Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [144]
B’Elanna had understood none of it. All she could keep in her mind was the fact that these bastards were still breathing and her friend Max Burke was not.
Yes, Max had also willingly tried to kill her and the rest of Voyager’s crew. Yes, he was even guiltier than the few that had managed to survive the incident. Yes, Max’s betrayal had cut her more deeply than anything the others had done. Yes, yes, yes. But B’Elanna had known Max, since her brief unhappy stay at the Academy. She had even loved him in a way. Tassoni and the rest were strangers.
Janeway’s “redemption” was a perverse reward indeed if it was something these five could receive but Max couldn’t.
As these dark thoughts assailed her, Voyager took another jolt, causing her hand to slip as she reached for the ladder’s top rung. She flailed there for a second, barely maintaining her balance.
“Need a hand?” said someone above her. She looked up into a soft-featured brown face with sad dark eyes. It was Noah Lessing, one of Tassoni’s fellow survivors. Why does one of them pop up every time I think about Equinox ?
“Save it,” she said, hauling herself onto the deck beside him. “Unless you want to lose that hand.”
Lessing backed away, giving B’Elanna the room she needed to pass without having to touch him.
As she rounded the far corner, she saw the doors of the turbolift, apparently functional again, sliding open. Voyager’s first officer stood just inside, arms clasped behind his back, looking, as usual, as if he’d been carved out of some ruddy slab of granite.
“B’Elanna,” said Chakotay, beckoning. “Didn’t you hear the order? The captain wants us in the briefing room.”
“Coms are glitchy on the lower decks,” she said as she joined him.
“I’m sure you’ll get to it,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s on the list.”
Captain Kathryn Janeway was a prepossessing woman in a sort of don’t-make-me-put-you-out-the-nearest-airlock kind of way. She wasn’t one for practical jokes and she wasn’t stupid. So it was only with difficulty that B’Elanna was able to process what she was saying.
“It was an honest mistake, B’Elanna,” Janeway said. “You could say the whole thing is really my fault.”
B’Elanna stood by the still open briefing room door, seething. The nails of her left hand pressed hard into her palm as the anger inside her tried and failed to find some release.
“Honest mistake,” she repeated through her teeth.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Janeway. “Mr. Tassoni wanted to make himself useful. I knew you had your hands full with all these system malfunctions, so I told him to pitch in where he could.”
“And his idea of pitching in was to destroy the ship,” said B’Elanna.
“You are in error, Lieutenant,” said Seven, completely missing the venom in B’Elanna’s voice.
“Oh?” said B’Elanna softly. “I am, am I?”
“Clearly,” said Seven. “It’s obvious Crewman Tassoni’s intention was to avert potential danger, not create it.”
“You think so?” said B’Elanna.
“His modifications to Voyager’s base code allowed the ship to automatically compensate for several of the malfunctions caused by local subspace conditions,” said Seven. “Without them, this vessel might very well have suffered the fate you described.”
The others waited for the explosion from B’Elanna. Chakotay in particular seemed braced for, at the very least, a stream of purple invective.
None came.
“All right,” said B’Elanna in a close approximation of her usual tones. “Next time give me some warning.”
“Absolutely,” said the captain. Then, the disaster seemingly averted, she gestured for the engineer to take a seat.
“So,” said Chakotay, still watching B’Elanna as she slid into an empty chair. “What’s the big surprise?”
“What would you say,” said the captain with a grin, “if I told you that Mr. Kim has discovered the source of our subspace problems?”
It wasn’t an asteroid, but it resembled one. It was about two-thirds the size of Voyager and maintained