Equinox - Diane Carey [61]
CHAPTER 11
MUSSED CLOTHING, TORN HAIR, SMEARED WITH LUBRICANT
and leakage, smelling and scratched, Kathryn Janeway sat on her darkened bridge in a shadow cast by a particularly ill-placed work light that was trying to illuminate an area on the lower deck where two crewmen were lying in a trunk up to their armpits. Tuvok, Paris, Kim, none of them looked any better. The haunting image was remarkably reminiscent of her first glimpse of the Equinox's bridge-how welcome and how pathetic it had seemed to her. A Starfleet ship, in the grip of turmoil, its crew struggling valiantly to keep going one more minute at a time, the bulkheads and ceilings in midcollapse, scored by phaser etchings, cables hanging like veins from gaping wounds ... Too familiar now. Too close. No more nice clean ship
with tidy corridors and a healthy crew. No more safe haven.
Her face and neck were back to normal at least, though still stinging from the reintegration treatment She was too aware of Chakotay and kept glancing at him as he worked up there on the circle deck.
Had Rudy Ransom's crystal ball just been clearer than her own? Sharpened to a focus by the crushing loss of thirty-nine shipmates who had entrusted their lives to him? Had he seen the ugliness of reality because he had been forced to stand toe to toe with it, whereas Janeway had been buffered by a clean ship and a full belly?
No. I won't cross. I don't care how close I get to the line. No matter how easy it is to understand you, I won't let you drag me over it.
When Chakotay approached her, somewhat fishily, and handed her a PADD without a word, she took it with more willingness than she might've an hour ago. Alternatives were turning thin and going extinct. Any glimmer would do.
"It's not exactly Shakespeare," she commented, scanning the fractal patterns that apparently translated into something the aliens might comprehend. So that's what their language was based upon. Repetitions and sequences and mathematical exponents. No wonder Ransom had never found it.
"A small olive branch," Chakotay quietly offered, "is still an olive branch."
Janeway handed the PADD to Kim. "Run this through your translation matrix."
"Set your weapons down," Chakotay suggested.
When Janeway didn't countermand, Paris looked up in question. "Commander?"
Chakotay held out a passive hand. "Somebody's got to start trusting somebody around here."
"Belay that order," Janeway roughly said. When he turned to her, she added, "I appreciate your optimism, but in this case ... weapons."
She'd cut him down again, this time in front of everyone. Trust? Not this time. Would she ever trust again? Even the two of them weren't sure they trusted each other completely right now. The line was drawing itself right between them.
Around her, everyone drew a weapon, even Chakotay, and charged their phasers with wailing power.
"Ready to transmit," Kim said.
Janeway glanced at Tuvok. "Drop shields. Bridge only."
As if that would make any difference for the lower decks.
Tuvok worked with one hand, his phaser ready in the other.
The alien tone began almost instantly as the shields went down. Janeway braced to fire at anyone who was threatening. If the aliens didn' t like the sound the ship was now sending, then it was all over. They'd be like Ransom, fighting day in and day out, for years. This would be Voyager's equinox.
No one spoke, no one shouted. No one warned, "Here they come" or "There they are." Glowing with angry incandescence, the first alien globe appeared on
the upper port side. Agitated, an alien broke through, its cranial membrane parted and bladed, its teeth bared, claws grasping. Racing from its scalpel cut in the spatial plane, it veered toward Harry Kim, the nearest crewman to the globe portal.
Somehow, whether by self-control or sheer shock,