Caretaker

Prologue

A roar of scarlet light blasted through the tiny spaceship’s bridge, and alarms screamed as if in surprise as the deadly tremor of a direct hit went rattling off down the ship’s already battered frame. Chakotay wound his ankles more securely around the base of his pilot’s chair to keep from being pitched to the deck, then tapped a rapid sequence on the panel without looking back to see how the rest of his crew fared.

If he looked, he would have to go to them, and there was no place for that just now. A time to fight, a time to mourn, he tried to console himself. Chakotay didn’t remember anymore what noble figure in his people’s past had first said that. He wondered if that old Indian had ever faced anything quite like this.

The ship’s engines stuttered, then barked suddenly into life to spiral them off at an oblique vector.

Another blast of light shattered across the viewscreen dominating Chakotay’s vision, and this time he had to grab the console itself as the ship bucked out from under him.

“Direct hit.” Tuvok sat his station as easily as he would have on any planetbound installation—unperturbed, unshaken. Skin and hair the color of polished walnut blended the Vulcan into near invisibility under the ship’s unnatural darkness. It wasn’t as if Chakotay would have seen anything interesting in Tuvok’s expression, anyway—Vulcan discipline rendered the alien’s face as emotionless as his voice, making him a steady (if uninspiring) companion in such fights.

“Shields at sixty percent …”

“A fuel line has ruptured,” Torres’s voice added to the litany from somewhere out of Chakotay’s sight. “Attempting to compensate …”

This time, Chakotay felt the belly of his ship split open under the force of a torpedo strike too distant to count as a hit, too near to be ignored as a miss. Even so, he couldn’t help smiling, just a little, at Torres’s roar of frustration as she kicked and pummeled her panel at the back of the craft.

“Dammit!” Her voice fairly dripped with the Klingon anger she’d unwillingly inherited from her mother’s contribution to her genes.

“We’re barely maintaining impulse. I can’t get any more out of it—” Chakotay sensed the next shot coming, easing their craft into a turn he hoped would be fast enough without blowing out their damaged engines.

“Be creative.”

Torres exploded a Latino curse in his direction. “How am I supposed to be `creative’ with a thirty-nine-year-old rebuilt engine—” “Maquis ship!” The gray, leathern face of a mature Cardassian flashed onto the viewscreen, blotting out the starscape. “This is Gul Evek of the Cardassian Fourth Order. Cut your engines and prepare to sur—” Chakotay interrupted his piloting only long enough to close the comm channel with the heel of his hand.

“Initiating evasive pattern omega …” Something let loose with a crash and whoosh! of flame. Chakotay ducked his head away from the rain of sparks that singed his close-cropped hair, and keyed the sequence. “Mark!”

The ship jerked like a rabid dog, then started to run.

When Chakotay had been a boy only just taking the first steps into what would become the journey of his manhood, he’d traveled out west with his father and uncle, stayed awake for almost three days in woods so very like where his ancestors used to live, and chanted to keep himself brave as his father and uncle tattooed the first lines into his virgin face. Remember, they had told him, what you are made of. Every time you look in a mirror, remember that less than five hundred years ago, the grandfathers who preserved these marks for you stood in woodlands light-years away with their knives and arrows, throwing sticks and shields, and fought a wave of ignorant invaders so that you and other children like you could be born and taught and tattooed in the way of our people for centuries to come. What his father didn’t talk about was how, despite the mighty battles waged by Chakotay’s forefathers, those ignorant invaders had taken the land, relocated the families, and done everything possible to make sure the prayers and language and tattoos didn’t survive, all in the name of what they believed was virtuous and right.

But Chakotay had known all that already. He’d known it from history tapes and museum exhibits—known that the tolerance and freedom he and his people enjoyed on their fertile colony world had not always existed. And he had been fiercely grateful to everyone who had fought to preserve this life for him.

