Ragnarok (2 page)

He knew his job, understood his duties, but hadn’t yet learned to anticipate his captain’s wishes, to do, without being told, that little bit extra that would make him a really first-rate operations and communications officer.

It was an amazingly bad bit of luck for him to have had his first mission wind up like this, Janeway thought; his parents, back on Earth, must still be in shock at the disappearance of their pride and joy.

“Ensign Kim,” Janeway said, “I want you to review the ship’s sensor records. Find out everything you can about that beam—its waveforms and energy signature, where it came from, what it did to us, if anything—whatever the computers can tell us. I want to know just how closely it matches the tetryon beam that the Caretaker used to scan us.”

“Yes, Captain,” Kim replied, immediately setting to work at his console.

“You think that that beam was the Caretaker’s companion checking us out?” Tom Paris asked from his place at the forward control panel, a long, curving console that separated the central and lower levels of the bridge.

The question wasn’t one that the officer at the helm should have been asking, really—but then, Tom Paris wasn’t really the officer who should have been at the helm. Lieutenant Stadi, the Voyager’s regular pilot-navigator, had been killed during the abrupt journey from the Alpha Quadrant, and Paris, a onetime renegade who had been aboard as an observer, had been appointed to fill in.

Paris was an admiral’s son, and no one had ever let him forget it—including himself. Janeway was sure that that desperate need to live up to his family’s standards had been what led Paris to falsify reports—and then, later, to admit that he had done so, an admission that had gotten him kicked out of Starfleet.

He had probably felt he had nothing left to lose when he joined the Maquis as a mercenary. Janeway supposed, however, that getting caught and landing in a New Zealand prison might have convinced him otherwise.

Maybe Tom Paris was the sort who had to hit bottom before he could start back up; if so, Janeway thought he’d done it, there in that prison camp. It hadn’t been a particularly harsh environment in a physical sense, but for an admiral’s son who had always thought himself destined for command, it must have been hell knowing where he had been sent, and that by his family’s standards he deserved to be there.

But he was on the way back, Janeway was sure. Ever since the Caretaker had grabbed the Voyager, Paris had done his best for Janeway and for the ship.

Janeway thought his manners still left something to be desired, though.

His question, while reasonable, had the ring of impertinence.

And it was a good question—had that tetryon beam originated with the Caretaker’s lost companion?

The being that had snatched Voyager from the far side of the galaxy had been called the Caretaker because it had dedicated itself to protecting and caring for a race known as the Ocampa—Kes’s race. It had built an immense construction Janeway had, for the lack of a better name, called the Array, and had used that construction to perform whatever tasks it chose to undertake, such as supplying the Ocampa civilization with energy—or scanning and then capturing the Voyager.

The Caretaker was dead now, dead and gone, and the Array had been destroyed to keep it out of the hands of those unpleasant locals called the Kazon-Ogla. That left the Ocampa—and the Voyager—to their own devices.

Before the Caretaker had died, however, it had told the crew of the Voyager that it had once had a companion, an extragalactic creature like itself, but that this companion had deserted the Caretaker and the Ocampa long ago, centuries ago, to wander the stars.

It seemed a safe assumption that this companion would use the same technology that the Caretaker had used—and Janeway knew of no other source, anywhere in the galaxy, of coherent tetryon beams.

Of course, she didn’t know that there weren’t other sources, either.

No one in the Alpha Quadrant had ever developed tetryonic technology, but the Voyager was not in the Alpha Quadrant. They had already encountered some technology in the Delta Quadrant unlike anything Janeway had ever seen before.

“I think, Mr. Paris, that it might have been the Caretaker’s companion,” Janeway replied evenly. “I hope to have some actual evidence one way or the other when Ensign Kim completes his study.”

“And in the meantime, Captain,” Neelix said anxiously, “if I might point out that we are still heading directly into a war zone at incredible speed…”

Janeway glanced at the display on the main viewscreen. The Voyager was, indeed, headed directly toward the Kuriyar Cluster and traveling there at warp six, but even so, they would not reach it for hours—plenty of time for Harry Kim to review whatever the ship’s automatic systems had recorded about the tetryon scan.

