STAR TREK - VOY - Equinox
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PROLOGUE
"IS IT ALIVE?"
"I don't care. I'm eating it anyway."
Sweat mixed with metal shavings grated against the captain's hand as he rubbed the back of his neck.
Whatever it was, they were all going to eat it, down to the last dirty crew member still alive on his ship.
Funny how hunger could make the grotesque palatable.
He glanced at his first officer. The usually good-looking Max Burke, Casanova of the ship, lounge-lizard
extraordinaire, was today a pathetic sight His dark hair was dirty, black eyes sunken with fatigue and
hunger, his face shadowed, unshaven. Attention fixed on his bowl, he plowed through the questionables
handed him by their exotic Ankari hosts as if his captain's "I don't care" were a direct order to consume.
Burke was the last to eat
He'd been busy until now securing the ship from the last deadly encounter.
Behind them, Noah Lessing and Maria Gilmore checked a pile of cargo containers and other equipment
for harmful emissions. The Ankari didn't have much to spare, but they were willing to offer.
And who in his right mind would turn down a dinner with big caterpillars who wore suits?
Across the campfire from the two officers, one of the Ankari waved its idea of a hand.
"Captain Ransom," the universal translator struggled, "we gift you ritual. You spirit like."
Accepting a glance from Burke, Ransom paused, then said, "We ritual... appreciate. We thank."
Burke muttered privately around his mouthful, "You sure we're not the ritual? Maybe they're ... y'know,
fattening the-"
"Shh. Hope not."
The two puff-faced Ankari who had the job of entertaining the visitors now revealed a device made of a
dozen metallic tubes with their tops cut on the diagonal like organ pipes-or was it a device? It could've
been a bottle of window cleaner. Inside was a gelatinous liquid that shifted from blue to green.
"Blast from the past, Rudy," Burke said, attempting a smile. "It's a lava lamp. I always wanted one."
Ransom also smiled and nodded at the two aliens. "Beautiful. Thank you for showing us."
The aliens paused, blinked at each other, then seemed-if he read segmented body language right-to
shrug. Now they activated the device.
"Fortune spirit," the Ankari on their right buzzed. "Realm far, you travel bless."
"Oh, I get it," Burke grumbled, and went back to eating.
"Very generous of you," Ransom told the aliens.
The device was blinking now, its colors shifting.
"Ow!" Burke dropped his plate and covered his ears. An instant later Ransom heard it too-a
head-splitting noise, a single tone, as if the highest note on a church organ were stuck on superworship.
Behind them, the rest of the crew flinched and tried not to react in a negative way despite the howling
noise shearing their ears.
Ransom was about to wave the aliens to stop their "gift"-that it was lovely, more than generous, he and
his crew just didn't deserve such a wonder-when a thread-thin black line appeared in midair over the
campfire.
Beside him, Burke flinched. Ransom held him back with a trembling hand. Wait.
The black line parted as if a scalpel had cleaved it, giving presence to a fissure in the air above them and
then to a bulb of phosphorescent blue light. From an inconceivable backstage curtain, a fluid form
appeared; free moving and independent, it pierced through the fissure. Green-blue?-with some kind of
face, two paws, and a short tail. Built for swimming?
In his biologist's mind, Ransom instantly analyzed the "spirit." Head at one end, tail at the other, floating
upright, clutching hands-was that an opposable thumb? He couldn't tell.
The hands were knobby-knuckled and in repose. Average skull formation for gravity conditions, so it
wasn't space-evolved... but it floated freely in spite of no visible antigrav hovering mechanism.
Back to the swimming hypothesis?
Otherworldly and translucent, the moving form slipped over the campfire and bansheed its way to an
open place between two trees. There it floated, angelic and perplexing.
"Is it alive?" Ransom murmured.
Moving very slowly, Max Burke brought his tricorder around. "I dunno ... but I'm going to eat it anyway
..." The tricorder bleeped softly.
The alien form flittered with what might be electrical energy-might not.
