Equinox - Diane Carey [6]
Only her quietly roiling stomach warned of how quickly things could go sour. Chakotay sat at her side, his hands nervously gripping the chair. He hadn't been able to confirm the bona fides of the distress call or even to pick up definite emission signatures to confirm that this was a Federation ship. It could be a clever fake. He didn't like that. Chakotay wasn't one who really liked flying blind.
After five years of trouble and strife, Janeway was willing to take the chance of being trapped just to give her crew a taste of their old life-answering a friendly cry for help in the distance as they had all signed up to do. Even if things went wrong, they had had this momentary taste of their old cause.
Tom Paris had the helm-he'd pulled rank on the
watch officer. Harry Kim manned his own station. Tuvok on the sensors, B'Elanna Torres at tactical, Seven of Nine manning the science readouts, and Neelix here for no good reason except maybe to recognize his own quadrant's bad guys if this were a trick. Other crew, who were actually supposed to be on this watch, puttered around the bridge's upper deck, pretending they weren't bothered by the invasion from the other watch. Captain's prerogative, they knew, but still...
Even The Doctor was here, wearing the mobile emitter that allowed his holographic program to roam the ship instead of being confined to sickbay. Janeway had come to like having him around, as if he were a living physician rather than just a particularly quirkish learning hologram.
Janeway deliberately didn't glance around. That would've made them all self-conscious. Everyone else on the ship wanted to be here, too, she knew. Even joy had its limitations.
"We're approaching the coordinates." Tom Paris' voice had a forced control about it
'Take us out of warp," she ordered.
"I've got them!" Kim let it all out 'Two thousand kilometers off the port bow! They're moving at low impulse."
Janeway frowned. Low impulse?
"Intercept," she said, then resisted the urge to tell Paris not to move too sharply or a ship Voyager's size could plow over the other one like a bulldozer. "Tuvok, can you get a visual?"
The forward viewscreen showed only open space,
but in their minds they could already see the other ship. Everybody had checked the banks. They all knew what a Nova-class ship looked like clamshell primary hull, simple engineering hull, two nacelles, a little squatty. Average.
Until today. On this particular day, at this hour, the little Equinox had her moment in the sun. She was the nearest handhold to home for the lonely Voyager crew, who almost never got to see their own ship from the outside. Now they could look out into unfriendly space and see a vision of themselves, brushstrokes of home in the form of a familiar design.
The first shape they saw with their naked eyes, though, wasn't the lines of Starfleet engineering. Instead it was an energy bulb fractured with blue and white demolition. Full shields, under assault.
Janeway leaned forward in her chair, squinting.
Now she could see the ship itself, veering toward Voyager on a Z-plane.
"They're heavily damaged," Tuvok reported, not nearly as Vulcan-stiff as usual. "Multiple hull breeches ... warp drive is off-line-"
"What's happening to their shields?" Neelix interrupted.
"They're being disrupted," Torres answered, reading her engineering monitor, "by some kind of energy surges."
A simple statement, but to Janeway it said much more. Disruption meant assault. Surges of energy were different from shots or sabotage. It meant there was an unseen force acting upon the other ship. She was glad
Voyager had maintained Red Alert, all shields and precautions on-line. No visible enemy didn't mean no enemy.
"Weapons fire?" Paris asked.
Tuvok shook his head, even though Paris wasn't watching him. "There are no other ships in the vicinity."
"We're in hailing range," Kim reported tensely. Janeway could tell he was an instant from hailing them himself.
"Open a channel," she told him. He already