Equinox - Diane Carey [35]
"Oh... a terrible tragedy on Earth. I forget the year. Nineteen twenties, I think. Exploration vessel, sailing
ship, got caught in the Antarctic ice floes. Its crew tried to survive there, tried to save the ship, but the hull was screwed into place as the ice closed tighter and tighter. You know glacial ice is different from water ice, don't you?"
"Never really gave it a thought, sir."
"Packed snow is harder and denser than frozen water. It inexorably crushed the ship while the crew watched. The Endurance."
"Did they live?"
"I think most of them did. It's been a long time since I read the account... they certainly were survivors in the most heroic sense. They made a transantarctic trek. On foot."
"On foot-whew."
"But they had to watch their perfectly functional ship be slowly crushed. They just couldn't get her out of there." This must be something like that for the Equinox crew. Their ship is still functional, but it was time for the icy trek.
"Seems a shame," Kim went on, "to cut loose a whole Starfleet ship when we're so alone ourselves. I don't think our crew likes it any better than their crew does."
"Mmm," Chakotay uttered distractedly. "I wonder if we could fool the aliens into thinking the Equinox is still their target. Get them to follow the derelict while Voyager gets away."
Kim looked up. "Sir, we're still not sure what makes them attack us at all, never mind whether or not they'll follow Equinox instead of us."
"I know. But there's a certain logic in their attack, that's what bothers me. They didn't come after us when we first veered in. They didn't split up and come to meet us as we approached. They stayed with Equinox. I can't imagine why they would... as ships go, two Starfleet ships are basically similar. The same emissions, the same construction materials, the same pulsations ..."
"Are you saying they're intelligent?"
Chakotay shrugged, unwilling to go that far. "No evidence of that yet. If we had time, we could explore it. We've only got a few hours, barely enough to support our shield network, never mind try to communicate with something on another astral plane. There's obviously some higher evolution going on, after all, because they have heads and tails and some kind of hand. But so does a lizard."
Kim leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Do you agree with the captain? Is it right to order another captain to ditch his ship even though it's still under power? If it were derelict, that'd be different. What do you think?"
Hoping the rest of the crew would just opt not to think about this, Chakotay found himself caught, as first officers often do, between his captain and those who were looking up to him as the senior officer who represented the crew when he wasn't on command watch. There were subtle shifts of consultation in a ship's complement. The captain was on duty now; that made Chakotay the voice of the crew for a few hours. Kim felt able to bring a serious and troubling question to his first officer.
The fact that Chakotay didn't answer right away betrayed his doubts.
"It's complex, Harry," he began inadequately. "We haven't been faced with anything like this. The captain's winging it."
"But can she do this?"
"She's doing it. Captain Ransom is going along without protest."
"Would you do it?"
The question, so innocently and honestly posed, raised the hairs on the back of Chakotay's neck. Back up the captain? He would. Do the same thing?
"I don't know," he said. "There's a certain damnable flexibility built into Starfleet. There had to be. Look at us, after all. The regulations and laws were developed for a fleet that could contact each other in a dependable network all the way back to Starfleet Command. Nobody ever anticipated Voyager and Equinox. Would I do what Captain Janeway's doing? I can tell you that everything looks different when you change chairs. Captains aren't cut from the same mold. Ransom's got his own methods, his own tricks that got them this far. He's got his own timing, his own judgments, his own criteria for deciding