Equinox - Diane Carey [11]
Good. They'd found somebody else alive.
"I don't... believe ... we've met." A voice Chakotay didn't recognize. Sounded like the man was in pain.
"Ensign Harry Kim. This is Seven of Nine. I'm going to have to cut him out with a plasma torch. Talk to him. Keep him calm."
Then Seven's throaty voice, not really very calming, "State your name."
"Lessing ... Noah. What are you doing on this side of the galaxy?"
"The answer is complicated."
"I don't care where you're from... I'm just glad you're here."
Through the tube Chakotay could hear a plasma torch sizzle to work. He resisted the urge to climb up there and help. They could handle it, he knew, and there was hardly enough room up there for another person to go banging around.
"Do me a favor," Lessing murmured. "See if my legs are still there ... I haven't felt them in two days."
Chakotay winced and held his breath as the girl sniffed and began to recover against him. Please let the man's legs be there.
"Your limbs are intact," Seven said then, bluntly. At least it was the right answer.
"Thanks..."
"Seven, give me a hand over here," Kim asked then, and Chakotay got that feeling again that he should be up there.
"You will be alone for a moment," Seven's gravelly tone thrummed down the tube. "Do not be frightened."
Lessing's voice was weak but carried a thread of hope. 'Too late for that."
There was a crash of fallen debris back in the main section. Paris rummaging around, probably. How many more crew were holed up in cubbies all over this pathetic ship? And the uglier question-how many were lying desiccated, mummified by whatever force had invaded the ship?
He wondered how the other search parties were doing. Neelix leading a security team to the crew's quarters. The captain... heading for the bridge. What would she find there? His chest constricted with concern. He knew what she dearly wanted to find and what it might mean to her to have come so close to rescuing another Starfleet ship, to finally be the big sister to other desperate Federation waifs, to do the job a starship is really meant to do rather than just race through space on a thinly veiled hope to get home.
Where was the rest of this ship's crew? There should be nearly a hundred people here. They couldn't all be hiding. They couldn't all be dead, could they? Stacked in coffinless indignity in the hold by their pitiful shipmates?
He rejected the hideous image. They were here somewhere. But where? And where was the enemy?
Another dead one. Horribly disfigured. Teeth cracked, yellowed, offering a grotesque grin beneath dried eye sockets. Each one desiccated Kathryn Janeway's smoldering hopes a little more, and a little more.
Not all of the corpses were fully desiccated. Some bore the marks of partial mummification, others just flakes of destroyed skin tissue, as if they'd been sprayed with acid. Just as dead, though.
Her dreams of flying in like the avenging angel shriveled with each new discovery. She hadn't found a single living person yet. They weren't in the corridors or turbolifts.
Please, Chakotay, be having better luck.
And what a nightmare these corridors were. Whole door panels were blown completely off, lying smashed, cut in half, bent, crumpled, like the tons of other debris made of disembodied beams, ceiling panels, access hatches, trunk lids, and electrical guts. Much of it still hissed and fritzed, trying to keep doing whatever job it had done in life.
In life...
Behind her, Tuvok hadn't said a word, not a single word, since they'd left the secondary hull. That worried her. Stoicly he had followed as she led the way through the dark ship's neck, through the primary hull without the benefit of turbolifts, and finally up through the lift
tube toward the bridge. Even when he stepped forward to help her pry open the lift doors that led to the bridge, Tuvok still spoke not at all.
Janeway's mind divided between the Equinox's crew and her own. What were they all feeling? How awful was it to have the chance to rescue