"Not a spirit," the first officer finally concluded. "Nucleogenic matter... no-antimatter! High levels radiating
right now."
"Now? In the same physical space with matter?" Ransom asked.
Burke shook his head at what he was reading. He had no answer. Here they were, and there it was.
"Life form?" he pressed. "Not an illusion?"
"Seems to be some kind of life," was all Burke would say.
Swirling merrily through the air around them now, the liquid animal danced like an ocean wave come
inland for a visit, then lost dimension and slipped back into its scalpel cut.
The rift healed clean.
In his stomach Ransom's unidentified dinner crawled
around as if he'd forgotten to chew it. At his side Burke reviewed the graceful visitation on his tricorder
screen, running analysis after analysis, his black brows flaring higher with every pass.
The Ankari hosts rocked with pleasure. They were proud of themselves for the show. Ritual, whatever.
Ransom cleared his throat. "You thank," he managed. "Pretty."
"Bless pretty voyage," one of them said. "Bless ship Equinox."
"You thank," he said again. When the two aliens got up and moved away, apparently satisfied that they'd
been hospitable, Ransom kept an eye on them but spoke to Burke. "Max... what've you got?
Brainwaves? Language? Anything?"
"It... I don't... does this make sense?" Burke showed him the tricorder readings. "If we could hang on to
this for a few minutes ... think of it! Look at the enhancement!"
"Shh," Ransom halted. "Let's do this by the book."
"We left the book in the Alpha Quadrant! Rudy, if we could contain this, the power flux-"
"Shh. Give me a chance to talk to our friends. Keep the crew working. Get that stuff loaded. Let me just
talk to them..."
"It's inside!"
Over the single-toned whine made by the Ankari cylinder, Maria Gilmore's triumphant cry buzzed fiercely
through the research lab aboard U.S.S. Equinox. Her thick blond hair fell forward over her
shoulder as she leaned closer to the containment chamber's controls.
The lab was small, dim, and damaged, still stinking of fried electricals from the last time they'd had to fight
their way out. Ransom worried that he was getting too used to that stink. If this worked, the cozy old
ship would get a heck of a cleanup.
At first the fluid-creature was passive, exploring the multiphasic containment chamber Gilmore had built.
It seemed curious, moving around it in a looping circle to every side, every corner.
Nearby, Max Burke furiously fed readings into the engineering link computer and the med link. The med
link showed no change, but the engineering link flashed and its readings sped too fast to follow. That was
one happy computer.
If Captain Ransom had entertained any doubt that the swimmer was indeed alive, that dissolved in a
sudden screech. It realized it was trapped inside the containment chamber. Its green skin darkened to
blue, and it began to thrash from side to side, up and down, screaming louder.
Burke's voice cracked as the containment field spiked. "Something's wrong."
"Rudy!" Maria Gilmore backed away from the chamber, horrified.
The creature's cranial membrane parted just as the fissure doorway had. Terrible features broke through
the egg-yolk membrane, hideous features recognizable anywhere in the universe as threatening. As they
watched, breathless, the creature imitated everything
from horns to fangs to feathers as it splashed around the inside of the chamber.
"Get it out of there," Ransom ordered.
Burke's whitened hands worked on the controls. The alien cylinder's colors washed, but nothing
happened to free the creature trapped inside the chamber.
Its screaming got louder, its thrashing more desperate.
"Send it back!" he shouted over the maddening whine.
"We can't..." But Burke worked faster, his desperation peaking with the creature's. Sweat sheeted his
swarthy face, making him look old.
"Oh, God!" Gilmore's hands clamped over her mouth.
Inside the chamber, the creature went into some kind of convulsion, heaving its insides out all over the
chamber walls until it finally slumped and its shrieking died to a low whine. As they watched, unable to
activate the Ankari cylinder to take the creature back as easily as they had brought it here, the creature
withered to half its size and began to desiccate before their eyes.
