Equinox - Diane Carey [19]
"I'm impressed," Janeway said. "It took me most of my training to understand what a captain has to do under pressure. I trained for it, studied other captains, other situations ... you never did that, yet you handled the situation when it faced you."
"I'm a scientist, not a battle captain," Ransom agreed. "Promotion was a surprise for me. When I discovered the Yridians, I was a science officer whose captain was in a coma. I wasn't even technically in
charge of the mission. If the captain had come out of the coma instead of dying, he'd have gotten the mission credit. Instead, I got it and they gave me a ship of my own. I never expected that."
"You deserved it. You were the one who traced the Yridians and their living settlements, not your captain."
"Oh, I deserved that part," he said with a laugh. "But not a whole ship of my own. When they made me a captain, I thought they meant captain of research, not captain of a ship."
"What were you doing when the Caretaker..."
"Kidnapped us?"
He didn't seem as bothered by revisiting the event as Janeway thought he might be, as she sometimes was in the dark hours of off-watch.
"We were as close to safe space as we could be without sitting on top of a Starbase. We were doing bio-scrapings of a comet-washed asteroid belt. Can you believe it? Simple as putting on your boots! It was a milk run. We were just learning how to fly the Equinox. None of us even knew the ship very well. We learned the hard way."
Janeway gestured him around a curve toward the as-trometrics lab. "Science ships aren't really built to take the kind of pounding you've been enduring."
"She's a terrific ship," Ransom quickly defended. "I never knew she could take so much. She never broke down, not critically. Even with her trunks spilled and her electrical guts ripped out, she's still capable of warp speed and shields. Funny... when I first came on
board her, I didn't really like her very much. I was used to the big Berengaria-class lab barges."
"Sometimes I think of Voyager," Janeway said, "as an island instead of a ship."
"Oh, not me. I'm all too aware of being on a ship in the middle of a big empty sea. Equinox has never seemed as secure as an island. That's where you're lucky."
"Well, now we're all lucky." Janeway offered one more smile before donning her captain-aplomb as they strode into the astrometrics lab.
Inside, Tuvok, Seven, and Maxwell Burke were at the console, studying graphics of both Voyager and Equinox on the large domescreen. The two ships were flying in formation, as indeed they were in real life, and the computer was duplicating their positions and energy emissions for purposes of analysis.
Janeway took two seconds to appreciate the loveliness of those graphics. Not only functional, they were beautiful to look upon.
Seven looked up. "I've run a thermographic analysis of our shields," she reported. Without Janeway's asking, she worked at the enhance controls, and the graphics above changed.
Dozens of hotpoints appeared and disappeared around the shield sphere that enveloped both ships, each point a crackle of violent en ergy as if something were trying to break through. Janeway realized with a spearing tension that they hadn't beaten off the assault-it was still going on.
"It revealed multiple stress points," Seven explained.
"We believe they're the result of alien attempts to infiltrate our vessels."
Now that that was confirmed, Janeway also noticed a certain orderliness about the flashes of hotspots. They appeared around the ship not in random order, but in a repeated sequence. As she watched, the sequence changed slightly, then repeated itself over and over again.
Tuvok stepped closer and indicated the screens. "Each time a fissure opens within a meter of our shields, it weakens them by point three percent."
Glancing now at the numbers and factors displayed by the lower consoles, Janeway looked up again at the graphic display and