Caretaker (8 page)

“Captain …?” Kim interjected. An oddly welcome distraction, if only because Paris wasn’t sure how long he could hold up his facade of strength beneath the understanding sympathy in Janeway’s eyes.

“Captain, something’s out there!”

She turned to face him, recrossing the bridge to lean against the railing below him. “I need a better description than that, Mr. Kim.”

“I don’t know.” But he blurted it, and Paris could see the embarrassed color rise into Kim’s face as the ensign hurried to compile enough information for a better reply. “I’m reading …

I’m not sure what I’m reading!”

“Can you get the viewscreen operational?”

“I’m trying. …”

It sputtered to life with a great roar of static, and Paris whirled to face it as though expecting another attack. Surges and hisses flared across the screen’s surface, twining together and apart as the image beyond them fought its way to the foreground. At first, Paris thought it was a city, and that Kim had somehow captured a nearby planet’s visual transmission. Then the stars filling the space all around the weird structure gradually faded into view, and Paris realized that what he’d taken for buildings were only the smallest in an eerie collection of struts, arches, and pylons that bristled across the surface of some sort of long, flat orbital structure. Energy pulsed and leapt between the insectoid spires, finally throwing itself out into space where it seared off into distant infinity. Like a lighthouse, Paris thought.

Or a radio signal.

Near the belly of the giant array, a tiny speck of matter glittered in the reflections of the great device’s waste light.

Paris only knew it was the Maquis ship by the trail of text at the bottom of the viewscreen, identifying the stolen vessel’s registration.

“Captain …” Kim’s voice was too quiet, almost numb compared to the chaos around him. “If these sensors are working, we’re over seventy thousand light-years from where we were.” He looked over at Janeway with an expression too stunned to even be afraid.

“We’re on the other side of the galaxy!”

The other side of the galaxy. Janeway moved carefully away from Paris and the ruined helm, closing her hands on the smoke-stained railing so she could lean on something without showing weakness in front of her crew.

The other side of the galaxy!

They didn’t prepare you to hear things like that when they trained you at the Academy. Negotiations, combat, the intricacies of shipboard policies and politics, all the possibilities of starfaring life that a captain could reasonably look forward to—these things had filled the days and nights of Janeway’s career, not wild speculation about what procedures to follow when your Ops officer reports you’ve been transported seventy thousand light-years from home.

So she fell back on the basics. “What about the Maquis ship?”

Kim blinked down at his panel as though the smoke still swirling through the bridge were stinging his eyes. “I’m not reading any life signs on the Maquis ship.”

“What about that—” Janeway jerked her chin toward the spiny tangle dominating Voyager’s main screen. “—that Array?”

“Our sensors can’t penetrate it.”

She studied the rhythmic flashes throbbing out from the center of the structure, watching them sparkle off into the distance and vanish.

“Any idea what those pulses coming from it are, Mr. Kim?”

“Massive bursts of radiant energy …” He called up more readings, and Janeway waited as patiently as the current chaos would let her. Down by the viewscreen, Paris had moved Stadi’s corpse off to one side and started putting out fires on the helm console. “They seem to be directed toward a nearby G-type star system,” Kim reported at last.

“Try hailing the Array,” Janeway told him.

The ensign nodded acknowledgment, and Paris looked up from the helm as though waiting for her orders as Janeway made her way around the bridge to push debris away from whatever consoles still functioned. You’re not an officer here, she thought with some vehemence. I will not give you even the smallest responsibility under conditions such as this.

But it wasn’t a confrontation she intended to have right now.

The chirp of her comm badge offered an excuse to turn away from Paris’s expectant face without specifically dismissing him. She tapped her badge to take the call.

“—Engineering to bridge—” The comm channel spit and shattered with static, but even that couldn’t drown the barely controlled panic in Junior Engineer Carey’s voice. “We have severe damage—the chief’s dead … possibility of a warp-core breach …”

“Secure all engineering systems,” Janeway ordered. “I’m on my way.”

Kim looked up as she hurried past him for the turbolift. “No response from the Array.”

