Ragnarok

For the moment, all was well aboard the Federation starship Voyager.

While there were repairs being made, and they were, as always, shorthanded, there were no life-threatening emergencies at the moment.

The engines were working well, life support was functioning, the hydroponics plant in the forward cargo bay was flourishing; they were well clear of any inhabited systems or hostile craft.

This relatively relaxed situation meant that Captain Kathryn Janeway could afford to take the time to think ahead, to plan out exactly where the ship was headed, and that was just what she was doing as she and Neelix stood on the central level of the ship’s bridge, studying their charts.

Around them, the rest of the Voyager’s command crew went about their business, black-shod feet silent on the soft gray carpeting, hands moving quickly across the gleaming black panels, eyes watching the illuminated blue and gold displays. The low humming of the ship’s engines was a constant, reassuring background sound, punctuated every so often by the hiss of an automatic door opening. Janeway and Neelix paid no attention to any of that; they were focused on the navigation screens. Neelix leaned forward, both hands on the smooth black console, while Janeway stood nearby, holding on to the chrome rail that ran between the upper and central levels of the bridge. Both of them were considering what course they should take.

Obviously, their general direction was back toward the Alpha Quadrant and the Federation—she had promised the crew she would get them home, no matter how long it took, and Captain Janeway intended to keep that promise.

Still, they couldn’t simply head off in a straight line across the galaxy. There would have to be more stops along the way; they would need to replenish certain supplies, find ways to repair damaged equipment. The ship’s replicators were no longer entirely functional, and were never able to provide everything they needed, in any case replicator technology had its limits.

Some things couldn’t be reliably replicated—including some of the essential elements that powered the replicators.

So there would be stops for supplies. There would probably have to be stops simply to give the crew a chance to breathe fresh air and move about unconfined by steel bulkheads, as well—that was essential for morale. Visits to the holodeck only went so far toward delaying the inevitable cabin fever, one hundred and forty people who knew they were probably going to be confined to the same ship for years on end needed chances to get out on a planetary surface, to look at open skies and breathe unfiltered air every so often.

At least the holodeck’s energy systems were incompatible with the rest of the ship, so that there was no reason to shut it down to conserve their precious resources—the energy it consumed couldn’t have been used elsewhere in any case. Keeping it activated was an emotional necessity. The crew needed somewhere to unwind.

But it wasn’t enough.

Stops would have to be made.

And the question was therefore where these stops should be made.

While Starfleet had, of course, programmed complete star maps of the entire galaxy into the ship’s computers, those were limited, providing little more than the location and spectral type of each star. That had been enough information to tell them almost instantly where they were when they had been snatched across the galaxy, but it wasn’t much help in planning their route home.

Smaller or less stable and obvious bodies—such as planets, anomalies, dust clouds, or magnetic storms—were not included in the star maps.

The Voyager carried no charts, no records, no descriptions of any of the worlds or civilizations it might encounter in this part of the galaxy, nor of any dangerous phenomena, such as plasma storms, ahead.

The ship’s computers could provide vast quantities of information about virtually every inhabited body or energy field in the Alpha Quadrant, as well as a good-sized slice of the Beta Quadrant and even those relatively tiny areas near the Gamma Quadrant wormhole that had been charted—but the Voyager was in the Delta Quadrant, yanked across to the far side of the galaxy by an extragalactic alien being known as the Caretaker, and then left to its own devices.

The Federation knew nothing about the local hazards of the Delta Quadrant. No Federation vessel had ever come here before the Voyager’s unplanned arrival.

So, as explorers of every kind had done before her, Kathryn Janeway had taken on a native guide, a local inhabitant who claimed to be completely familiar with most of the various planets and their inhabitants in the vicinity.

He doubled as a cook and handyman, but the Talaxian who called himself Neelix had been taken aboard the Voyager primarily as a guide.

And today Captain Janeway had summoned that guide to the bridge, where he stood a meter away from her, bent over a navigation panel.

He didn’t have to bend very far, Neelix was shorter than the average human, though he made up for some of that with an exuberant personality. His clothing was brightly polychrome, garish in comparison with the subdued grays and blues and silver of the Voyager’s interior. Janeway supposed that among his fellow Talaxians Neelix might well be considered tall and handsome, and his attire the height of fashion, as he sometimes claimed, but by human standards he was… well, ugly was too strong a word.

Comical wasn’t too strong. Comical fit the bill nicely. She hoped she hadn’t let Neelix know that; he had as much pride and self-respect as the next sentient being, and she doubted he’d appreciate knowing that his appearance reminded her of a clown’s.

She thought he might suspect it, but that wasn’t the same as knowing.

Neelix was basically humanoid. His oddly shaped head was adorned with brownish mottling, sparse tufts of hair, concavities at the temples, pointed and multilayered ears, and a blobby nose that appeared to have been slit down the middle; when that was combined with his taste in clothing the result was definitely clownish.

Still, Neelix was no fool. Janeway watched with interest as he frowned at the diagram on the display screen, one finger tracing along the curving diagram.

“Your star charts are still difficult for me, Captain,” he said, “but if I understand this correctly, I think you really ought to change course.”

Rather than crowd her guide, Janeway reached over and tapped a control, transferring the star chart and its accompanying readouts from the console to the main viewscreen that stretched across the front of the ship’s bridge. She studied it for a moment, then turned to face her alien helper.

“Why?” she asked. “Our sensors don’t show anything particularly hazardous on our present course.”

“Well, of course,” Neelix said with a deferential shrug, “I suppose that would all depend on just what you consider hazardous.”