“I’m aware of that,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Neelix.” She turned toward the communications station. “Anything, Ensign?”

“Not much, Captain,” Kim reported. He leaned forward, looking over his control panel at the captain. “I haven’t been able to distinguish any identifying characteristics in the beam—there are no resonance frequencies, no interference patterns, no detectable scatter. It’s just pure monoparticulate tetryon radiation. That’s the same thing we found when we analyzed the computer records of the Caretaker’s scanning beam, but it doesn’t really tell us much; I’d think that anyone who could project a beam like that in the first place would be able to keep it this clean.”

“Have you located the source?”

Kim shook his head. “I can give you a direction, Captain,” he said, “but no range; the beam didn’t last long enough for us to triangulate, and without any scatter or Doppler effects… well, it could have come from that cluster just ahead of us, or from somewhere back in Alpha Quadrant, or from anywhere in between, for all we can tell.”

“What’s the direction, then?”

“I’ll put it on the screen.”

A moment later Kim’s diagram appeared on the main viewer, Janeway took one look and smiled wryly.

“It would seem, Mr. Neelix,” she said, “that our mysterious scanner lies in exactly the direction that you’d advise us to avoid.”

Sure enough, if the Voyager were to attempt to backtrack the tetryon beam, it would travel directly through the exact center of the Kuriyar Cluster—assuming that they didn’t come across the beam’s source before they got that far.

Janeway looked around the bridge at her command crew.

Her first officer, Chakotay, was seated in the right-hand chair of the two set below the rail that divided the upper level of the bridge from the central. He sat there, impassive, calmly awaiting her decision; she knew that he would not hesitate to argue if he thought she was making a disastrously wrong choice, but that he trusted her to do the right thing. He had been the commander of the Maquis ship that the Caretaker had abducted and that the Voyager had been hunting, but he had seen the necessity of joining forces, and in the end had sacrificed his own ship to make sure the awesome technology of the Array did not fall into the wrong hands.

Now he served aboard the Voyager, replacing her own dead first officer, and he served very well, accepting her authority as captain, but never being slavishly obedient. If he had some strong objection to her plans, he would say so.

Tuvok, the Voyager’s Security/Tactical officer, was in his station at the starboard end of the upper level, a bay that mirrored the Operations bay. He was as calm as Chakotay—but he was a Vulcan; he was always calm. His serenity was a racial characteristic, where Chakotay’s was a sign of his trust in her competence.

Tuvok had been with her for a long time. He, too, knew when to speak up.

Paris, at the helm, was studying his controls, only glancing quickly at Janeway now and then; she thought he was trying to hide his eagerness to venture into danger. Janeway knew the threat of alien warships didn’t worry Paris; if anything, he was looking forward to testing his piloting skills—and his courage—against them. Tom Paris, the admiral’s son, clearly still felt he had something to prove—to himself, if not necessarily to anyone else.

Harry Kim, on the port side in Operations, was visibly nervous, and was trying hard not to be, or at least not to show it. He wanted to be as fearless as anyone—that was part of his vision of the ideal Starfleet officer, an ideal he desperately wanted to live up to—but he had enough imagination and common sense that he couldn’t help thinking just how nasty the situation might get if the Voyager ventured into that cluster.

Neelix, down near the viewscreen, was nervous and clearly didn’t care who knew it; Janeway guessed that he thought venturing into a known war zone was insane, but he’d seen enough of human behavior—of her behavior, specifically—that he knew she was considering it anyway.

And Kes, up by the gray door of the turbolift, was watching them all, fascinated. She probably hadn’t given the possibility of death and destruction ahead of them any real thought; she was too interested in observing the people around her to worry about herself.

All but Kes undoubtedly had their own opinions as to whether the Voyager should follow that tetryon beam into danger, or avoid the Kuriyar Cluster, but none of them were arguing with Janeway about it; they knew the decision was hers…

“Surely, Captain, you aren’t going to risk all our lives, and your lovely ship, just to see where a scanning beam came from?”

Neelix asked.

