Caretaker (7 page)

His heart started to thunder inside him.

“Full impulse,” Janeway commanded.

Stadi obeyed without acknowledgment, the ship humming with power as she brought it about. Paris wished suddenly, emphatically, for a station at which to sit, some way to be useful, to help.

Kim remained glued to his readouts. “The wave will intercept us in twenty seconds …”

“Can we go to warp?”

Stadi shook her head, still frantically working her controls.

“Not until we clear the plasma field, Captain.”

“… eight seconds …”

Clearing the space in two swift strides, Janeway slapped at the intercom on the arm of her command chair. “Brace for impact!”

“… three …”

The captain’s voice still echoed in the decks below them as the hand of God seized hold of the ship and flung it into the void.

Stadi swallowed a scream as the very fabric of her reality splintered into a hundred unique cries of desperation and pain.

She hunched over the conn, fighting for control of her mind now that control of the ship was impossible. Personal discipline must come first, a voice from far in her past told her gently.

After this, all other things will follow.

But how could one find peace when the empathy that bound a Betazoid so strongly to her crewmates was twisted back against her as a torture?

All her early fears about close contact with the mentally powerful but untrained human race crashed over her in a horrifying wave of regret.

“How can you stand it?” she’d asked her aunt. She remembered being small, and reed-flat, not yet having come into the womanhood that would give her full understanding of the control her aunt seemed to wear so effortlessly, like a comfortable robe.

“All their thinking, all their feeling, all the time!”

Aunt Shenzi had lived with humans for longer than Stadi had even been alive at this time. A government worker of some sort, whose interactions with the human-run Federation kept her locked away on Earth for sometimes years at a time. “It isn’t all the time,” she told Stadi. “Only when they feel about something very strongly.”

From what little Stadi had seen, with humans that was almost always.

“But don’t they take away your self?” Stadi had protested. “Crisa says humans push their emotions all over you, until you can only feel what they feel, and none of what you really are.” Crisa was seventeen, and had been to a Federation reception the year before where all of the young Starfleet ensigns had asked her to dance.

“Crisa isn’t exactly a model of personal shielding,” Aunt Shenzi had pointed out with a frown. Which was true—half the time, Crisa dithered and fussed because of some other Betazoid’s emotions as much as because of her own. “A little leakage from human emotions is bothersome at times,” Stadi’s aunt went on, “but hardly the monster Crisa makes it out to be. You’ll see.”

And now, years and years later, Stadi finally did see. She saw an admiral with a great mane of white hair scowling down at her with fatherly disapproval—a woman with warm, smiling eyes too wise and patient for her years—a man and a dog tumbling together in the overlong grass, with a lover’s amused voice admonishing them to be careful, or they’d get dirty. But it was other people’s memories, other people’s lives, swimming to surround her in that eternal nowhere moment that marked their disappearance from the Badlands and their arrival at—she didn’t know. Death?

Was this the fabled instant when one’s life flashed before your eyes?

And here I am with someone else’s life, Stadi thought with startling clarity. Just as Crisa had warned. Just as Stadi had feared for herself all those years before.

Not just their lives. Aunt Shenzi’s voice tickled her thoughts as though she were standing right by Stadi’s ear, petting back her hair.

Their lives, and your life, and all of you blessed because of it. Aunt Shenzi had died seven years ago, when she and the human woman she’d lived with for so long were on a passenger ship destroyed by the Borg.

Come tell me all about it, dear.

It would be like going home, Stadi thought with a shudder of relief.

She could leave all the noise of human panic behind, and embrace an emotional quiet she hadn’t known since leaving Betazed for the Academy.

She’d miss the humans’ lively inner chatter, but she would welcome Aunt Shenzi’s promised peace even more.

All right, Aunt Shenzi, I’m coming. She felt the ship burst suddenly out of its darkness, into a light so bright and burning she could feel it blasting through her face, her hands, her chest. Surely this was Voyager’s death throes, and what she felt jolting beneath her was the explosion that threw it to pieces.

