Equinox - Diane Carey [55]
"There's not much we can do," Ransom agreed. "We'd be back in the same boat, literally. The shields from one ship can't protect both. We saw that. Janeway had her chance to make a united front. She decided to flash her feathers instead."
Burke nodded. "It's all right, Rudy. You did the right thing. They wouldn't back us up. At the first disagreement, they took us into custody."
"If they don't get killed, she might understand us a little more."
On the port-side monitor, a clear view of Voyager surging along with her nominal shields crackling and compromised bored to the guts of both men. They knew what that felt like. There was a strange and unsatisfying win in seeing Captain Janeway finally having to see what it had been for the Equinox crew.
Ransom felt his jaw stiffen. "She's only scratched the surface of the Delta Quadrant. Five years seems like a long time, but we're all still fifty years from home. Who's she kidding? This is home. Without the nucleo-genics, that ship is the end of their dreams. How long before her crew starts wanting real lives? Family lives? Futures with a chance for a home instead of crew quarters? A wife or husband instead of a department chief? They're young now, but that won't last."
"You're always thinking of us, aren't you?" Burke commented. "That's why we'd do anything for you. You're nothing like Janeway."
A tinge of guilt rammed through Ransom's chest. He
held up a hand. "No, Max, you're wrong. She's just like me. You saw the way she resists. She just hasn't been to the edge yet. She hasn't figured out that she won't last either. There's no magic youth potion, and she's ten or twenty years older than most of her crew. When will she start wishing for a peaceful retirement and a life of her own?" Ransom grasped the bridge rail and watched the monitor as Voyager's shields flashed in a Halloween display of color and light. "I hope she lives," he said. "She's got a lot to learn."
A locomotive made of rubber and gel and teeth and claws drove Janeway to the deck. She felt her pelvis, then her shoulder blades slam to the hard carpet as the side of her head scraped the rail's support stanchion. Energy crackled around her body from the contact. Phaser fire grazed her cheek, forcing her to roll to the right. Mocking her on the main screen was a clear view of the Equinox soaring off from under Voyager, rushing away to pursue her own captain's vision of survival.
As the single instant of attack telescoped and stretched out, she fell off the command chair's platform and down to the lower deck. It saved her life. The alien scraped by, an inch over her, driven off by Chakotay's phaser.
A burning sensation seared her left cheekbone, leaving her half blind and disoriented. Her skin crimped, her mouth tugged to the left as if stretched. Her neck felt as if it were cracking like scorched plastic. As she constricted her stomach muscles and forced herself up,
Janeway was faced with the horrid tableau of Chakotay firing again at another alien. The creature who had scraped Janeway now veered into the highest edge of the bridge celling, jackknifed, and struck Chakotay in the back. This time, it didn't miss.
Paris launched from his helm and fired at it, but too late. Chakotay was already down. The alien skimmed over Chakotay into Janeway's line of fire and Kim's crossfire. It screamed, withered, and sizzled out of existence.
Chakotay-if it ended this way, without a kind word-
Now her cheek and neck began to shrivel and turn cold. The burning sensation dried to a crisp ice as she dragged herself to her command chair and pummeled the arm console.
"Tuvok! Give me tactical control!"
She did the craziest thing she could think of. Authorize the ship's self-destruct sequence, which shut down all the safeties and allowed her to send a single surge of blinding power to the deflector pulse, giving the shields extra strength. With her head swimming, she forced herself to remember to disengage the self-destruct when the alien tone began