Yet now, hundreds of thousands of miles away from the planet his ancestors had called home, Chakotay found himself allied with a band of proud colonists who wanted only to save their homes and families and ways of life, just like those Indians on long-ago Earth. No matter how just and necessary the Federation believed its treaty with the Cardassians—no matter how many times some admiral claimed they were sorry to abandon the border colonies to the uncertainties of life under Cardassian rule—Chakotay couldn’t make himself believe this situation was any different than a hundred other stories where the dominant culture imposed its will on peoples who hadn’t the power to turn back the tide.

He’d be damned if he let that happen again here. If nothing else, he owed it to his grandfathers.

Something shoved at the ship from behind, and Tuvok reported evenly, “Shields at fifty percent.”

Damn. Chakotay twisted a look at Torres without lifting his hands from the controls. “I need more power.”

“Okay …” She blinked, her thick brow ridge wrinkling as the fluid mind beneath her black mane darted through more engineering options than Chakotay even knew. “Okay,” she said again, suddenly, “take the weapons off-line. We’ll transfer all power to the engines.”

Tuvok lifted his head with a politely arched eyebrow.

“Considering the circumstances, I’d question that proposal at this time.”

“What does it matter?” Torres shot back acidly. “We’re not making a dent in their shields anyway.” She returned Chakotay’s unhappy sigh with a battle stare that, even coming from a half-Klingon, could have melted pure deuterium. “You wanted `creative.”” Not “wanted”—didn’t have a choice. There really was a difference.

Chakotay turned back to his panels as another blast from the Cardassian ship burned into their shields. “Tuvok, shut down all the phaser banks.” He flicked a hopeful look at Torres. “If you can give me another thirty seconds at full impulse, I’ll get us into the Badlands.”

The best of all possible options, and not a good one, at that.

“Phasers off-line,” Tuvok reported. He sounded as unhappy as a Vulcan ever did.

“Throw the last photons at them,” Chakotay told him, his mind already racing ahead in an effort to construct a preliminary course through the Badlands’ plasma storm maze. “Then give me the power from the torpedo system. …”

“Acknowledged.” Tuvok primed the warheads with a flick of his hand.

“Firing photons.”

A bark of percussive thunder, and the little ship jolted at every launch. The answering flash and rumble of the torpedoes slamming against those impenetrable Cardassian shields only encouraged Chakotay a little.

“Are you reading any plasma storms ahead?” he asked Tuvok.

“One,” the Vulcan replied. “Coordinates one-seven-one mark four-three.”

Chakotay nodded once, shortly. “That’s where I’m going …”

The ship responded to his commands like a brain-dead mammoth—slowly, stumbling. We’ve got to get out of here, Chakotay thought, feeling weirdly as if that urgency had only just occurred to him. As they dropped down and starboard, a surge of unseen energy splashed against the ship like a careless wave. The absence of curses and alarms told him it hadn’t been a Cardassian torpedo.

“Plasma storm density increasing by fourteen percent …”

Tuvok’s dark eyes stayed riveted to his sensors. “… twenty … twenty-five …”

Chakotay didn’t need the Vulcan’s recitation to feel the growing fury in the space distortion. It was just what he had hoped for.

“Hold on!”

The crash of the storm swallowing them whole rivaled any blast from the Cardassian warship, but it was a welcome, familiar violence that lifted the crushing dread from Chakotay’s heart even as it battered his tiny craft. Thrashing flares of electro-magnetic fire writhed across the viewscreen, whipping their damaged shields like living tentacles as plasma rocked and shook and pitched the Maquis ship in warning of what they would face should they stray too close to the heart of that fury.

It was a power Chakotay already respected well, and one he didn’t plan to abuse. Weaving carefully between the grasping tendrils, he counted the seconds since the Cardassians last opened fire on them, and smiled.

As if aware of Chakotay’s thoughts, Tuvok volunteered from the weapons station, “The Cardassian ship is not reducing power.

They’re following us in.”

