Equinox - Diane Carey [56]
Two fissures in her periphery collapsed almost instantly. The attack had been beaten back, for the moment at least.
"Won't hold for long," she murmured. Had she been talking? Saying something else? A faint echo of her own voice implied that she'd been thinking aloud. Now
that her head began to clear, she stopped doing that and looked around to assess her crew.
Tousled and sweat-sheeted, Harry Kim pulled toward his station. So did the others.
Except Paris... he was kneeling beside Chakotay, his face a plaster of worry and crawling revulsion.
Janeway pushed up a little to see Chakotay's face. Like crumpled paper, one whole side of his skull was vitrified, dark and sunken. Oh, no.
Empathizing with him, she touched her own wounds. Felt like broken cardboard. Beneath it there was a sizzle of desiccating tissue and fluids. But she was alive. Was he?
"Bridge to sickbay," Paris choked. "Medical emergency."
Nothing happened. No answer.
"Doctor, respond."
Janeway's hands shook. Why wasn't The Doctor answering? Had the aliens shut down the comm system somehow?
Aware of Janeway's eyes upon them, Tom Paris glanced at her, then motioned to Ensign Rogers on the lower deck. "Ensign ..."
Clutched by grief and guilt, Janeway couldn't voice her gratitude at his effort to get help for Chakotay. All she could focus upon was her first officer, lying there after saving her life, still distant after saving her soul.
As Paris and Rogers carried Chakotay to the lift, out of her line of sight, the captain gripped the arms of her command chair, struggling to steady herself. Until now
she hadn't realized fully what Chakotay was talking about before.
He was right. Deep in her heart she had always known that Ransom's level of desperation could come to Voyager if they got a little less lucky. She'd heard too many Donner Party stories to think it could never happen to her. Some turned to cannibalism, and some let themselves die first. She knew, in this epiphanic moment, that she might have the cannibal in her.
Cannibals eat the dead. How long before she would be willing to make somebody dead?
Around her in the air hung the stink of blowtorched aliens, the drifted leavings of their fluids and skin incinerated by phaser fire. Her phaser, her crew's. She'd made the aliens dead so she and hers could live.
So many things could yet go wrong-when would she be forced over the line? She had to stop him, stop Ransom, before she got to the line.
"Casualty reports are coming in," Harry Kim struggled. "Two dead ... thirteen wounded ... and we took heavy damage to the engines."
Janeway forced her rattled brain to process his words. "The Equinox?"
"They have gone to warp," Tuvok reported from somewhere.
"Any sign of nucleogenic particles?"
"No."
"Then they haven't engaged their 'enhanced' warp drive yet. Keep looking for-"
The universe parted again and the tonal shriek re-
turned. The crew braced again, drew weapons again, the worst was here again.
"Stabilize the shields! Double shield the bridge, Tuvok. If we don't have a command center, we don't have a ship. Phasers!"
Two more bulbous fissures opened overhead. She braced her legs and started shooting, firing directly into the globes as if going after a tumor with a scalpel laser.
Tuvok worked furiously, nursing the shields until the whine of invasion fell away again.
"Captain," Harry Kim began, his black hair flopped into his eyes, "that sound... it's registering as patterned."
As he squinted at the analysis screens, Janeway asked, "That shriek? You think it's something more than just a shriek?"
"I'm slowing it down on the sonograph. It's got a definite pattern about it."
"Does it repeat?"
"Yes, parts of it repeat. It's got inflections, though. Could it be a language? Should I run it through the linguistics banks?"
"Ransom said he tried that. Why don't you try running it through all the other banks. Maybe something in the system will recognize it on a free search."
"Aye,