Equinox - Diane Carey [67]
Chakotay remained silent. No opinions. No observations. Could he be that hurt?
She looked at him. "Go to astrometrics. Start looking for the kind of place you'd hide if your ship were damaged."
Argue with me, would you, please?
He stood still for a moment, then unclasped his hands. They fell to his sides. "Yes, ma'am."
As he left the office, Janeway closed her eyes. The breath sank out of her as if she were a pitcher being poured. He had his orders ... that wasn't the way she'd hoped things would go between them.
Feeling a hundred years old, she moved to the viewport and gazed out at the nearest star system, a foggy blur on the edge of a stellar dust cloud. Blue, mostly.
Was he right? Was Ransom? How long before she had to admit they weren't going to make it back to Earth? Not this way, dogging along under conventional power. They couldn't go on being a little isolated island of Federation law, all by and for themselves. Ransom had realized that right away, and she had condemned him for it. Was he right? Could they never possibly succeed under conventional power?
It's not fair, but he's still accountable. It's a reason, not an excuse. Because I haven't walked in his shoes, I can't judge him? Yes, I can.
At what cost, Chakotay? We have to live with each other, all of us in this floating fortress. What cost for us?
As she gazed out the viewport at the stars, the mindless stars, she saw her own sorrowful reflection in the port window. Hair mussed, dirty, frayed. Fierce lines bracketed her mouth. Her eyes were undescribable.
The witch in the mirror was one unhappy lady.
Tranquility base ... the alien coastline. Ivory sand, lapping crystal-colored water, wide-winged birds.
Ransom breathed deeply, conning himself that he was breathing the cool windborne air of the shoreline instead of the stuffy recirculated stuff of a half-crippled ship. This was a good place, wide and free. Sprawling with life. Birds, bugs, lizards ... not like the Skeleton Coast.
What...
In his mind he worked to focus the vision of the beach. On a distant dune, frilled with rushes and patterned with the tracks of sand crabs, stood a human figure, a woman. Willowy and windblown, she gazed at him with the sun streaking her long blond hair. She stood in a haze of warm air. He couldn't see her face, but she was looking at him. Haunting him, watching him-
Even through the blur of distance and haze, her eyes asked questions of him that burrowed to the depths of his soul. She stood on the dune, her legs braced, as sea water lapped at the crabs walking below on the white sand. Watching, watching.
He pulled the synaptic stimulator from behind his ear. Her eyes were still on him in his mind.
Around him now, his dismal ready room was a sudden comfort, a place he understood, with the right kinds of surprises. The mind, that was something else.
Curiously looking at his synaptic stimulator, he summoned his sense of immediacy and went out onto the bridge, where he held the device before Maria Gilmore at the engineering auxiliary station.
"How was the beach?" Gilmore asked.
"Do these programs have people in them?"
She looked up. "No. Just landscapes. Why?"
He paused, thinking of describing what he had seen. "Forget it," was his decision. "How's the away team doing?"
Hills and wilderness. A scent of pine, and something else that couldn't be likened to anything on Earth. He'd smelled something like that on Omicron-Indii once, though. Nutty, but perfumed.
"Stay down."
"Aye, aye."
Chakotay motioned to the security team behind him and Tom Paris to keep back a few steps. His tricorder was reading life forms-human. His victory was soured by the fact that his relationship with his captain was strained right now and his heart wasn't in this capture.
There were trees here, plenty of them, billions of them, trillions. Every one had a fern growing out of its lower trunk, so the land was unaccountably lush
and spongy with fungus