Equinox - Diane Carey [46]
Feeling guilty that none of these major and haunting decisions were his, Chakotay caught up with her and set the pace a little slower. As he watched Gilmore at his side, he was thinking of Kathryn.
"Did you try to communicate with the aliens?"
"Of course we did," she said defensively. "Our universal translator only picked up random signals. We think it might've taken some damage."
"Did you try to repair it?"
"When we had time." She gazed at the carpet as they walked. "You think we're horrible, don't you?"
"What I think doesn't matter. It's Captain Janeway's interpretation of the law that matters now. We've never had a law enforcement role in the Delta Quadrant until now," he went on. "There was no one else who had sworn to live under our laws."
"Until now." Gilmore slowed down even more, to an uneasy stroll. She didn't have to hurry anymore, after all. "Please don't judge Rudy too harshly. I know this seems to you like a giant step, but for us it was a lot of little steps. An inch at a time. At first we tried to keep the nucleogenics alive and just borrow the power. If only that had worked! We tried for weeks to modify our containment chamber just to hold them for a few minutes and let them go back. When we tried a second time, a third-every time we really expected them to live. We really did. Every time we failed, there was just enough difference that we tried again. We kept getting little bits of hope that we could keep them alive and ourselves too. There were a few variations on a theme, but every time... they ended up dead."
"And each time, since they were dead anyway-"
"Yes, we used the nucleogenic matter. Of course! Why not? You would too, if you were in our shoes. Rudy kept trying to communicate with them and kept failing. We would've happily traded for their natural dead, like an organ donation. We didn't want to kill. But they wouldn't talk, or just plain couldn't. All they
did was attack and attack. When the aliens kept breaking through, we defended ourselves. That means more of them died. And, yes, we used the corpses. So would you."
Chakotay felt his chest constrict with the truth of it. She was right-this was different from indiscriminate slaughter. And she was also right that he might've done the same thing, given the same circumstances. They hadn't just shot into the water.
"We're scientists," she quietly reminded. "Science was our way to survive. We couldn't make it with speed and brute force and tactical advantages and sheer power like a starship could. After two years of trying to communicate, we gave up trying. Wouldn't you? They'd been viciously attacking us without ever pausing to learn signals or even try to talk to us. They were just killer bees, animals with some sense of organization who attacked us every chance they got. We defended ourselves, and some of them got killed. When they died during attacks, we used the matter. Then on Christmas Day three years ago, we got caught in a nova wash. We were completely stuck, trapped. We struggled for days to get out. Do you understand? We were dying by centimeters. We gave ourselves up for dead. It wasn't the way the story was supposed to end. I saw Rudy during that time ... he'd failed. Suddenly he hadn't just lost half his crew-he'd lost all of it. On New Year's Day he ordered us to summon one of the creatures with the Ankari device and use the matter for a boost. It worked. The creature died, and we lived. After a while, it wasn't so hard to summon
them when we needed to move ahead again. In Rudy's mind, he's hunting animals, not murdering people. He never jumped happily over that line. He zigzagged over it an inch at a time, until we were finally all the way over it."
"Captain Janeway's not going to see it that way," Chakotay warned. "Things are pretty cut and dried for her where regulations are concerned. In her mind, that's what has saved us."
"And what saved us was suspending the regula tions," Gilmore said. "Captain Janeway hasn't lost half her