Nauseated, Maria Gilmore blinked at the chamber she had been so proud moments ago to have built.
She clutched her arms to her chest, hands clenched, her expression pitiful.
Digesting the facts faster, Ransom stepped to the chamber wall and watched the last drying phase of the
creature's death. "Max, is it dead?" he asked.
Burke indulged in a hopeless sigh. "Yeah. Something about the multiphasics. Those membranes can't take
it.
If we could've held it here just a couple of minutes, the nucleogenics might... might..."
When his voice faded off, Ransom looked at him. Burke was peering into his screen.
"Max?" Ransom prodded. "Come on, give."
Parting his lips to speak, Burke was only able to offer a panting excitement that brought back the sweat
beads on his forehead. "Rudy-it's still here!" He held a hand toward the monitor as if pointing out a
window. "The enhancement properties are lingering!" Fiercely he swiveled to his captain. "Let me test the
remains! Give me the authorization for autopsy!"
"What if it's sentient?" Gilmore protested.
"That doesn't matter now!" Burke reacted to an argument not yet made. "It's dead, Maria. Rudy, it's
dead-"
"And there's no information so far that it's intelligent," Ransom agreed. "We tried everything. It was like
trying to communicate with a cat."
Burke slipped from his chair and stood up. "There's a time limit here."
Effectively prodded, Ranso m nodded.
"Do it."
As Burke rushed to his work on the bubbling corpse, Ransom turned to Maria Gilmore, quaking at his
side.
"If you're lost at sea, you eat fish," he told her. "If this is what we think it is, then we've got a ticket out of
the Delta Quadrant. Paroled... from a mighty long sentence."
CHAPTER 1
OR A SENTENCE TO BROIL IN HELL.
Science vessel, mouth of hell... explain the difference.
His vision blurred from a scalp wound on his forehead, Captain Ransom gripped the arms of his
command chair and endured another shattering energy punch on his ship's shields. In his periphery he
saw sparks blow forward from some unfortunate console behind him, but he didn't turn to look.
Uncontainable free-roaming energy fractured the deflectors again.
He murmured an encouragement to the ship. Despite constant punishment, tough old Equinox was still
standing up to the torture of unseen attack time after time. If only there were another ship to shoot at-a
solid target would be so much easier for him and the crew to understand, to focus upon.
Red Alert flashed relentlessly. He kept meaning to turn it off. They were almost always at Red Alert these
days. The flashing didn't help. They were beyond panic.
The ship, too, was in electrical panic, as if it actually knew. Racing along at high warp while under siege,
the sturdy science vessel heaved itself forward on a spatial plane, spitting and clawing its way along while
her shields sparkled in destruction's grip.
Rudy Ransom was dully aware of the crew members around him rushing from station to station, covered
with grime, frayed to the last nerve ending, every one of them doing double duty every day-John Bowler,
Dotty Chang, Ed Regis. There was Max Burke, of course, doing his best to fill the shoes of exec, even
though his specialty was tactical, and he hadn't been ready for promotion. Some promotion ...
Ransom winced in empathy as Burke tripped on a peeled-back piece of hull plating, his foot snagged in a
dent. Chunks of debris swung on frayed cables from the ceiling, unrepaired, not even cut out of the way.
Exposed circuitry sizzled brutishly. Scorched bulkheads smoked and smelled. Ransom sniffed, hoping for
a molecule of fresh air. Dreams, dreams.
Staying in his chair, Ransom resisted the urge to help Burke to his feet. The crew didn't need to feel more
helpless than they already were.
Burke staggered up and plunged to the nearest monitor. "Shields at twenty-nine percent!"
'Twenty-nine down, or down to twenty-nine percent left?" Ransom asked.
Burke's face was a blot of white against the dark bridge. "Down to twenty-nine percent! They're
breaking through!"
The back of Ransom's hand swept a dribble of blood out of his eye. It was hot, gluey. "Let them."
Through a gush of brown smoke, Burke looked at him. "Sir?"
