Equinox - Diane Carey [54]
Two seconds ... three ... there it was!
A tailed alien, dinosaurian and mythical, surged through the fissure and flew like a fruit bat around the bridge. It rushed at Burke, but then was jolted back by the force field they kept permanently erected on the bridge. Caught, the alien instantly reversed itself like a high diver making a flip, but it hit the other side of the force field that had instantly snapped up.
Trapped!
In midair the alien whipped up and down, back and forth, as if its tail were a flag, its extended clawed arms the pole. Screaming hideously, shrieking so high-pitched a sound that it matched its own breakthrough tone.
Ransom and the others watched together as it thrashed itself to death, striking the force-field grid and electrocuting itself at every hit. Only a few more seconds ...
When the alien finally suffered a final attack and slithered in a heap to the deck, Ransom felt less for it than he ever had. Finally, the damned slimy things had taken the last bit of humanity from him. Or Janeway had.
To Michaelson he snapped, "Get that to the lab."
He swung around as Lessing's console bleeped and the now-helmsman said, "Sir, the engines are up and running!"
"Set a course for the Alpha Quadrant, maximum warp. Engage."
"Keep firing!"
Captain Janeway clung to her chair and focused on a dozen places about the bridge in sequence. The ship was firing freely now on Equinox, whose crew was aboard and had stolen the deflector field generator. If Ransom hadn't been a criminal before, he was one now.
The alien tone squealed in her ears, deafening her to the rote responses of the crew around her.
She pushed out of her chair. "Arm yourselves!"
At his station, Harry Kim was sheeted with sweat. "Fissures are opening, all decks!"
All-
Dividing her attention between the bridge and every other deck, Janeway felt her brain boil with determination to defend her ship and crew at any cost. Above her, ragged and glowing bulbs formed and scarlike fissures opened within them, expanding as quickly as an envelope opening. She took aim and fired.
Then another one opened-and another! Four! Six!
With her single action, she gave permission for all the others to fire at will.
Rifts cracked the bridge's atmospheric fabric with alarming randomness now. Phasers fired and aliens shrieked in their rage and murderousness.
At the center of the bridge, Janeway was the pivot of all the action. She spun and fired, spun and fired, fighting for control to keep from shearing off someone's head in the instantaneous reflex of shooting again and again at targets that just opened up here, there-
She heard the scream from behind her an instant too late. As she tried to spin, she tripped on the command chair's mounting. She fumbled.
The alien shriek was millimeters away when she recovered. Before her rushed a demonic face, stretched into the grimace of an unmistakably animalistic predator. As it struck her, she heard a thousand sounds-the alien tone, their shrieking voices, the screams of her crew, the whine of phasers, the pummeling of her own heartbeat, and Chakotay's anguished cry as the alien dive-bomber struck her at full strafing speed.
"Captain!"
CHAPTER 10
"THE SHIELD-GRID IS BACK IN PLACE. THE ALIENS ARE
staying clear."
The victory in Max Burke's voice was unadulterated. They'd survived again, but again at a cost. Before, it was always a cost in lives. Today it was a spiritual cost.
Rudy Ransom kicked aside a bump plate among the litter on his bridge. "Are sensors picking up Voyager?"
Off his console, Noah Lessing reported, "It looks like they're under attack."
The report carried a loaded question Should we go back and help?
Disturbed to the bottom of his guts, Ransom added up his options. They'd come this far. Janeway had pushed him farther over the line.
"Maintain course," he said.
Sweating and working to control an inward shudder,
Max Burke stepped down to his captain's