Janeway smiled. “Magnetic storms, super-novae—I’d say that sort of thing qualifies as hazardous. Is there anything like that ahead of us?”

“Well, no,” the Talaxian said, drawing out the final syllable thoughtfully. “Nothing like that, exactly. But everyone around here generally considers it a good idea to avoid that star cluster ahead.”

He rounded the end of the forward console, took a few steps toward the large screen, then pointed at the particular group he meant.

“Why?” Janeway demanded again.

“Because of the war, of course….” He saw her expression, and caught himself. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I guess you don’t know about that.”

“No,” Janeway said. “What war? Are the Kazon-Ogla active around here?”

The Voyager’s crew had already had one run-in with the local group known as the Kazon-Ogla, and Janeway had to admit she wasn’t eager for another.

Neelix sighed, and pointed again. “No, not the Kazon-Ogla,” he said.

“That’s the Kuriyar Cluster ahead, where the Hachai and the P’nir live.

Unpleasant people.” He shook his head in distaste. “They’ve been at war with each other for as long as anyone can remember—centuries, certainly, and probably for millennia. Even in our very oldest legends, from the first days that Talaxians began to travel in space, the Hachai and P’nir were fighting each other.”

“And they’re still fighting?” Janeway asked. She stepped away from the rail for a closer look at the screen.

“So far as I know,” Neelix said. “I haven’t actually gone into the Kuriyar Cluster and asked lately, you understand.”

“Has anyone else?”

Neelix shook his head. “People around this part of the galaxy have always tried to avoid the Hachai and the P’nir anyway, and walking into the middle of their war is extremely unpopular.

They’re not always very careful about who they shoot at.”

“I see,” Janeway said noncommittally.

“Perhaps I’ve misread your proposed course,” Neelix said apologetically, “but it appeared to take us directly through the Kuriyar Cluster.”

“It does,” Janeway admitted. “You would advise against that?”

“Oh, very much so, Captain.” Neelix nodded enthusiastically.

Janeway glanced over toward the turbolift, where Neelix’s Ocampa companion Kes was standing and trying hard to be unobtrusive.

Kes’s appearance was much closer to human than Neelix’s; except for her ears she could have easily passed for a native back on Earth. She looked frail and ethereally beautiful—and, Janeway knew, she was even younger than she appeared, and quite possibly less human than Neelix, despite her outward form. The average Ocampa life span was only nine standard years; Kes, little more than a year old, was a mature adult.

She also had hints of some little-understood Ocampa psychic gifts—telepathic projection, and other, less easily defined abilities.

Kes, seeing Janeway’s look, nodded vigorously. “I agree,” she said.

Janeway wasn’t sure whether this agreement meant that Kes actually knew anything about this war, or simply that she was supporting her friend, but it didn’t really matter. They had taken Neelix aboard the Voyager to act as their native guide, and there was no point in having a native guide if one didn’t take his advice.

Janeway was turning to face the main viewscreen again, about to give the order to change course, to take them safely around the star cluster in question, when Harry Kim, the ensign manning the Operations station, suddenly announced, “Captain, we’re being scanned—I think….”

He turned, and shouted, “Captain, it’s a tetryon beam, a coherent tetryon beam!”

Janeway whirled. “Red alert!” she shouted, grabbing for the railing.

“Be ready to brace for impact!”

The lights dimmed instantly at the captain’s call for red alert, to permit the bridge crew to focus more closely on their control panels.

Janeway, gripping the railing, turned to face the Operations station.

That station was a bay set into the port side of the bridge’s upper level, a bay where Ensign Harry Kim stood, almost surrounded by displays and controls.

“Ensign, do you read a displacement wave anywhere?” she demanded.

“Negative, Captain,” Kim replied, as he quickly scanned several panels.

“No sign of any other unusual phenomena.”

Janeway relaxed slightly, relieved—but also somewhat disappointed.

Once before, the U.S.S. Voyager had been scanned by a coherent tetryon beam—and immediately afterward the ship had been caught in a magnetic displacement wave that had dragged it halfway across the galaxy in an instant. The tetryon beam had been used by the Caretaker to see whether anyone aboard the Voyager might suit its purposes, and when it had discovered that there were possibilities—though they hadn’t worked out in the end—it had sent the displacement wave to fetch the Voyager to its own vicinity.

That journey had been brief and violent, and had left the ship damaged and several of her crew dead or injured; the vacancies had been made up with the crew of a rebel ship, a Maquis ship, that the Voyager had been hunting, and that had been similarly abducted.

It had been a rough ride, and furthermore, the abduction had left the Voyager stranded tens of thousands of light-years from home.

When another tetryon beam was detected, Janeway’s first thought had been that they were about to be hurled back home. When that didn’t happen she was relieved to be spared whatever damage the transition might have inflicted, but disappointed that they were not being sent back to the Alpha Quadrant and the Federation.

“Lock our own sensors on to the beam…” she began.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Ensign Kim interrupted without turning from the sensor console, “but it’s gone. Duration was less than point four seconds.”

“Any sign of a recurrence?” Janeway asked. “A cycle, perhaps?”

“No, Captain,” Kim answered. “It seems to have been an isolated event.”

Janeway frowned. “Cancel red alert,” she said; the bridge’s normal lighting returned, banishing shadows and restoring the usual soothing colors. The captain stared at the viewscreen for a moment, then turned again to the Ops station.

Harry Kim watched her from behind his controls, ready and eager, anxiously awaiting her orders.

Kim had come aboard the Voyager fresh from Starfleet Academy, thoroughly educated and completely trained, but still inexperienced, still a bit naive. His rather round Asian face was open and easily read; he hadn’t yet learned to mask anything.