'Take the shields off line and recharge the emitters. That'll bring them back to full power."
Burke digested the idea, but hesitated. "The charging cycle takes forty-five seconds. We'll be vulnerable."
"We'll be dead if we don't get those shields back up." Ransom glanced around at the whole bridge crew,
meeting eyes with as many as possible. "Arm yourselves."
Those two words, horrible and hated, doomed them to the next few minutes. He never said, "Red Alert"
anymore. He said, "Arm yourselves."
Crew members stepped quickly around and over the blast-curled machinery and circuit guts spread
across the deck, grabbing phaser rifles and hand phasers that hadn't seen the inside of a weapons locker
in months. Burke struck a button on the console where he leaned. The "Arm yourselves" button for the
lower decks.
Give them all a few seconds. Hold back. Hold on. Ransom himself stood up and shouldered his own
rifle. So few people were on the bridge anymore ... he worried about the crew down in engineering.
Only five people down there right now. When would they get a chance to sleep again?
His chest constricted at the responsibility. He was
batting about sixtyforty with this kind of order, wild chance, daring risk. Not too good. Bad odds.
When everyone he could see was ready, armed and alert, he counted off five more seconds on behalf of
the lower decks, then sharply ordered, "Drop shields!"
Burke struck his controls.
Shields down. Ransom read that in Burke's stance as the first officer worked with his left hand while
holding a phaser in his right. Everyone held still, except for heads swiveling, eyes flashing, chests heaving.
The dissonant otherworld frequency began as softly as a mosquito's whine, then speared up to an
eye-popping squeal. Louder, louder! Invasion!
"Recharge cycle?" Ransom asked, keeping his eyes moving.
"Thirty seconds!"
Would they beat it?
What a way of life. This was like being caught in a spider's web, being able to rush from thread to thread,
only to be caught on each one, to face breaking away again, to get caught again, and the spider didn't like
them.
The crew swept their weapon muzzles in short arcs, trying to keep each other out of the lines of fire. The
otherworldly whine screwed their feet to the deck, hammering their skulls from inside. From his position
in the middle of the bridge, Captain Ransom was the first to see the hideous inevitability.
"There!" He swept his phaser rifle clear of Burke's head, aimed at an opening fissure in midair near the
ceiling. The rip expanded as the captain aimed. Sweat
squished between his hand and the phaser grip as he opened fire.
Burke ducked out of the way as half the remaining ceiling crashed to the deck where he'd been standing.
While the fissure opened, Ransom kept firing at it, consumed with frustration as he saw another glowing
ragged-edged fissure open behind Burke, and a third behind Chang.
The noise, louder now! Combined whining from three fissures, enough to drive a man to screaming. The
phasers-more whining, howling added to the unnatural scream of the alien invaders-and bright, blinding
heat rays demolishing everything they touched. Phasers on kill, scoring the interior of the bridge. They'd
lost a crew member last week in sweeping friendly fire.
All around Ransom, the crew swung to fire again and again at the bulblike fissures opening above them.
Not enough time. Burke, over there, still frantically working-
"Time!" Ransom demanded.
'Ten seconds!"
More screaming, but this time it was the panicked horror of human screams that rang with such
poignance on the captain's human ears. This sound, by far, was more ghastly than the shriek of the alien
invaders. Here they came!
Through the rifts, racing with demonic speed, the translucent, slug-tailed aliens batted around the bridge.
Two, three-Ransom lost count almost instantly. The aliens entered a blindingly fast holding pattern for
enough moments to notice, then split up.
Each one targeted a human. Wildly, Ransom squeezed the rifle's firing pad. The phasers squealed, harder
and hotter. The overhead formation of wraiths broke. Green haze flashed around the bridge, distorting
the crew's senses like strobe lights in a bar.
Attack!
CHAPTER
2
"WE'VE GOT A DISTRESS SIGNAL, CAPTAIN."
"Isolate."
