The Murdered Sun - Christie Golden [30]
The entire bow section of the bridge faced a sheer wall of stars. Kim guessed it was about four stories high and comprised the wall. The beautiful sight of open space it afforded was little short of stunning and strangely incongruous with the sinister feel of the rest of the bridge.
Janeway hit her comm badge. "Janeway to Voyager. Transportation was successful. We're on the bridge right now."
"We will continue to monitor you from here, Captain," came Tuvok's reassuring voice.
Kim's eyes narrowed. In front of him was a large globule of liquid.
It appeared very dark in this erratic, subdued lighting.
Frowning curiously, he automatically reached to touch it with a gloved hand. It burst into several smaller globes, each of which floated off.
"Captain, there appears to be some kind of leak," he said. Leak from what?
At the sound of his voice, Janeway turned to regard him. Behind the clear plastic of her face mask, he saw her eyes focus on something slightly above and behind him. She opened her mouth to speak, raised her hand to point.
At that moment, something bumped into his left shoulder.
Startled, he whirled around, the movement initiating as swift and sure and degenerating to slow and clumsy in the zero g.
He came face-to-face with a floating corpse. The mask covering the dead features hovered mere inches from his own. Kim gasped and instinctively jerked backward. The movement set him off balance, and for what felt like an eternity, he flailed. Then Janeway's hand was there on his elbow, steadying him. Her face was compassionate, and Kim knew that his own radiated his shocked surprise and horror. He'd seen and examined bodies before, but the whole situation here was so surreal, like something right out of a nightmare. He realized with a second jolt of sick dismay that the floating globule he'd put his hand through was no "leak"--at least, not one from the ship. That and the other many balls of dark liquid currently twirling lazily through the zero g atmosphere had been the blood of the dead Akerians.
For just a second, Kim hyperventilated. His captain's hand was strong.
He caught his breath, calmed himself, and nodded to her.
"I'm okay."
She nodded her own head in acknowledgment. "I'm glad you're here to see this, Harry." Her voice was soft, laden with accepted regret.
"This," and she gestured to the dead, floating in their damaged vessel, "is the real aftermath of battle."
Torres, who had been examining equipment, turned to regard Janeway.
"They fired on us first, Captain. You were down in sickbay, you saw the sort of damage they could have inflicted if we'd let them."
"I'm not saying we didn't do the right thing." Janeway paused, her blue eyes taking in the scene. "We had no choice. I'm only saying that every action has a result. We made this. We must not ever forget how devastating the consequences of our behavior can be. Carry on."
Kim swallowed hard. He was able to look squarely at the corpse now, still shamefully glad that its face, whatever it may have looked like, was covered by the warrior's helmet. Kim didn't feel up to gazing into dead, accusing eyes at the moment. From what he could tell of the Akerian encased in the armor in which he had died, their race was bipedal, vaguely human shaped with regard to the proportion and placement of arms and legs. The head, though, if the helmet was an accurate indication, was enormous. When he was a child, he had adored tales of the Greek gods. The dead being floating in front of him reminded him of the story of the Minotaur--a misconceived creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull. Perhaps it was simply the size of the head and the placement of the ornamental horns that decorated the metal helmet, but once the idea had occurred to Kim, he couldn't shake it.
"I'm picking up energy sources, Captain." B'Elanna