Cybersong (11 page)

There was a seventh sense for a pilot, a place where the mind merged with machine. Where there was no thought, but only being.

It was sacred space.

Kes sat quietly, almost like a statue, as he brought the shuttle around through the gash that Tom Paris had found so easy to navigate.

“There they are,” he said, spotting the earlier shuttle already neatly parked on the exposed deck. “They would have had to wear environmental suits out there. There isn’t any air in here.”

“Are we going to stop next to them, or are we just going to call them?”

Kes asked innocently.

Chakotay turned to her with absolute shock on his face. She was right!

Inside this hulk there was no tachyon field. It was a null zone. And so his comm badge ought to work fine.

He flicked it on. “Away team, this is Chakotay. Where are you?”

“We’re on the bridge trying to get a download from the alien log,” Janeway’s voice was crisp and clear. “How did you cut through the tachyon field? I thought our commbadges wouldn’t work with the interference.”

“Just a minor repositioning,” Chakotay said, his voice perfectly calm.

He ignored Kes’s raised eyebrow and slight smile. “Do you have any idea when you’ll be back aboard? We’re getting a little worried.”

“We’re fine,” the captain told him. “And I expect to be out of here in less than an hour. We’ll have to do more investigation later, when we have a better idea of what we’re looking for.

We’ll see you soon, Voyager. Janeway out.”

“I suppose repositioning is an accurate way to describe it,” Kes said as if she had learned something new. Her voice was so warm and soft, her eyes so innocent, it was easy to think she was human. The Doctor had been very impressed with her desire to learn, and now Chakotay knew why.

There was enough room to maneuver, to loop around through the blasted-out decks before emerging from the hole in the alien hull once again. Back into the tachyon field that somehow had never stopped its infernal buffeting and interference.

“No reason for them to know that we were out here, in case of an emergency,” Chakotay said. “There was no emergency. But it’s better to be prepared.”

Kes agreed, her voice firm and serious.

Then suddenly she became still, and her body braced as if for some shock. “Something bad,” she said, breathing raggedly.

“Something bad is happening. Going to happen. I don’t know.

Get them out. Get them now.” Her words became higher in pitch, her entire aspect growing more agitated as she strained against the shuttle belt.

Chakotay didn’t hesitate. He flung the shuttle into a blazing spin and whipped it out as they converged on the alien vessel again. As they approached the opening in the side, they were thrust backward by a force that nearly knocked Chakotay out of the pilot’s seat.

Debris shot past them, piercing shards of the dead hull reeling out of control like a sandstorm around them, abrading the resistant skin of the craft.

Chakotay could not think. His mind was focused on one point, his entire being alive with a single purpose. To stay alive. To get through this bombardment of shrapnel.

He didn’t remember putting the shields up, but the indicator light glowed on the console. Still, the shuttle shields were not complete protection against the discharge of junk that engulfed then.

He pulled the shuttlecraft hard to port, avoiding a tumbling chunk of metal blasted at them with the force of a projectile weapon. The shuttlecraft was awkward and bulky. It had not been designed for evasive exercises.

Kes gasped aloud. Chakotay ignored her. The first wave of wreckage had passed them now, but there were the smaller pieces that were traveling even faster and could tear right through their skin if it weren’t for the shields.

They had shields, they had the shuttlecraft. The away team had nothing but the environmental suits, which had not been built to stand up to a frontal attack.

The captain, Paris, and Kim could be dead now. Chakotay felt it as a grim coldness that he ignored. No use imagining all the possibilities.

“They’re alive,” Kes said.

Chakotay heard her but didn’t really listen. He had too much to do.

Get back inside the dead ship while avoiding the leftover flotsam after the explosion. Find the away team and get them back. Get them safe, keep them alive.

This time it wasn’t as easy to slip between the scarred plates of the dead ship. The force of the blast had loosened a tangle of internal wires and ducts that now hung like Spanish moss from every newly ripped surface. What had once been empty space was now a jungle thick with looping cables and masses of colored crystals caught in strands of mesh. Some of the crystals sparkled, and a few of the cables sputtered in the dark. Not everything aboard the alien craft was dead.