"You're not going to believe this. I don't believe it-"
"Well, Chakotay, let me see it and we'll decide later to believe it or not."
Even through her own calm words, Kathryn Janeway caught a hint of nervousness. She knew what he
saw, and she didn't believe it either. Federation distress frequency, here! Sixty thousand light-years from
Federation space. Was someone baiting them?
The Starship Voyager had answered plenty of distress calls in the past five years, a tricky and haunting
decision in itself for the captain of a powerful ship. Was it interfering to answer a call for help in a
quadrant where the Federation had no authority? She didn't
know. So she had made her own policy and always answered, sometimes to the good, other times ...
other results.
But this signal might as well be coming from her own ship-a Starfleet vessel where no Starfleet vessel
should be, stranded impossibly far from home, on a constant quest to fulfill her duty to get home.
"Captain Ransom!... The Equinox!... Under attack! ... assistance!"
Chilling. She hunched her shoulders. No-relax. The crew was watching.
Chakotay's shadow fell across her, warm and comforting as always, his wide shoulders bearing so much
of her burden that Janeway sometimes enjoyed the temptation to shift it all to him, to have a captain again
instead of always being one.
Around them the security of the starship provided a nest of safety in a hostile quadrant The ship was in
arguably good shape after a couple of lucky trades in the past month or so. As the screen struggled to
focus before her, she became insecure in her privilege.
Before her an image crackled, its transmission damaged at the source.
A captain in trouble, rocking with violence in his command chair, begging for help in a quadrant without a
heart.
"Captain Ransom! The Equinox!... under attack!...
assistance-"
A Federation vessel? Not here, not a science ship, at this distance. It had to be a sensor echo or a
malfunction. Janeway parted her lips, about to ask for a systems
check, but Chakotay would already have done that. She held her tongue rather than insult him.
Instead she looked to her other side, to Seven of Nine. The lovely and terminally stoic young woman was
coldly playing the message. Seven glanced at the captain, picked up a nuance, and muted the sound.
Together they watched the terror on the screen, saw the panicked crew rushing behind their desperate
captain as he crumpled into his chair and pressed his shoulders into its backrest, his expression carved
with rage as he fired his phaser rifle again and again.
"Ransom," she murmured. "He was in command of a science vessel. The Equinox..."
"The distress call was transmitted approximately fourteen hours ago," Seven reported.
Janeway narrowed her eyes, about to ask the most important question, but Chakotay spared her by
answering i t himself. "Three point two light-years."
That tied it. No echo.
Janeway's heart jumped, then pounded. Three light-years! She forced her breathing to remain normal.
"Try to get a fix on their position."
Excitement-discovery! Friends! After five years of exile, of alien faces, confined to the halls of their own
ship and no other, no equals, no comrades. Five years.
"What are they doing in the Delta Quadrant?" Again, Chakotay, with the operative question that Janeway
preferred to have the answers for, yet did not.
In her elegant innocence, Seven posed a logical, if naive theory. "Perhaps they're searching for Voyager."
As her heart kept thundering, Janeway squeezed
one hand closed, tightly, and willed an outer calm. "The Equinox is a Nova-class ship. It was designed
for planetary research, not long-range tactical missions."
She met Chakotay's eyes. There she read the concerns haunting her. Was this a trick? A lure?
Beneath his tribal tattoo, Chakotay's eyebrow crooked in silent understanding. He would check that too.
Without a word, he turned and hurried out of the room, heading for the auxiliary sensors to make a
thorough defensive scan. He'd do a thorough job. Soon there would be answers.
She needed answers. The whole thing sounded wrong. Equinox was strictly an information-gathering
ship, no assault capabilities other than basic shields and a few stern-chasers for defense. What was it
doing so far away from charted space?
"Did you know this individual?" Seven asked, always probing, asking the kind of questions most of the
crew knew better than to ask their captain at moments like this.
"Only by reputation," Janeway accommodated, never holding Seven's ignorance against her. "He was an
exo-biologist promoted to captain after he made first contact with the Yridians."
