Equinox - Diane Carey [33]
"You'd be surprised," he commented. How I've changed. "I'm not the ... what did you once call me?"
Her eyes flickered with questions, then she remembered. "P'tak."
He grinned. "I'm not the p'tak I used to be. Let me prove it to you."
Reverie brought an uneasy smile to her shapely mouth and guilt to her eyes. "Don't get me wrong. It's good to see you again ... but ten years ..."
Burke let his expression tell his thoughts. 'Tom Paris?"
She seemed relieved, but not happy. 'Tom Paris."
Oh, well. "You could do worse."
With B'Elanna thoroughly involved in that old triangle, Burke slipped back to the command station, knelt, and recovered his tricorder, using a little sleight of hand to also retrieve the remote off the bolt. He slipped it into his hand and clenched it, tapped the schematic, which now read, "DOWNLOAD COMPLETE." He stood up again, thanking his stars that he'd waited long enough. There wouldn't have been a second chance.
Holstering his tricorder and hiding his deception, he turned to her. "So ... we're on for dinner? Just you and me?"
"Get going!" she said. "Or I will throw you in the brig."
As he left, he felt her eyes on him.
Better there, than other places.
The soft lights and controlled atmosphere of Voyager created a falsely reassuring environment for both crews. Although the crew members were hurrying about in preparation for a defense against the unknown, concentrating on the shields even before the problem of
getting out of this altogether, Chakotay had expected the Equinox people to take the abandonment of their ship worse than they had. He had to give them credit. To the last, they were accepting Captain Janeway's questionable order to release a functional ship that was legally under the authority of its captain.
"Before we abandon the Equinox," he continued, "we should try to salvage any useful components."
Around him in the mess hall, a place that had become the clubhouse for the stressed crew and a meeting place for decisions-somehow more accommodating right now than the briefing room-Harry Kim, Maria Gilmore, and several others huddled around PADDs and coffee. Chakotay liked this-even in adversity, they were starting to feel like shipmates.
"Let us start with your dilithium crystals," he suggested, looking at Gilmore.
"What's left of them," she conditioned. "I'm afraid we're down to a few isograms."
Kim tried to make a joke. "That's barely enough to power the sonic showers."
It wasn't funny, or very encouraging.
Gilmore shifted uneasily. "Can I make a suggestion?"
Chakotay gestured. "Please."
"Forget about primary systems. They're too badly damaged. Let's focus on supplies. We've picked up a few items that might come in handy." Showing him the information on one of the PADDs, she clarified, "We've got a dozen canisters of mercurium... and two kilotons of kemacite ore."
Chakotay turned to Kim. 'Tell Neelix to make room in cargo bay one."
"Right."
"Could you use a synaptic stimulator?" Gilmore asked.
"Depends," Chakotay said. "What is it?"
"A neural interface you wear behind your ear. It taps into your visual cortex and shows you different alien vistas. Think of it as a poor man's holodeck."
Kim smiled. "So that's how you kept yourself entertained."
"Beats checkers ... the Ponea gave it to us."
"Never heard of them," Chakotay encouraged.
She smiled, this time more genuinely. "We called them 'the life of the Delta Quadrant.' They see every first contact as an excuse to throw a party."
Another clue about life aboard Equinox. Every first contact was an excuse to throw a party. At least it was to everyone else. Chakotay divined from this that life aboard the other ship had been no party when new life forms and civilizations were discovered. It must've taken a horrible lot of bad encounters to drive a Starfleet crew to shun first contacts.
Gilmore gazed at the table. "I wish we'd encountered more species like that..."
Neither Chakotay nor Kim said anything,