Equinox - Diane Carey [4]
"Time!" Ransom demanded.
'Ten seconds!"
More screaming, but this time it was the panicked horror of human screams that rang with such poignance on the captain's human ears. This sound, by far, was more ghastly than the shriek of the alien invaders. Here they came!
Through the rifts, racing with demonic speed, the translucent, slug-tailed aliens batted around the bridge. Two, three-Ransom lost count almost instantly. The aliens entered a blindingly fast holding pattern for enough moments to notice, then split up.
Each one targeted a human. Wildly, Ransom squeezed the rifle's firing pad. The phasers squealed, harder and hotter. The overhead formation of wraiths broke. Green haze flashed around the bridge, distorting the crew's senses like strobe lights in a bar.
Attack!
CHAPTER
2
"WE'VE GOT A DISTRESS SIGNAL, CAPTAIN."
"Isolate."
"You're not going to believe this. I don't believe it-"
"Well, Chakotay, let me see it and we'll decide later to believe it or not."
Even through her own calm words, Kathryn Janeway caught a hint of nervousness. She knew what he saw, and she didn't believe it either. Federation distress frequency, here! Sixty thousand light-years from Federation space. Was someone baiting them?
The Starship Voyager had answered plenty of distress calls in the past five years, a tricky and haunting decision in itself for the captain of a powerful ship. Was it interfering to answer a call for help in a quadrant where the Federation had no authority? She didn't
know. So she had made her own policy and always answered, sometimes to the good, other times ... other results.
But this signal might as well be coming from her own ship-a Starfleet vessel where no Starfleet vessel should be, stranded impossibly far from home, on a constant quest to fulfill her duty to get home.
"Captain Ransom!... The Equinox!... Under attack! ... assistance!"
Chilling. She hunched her shoulders. No-relax. The crew was watching.
Chakotay's shadow fell across her, warm and comforting as always, his wide shoulders bearing so much of her burden that Janeway sometimes enjoyed the temptation to shift it all to him, to have a captain again instead of always being one.
Around them the security of the starship provided a nest of safety in a hostile quadrant The ship was in arguably good shape after a couple of lucky trades in the past month or so. As the screen struggled to focus before her, she became insecure in her privilege.
Before her an image crackled, its transmission damaged at the source.
A captain in trouble, rocking with violence in his command chair, begging for help in a quadrant without a heart.
"Captain Ransom! The Equinox!... under attack!...
assistance-"
A Federation vessel? Not here, not a science ship, at this distance. It had to be a sensor echo or a malfunction. Janeway parted her lips, about to ask for a systems
check, but Chakotay would already have done that. She held her tongue rather than insult him.
Instead she looked to her other side, to Seven of Nine. The lovely and terminally stoic young woman was coldly playing the message. Seven glanced at the captain, picked up a nuance, and muted the sound.
Together they watched the terror on the screen, saw the panicked crew rushing behind their desperate captain as he crumpled into his chair and pressed his shoulders into its backrest, his expression carved with rage as he fired his phaser rifle again and again.
"Ransom," she murmured. "He was in command of a science vessel. The Equinox..."
"The distress call was transmitted approximately fourteen hours ago," Seven reported.
Janeway narrowed her eyes, about to ask the most important question, but Chakotay spared her by answering i t himself. "Three point two light-years."
That tied it. No echo.
Janeway's heart jumped, then pounded. Three light-years! She forced her breathing to remain normal. "Try to get a fix