and pulling Kes's arm to keep her with him. If nothing else, at least he knew hew to stay out of the way. "Wait till you see how they live!" Janeway heard him whisper to his paramour as she and the crew piled into the waiting turbolift.
You assume I can keep us all alive long enough for her to enjoy, she thought back at him with a sigh. It wasn't the kind of thought worth dwelling on. Forcing herself not to fidget, she endured the ages-long turbolift ride to the bridge in silence, too keyed up to think of anything but orders worth saying.
She wasted no time once the lift released into the bridge's busy clamor. "Bring weapon systems on-line," she told Tuvok as he headed for his station. "Red alert."
Chakotay and the Maquis were ahead of them, already cutting under the belly of the first Kazon ship as the Array loomed large and dark ahead of them. Don't get too close! she warned the Maquis commander. Bad enough that the Caretaker still spat fat gobs of white light toward the planet's surface at irregular intervals--they still didn't know enough about Kazon artillery to count on their shields as a defense. Besides, Janeway had a feeling Chakotay's ship wasn't in much better condition than hers after their passage through the Array's displacement wave.
She slipped into her command chair with Paris still hovering at her left shoulder, unwilling to take her eyes off the sleek alien ships now veering outward to start their first orbit of the Array.
Tuvok glanced up from his panel. "The lead Kazon ship is hailing us, Captain."
Janeway nodded, but didn't look at him. "Onscreen."
For some reason, even giving the command didn't entirely prepare her for the sudden disappearance of her window on the doings outside. When Jabin's cracked, dust-stained face rippled into being on the viewscreen, she was irritated just to be seeing him there, even before he opened his mouth in a broken-toothed smile.
"Have you come to investigate the entity's strange behavior, too, Captain?" he asked with false good humor.
Janeway wasn't interested in engaging in any sort of masculine charade.
"All we care about is getting home, Jabin. We're about to transport over to the Array to see if we can arrange it."
The Kazon leader cracked a harsh laugh. "I'm afraid I can't permit you to do that."
"We have no dispute with you."
"We have a dispute with anyone who would challenge us," Jabin countered. And this time, Janeway noticed, he didn't even make the effort to smile.
She chewed back an impulse to shout at him, saying simply, "This is ridiculous. We have no intention of challenging you." We have no intention of being here long enough to even care what happens to you!
But Jabin was already signaling angrily at someone not directly in line with the screen. "And I have no intention of letting anyone with your technological knowledge board the Array."
"Jabin, we can discuss this like two civilized--!"
He cut off communications with a snarl, and Janeway saw the flash of the Kazon ship's weapons fire before she even finished her plea. "I guess we can't."
The thunder of the energy packets detonating against their screens seemed to cause more sound and fury than actual damage, but Janeway couldn't discount the intent behind the unprovoked attack.
"Shields are holding," Tuvok reported.
She nodded