Equinox - Diane Carey [13]
"Caretaker."
Captain Ransom sunk in his chair, comprehending the new weight upon them both.
Janeway's heart sank at his expression. She slipped her hands under his arms and got a grip on him to lift him to his feet. "We'll compare notes later. Let's get you to Voyager."
"Rudy? Are you alive? It's not a dream?"
"Max ... I thought they finally got you."
Captain Ransom slumped back in his diagnostic bed, but he reached across the short gap to the other bed and managed to catch Max Burke's wrist. Burke moved a little and found his captain's hand. Back from the dead. Suck blood now? Sleep in a coffin?
They already had been.
Ransom's legs were numb, but he could feel his toes through lingering mental and physical shock and the weakness of near starvation. Another slip through the noose just before it broke his neck. What about the others?
"How many alive?" he asked bluntly, raising his head with a struggle.
The Voyager's doctor scanned him with perfunctory disinterest but seemed a little bothered by the question.
Strange-an Emergency Medical Hologram shouldn't be bothered by anything at all.
"Your crew suffered many injuries, Captain Ransom," The Doctor said. "We're treating them all." He paused, adjusted something on Ransom's treatment, then followed through on the question he couldn't avoid. "Captain Janeway will speak to you about your survivors."
His stomach cramping, Ransom squeezed Max Burke's hand, got a limited response, then let go of the grip. It would hurt only after another minute or two.
"Max, did they tell you how many?" he asked.
On the next bed, Burke closed his eyes a moment. "They only told me the captain wants to brief us when we're back to shape. I'd guess there's only a couple of handfuls of us left, Rudy. We know as well as they do what the last attack did."
A handful or two, out of a crew of eighty-seven. Four score and seven children ago ...
He pressed his head back on the rest. "It's awful to survive," he murmured.
"Rudy," Burke groaned, "you kept us going. There wouldn't be even a handful of us left if you'd died first. Nobody would know what happened to the Equinox." He sighed and rubbed his thigh, apparently aching. "I'm glad we didn't end up a 'missing in action' note on some Starfleet blotter. The others deserve more than that."
The others. The dead, he meant.
Years beyond tears, Ransom let his hands tremble a moment before clenching them. He watched blankly as
The Doctor puttered around him and Burke. While this went on he tilted his head and looked past the hologram to the other beds, where he thought he could make out Noah Lessing, Maria Gilmore, and Mike Franco on other beds in the ward, unconscious or sedated. There were two more beds in his line of sight, both with bodies on them, but these were covered with thermal blankets all the way up over the faces. Hadn't made it through treatment.
He let his eyes drift shut again and tried to relax the twitching muscles in his neck. The shock of having lived when he'd given himself up for finished-he couldn't absorb it. This could all be the last-second dream before blackout.
Perhaps thinking this was prying, The Doctor administered an inoculation to Burke and said, "Excuse me, gentlemen," and disappeared into a lab, leaving them alone.
"Rudy," Burke began, lowering his voice, "do they know about..."
"I don't think so." Ransom lowered his voice to nearly inaudible. "The critical areas are fully contaminated. Nobody'll be able to get in there for days. That'll give us time. I have to probe out their captain's attitude."
"Look at this ship! It's so clean ... and this bed! It's a bed!" Burke ran his hands down the blanket that covered his legs. His dark eyes were dull, shadowed, but hopeful. "No rips, no burns, the lights are on, smells good, heat, fresh air... I've never been on an Intrepid-class ship before. Have