Equinox - Diane Carey [8]
shadows and pulsed by the low thrum of drained power trying to come back on-line. It took him a moment to orient himself. The companionway to the warp core.
The shattered corridor might as well have been aboard Voyager, except that it was a little narrower. Chakotay found himself disconcerted to see this variant of his own ship so critically wrecked. This was the fate they had struggled against for five years, somehow keeping the starship through luck and pluck from looking like this.
All around him crushed and blasted electrical trunks lay open like forgotten surgery, several still snapping from their latest trial. The deck itself creaked under his feet, its structural bolts compromised by stress from the outer sections. Hull breaches hissed here and there. Not big ones, but troubling to see. This was a ship in trouble-Chakotay knew even instinctively-punctuated by the smell of leakage and burning circuits. The darkness itself cloyed at his shoulders, a cold cloak for a Starfleet officer to wear on a Starfleet ship. This was heavy damage, not just the damage of one assault. Sniggering guilt came over him that the Equinox crew had gone through this torment all alone out here. No, it didn't make any sense.
He led the way in. Behind him, Torres, Paris, Neelix, and Kim were tight-throated and silent. They too could see the plaintive echo of themselves and their own ship in this tunnel of horrors.
As he stepped carefully, tripping twice, shining his wrist beacon garishly through the wreckage, Chakotay raced through a sudden recollection of raiding a junk-
yard when he was twelve. He'd climbed the wrong pile and been trapped under a crushed runabout hulk. The yard's Rottweiler found him and barked until somebody came. Beating back images of losing a foot to a big dog, he picked his way forward. His beacon wobbled as he fielded a shiver through his arms and back.
It was cold! But only in the first corridor section. As he moved into the main engineering area, a curtain of cloying heat descended. The ship's atmospheric controls had gone wacky, completely confused.
Over there, the warp core throbbed at low ebb. Not enough power. At least it wasn't breached. Chakotay flinched inwardly as his beacon fell on something that wasn't crushed or crumpled machinery-a human body.
Dead. No life sign at all. Barely read as organic. Why?
He glanced behind him. "Split up. Neelix, the crew's quarters. Harry, Seven... check the tubes and conduits."
Nobody could even muster an aye, aye. He heard their careful footsteps angle off and tap away, occasionally encouraging something to crinkle or crash or clunk.
Behind him, Tom Paris pressed a little closer than necessary when Chakotay had to pause to move a wrecked insulator plate. "Sorry," Paris murmured, dry-throated. He didn't move back very much, though.
Chakotay found B'Elanna Torres in the dimness. "See if you can bring the main power on-line. Tom, stay with me."
Steeling herself in the spooky darkness, Torres headed through the ravagement to the warp core, seeming relieved to have something to do that didn't involve these bodies lying around. That was Chakotay's job.
He picked his way to the nearest fallen crew member. All his senses told him the effort was empty, but even in death he thought he'd want somebody to check, to touch him one more time, just as a futile gesture.
But this one-as the beacon fell across the face and shoulders, he didn't want to touch it. Beside him, Paris shivered.
"What happened?" Chakotay asked.
Struggling, Tom Paris raised his tricorder and worked it. "Some kind of thermolytic reaction. It desiccated every cell in his body."
What was left could rival Ramses for ugly. The eyes were gone, sunken back into the shriveled head. Darkened flesh had dried to a crust and peeled back from teeth bared in a