RANSOM: Janeway wants to bring on the security grid at nineteen hundred hours. We'll have to act before then. Tell the others to be prepared to. Max, the transporter room's not far from here. Keep moving.
[Briefing room] JANEWAY: The alien compound. Ten isograms. If I understand your calculations, that's enough to increase your warp factor by what, point zero three percent for one month? Unfortunately, that boost wouldn't get you very far, so you'd need to replenish the supply and that means killing another lifeform, and then another. How many lives would it take to get you back to the Alpha quadrant? I think you know the reason we're under attack. These aliens are trying to protect themselves from you.
Ransom: 63, that's how many more it will take. Every time I sacrifice one of those lives, a part of me is lost as well.
JANEWAY: I might believe that if I hadn't examined your research. These experiments were meticulous and they were brutal. If you'd felt any remorse, you'd never have continued.
Ransom: Starfleet regulation three, paragraph twelve. In the event of imminent destruction, a Captain is authorised to preserve the lives of his crew by any justifiable means.
RANSOM: We had nothing. My ship was in pieces. Our dilithium was gone, we were running on thrusters, We hadn't eaten in sixteen days. We had just enough power to enter orbit of an M class planet, and lucky for us, the inhabitants were generous. [Ankari campfire] RANSOM [OC]: They were called the Ankari. They provided us with a meal, a few supplies, even some dilithium crystals. They even performed one of their sacred rituals to invoke spirits of good fortune from another realm to bless our journey. But these weren't spirits, hey were nucleogenic life forms. Our scans revealed that they were emitting high levels of antimatter. Later the same night we managed to obtain one of the summoning devices in exchange for an energy converter. [Equinox Research lab] RANSOM [OC]: We constructed a containment field that would prevent the lifeform from vanishing so quickly, but something went wrong. RANSOM: Get it out of there. RANSOM [OC]: We tried to send it back.
RANSOM: But it was too late. [Briefing room] RANSOM: We examined the remains and discovered it could be converted to enhance our propulsion systems. It was already dead. What would you have done? We travelled over ten thousand light years in less than two weeks. We'd found our salvation. How could we ignore it?
[Briefing room] RANSOM: We examined the remains and discovered it could be converted to enhance our propulsion systems. It was already dead. What would you have done? We traveled over 10,000 light years in less than two weeks. We'd found our salvation. How could we ignore it?
RANSOM: It's easy to cling to principles when you're standing on a vessel with its bulkheads intact, manned by a crew that's not starving.
JANEWAY: It's never easy, but if we turn our backs on our principles, we stop being human. I'm putting an end to your experiments and you are hereby relieved of your command. You and your crew will be confined to quarters.
[Bridge] Janeway: Doctor, return to their research lab and retrieve all the data you can locate on the aliens. I want to find a way to communicate with them.