String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [28]
Disaster plus 5 minutes, 40 seconds
Chakotay had never heard a sound like the one that erupted from the Monorhans when the transport disintegrated—a shrieking howl that spiraled in and out of the ultrasonic, making his sinuses and eardrums ache. His first fear was that the Monorhans would think that Voyager had devised the disaster, and, indeed, the youngest had turned toward Janeway and assumed what Chakotay had interpreted as a threatening stance. Tuvok must have agreed, because he drew his hand phaser and pointed it at the youth, who did not even seem to notice. Fortunately, Captain Ziv did and called to his crewman in a series of sharp rasping clicks. The young man backed away from the captain immediately and joined his fellow crewmen, who had fallen into a ring around their captain.
Captain Janeway recovered more quickly than Chakotay, calling to the helm to stop, then ordered a sweep of the sector for survivors. Chakotay didn’t see how there could be any. He kept staring at the main monitor, the sensors locked on to the spreading field of…what was it? Debris? Could they even call it that? The ship hadn’t exploded or even broken up; in his Maquis days, Chakotay had seen more than his fair share of ships die that way. But this…It made no sense. The Monorhan transport had simply disintegrated.
Shaking himself, feeling the sense of shock receding, Chakotay climbed the three steps to the secondary scanning station beside Tuvok’s and began replaying the sensor logs. Tuvok was doing the same, but his attention was focused primarily on sweeps of the area. Gods of my father, the idea of an attack didn’t even occur to me. “Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Tuvok said.
“So it wasn’t an attack?”
“I would not presume to make such an assumption. Let us just say, the probability is growing lower with each passing second that we remain alive.”
As he studied the sensor logs, pieces began to click into place. “We have to get back into their system.”
“Agreed,” Tuvok said, “but bear in mind that we do not know how this area of space will affect us if we stay too long.”
“I have to speak to the captain, make sure she understands what’s happening.”
“Will she not be preoccupied with our guests?”
Glancing across the bridge, Chakotay saw the captain and Neelix herding the Monorhans toward her ready room and silently agreed with their decision. Better that the grieving aliens should try to absorb what had just happened in relative privacy. How many refugees had Ziv said were on the transport? Twelve thousand? Did that include crew? He shook his head. Did the number even matter? He looked around the bridge and tried to guess what Voyager’s crew might be thinking. Is this our fate? he wondered. All because we slowed down for a minute at a binary star, and that was just precisely long enough to put us in precisely the spot where we almost collided with a wandering refugee? What were the odds? In the entire great galaxy, what were the chances these two ships should encounter one other? Chakotay shook his head again and tried to recall which of the Great Spirits had such a sardonic sense of mischief. Why, Coyote, the Trickster, of course. Then, in a moment of cross-cultural referencing that Chakotay could only ever attribute to stress, he recalled that in Greek legend the warrior Odysseus was often referred to as the Trickster. And what was another word for one on an odyssey?
Voyager.
Disaster plus 7 minutes
Don’t call me, B’Elanna Torres thought as she raced from station to station, checking readouts and consulting with her experts. Don’t call down here and ask me to explain what just happened because you know, you already know I don’t know!
B’Elanna’s combadge chirped, but she ignored it as she studied the data coming in through the sensors. The shields had momentarily collapsed when Voyager had encountered an energy surge, but came back up again almost immediately. Readings showed space around them was closer