Equinox - Diane Carey [2]
"Oh, God!" Gilmore's hands clamped over her mouth.
Inside the chamber, the creature went into some kind of convulsion, heaving its insides out all over the chamber walls until it finally slumped and its shrieking died to a low whine. As they watched, unable to activate the Ankari cylinder to take the creature back as easily as they had brought it here, the creature withered to half its size and began to desiccate before their eyes.
Nauseated, Maria Gilmore blinked at the chamber she had been so proud moments ago to have built. She clutched her arms to her chest, hands clenched, her expression pitiful.
Digesting the facts faster, Ransom stepped to the chamber wall and watched the last drying phase of the creature's death. "Max, is it dead?" he asked.
Burke indulged in a hopeless sigh. "Yeah. Something about the multiphasics. Those membranes can't take it.
If we could've held it here just a couple of minutes, the nucleogenics might... might..."
When his voice faded off, Ransom looked at him. Burke was peering into his screen.
"Max?" Ransom prodded. "Come on, give."
Parting his lips to speak, Burke was only able to offer a panting excitement that brought back the sweat beads on his forehead. "Rudy-it's still here!" He held a hand toward the monitor as if pointing out a window. "The enhancement properties are lingering!" Fiercely he swiveled to his captain. "Let me test the remains! Give me the authorization for autopsy!"
"What if it's sentient?" Gilmore protested.
"That doesn't matter now!" Burke reacted to an argument not yet made. "It's dead, Maria. Rudy, it's dead-"
"And there's no information so far that it's intelligent," Ransom agreed. "We tried everything. It was like trying to communicate with a cat."
Burke slipped from his chair and stood up. "There's a time limit here."
Effectively prodded, Ranso m nodded.
"Do it."
As Burke rushed to his work on the bubbling corpse, Ransom turned to Maria Gilmore, quaking at his side.
"If you're lost at sea, you eat fish," he told her. "If this is what we think it is, then we've got a ticket out of the Delta Quadrant. Paroled... from a mighty long sentence."
CHAPTER 1
OR A SENTENCE TO BROIL IN HELL.
Science vessel, mouth of hell... explain the difference.
His vision blurred from a scalp wound on his forehead, Captain Ransom gripped the arms of his command chair and endured another shattering energy punch on his ship's shields. In his periphery he saw sparks blow forward from some unfortunate console behind him, but he didn't turn to look. Uncontainable free-roaming energy fractured the deflectors again.
He murmured an encouragement to the ship. Despite constant punishment, tough old Equinox was still standing up to the torture of unseen attack time after time. If only there were another ship to shoot at-a solid target would be so much easier for him and the crew to understand, to focus upon.
Red Alert flashed relentlessly. He kept meaning to turn it off. They were almost always at Red Alert these days. The flashing didn't help. They were beyond panic.
The ship, too, was in electrical panic, as if it actually knew. Racing along at high warp while under siege, the sturdy science vessel heaved itself forward on a spatial plane, spitting and clawing its way along while her shields sparkled in destruction's grip.
Rudy Ransom was dully aware of the crew members around him rushing from station to station, covered with grime, frayed to the last nerve ending, every one of them doing double duty every day-John Bowler, Dotty Chang, Ed Regis. There was Max Burke, of course, doing his best to fill the shoes of exec, even though his specialty was tactical, and he hadn't been ready for promotion. Some promotion ...
Ransom winced in empathy as Burke tripped on a peeled-back piece of hull plating, his foot snagged in a dent. Chunks of debris swung on frayed cables from the ceiling, unrepaired, not even cut out of the way. Exposed circuitry