"Species six-two-nine-one," the girl said. "The Collective determined that they were extinct"
"So did the Federation. Ransom proved otherwise. I always wanted to meet him. Too bad it won't be
under better circumstances."
"I look forward to meeting him as well. And his crew. I wish to expand my knowledge of humanity."
Glancing at her, Janeway tried not to make too big a deal out of Seven's lingering alienness. The girl was
human, but had so long been infected by the cyborg horror that she still acted as much machine as alive.
"Let's hope you get the chance," the captain said simply.
Seven's large eyes flickered with a brief flash of life. "I've got their coordinates," she offered, taking
refuge in data. "Heading two-five-eight, mark twelve."
A Federation ship broadcasting a distress call! Purpose surged through Janeway such as she hadn't felt in
years. This was her real job, the thing she'd been charged to do, the duty for which her oath had been
sworn-to protect and defend Federation assets, property, and personnel in space. For five years every
decision had been troubling-should she go, should she ignore, should she contact. Always a trick to make
the choice to respond.
But not today! For the first time since they'd been flung away from Federation space and trapped in the
Delta Quadrant, there was no doubt about Voyager's charge.
Her heart started bumping again. She touched the controls, freezing the redundant distress call.
"Set a course, maximum warp. Go to Red Alert."
Seven moved away immediately to carry out the order. That was all Janeway had to do-speak, and they
would obey. A captain's privilege to offset the burden.
For the first time since she could remember, she wor-
ried not for her own crew but for another ship's leader lost in the Delta Quadrant. She peered at the
frozen face of the man on the small screen. "Hang on, Captain," she murmured.
Tense hours linked the frazzled distress call to the first glimpse of a troubled ship on the sensor horizon.
All the first-watch officers were here, some who should have been asleep. Word had rocketed through
the ship that another Federation vessel-even a Starfleet vessel-had called out in the vast empty night.
They'd found a long-lost brother.
Everyone was here who had an excuse to be on the bridge. Janeway could've cleared the bridge,
probably should have, but her own sentimentality stopped her. They deserved a moment like this.
Only her quietly roiling stomach warned of how quickly things could go sour. Chakotay sat at her side,
his hands nervously gripping the chair. He hadn't been able to confirm the bona fides of the distress call
or even to pick up definite emission signatures to confirm that this was a Federation ship. It could be a
clever fake. He didn't like that. Chakotay wasn't one who really liked flying blind.
After five years of trouble and strife, Janeway was willing to take the chance of being trapped just to give
her crew a taste of their old life-answering a friendly cry for help in the distance as they had all signed up
to do. Even if things went wrong, they had had this momentary taste of their old cause.
Tom Paris had the helm-he'd pulled rank on the
watch officer. Harry Kim manned his own station. Tuvok on the sensors, B'Elanna Torres at tactical,
Seven of Nine manning the science readouts, and Neelix here for no good reason except maybe to
recognize his own quadrant's bad guys if this were a trick. Other crew, who were actually supposed to
be on this watch, puttered around the bridge's upper deck, pretending they weren't bothered by the
invasion from the other watch. Captain's prerogative, they knew, but still...
Even The Doctor was here, wearing the mobile emitter that allowed his holographic program to roam the
ship instead of being confined to sickbay. Janeway had come to like having him around, as if he were a
living physician rather than just a particularly quirkish learning hologram.
Janeway deliberately didn't glance around. That would've made them all self-conscious. Everyone else on
the ship wanted to be here, too, she knew. Even joy had its limitations.
"We're approaching the coordinates." Tom Paris' voice had a forced control about it
'Take us out of warp," she ordered.
"I've got them!" Kim let it all out 'Two thousand kilometers off the port bow! They're moving at low
impulse."
Janeway frowned. Low impulse?
"Intercept," she said, then resisted the urge to tell Paris not to move too sharply or a ship Voyager's size
could plow over the other one like a bulldozer. "Tuvok, can you get a visual?"