The searing light seemed to throw her upward, out of herself, away from all the noise and terror, away from all the fear and pain. Smiling, Stadi reached out to embrace her Aunt Shenzi, and they moved away together, into silence.

The viewscreen was filled with tracers of light. Like ribbons of the plasma they were trying so hard to avoid, First Officer Cavit thought.

Or the ion trail of a dying ship, reaching out to entangle them and drag Voyager and everyone aboard her down its mouth to a nowhere place that even the Maquis couldn’t escape.

Stars ceased to exist, time almost shattered to a standstill, even the powerful forward momentum of a starship in warp drive seemed to thin out into nothingness until it faded from Cavit’s senses like the falling Doppler shift of a retreating scream.

They were suspended in amber, pinned in place against the motionless velvet of a space-time anomaly.

Then, with a crash, reality spun into wild motion again, and that transcendent moment of timelessness was lost.

Cavit felt a wash of killing heat as the helm panel at the front of the bridge exploded with a booming roar. Quite unconscious of his movements, he turned toward the sound. A million fears fought for prominence in his head—fear of an oxygen-stealing fire, fear of a gas leak, or, worst of all, a total hull breach—but he never had the chance to find out which of those many deaths was the true one. A hard wall of violently compressed air swatted him over the bridge railing, onto the upper deck, and all the breath rushed out of him as though he’d been punched by a giant’s invisible hand. He hit the floor on his shoulder, felt the socket push against itself with the force.

Whatever had racked the ship before still held her, flinging her the way a dog would fling a helpless rabbit, and Cavit struggled to stop himself when the rough pitching rolled him uncontrolled beneath the feet of the officer at the engineering console. They both tumbled against the panel. Cavit smelled blood—whether on himself or on the engineer, he couldn’t tell—just as he slammed the base of the machinery with the engineer’s weight pinning him to the floor.

The very first ship Cavit had ever served on board was a Starfleet colony-relief transport, some ten or fifteen years ago.

He’d been a young ensign then, not even out of the Academy, really.

They’d sent half his class out on short-term noncombat hauls as part of some new curricular plan, giving them the chance to experience the reality of what they all thought they wanted to train to do. A chance to get their feet wet, in a manner of speaking.

Cavit had thought it the most exciting assignment in the world at the time. The U.S.S. Kingston had ferried scientists and medicines, animals and supplies, to every growing colony between Miracle and Cimota VI. It had seemed like there could be nothing so romantic, nothing more important than bestowing on mankind’s most remote bastions the very elements of life they needed for their everyday survival. He had felt like a young god, bringing blessings from the stars to every planet on their itinerary. The Kingston’s CPO, Russ Tepper, had laughed to hear Cavit admit to his feelings, but even that had never changed the young man’s private views.

Then, while the Kingston was shipping stock gametes from the Vulcan genetic yards to Rukbat III, Orion pirates swept down on them and carved their hull apart.

The Orions had thought the Kingston was carrying latinum to a processing plant in the Ganges Sector, where it would be smelted and put to use in all its various valuable forms. The pirates were on board and reaving through whatever crew stood up to fight them before they discovered their mistake. By then it was too late for the Orions to back away as though nothing at all had happened. If they left without murdering every member of the Kingston’s crew, then there would be witnesses who had seen the Orions, seen their ship, identified its engine patterns so that the Federation authorities could hunt down the Orions to a man and bring them before the fair but efficient Federation court of law. Worse yet, they might be turned over to their own government, which had some particularly unpleasant ways of dealing with privateers who were stupid enough to be caught by the Federation. The Orions had no choice, as far as their limited views of morality took them—they had to clear the decks and make it look like some other brand of raiders did the dirty work before running with their tails between their legs for the hiding places in their own sector of space.

If this crew was composed of primarily unarmed workers and untried ensigns, well, it was merely one of the casualties of doing “business” with the Orions.