Chakotay cut power down to maneuver through the maze. “How are we going to find them in this mess?” he muttered to himself as his fingers flew over the console.

The commbadge should give me a good location reading, he thought.

He had never wished so hard for a transporter on a shuttle. But wishing wouldn’t do any good and the commbadge would.

He opened communications and tried to raise them. “Captain, Paris, Kim, what’s your status?” he asked quickly.

There was no answer. The badge crackled empty in the wake of the explosion. Fear tickled the back of his neck. If he couldn’t find them, he couldn’t save them. If they were alive.

They had to be alive. The commbadges were malfunctioning. Maybe they had been abraded by the dust of the explosion. Maybe they were shorted out in the environment. Maybe, maybe …

The clock was running. He tried the badge one more time. If he couldn’t raise them, he could at least use the badges to trace them through the wreckage. Maybe they were unconscious or unable to talk.

Every second counted. “Away team, what’s your status?” he asked again. His voice revealed no stress or concern. “Away team, we aren’t getting any signal from you. Please identify.”

“Chakotay? That you?” he heard Paris ask faintly.

“Yes. What’s your status?” Chakotay demanded.

“I’m caught under a beam that’s fallen. I can’t see Harry or the captain.”

“Okay, we’ll get right on it,” Chakotay said. He touched the console once more. This time it displayed a schematic of the local area with the three comm badges flashing red. That didn’t necessarily mean that the badges were still on the officers, though given that they were wearing environmental suits, Chakotay would be very surprised if they had fallen off, unless a suit was ripped open. And then time wouldn’t matter anymore.

He still had to steer through curtains of rubble to get even close to the section where the indicators said that the away team had been trapped. When he reached the area there was no place to land the shuttle. It was too large and there was no surface left uncluttered by dangerously snaking live connections.

Chakotay took one look and grimaced. He was going to have to put on an environmental suit anyway. He used the magnetic locks to tether the shuttlecraft so that it remained tied next to a large, solid-looking projection.

When he was certain that the shuttle was secure and when he had a map of the interior of the area in his head, he turned to the back storage area to get the e-suit … and saw Kes, already suited, laying out the various pieces.

At least she hadn’t put the helmet on yet. He had been so focused on finding the away team that he had forgotten Kes was there.

“Kes, what do you expect to do out there?” he asked. “There isn’t anything you can do for anyone until we get them out of the suits and into a pressurized environment again.”

“I can help you get them out of there,” Kes replied.

“You’re not strong enough,” Chakotay waved her off. “Besides, your skills are more useful here.”

Kes smiled sweetly. “But there’s no gravity out there, so strength or weight don’t matter. I can manipulate things as well as you can.”

Chakotay blinked. The Ocampa lived under ground. How could Kes have gotten any idea of the requirements of a zero-gee rescue?

He didn’t have time to wonder. There was one door to the shuttle that was equipped as an airlock. Chakotay chose that exit and took Kes with him, for a single cycle.

The airlock cycled through and Chakotay grabbed at Kes so she wouldn’t drift off when the door opened. His own boots were set on magnetic secured. Kes’s boots were turned off. Chakotay suspected that she didn’t know they could be activated. Now wasn’t the time to tell her.

He took her belt clip and attached it to a long strand on his own belt.

That way they wouldn’t get separated.

The airlock cycled through and the outer door opened.

Because his boots were on, Chakotay could walk out of the door and step onto the skin of the shuttlecraft. Kes floated behind, both her hands on the line that connected them.

They were in an alien world. Sheets of tubing and mesh cascaded around them like soft hanging art. Occasional flashes of hard white, or blue, or pale green light jumped between connections, backlighting the whole like an electrical storm. The crystals caught in the mesh sparkled on their own in softer colors than the flashes.

Chakotay had another long magnetic rope with him. It was fine filament and soft in his hands, but it ended in heavy magnetic disks to catch a steel object. Chakotay had never seen the thing used in real life for its intended purpose. People just thought of it as rope.

