Caretaker - L. A. Graf [80]
"We'll do our best. Kim out."
Torres looked up at the young Starfleet officer's sign-off, but Chakotay couldn't read the expression on her face.
"They're in trouble," he admitted needlessly.
Torres turned back to her panel. "Neither of us has enough firepower to stop that ship."
Hell, Chakotay thought, we barely even have a ship left! He thumbed through the readings on his comm, verifying for about the millionth time that they'd sustained no warp-core malfunctions or breaches to their antimatter pods. It was somehow undignified to think about going up like a junior sun with nothing to show for your effort but a good story once you got to the spirit realm.
His eyes slipped back up to the viewscreen, tracking Voyager's unsteady attempts at swerving its carved-up hull away from the cruiser's slashing. He couldn't help wondering what the point was of piloting a small antimatter bomb if you didn't plan to detonate it at least once in its lifetime. Plotting the Kazon's coordinates against its speed and size, Chakotay Found himself almost grinning with anticipation.
"I'm setting a collision course," he told Torres, still intent on his work. "But the guidance system is disabled--I'll have to pilot the ship manually." He cut off any protest she might have voiced by waving her off and commanding, "Get the crew ready to beam to Voyager."
Kind of a nice concept, he admitted to himself as Torres started shouting at the rest of the bridge crew to prepare an evacuation.
He got to rescue a Starfleet vessel and take it over, all in the same grand gesture. How many Maquis would ever get a chance to say that?
Opening a subspace channel, he kicked in the top impulse this dying artifact could give him. "Paris!" he shouted above the engines' whine. "My crew is coming over. Tell one of your crackerjack Starfleet transporter chiefs to keep a lock on me."
The first of the smaller Kazon ships veered frantically out of his path, phasers blazing but missing their mark, "I'm going to try to take some heat off your tail."
The first transporter beams began to sear the air somewhere out of sight behind him. Chakotay felt a certain relieved peace at hearing his crew lifted to at least some place of relative safety.
"Acknowledged," Paris answered, whether in response to Chakotay or the arrival of the first transports, Chakotay wasn't certain. The Maquis watched Voyager jerk briefly into warp, then fall back into normal space again. "But don't even think for a second this gets us even.
Your life is still mine, Poocuh.
Paris out."
Chakotay gritted his teeth and hung on to the console as the huge alien cruiser began its lumbering turn to face him. There was something distinctly unsatisfying about saving the life of a smart-ass. Maybe after he got on board Voyager, he'd teach Paris a few things about the counting of coup. Or if their crackerjack transporter tech turned out not to be so brilliant after all, he could always haunt Paris until the end of eternity and make his life completely miserable. That was almost worth looking forward to.
As he tore past Voyager and homed in on the Kazon monster, Chakotay found himself wishing he'd been able to come up from behind, as he'd first envisioned. He didn't have much left in the way of screens, and even those were down to allow the removal of his crew. Just get close enough, just get close enough-"almost" counts when you're playing with antimatter....
The Kazon loosed a ball of burning plasma that slammed the front of the ship with enough force to make the hull creak and scream.
Chakotay rose from his seat, leaning back toward Ops to shut down seals in the lower decks before the atmosphere breach could roar up and swallow him. Paris's voice came at him through the wailing of alarms.
"I'm getting you out of there, Chakotay--" "Not yet." Slapping down life-support to every deck but his, he threw the shields forward and cut impulse by a third. The next blast from the Kazon exploded a panel at the back of the bridge, but