Free Caretaker by L. A. Graf

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.
    “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