Now, secured to the hull of the shuttle, he began to swing the rope in a long lazy arc. There was no weight, there was no sensation of force in the rope as it looped around. Chakotay didn’t let the feeling fool him. He aimed at a metal spike on the deck and threw, using the energy in the swing.

The magnet drew the rope end to the spike and it attached.

Chakotay pulled at it hard, making sure it was fully secured.

Only then did he turn his boots off and pull himself down the rope, heading away from the shuttle and deep into the alien wreckage.

It seemed that he was moving in slow motion through the vacuum.

He had to be careful, couldn’t afford to drift away from the tether or he and Kes would drift out into the hull, unable to return. Or they would drift right out the gash and into the tachyon field, where they would be bombarded, their suits abraded until they died. Quickly.

All these scenarios dashed through his mind as he made his way carefully to the interior of what remained of the vessel. Once there, he turned his boots back on and felt secure on the surface. He showed Kes how her boots worked so that he wouldn’t have to keep her in tow.

They had work to do.

There was no reason for talk as Chakotay led the way through the rubble. He knew where the away team was. Once there had been a bulkhead between him and the bridge. Now there was only debris, fragments of the wall still standing only because they were wedged there by other remains.

He took out his hand lamp and saw that Kes had turned hers on as well.

He didn’t know she’d brought one. It must have been in the medical bag.

Two lamps gave enough light that they could make out variation in the wreckage. Legs. Bloated shiny legs—those had to be legs in an environmental suit. It looked like half the wall had fallen on whoever was down there.

He couldn’t hurry. He had to pick his way carefully through the ruins on the deck. It took less that half a second. It felt like eternity, seeing someone he knew down, hurt, trapped.

Maybe dead. He wouldn’t think of dead. Only in need of help.

He couldn’t see who it was at first. He was able to pitch the crystal from the chest area and look down. It was Harry Kim.

Kim was unconscious. Chakotay tried to dislodge the beam that had him wedged in, but it wouldn’t move. The commander tried again, using all of his strength to push the single fragment that was either stone or metal or some odd combination of the two.

He looked to where the edge ended in a great heap that had crushed a station. This wasn’t going to move. There was no matter of strength here, only the fact that the beam had nowhere to go.

Without thinking, Chakotay took the laser cutter from the pouch and cut the beam neatly. He was able to gauge it well, to get through the material without touching Kim’s environmental suit.

He smiled to himself.

“Kes, I need you over here now,” Chakotay ordered the Ocampa.

“I’ve found the captain,” Kes replied.

“How is she?” Chakotay asked as he slung his arm under Kim’s back. At least without gravity and encased in the suit, he didn’t have to worry that he could do further injury to the ensign. And without gravity, it was easy for him to carry Kim out of the rubble and back toward safety.

“I can’t tell.” Kes’s reply came clearly through the helmet speakers.

“She seems conscious but disoriented.”

“Is she trapped?” Chakotay asked.

“No,” Kes replied. “But I don’t think she can walk.”

“That’s okay,” Chakotay said. “See if you can carry her back to where we anchored. I’ve got Kim here. We’ll get them back and then I’ll go or Paris.”

“No one has to go for Paris. Paris can do very well by himself.”

Tom Paris’s voice came through clearly. “Just where are you?”

“Can’t you see our lights?” Kes asked, worry coloring her tone.

“I see something that probably is you,” Paris admitted. “But there are a lot of lights running around here. It’s hard to tell.”

“Okay, we’ll wait and hold the lights steady,” Chakotay said.

“Follow them and join up with us, and we’ll get you back to the shuttle.”

“Good,” Tom Paris said. “I can’t wait to get out of this suit.

How’s Harry?”

“He’s unconscious,” Chakotay said. “Okay, I can see you now.

We’re at your two o’clock. And be careful of the junk on the deck.”

Chakotay didn’t really see Tom Paris. What he saw was a flicker of moving paleness against the dark.

Finally, the figure drew close enough that the basic humanoid shape, bloated by the environmental suit but still recognizable, was clear.

Chakotay was pleased that no one could read his relief.