Cavit had been so young then, so eager to please his superiors, to do what he’d been told. When Russ Tepper grabbed him and the other frightened cadets, Cavit had been more than willing to follow the CPO to any part of the ship he said—to do anything Tepper or another officer told him to. Because doing what your CO’s said was right. If all else failed, you could just follow orders, and everything would be fine.

Tepper had crammed sixteen young men and women into the far aft cargo bays, inside and between as many different gamete-transport pods as he could turn off and move. By the time the Orions reached those smallest bays, they’d already discovered their error, and weren’t looking to spend any more time among this essentially worthless payload. They’d left the bays—and the sixteen people inside them—without even turning off the lights.

Cavit had huddled in silence, just as Tepper commanded, until the Enterprise arrived two days later to clean up what was left of the terrible slaughter.

He’d done the right thing, a dozen commodores and admirals had told him in the years to follow. All those young people had been so smart, so brave, so loyal, to hide themselves as ordered while their captain and crew all died. Because of them, the tragedy was exposed for what it really was, and the Orions who had perpetrated the horrible crime had been hunted down and punished as laid out by Federation law. Cavit had never attended the trials. All he knew was that—despite the commendations, despite all the glowing words Starfleet’s finest might heap upon him—in his heart he still felt like a traitor for having done nothing while his first ship was murdered. He went to sleep every night praying for forgiveness, and promising himself that if any ship on which he served was ever threatened again, he would die rather than forsake her crew.

I won’t let it happen again!

Pushing the lifeless engineer off him, Cavit dragged himself out from under the console and onto his knees. He didn’t know if emergency lighting had failed to come immediately, or if that first great explosion had blinded him, but he stumbled upright without being able to see, and felt for the railing with both hands. It won’t happen again, he promised himself. My ship, my captain, my crew—I’ll die before I disown them!

When he heard the creak and crack of collapsing metal above him, some dispassionate part of Cavit knew it was the ceiling giving way. He lifted his head, sightless eyes searching the darkness above him, but couldn’t tell which way to step to save himself.

He was still gripping the handrail, hating himself for his weakness, when the crush of falling debris drove him back down to the deck for the final time.

“Report!”

Paris jerked back into awareness at the sound of Janeway’s barked command. He blinked, reaching out to feel something familiar, something useful he could tell her, and realized with a jolt that he was facedown on the main deck with smoke and fire licking at him from all sides. He struggled to his knees, but couldn’t seem to remember which way he should turn.

“Hull breach, Deck Fourteen!” Kim had already made it back to his panel, scanning through screen after screen of information despite a fist-sized bruise across his cheekbone and a long streak of burn up one arm. “Comm lines to engineering are down—trying to reestablish …”

Paris stumbled toward where Stadi sprawled, unmoving, beside the shattered helm console. Behind him, he heard Janeway kicking aside debris from the collapsed ceiling, and realized belatedly that the smear of black-and-red he could glimpse inside that tangled wreckage was someone’s broken body.

“Repair crews!” Janeway shouted to raise her voice above both the sirens and the clanging of her fight with the bridge wreckage. “Seal off hull breach on Deck Fourteen—” “Casualty reports coming in,” a new voice called from the tactical console. “Sickbay is not responding.”

Stadi rolled limply when Paris pulled on her shoulder. This was a mistake, he realized the moment she sagged onto her back and exposed her burned, unseeing eyes. He shouldn’t have expected anyone to survive an explosion the size of what destroyed the pilot’s console, shouldn’t feel this throb of frustrated grief and anger over something he hadn’t caused and couldn’t control.

“Bridge to sickbay.” The captain stood immediately behind him now, apparently having given up her rescue efforts on whoever had been crushed in the ceiling collapse. “Doctor, can you hear me?”

Cavit. The name came to Paris in its own little explosion of understanding. He hadn’t heard Cavit since the displacement wave caught them, and Janeway hadn’t asked where her first officer was.

Which meant she already knew. Janeway moved toward where Stadi lay on the bridge floor.

Taking the captain’s composure as his example, Paris stood slowly and turned with what he hoped was a brave expression. “She’s dead.” If his voice was less than steady, he only hoped the captain would understand.