The forward viewscreen showed only open space,
but in their minds they could already see the other ship. Everybody had checked the banks. They all
knew what a Nova-class ship looked like clamshell primary hull, simple engineering hull, two nacelles, a
little squatty. Average.
Until today. On this particular day, at this hour, the little Equinox had her moment in the sun. She was the
nearest handhold to home for the lonely Voyager crew, who almost never got to see their own ship from
the outside. Now they could look out into unfriendly space and see a vision of themselves, brushstrokes
of home in the form of a familiar design.
The first shape they saw with their naked eyes, though, wasn't the lines of Starfleet engineering. Instead it
was an energy bulb fractured with blue and white demolition. Full shields, under assault.
Janeway leaned forward in her chair, squinting.
Now she could see the ship itself, veering toward Voyager on a Z-plane.
"They're heavily damaged," Tuvok reported, not nearly as Vulcan-stiff as usual. "Multiple hull breeches ...
warp drive is off-line-"
"What's happening to their shields?" Neelix interrupted.
"They're being disrupted," Torres answered, reading her engineering monitor, "by some kind of energy
surges."
A simple statement, but to Janeway it said much more. Disruption meant assault. Surges of energy were
different from shots or sabotage. It meant there was an unseen force acting upon the other ship. She was
glad
Voyager had maintained Red Alert, all shields and precautions on-line. No visible enemy didn't mean no
enemy.
"Weapons fire?" Paris asked.
Tuvok shook his head, even though Paris wasn't watching him. "There are no other ships in the vicinity."
"We're in hailing range," Kim reported tensely. Janeway could tell he was an instant from hailing them
himself.
"Open a channel," she told him. He already had it open. All right, then. "This is Captain Kathryn Janeway
of the Federation Starship Voyager. We're responding to your-"
"Voyager! You've got to extend your shields around our ship! Match the emitter frequency!"
Making one attempt at confirmation, Janeway asked, "Are you under attack?"
"Shields! Quickly!"
No hello, no formality, no nuthin. Save my ship.
She knew that tone.
"Do it."
Now the crew had something to do. Paris had to maneuver the starship directly above the science vessel
to make full use of the shield dome. On the viewscreen they could see the shape of Equinox, about half
the size of Voyager, engulfed in the fracturing bulb of her own shields. Tuvok had to gauge and calculate
the assault in order to modulate the starship's shields to repel the level of attacking energy. Torres
worked to reroute necessary power to the grid. Kim made sure the way be-
fore them was clear of meteoritic obstacles or gas clouds that would only make things harder.
Chakotay kept a close watch on the detail monitors at his chair's access, while Janeway watched the
overall scene. Neelix sent his best good wishes across the gulf of space.
"We're in position," Paris reported.
Tuvok, at the same time, said, "I'm matching their shield frequency."
Janeway ticked off the seconds. She could order them to work faster, but why? Her ears were ringing.
Anticipation? A midshipman's reaction. She tried to get control over it, but the whine only got worse.
Behind her, then, The Doctor's voice, talking to someone else on the upper deck-"Do you hear
something?"
That was no ringing in the ears. Malfunction?
Janeway spun around, but Seven was already working the problem.
"Interspatial fissures are opening on decks ten, six... and one!"
Janeway turned again. "Tuvok!"
He didn't look up or respond at all. His large hands played on the controls with swift intensity. That was
his way of responding.
The shields' activation lights blinked red, orange, then went to green. On the monitors around the bridge,
schematics of the Voyager's deflectors engulfing the Equinox as well as the starship made a big
theoretical bulb in space. The attack was forced back by the starship's considerable power-whatever the
attack was.
"Shields are holding," Tuvok told them.
"The fissures?" Chakotay asked, implying that he might be seeing something on the detail monitors that
Janeway couldn't see on the large screen.
She was glad he was here.
"No sign of them," Seven answered.