“I’m afraid I am,” Janeway replied, reaching the decision everyone had known she would reach. “Mr. Paris, take our heading from Ensign Kim’s analysis of the tetryon beam; we will attempt to follow it to its source.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Paris answered promptly, his tone almost gleeful.

“But Captain…!” Neelix began.

Janeway looked him silently in the eye, and the little alien stammered, then fell silent.

She almost felt sorry for him. It was true that there was no point in taking on a native guide if you ignored all his advice, but Neelix didn’t truly appreciate the situation here. If the Voyager didn’t find a shortcut of some kind, most of her crew—perhaps all of her crew—would be dead of old age before the ship reached Federation space.

That assumed that they didn’t crack under the strain and kill each other first. And that the Voyager could survive that long without proper maintenance.

It was worth taking a few risks—even a few large ones—to avoid any such fate.

Neelix merely wanted to survive, and to enjoy his life, and he was perfectly content aboard the Voyager, with a comfortable berth and plentiful food and water and Kes at his side; he wasn’t interested in going anywhere in particular.

Janeway could hardly fault him for that, but for her own part, she wanted more, much more. She wanted to return home, to see her lover Mark again, to see her crew safely back to their families.

It was worth taking a few risks for all that—but not foolish ones.

She looked to starboard.

“Mr. Tuvok,” she said, “I want long-range scanners operating at full military readiness, with shields and phasers on standby. If we’re entering a war zone, I want to be ready for anything. It’s not our fight, but the locals may not realize that.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

“Very good. Mr. Paris, give us warp seven.”

The decision made, Janeway sat back in her chair and watched as the image of the Kuriyar Cluster expanded to fill the screen before her.

Janeway suppressed an exasperated sigh as her Talaxian guide popped up at her side again the very instant she set foot back on the bridge.

“Captain, please reconsider!” Neelix said. “The Hachai and the P’nir have been at war with one another for centuries; they’ve exhausted entire planets building their war fleets. Their ships could be anywhere.”

Janeway, who had listened to Neelix’s protests for half an hour before retreating to her ready room for five minutes for a respite, paused on the steps and turned to face him at that.

“They could be anywhere? Do you mean they have cloaking technology?” she asked, with interest.

“Have what?” Neelix replied, startled.

“Cloaking technology.”

“Ah… I don’t know what that is,” Neelix said. “Perhaps the translator is malfunctioning; I might know it by another name.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Neelix,” Janeway replied, turning her attention back to the main viewer and proceeding to her chair.

“I think it’s unknown around this part of the galaxy. Which is just as well.”

“Unknown to me, perhaps,” Neelix said, seeing a possible opportunity, “but does that mean it’s unknown to the Hachai? Or the P’nir?”

“Probably,” Janeway said dryly.

Neelix, seeing that that particular gambit wasn’t going to work, that Janeway was not sufficiently afraid of “cloaking technology” to turn aside merely because the combatants might have it, returned to his basic theme. “Even so,” he said, “the Hachai and the P’nir both have fearsome weapons, and they have thousands of warships cruising the cluster, shooting at everything they see.”

“Everything?” Janeway asked, as she looked over at Neelix again.

“Yes, Captain, everything!” Neelix said enthusiastically. “You see, throughout the war the P’nir have used many ruses in their attempts to gain the advantage—they’ve had warships disguised as neutral trading vessels, bombs disguised as asteroids or wreckage, and so on. You can imagine the havoc they produced!”

“Yes,” Janeway acknowledged. “I can see that.” She studied the viewscreen; they were approaching a star on the outskirts of the Kuriyar Cluster, a young main-sequence star that could reasonably be expected to have planets.

If one of those planets was M-class the Voyager might be able to pick up a few supplies, and the crew might take a brief shore leave.

“Well,” Neelix continued, “as a result of those tricks, the Hachai became understandably distrustful of anything unfamiliar that passed through their space. The last several ships that came into the cluster and attempted to trade with the Hachai were given one warning, then fired upon—the Hachai took them to be more P’nir trickery.”

“Interesting,” Janeway said. “And the P’nir? Are they equally afraid of Hachai deception?”