Equinox - Diane Carey [26]
"They're going to find out eventually."
"Not if we keep them out of the research lab. And away from the warp core injectors. Be careful what you say around their crew. And that includes old girlfriends."
A tacit warning, yes, yet very serious. For a captain to interfere in the relationships of his crew was one of the most delicate lines a commander could stride.
Janeway, he guessed, would agree. She seemed to run her ship with very little personal involvement
among the crew members. Despite having been locked in the Delta Quadrant with virtually no hope of fanning out into more human society, it would've been normal and expected for people on the ship to start pairing up. Ransom hadn't seen much evidence of that so far. Maybe they were all holding back. Or Janeway had managed to lower a veil of deceptive hopes for them, convincing them they really could get back just by going fast.
They couldn't. Ransom knew that Warp eight or warp twelve, it didn't matter. The distance between here and the Alpha Quadrant still swallowed an entire normal lifetime. If they did get back by just flying, the survivors would be old men and women-without families, without homes, with no stakes-whose relatives had all but forgotten them, whose children had grown up without them and gone off to build their own lives. Their ships would be out of date, obsolete, backward, relics. Only their information about the Delta Quadrant would be worth anything; and the fact was that if space couldn't be bent, then it didn't matter. The Alpha citizens couldn't come back and forth fast enough to make any bond between the quadrants. If distance could not be surmounted, then time would beat them. So what was the information worth? Nothing. Going home by going straight was useless, hopeless. Pointless. Janeway was fooling herself and her crew.
A sagging sensation cloyed Ransom as he moved away from Max before those thoughts popped out. He took a big chunk of food from his first officer's plate, popped it in his mouth, said, "Not bad," by means of a
farewell, and headed out of the mess hall. He didn't like leaving Max with that posture, that defeated and fearful slump, worried that all this comfort would be critically temporary. But if they stayed and talked...
He didn't like the closeness of strangers. The crew was enjoying meeting new friends, but for a captain it was different. Janeway wasn't going to be the comrade he'd hoped for. He couldn't expect her to be. She ran a completely different kind of ship, one with different formative experiences over the past five years. Eventually she might be forced to understand, if things went the way Ransom expected. Too late, though. And he didn't have time to be her conditioner.
"Rudy!"
Halfway back down the corridor, Ransom discovered with some tension that Max had followed him out Neither wanted to be seen talking secretly by any more others than absolutely necessary. Funny-though half the size, Equinox had provided more privacy. Of course, on Equinox, they hadn't had to talk much after a while. They only had two jobs. Defend and propel. No chitchat No philosophy class.
"We can't talk here, Max," Ransom aborted as his first officer fell out of his jog.
"We have to talk somewhere." Burke lowered his voice. "I don't think they're the type to have security recordings all over the ship. They don't have any reason to. Please-I'm not sure what to do."
"All right, all right" Though he did not stop walking, Ransom slowed down.
Now that he had permission to speak, Burke fell dis-
turbingly silent. Unable to leave his first officer with that question What should I do? pending, Ransom plunged into it.
"I've skimmed her logs. She's done more than bend the rules. She's openly and with deliberation participated in the Delta Quadrant Answering a distress call is arguably against the rules. To hear some strict interpretations, even existing in somebody else's territory is against the rules! How can we deal with that in our situation? Nobody's ever been