Not that she’d expected one. That would have been too easy.

“Ensign—” She waved Kim away from his position. “Get down to sickbay, see what’s going on. Mr. Rollins, the bridge is yours.”

She ducked into the lift while the doors were only half open, trying to ignore the sudden clench of her stomach when it occurred to her that the lifts might be dysfunctional and everyone on the bridge relegated to ladders and emergency shafts.

But the control panel lit up at a slap from her hand, and the internal system chimed a calm affirmative when she commanded it to go. A last quick glance at the bridge through the closing doors shocked her anew with the damage and death, but what shocked her most of all was the look of open disappointment on Paris’s face as he looked back at her, painfully aware that she had abandoned him there, dutiless, when there was so much on board to be done.

When the ship first trembled as though in response to some great external blow, Dr. Fitzgerald wouldn’t let the nurse, T’Prena, call up to the bridge to find out what was going on. As support staff to the great starship, he didn’t feel it was their place to be either bothering the command crew during times of crisis, or trying to tell the command crew what they should be doing.

“Captains know what’s best for their ships,” he was fond of saying.

“We know what’s best for their crew.” And, sometimes, what was best was keeping everyone occupied with their assigned duties when there was nothing more useful they could be doing.

Now, Fitzgerald rather wished he had some idea what was happening.

He’d been trying to keep T’Prena busy by using her Vulcan memory instead of a note padd as he ran calibrating samples through the cellular diagnostic sequencer. Distracting a Vulcan, after all, was hardly an easy task—judging whether or not you were successful was a whole other matter entirely. Vulcans didn’t fidget or prattle nervously when they were unhappy; they acted the same as they always did. They denied, even, that they could feel unhappy. But a long residency at the Vulcan Science Academy had taught Fitzgerald a lot more than how to gauge a pon farr hormonal surge. He’d learned, as well, that Vulcans in many ways felt just as much as humans did; they simply chose not to let those emotions rule their actions and lives.

Even when they engaged in behavior for what might otherwise be considered emotional reasons, they made sure they had a logical rationale for doing so. Whether or not that made them emotionless or simply uptight, Fitzgerald had never been able to decide. All the same, he’d realized that once he learned how to recognize the vanishingly subtle clues to Vulcan feelings, he’d begun to appreciate the advantage this gave him as a doctor—the advantage of knowing, just like with human patients, what a Vulcan needed mentally perhaps even before the Vulcan herself did. He was very proud of this skill. It wasn’t every doctor who could boast that he knew what was best for a Vulcan, and so Fitzgerald made it a point to do so whenever the opportunity presented itself.

But not in front of the Vulcans, of course.

I was only trying to do what was best. It was all he ever did.

He took his duties as protector of the crew’s health and welfare very seriously, and would never have done anything to cause any of them harm. Even Paris, to whom he’d spoken so rudely only yesterday—all Fitzgerald wanted was to protect any of the young men and women on board Voyager from suffering the same fate as those three poor crewmen on Caldik Prime. All it would take was a boy as trusting and impressionable as young Harry Kim believing Paris when the older man said he was responsible enough to take a shuttle, man the weapons, work the engines, and any one of the one hundred fifty innocent lives on this vessel might be forfeit.

That possibility was far more horrible to Fitzgerald than any ill feelings Paris might hold toward him. The doctor had even tried to explain that to Ensign Kim. “It’s for the best, you know,” he had said quietly over their breakfasts in the mess hall. “Men like that never come to any good.” He’d only been trying to protect everyone.

So when the ship lurched mindlessly and pitched the sickbay into darkness, the first thought to race through Fitzgerald’s mind was that he had to protect T’Prena. His first wife would have called him a chauvinist, would have claimed he didn’t think women—even Vulcan women—were capable of taking care of themselves. But if Fitzgerald had ever given a damn about what anybody thought, he’d probably still be married to at least one of his previous spouses. Throwing his arm around T’Prena’s shoulders, he pulled her against him and huddled them both tight against the sequencer, where they could use the wall-mounted unit to help guide them down to the floor, rather than be thrown about the room to smash into whatever examining tables and desks happened to be in the way. The doctor was proud of his quick thinking.