Chakotay aimed them neatly through a tear in the plasma hardly large enough to take them. “Gul Evek must be feeling daring today.”

Tuvok inset the video from his sensors to the edge of the main viewscreen, granting Chakotay the privilege of watching without interrupting the pilot’s work. It was worth having the chance to sneak a look, Chakotay admitted. The huge Cardassian vessel twisted and jumped as plasma discharge racked it from all sides.

Chakotay recognized their pattern—a crude attempt to follow the path sketched out by the Maquis ship on its way into the maelstrom. He couldn’t wait to see what happened when they tried to thread that plasma needle he’d just squeezed through.

Evek’s ship wrenched suddenly sideways—to avoid the skirl of fire biting at its belly, Chakotay supposed—only to have its upflung nacelle engulfed in a hungry tentacle that swelled all too quickly into a searing blast of light and spinning debris.

He caught the briefest glimpse of the warship as it tumbled over itself and off visual, trailing glowing destruction behind it.

“They’re sending out a distress signal on all Cardassian frequencies,” Tuvok reported. Which meant most of them were still alive. Too bad.

Torres snorted and thumped a fist on her panel in pleasure.

“Evek was a fool to take a ship that size into the Badlands.”

“Anyone’s a fool to take a ship into the Badlands,” Chakotay reminded her, and she rewarded him with one of her rare, sharp-toothed smiles and a rude gesture with one hand.

Still grinning, Chakotay passed his gaze over Tuvok on his way to returning all attention to his console. “Can you plot a course through these plasma fields, Mr. Tuvok?” It would be nice to have something to work from other than the seat of his pants, not to mention nice to let the computer do some of the work for a while.

“The storm activity is typically widespread in this vicinity.”

Tuvok fell silent as he swept their surroundings with whatever sensors the Cardassians had left them. “I can plot a course,” he decided at last, “but I am afraid it will require an indirect route.”

Chakotay shrugged, enjoying the luxury. “We’re in no hurry.”

Tuvok didn’t seem to appreciate the dry humor—after all, with no warp drive and damn little impulse, there wasn’t much hurrying they could do—but Chakotay had learned to enjoy the opportunities for humor made available by a Vulcan’s literal mind. Humor was something hard to come by in the Maquis these days.

Chakotay waited for the telltales on his panel to blink acceptance of the computer’s control, then pushed away from the console to climb stiffly to his feet. Muscles all down his back twinged in none-too-gentle reminder of the hours he’d spent hunched in the tiny pilot’s seat. He pulled his face into a grimace and stretched until his hands brushed the ceiling. Even with the ship still jumping and rumbling through the trails of plasma discharge, it felt good to be standing. He was getting too old for this kind of cat-and-mousing every day.

Torres remained glued to her station, calling damage reports and instructions to other parts of the ship while trying to sort out a snake’s coil of cables from around her feet. Other crew had appeared from nowhere, the noise of their cleanup a happy, relieved sound after the grim silence of the long battle. This was hard on them, Chakotay knew. So many colonists came into the Maquis because they wanted to save themselves and their families, not because they wanted to die.

Coming so close in a claustrophobic rattrap that had been smuggled into the Demilitarized Zone only months before by an overpriced Ferengi marketeer was enough to make even the most stalwart revolutionary question the wisdom of his fight. He expected to lose a good quarter of the crew once they set down for repairs among the Terikof Belt planetoids. Like always.

He clapped Torres on the back as he slipped past her, earning a startled jerk of her head in reply. He met her uncertain frown with a smile and an upraised thumb, appreciative of her good work over the last few hours, knowing how wrong it would be to try and tell her so.

She grunted, flushing that distinct shade of umber that no full Klingon would ever exhibit, and turned back to her panel with a terse nod.

Satisfied that she’d understood the compliment, even if it made her uncomfortable, Chakotay moved wearily toward the back of the command center to find the source of the ribbon of smoke that was steadily pooling in the struts overhead.