After a moment of relief for all, Janeway pressed forward. "Voyager to Ransom. Captain?"
Her chest constricted. No response. Not a flicker. Had she failed before her rescue mission had even
begun?
"Assemble rescue teams. Secure the Equinox. Tuvok, you're with me."
She spoke on the run toward the turbolift. If they thought she was worried, frightened, anxious-okay, so
they knew her better than she liked.
The others followed her. Chakotay, Tones, Paris, Neelix, Seven, Kim, all rushing to collect tricorders,
wrist beacons, hand phasers, and a medikit. The on-watch crew filtered back to their positions, allowing
the primary crew to be the away team. Janeway was glad it happened to work out that way this time.
She wanted her primary team to experience whatever was coming and to back her up if it went wrong.
A simple rescue mission, a Starfleet vessel. She hungered to be there.
The shields were holding. What could go wrong?
CHAPTER
3
COMMANDER CHAKOTAY LED THE AUXILIARY TEAM DOWN into the secondary hull of the
science vessel, directly into the engine room. Somewhere above, the captain was picking her way
through to the primary hull, heading for the bridge. They'd had to beam in down here, then split up. The
Equinox's primary hull had taken so much damage that they couldn't even find a beam-in point that wasn't
so damaged that the sensors couldn't read the integrity of life support. Beam into a vacuum and you'll feel
pretty silly at that last nanosecond before you die.
Beaming in-it seemed so ordinary in practice, yet today as Chakotay's body reintegrated and he could
see again, there was only a hellish dimness to look upon and the whole beaming process made his skin
crawl. A nightmarish tunnel laid out before him, overlaid with
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 grotesque smile. The throat
was nothing more than paper skin stretched over cords, drawn drumhead tight and stretched so thin that
the veins showed.
Paris turned toward the other unfortunates but paused to gather his innards. Chakotay paused with him,
waiting, having a slightly easier time because he'd listened to his intuitive side and steeled himself for
disaster. If the ship looked this bad, what must the crew look like?
Apparently, though, Paris had entertained higher hopes for a reunion with Starfleet brothers and sisters.
Those were now crashing.
"You all right?" Chakotay asked him quietly.
Paris drew a ragged breath and pressed his lips against unconcealed nausea. "I thought we'd be able
to..." He stopped himself, tempered down his reaction, and shook his head. "Maybe you better give me a
little push."
"Only if you carry me." Rewarding him with a funereal grin, Chakotay took his elbow and accommodated
with a nudge. Back to work, even if it was bad work.
"Commander!" Torres, kneeling at the warp drive's central core.
Chakotay moved to the core, then stopped to stare. What was that? Several exotic pieces of equipment
had been added to the core itself-conduit, injector ports ... almost old-fashioned, like someone had been
building a core from scratch in a basement lab. Why would they refit their core?
"I can't make heads or tails of this injector manifold," B'Elanna Torres told him, frowning into her
analytics. "And the dilithium matrix looks like it's been completely redesigned."
"We'll try to find one of their engineers to help us," Chakotay offered, a bigger promise than he could
make good on, if the body to his left was any clue. "In the meantime, see if you can bypass the core."
She was already involved in dissecting, but managed to toss a late, "Aye, sir," his way after he'd already
left.
Moving on through the lower hall, Chakotay kept his eyes swiveling over the twisted beams and plates
and the cables spilled like intestines, his mind racing about what malevolence could have done so very
much damage.
Come on, Tom," he murmured as he stepped by Paris, who had found another unhappy body.
"This must've been some fight," Paris rasped, failing to find a more creative comment.
"Anything from outside that could've caused this would also have destroyed the hull," Chakotay mused.
"Something invaded the ship and did this from inside."
"And I'll tell you what-look at these markings. Recognize this?"
Shining his wrist light to the point Paris indicated, Chakotay endured a moment of true denial.
"Phaser demarcations," Paris said aloud. "They were shooting full phasers in here. No holds barred. But I
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