“I think it would be best if we tried to make our way into the corridor,” he’d started to shout across the darkness.

Then the sequencer exploded.

The percussion of escaping flame and displaced air peeled most of the skin away from his skull and ruptured his eardrums with a clap of brilliant pain. He was glad the shock left him too dumbstruck to scream—his first intake of breath would have seared shut his lungs, leaving him helpless and mute for the five to seven minutes it would have taken him to suffocate. Assuming he remained conscious that long.

He struck the deck now in such a state of utter, chilling numbness, he knew his neurological systems must be severely damaged, his blood pressure already plunging below seventy. Of course—third-degree burns. Judging from the strange mixture of pain and insensibility cocooning his body, he estimated he’d suffered at least a forty-percent evaporation of skin surface in the initial explosion. That was not an encouraging statistic.

God, you’re even starting to phrase your diagnoses like a Vulcan!

T’Prena.

Fitzgerald remembered her with the peculiar jolt of a doctor who has somehow, impossibly, blanked out in the middle of a medical emergency.

She wasn’t just his nurse, now—if she’d been injured by the sequencer explosion, she was his patient and he had forgotten her. If she was dead, if he had killed her …! He’d never killed anyone in his life.

Not through accident, not through error, not even through some ill-thought inaction of his own. He dragged himself blindly across the floor as smoke billowed downward from the fire overhead, and the first sentence of the Hippocratic oath rang in echo to the thunder in his chest.

First, do no harm.

“… T’Prena …?”

She was a Vulcan—if she could have answered him, she would have.

That thought hugged his heart with pain as he searched for her through a gathering darkness that came from more than just the accumulating smoke. “Nurse …? It’s Dr. Fitzgerald …” He coughed, and the pain of it nearly tore him apart inside.

He found her with his hands, his eyes too stained with smoke to see her anymore. The front of her uniform was blasted open, stiff along the edges where the fabric had melted and burned. He did his best to avoid all the places where his flesh and muscle would be exposed—he must be filthy, he reasoned, his hands impossibly septic after crawling across this blood-and debris-littered floor. When his hands finally closed on the rounded knob of her shoulder, he groped his way down her arm in search of her wrist. It felt small and cool, the pulse jumping erratically beneath his touch no more than the struggles of a dying bird.

This will not be my fault! I will not let a patient die!

“… Computer …” Fitzgerald heard the console stagger sluggishly to life on the other side of the smoke-filled room.

“… Initiate emergency …” T’Prena’s pulse continued to flutter beneath his shaking hand. He held it tighter, willing it to strengthen, willing it to stay.

“… emergency medical …”

It fluttered, thickened, faded …

Fitzgerald’s breath caught painfully in his chest, and T’Prena felt cold almost the instant her heart stopped beating. No patient, he told himself. No reason to fight anymore. He was a doctor, and by his hand a living being had died. Lowering his head to the deck beside her, Fitzgerald closed his eyes to let that swelling final darkness take him.

Engineering glowed like the depths of Hell.

Janeway took a deep breath before striding out of the turbolift, trying to take in a thousand images at once. She counted three dead on the floor just inside the main doors, their bodies reduced to little more than blurred outlines beneath a shroud of torn, discolored tarps. She suffered a sudden, uncomfortable worry about what they were going to do with all these bodies.

That wasn’t something they talked about much at the Academy, either. A small group of engineers were already helping those of the injured who could walk into the corridor, and someone else knelt beside crew members who were so badly wounded that Janeway couldn’t bring herself to believe they would actually survive—even if sickbay was only half this damaged. From speakers out of sight in the gas clouds overhead, the computer’s dry, uninflected voice droned, “Warning. Warp-core microfracture. Breach imminent … Warning. Warp-core …”

Janeway pushed between two suited engineers to grab Carey by the shoulder. “What’s the warp-core pressure?”

He twisted about at the sound of her voice, his face a study in frustrated dread. “Twenty-one hundred kilopascals and falling.”