Flashback - Diane Carey [46]
But she scanned the board once quickly, then tapped a critical control.
"Phasers armed!" Kim gasped. "Kes! Don't!"
"Kes!" Chakotay lunged toward her, his hand outstretched to grab her by the shoulder just as she reached for the firing controls.
He didn't make it. She did.
Pfew pfew pfew-the phasers stabbed into the blue
nebula, igniting the sirillium traces still left around the shuttle, until the shuttle was engulfed in crackling mini-explosions.
Only by luck, the phasers weren't targeted and Kes hadn't hit the shuttle itself. Otherwise, one big boom would overwrite the noble end of Paris and Torres.
But the phaser beams chopped through the combustible nebula and scratched the shuttle, which was sucked into the trail of ignition by the collapsing currents. Chemical and turbulence force changes inside the nebula, caused by the eruptions of billions of sirillium molecules, caused negative pressure areas that dragged currents in, and the shuttle with them.
It took Chakotay four steps to make it down to the helm, and that wasn't soon enough to stop the firing pattern from playing out. Three phaser blasts cut out from the forward hull of Voyager, creasing the nebula with billions of detonations in long sizzling trails, and kicking the shuttle around like a football.
"Kes!" Chakotay yanked her physically out of the chair and sent her tumbling to the deck rather cruelly. "Why did you do that?"
Her normally placid eyes, so like a painting, were tortured and wide. "They attacked us! We have to return fire! They killed Valtane!"
Harry Kim looked over his console. "Kes, that's Tom and B'Elanna out there!"
"Yes!" Kes threw him a fiery glare. "She's a Klingon! We have to return fire!"
Chakotay snapped his fingers and summoned Lieutenant Carey from the upper deck engineering
station. "Carey, take her to sickbay! Make sure the Doctor keeps her there."
"Aye, sir." The engineer took Kes by both arms and steered her without much effort off the bridge.
"Kang did this!" Kes shouted. "He must've notified the Empire! We have to fire again!"
"Out," Chakotay said to Carey, and in a moment the lift doors murmured closed.
"What was that all about?" Kim asked.
"Condition of the shuttlecraft!" Chakotay barked. "Are they alive?"
Kim played his board for a few seconds. "Picking up some debris . . . but only bits. No sufficient mass for a shuttlecraft, but I can't pick up their trail. I've lost contact, sir!"
The stink was ungodly as Lieutenant Valtane was blown backward and slammed into the deck.
Tuvok left his post, an action that spoke for itself.
Sparks continued to rain upon him and the unfortunate Valtane as Tuvok gathered his bunk mate into his arms.
No emotions? Then whence came the notice of final comfort?
Janeway realized that this was a moment she had yet to see. She'd been here before it and after it, but this particular few seconds, critical for Tuvok and for Valtane if not for the ship and its captain, had been evading her.
Now she was here for it, and she was deeply moved. This might be the first time Tuvok had ever witnessed the death of a crewmate, never mind a
bunk mate. No one, Vulcan, human, or any other, could go unmoved from that and call himself alive.
Valtane's eyes stared, and his lips moved. Was he trying to speak? Would he speak words critical to Janeway's own problem? She started to step closer, to encroach upon the supremely private moment, when Valtane's eyes glazed and a wince of pain cut off his murmuring.
A hand of dizziness passed before Janeway's eyes, blurring the forms of the two young men on the deck. She wobbled and leaned back on the console, disoriented. Was the meld cracking again?
"Tuvok . . . what..."
A dog barked in the near distance.
Dog? On a starship?
It