Equinox - Diane Carey [41]
"All that is short-term," Janeway said. "You're either done drowning pretty soon, or you're dead. Ransom's experience lasted years. What does that do?"
"Like slow starvation, then," Chakotay altered his analysis. "All you know is that you're in a ditch with a load of bread and what people think doesn't matter. The world is great because you have the bread. It doesn't matter that people are looking down at you because you're a bum. A while later, you've eaten and hunger isn't your motivator anymore, and you start
thinking about how nice a real bed might feel. You start to notice the people staring at you because you're smelly. Well, maybe I want a little more than to sit here and eat bread. Your other priorities are coming back online. Motivations rebuild like a computer reloading. Eventually you start to realize what you were trying to do before you were starving and drowning. Maybe you still want to try that."
"Starving, drowning ... when you empathize, you don't beat around the bush, do you?" Janeway blinked, overwhelmed by the clarity of his perceptions, hoping she was interpreting them right. "You're saying Ransom might be satisfied, even happy, to be a researcher again? He might not want the first officer's posting?"
He began now to doubt his own logic. "I'd still want it, but that's me. I'm just saying that the Equinox crew is acting too cool to be normal. They gave themselves up for dead, made their peace, and suddenly they were resurrected."
"And the near-death experience has driven more than one person to instability."
"They'll come back, is what I'm saying," Chakotay tried to explain. "They haven't had enough time to settle down, remember what they really want, who they are, or even decide who to trust or what their mission should be. But they will. They'll slowly 'reload their programming.'"
"Yes, it's what's so unique about humans," Janeway added. "We're never satisfied for long. If we were, we'd never advance. We'd just settle down with the bread and the bed and eat and sleep ourselves into atrophy."
"What are you going to do? Tell him regulations give you authority to order him to abandon his ship, but you're going to ignore regulations when it comes to his seniority?"
His reissuing of the critical question, this time, couldn't be brushed off or turned philosophical. It was real, tangible, and problematic. Soon it would gain a sharp reality, and things would have to change.
Janeway entertained a brief, insane moment of handing command over to him and Ransom and retiring to some nice pink planet somewhere.
"Starfleet regulations represent solidity for us," she told him. Her voice was a cold rasp, deep in her throat. "Regulations are civilization. They're my anchorage. If we're going to be saved, regulations will be what saves us."
He nodded, flexed his legs and placed both feet on the carpet, and leaned forward. For a second or two he gazed at the carpet, then looked up, then stood up.
"Understood," he said, unreadable. "Whatever you wish, Captain. I'll back you up."
"I'm in."
Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram had known since the beginning that something very special was going on. Discovery of a totally new Starfleet ship, so far-flung from Federation space, had raised the heart rates and metabolism, not to mention the spirits, of everyone on board. Even Tuvok and Seven, two separate interpretations of Vulcanness, were reacting with heightened senses. Now the EMH had another group of
physiologies to track, to log, to care for. There was something pleasant about that, even for a hologram.
This