Equinox - Diane Carey [68]
"Shh," he warned, and motioned Paris to duck. Paris nodded, and crouched to wait, as ordered.
Chakotay shifted forward, following the signal on his tricorder, and now voices could be heard in the gully below.
Carefully, he reached out one hand and parted the chartreuse fronds before him.
There, below, were Noah Lessing and another Equinox crewman whom Chakotay did not know.
Lessing was saying, "I'm reading a vein of ore. Azimuth one seventeen, thirty meters. It could run pretty deep. We might need to use phasers to excavate it." Lessing paused then, and smiled as he surveyed the velvety moss at the gully floor. "McKinley Park... I used to take my sister there when we were kids. This looks just like it."
Glancing as Paris, moving very carefully, came to his side, Chakotay strained to listen.
"Let's see," Lessing went on, "as I recall there was a family of ground squirrels who lived over there... and there was a patch of poison ivy right next to it. When I was ten, I walked right through it. Swelled up like a
Rigelian bloodworm. When we get back to Earth, the first thing I'm going to do is see if that-"
Chakotay came to his feet as Lessing and the crewman climbed the embankment to within twenty paces of him and Paris. Paris also stood up, and both of them aimed their phaser rifles at the two grimy-looking so-journers.
It turned out to be a mistake to expect them to come quietly. For an instant even Chakotay forgot that these men, all of Equinox's crew, lived a life of sudden necessary action and had learned a long time ago not to hesitate.
The crewman instantly grabbed for his holstered phaser. Only the swung butt of Paris' rifle aborted the deadly move. The crewman smashed into the ferns, his jaw badly bruised.
This gave Lessing an instant to dive for cover, firing as he went. A phaser bolt scored the bushes next to Chakotay, forcing him to crank sideways into a palmetto, lacerating his left hand. Angry now, he brought his rifle around and fired wide, winging Lessing in the shoulder as the other man tried to dodge behind a tree. Lessing slumped to the ferns.
When Chakotay got to him, Lessing was already coming around. Dazed and defeated, Lessing blinked up at Chakotay and everything the Starship Voyager meant to his kind of pioneer.
Gripped by empathy and admiration for the level of survivalism these crew members demonstrated, Chakotay glanced at Paris, who was just taking the other crewman into custody.
Now this part was over. The hard part was just starting. He tapped his badge. "Four to beam up."
Ransom paced his bridge. In his mind were lush forests with his crew exploring. Space, thousands of light-years long between here and home. Green tails and claws, fissure globes, and the woman on the dune still watching him from the ivory sand in the back of his mind. He knew who she was. She was the souls of those animals come to challenge him. She was Kathryn Janeway in a dream package, leering at him from behind a book. He'd beaten everything else. He'd beat her eventually. He'd return to the beach and drown her.
"Captain," Gilmore said, as if she knew she was interrupting. "We're receiving a subspace transmission."
Whipping around, Ransom felt all his internal alerts snap on. "From who?"
"I can't tell."
His console showed nothing. "I don't see a ship out there. Open a channel."
Gilmore worked her controls, but nothing came over subspace. Wait-there was something-wrong channel, though...
"Doctor to Equinox! Respond!"
"We can hear you," Ransom answered.
"Voyager's found you! They've -tered orbit!"
For a moment Ransom didn't comprehend how he could know,