Flashback - Diane Carey [51]
"Hull breach on deck twelve." Commander Rand's voice came through the twisting smoke. "Section forty-seven . . . we've lost power on decks five, six, and ten . . . casualty reports are coming in ... nineteen wounded . . ."
"I saw her again, Tuvok," Janeway said, inching close to her officer and the dead lieutenant. "The girl. As Valtane died just now, it seemed to cause the memory to resurface."
Tuvok seemed not to hear her, or not to care, both of which were significant, though she didn't have a clue what to make of either. Slowly he took the time to lay Valtane on the deck, with a great deal more
care and gentleness than she had ever seen in him since.
He looked up, but not at her. Not at anything. He seemed to be looking up at whatever he saw in his own mind.
"What is it?" she asked, determined to prod the situation forward out of this mental quicksand lapping at them.
He stared, then blinked, then his brows drew tight as he tried to make a conclusion. Struggling inside his head, he murmured, "Something has gone wrong with the mind-meld."
Janeway started to ask him to specify, but restrained herself. He would tell her if he knew what was happening. A pointless question might only stress him further, lay more responsibility on him than she wanted him to bear.
She was supposed to be the guide, yet she might as well be leading him through a lightless cave with a smothering odor filling it.
"When Lieutenant Valtane died just now," Tuvok went on, looking down at the body, "I began to feel the anxiety . . . the fear... his death seemed to cause the traumatic memory to resurface."
"What are you saying?" she asked. "That you had a memory flash of the girl during his death eighty years ago?"
"No ... I do not remember its happening back then. However, I do feel a connection between the two memories here and now-in the mind-meld."
"So they are related. Then what-"
Suddenly a pair of legs appeared before them.
Janeway looked up to see Captain Sulu standing only a meter away, gaping down at her and Tuvok.
At her?
With a surge of shock and even anger, Captain Sulu balled his fists and demanded, "Who the hell are you?"
"The needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many."
Captain James Kirk
Star Trek III The Search for Spock
CHAPTER 15
"PARIS? TOM, ARE YOU CONSCIOUS?"
"Me? I better be. I'm in too much pain to be asleep. That Chakotay. . . you've gotta give him credit, trying to come in after us."
"Credit for craziness," Torres allowed saucily. "The stress on Voyager's hull will exceed safety limits."
She sank into the navigator's seat, because she'd done all she could aft, and the coolant leak was sneaking slowly forward. This was the only good air left, good being relative.
"Have any luck?" he asked.
Hating the motion, she shook her head. "None at all. I've pinched and picked and rerouted and repro-grammed."
"Well," he said, then paused for a grip of pain. "Well, maybe Chakotay'll think of something."
"He's not an engineer. It'd be a lot more prudent for him to give up on us. We're being shoved away from Voyager ten meters for every two they push through. Even if they loop around the other side, we'll be dead by then."
He gazed out the shuttle's viewport at the oppressive sparkling-blue nebula that was soon to poison and then crush them. Paris looked remarkably clean-cut and vulnerable for a self-professed rebel. He was afraid. B'Elanna could see that.
So was she. This hadn't started out as a life-threatening mission. What had gone so wrong that their own ship fired on them?
Obviously an accident of some kind, but a deadly one. Those things could happen when technology was high-flying and the most complex of physical and theoretical science was held on a very thin tether. She'd nearly lost Voyager itself to such things. She forgave, but for the next few minutes, the last of her life, she wouldn't be able to forget.
"I've tried