Ragnarok (19 page)

Their shields saved both ships from a fiery end, but the force of the impact collapsed the smaller one into wreckage.

“Nice shot,” Paris said. “Captain, we’re almost out—once we get through that gap up to starboard, at bearing one three three mark six zero five, we’ll be in open space.”

“Thank you, Mr. Paris.”

“I still think we should be shooting at the P’nir, as well as the Hachai,” he said, as he swung the Voyager around in a turn designed to make the Hachai think that he hadn’t seen the opening and was heading the wrong way.

“Mr. Paris, the P’nir may not be our friends, but at least they are not shooting at us,” Janeway told him. “I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Aye-aye,” Paris reluctantly acknowledged.

“Besides,” Janeway pointed out, “we don’t know how effective the P’nir shields are against us. We haven’t analyzed their waveform patterns; they may not have the same susceptibility to our phasers that the Hachai technology has. And the P’nir do have our friends aboard one of their ships, Mr. Paris; if we start firing at the P’nir, Chakotay and the others may be killed in revenge.”

Paris didn’t answer her explanation in words, but Janeway thought his shoulders slumped slightly as the truth of her words sank in.

His hands didn’t leave the controls, though, and the Voyager continued her planned feint and dash.

Janeway watched as the view on the main screen wheeled majestically, the immense array of warships sliding by as Voyager came around to head for the opening in the Hachai screen. The ships blocked out the stars, there were so many of them—the striped gray behemoths of the Hachai, the shadowy, jagged black of the P’nir, in one great shifting pattern that seemed to stretch on to infinity, all of it lit with the red and orange fire of energy weapons and the blue-green flaring of shields, shadowed with clouds of powdered wreckage.

And then they were turning away from the heart of the battle, and she could see the hard black of interstellar space, blacker than any P’nir hull and strewn with the sharp light of stars, between the moving ships. The screen of ships grew thinner, the holes between them wider, as Voyager’s nose swung around.

And there was the opening through which Paris intended to take them out, a space where there weren’t enough Hachai ships to complete an englobement, where P’nir light cruisers had forced a dreadnought out of formation for a moment.

“B’Elanna, you’d better have the engines ready for me,” Paris said, as the turn slowed and he reached for the warp drive controls.

Janeway tensed as she realized that Paris, who up until now had been maneuvering the ship entirely on thrusters or impulse, intended to slam on the warp drive, to send them out through that hole before the Hachai could close it.

If he missed, though, the ship’s shields wouldn’t save them; impact with a Hachai ship at warp speeds would reduce both ships to little more than a spray of gamma rays and superheated hydrogen.

And then, before Paris’s hand hit the panel, a P’nir cruiser sailed into the opening.

“Damn it!” Paris shouted, and the hand that had been reaching for the warp drive instead slammed down onto the phaser trigger.

The secondary phasers flashed out.

“No!” Janeway shouted, rising from her chair. “Mr. Paris, I…”

Then she stopped in midsentence, fascinated by what she saw on the viewscreen.

The instant polarity reversed, the phasers went through the P’nir light cruiser’s shields like a Klingon knife through fresh meat.

The power drop from penetrating the defenses couldn’t have been more than ten percent at the absolute most, Janeway judged, and the beam had hit the P’nir ship’s main fuselage slightly aft of center.

It was a good, solid blow, but nothing that any Alpha Quadrant starship couldn’t handle. The secondaries were less powerful than the Voyager’s primary armament, and the P’nir shields had cut their effectiveness slightly; furthermore, the hit hadn’t been on anything particularly crucial, such as a main drive or magazine.

A Federation starship would have shuddered, maybe taken a few minor casualties as crewmen slammed into bulkheads or were struck by flying debris. The crew of a Klingon cruiser, with its heavier armor, wouldn’t even have noticed the blow as some refractory coating burned away.

But the P’nir ship had virtually collapsed; several of the jutting, spiky protrusions had folded in on themselves or sheared off, while the main hull buckled. Atmosphere was boiling out from several ruptures.

Janeway shuddered at the thought of the slaughter they had just inflicted.

They got a good, close look at the damage as the Voyager sailed up near the crippled vessel, aiming for the opening in the Hachai formation—an opening that was no longer there. Three more P’nir light cruisers were blocking the Voyager’s path out to open space.

“Damn!” Paris said again, as he swung the ship about sharply, looking for another exit.

“Good try, Mr. Paris,” Janeway said, “and we’ll talk about shooting at the wrong side later. Meanwhile, see if you can find us another way out. Tuvok, analysis—what happened to that cruiser?”

“Fascinating,” Tuvok replied, as he put a recorded image of the P’nir vessel’s destruction on one of his wall screens and began playing through it in slow motion. Even as he did, however, he kept one hand on fire control, ready to retaliate against any attacker.

“It would seem, Captain,” Tuvok said, “that the P’nir place such confidence in their shields, or perhaps were so short of metals, that they have used the energy fields of the shields themselves as structural members in the construction of their ships—the fields form a sort of exoskeleton that not only protects the ship, but supports it.

The integrity of the hull without the shields would appear to be insufficient to withstand even the normal stresses of interstellar travel, let alone the impact of a Type Four phaser.”

Just then the ship shook the main viewer blanked out, and the blue-white glare of overloaded shields lit the bridge. The feedback rumbled through the ship, drowning out the sound of the Voyager’s own phasers returning fire. Janeway grabbed the forward console for support.

“More Hachai?” she asked.

“No,” Paris said, as he threw the ship into another turn, “I managed to dodge the Hachai that time. That was the P’nir who hit us.”

“Damn,” Janeway said.

“The P’nir are now concentrating fire on us,” Tuvok reported.

“However, the Hachai appear to be breaking off their attack in confusion.”

“I don’t care who we’re fighting,” Janeway snapped. “Take us out of here, Mr. Paris!”

“I’m trying, Captain, believe me!”

“Mr. Paris, if the Hachai are no longer firing at us…”

Janeway said.

She didn’t need to finish the sentence. “Right, Captain,” Paris replied. “I’ll try to go through them.” He swung the ship into yet another jarring turn.

Janeway watched the battle on the screens. The P’nir in this area had not originally intended to fight the Voyager; they were there to harass the Hachai and to take advantage of any damage the stranger did to their ancient enemy. Half a dozen light cruisers had been weaving through the formations of Hachai dreadnoughts, not so much fighting anyone as merely annoying their enemies. One of them had cut off the Voyager’s escape, apparently in hopes of keeping the strange ship trapped where it would do more damage to the Hachai.

No one out there seemed to have expected the Voyager to damage the P’nir.

When the Voyager crippled the P’nir cruiser and the sides suddenly changed, the P’nir ships in the vicinity had all immediately opened fire on the Voyager, but they were in no position for any sort of entrapping maneuvers, and they had no real defenses to protect them against the Voyager’s counterattacks.

They had no defenses except their shields.

For decades, those shields had been enough to protect the P’nir.

Now, however, the Voyager’s phasers were ripping through those shields at will, destroying the fields that held the P’nir warcraft together, crippling ship after ship—but other P’nir ships were coming in behind them, forcing their way through the suddenly porous Hachai lines.

Turning and dodging was no longer the Voyager’s best strategy; the P’nir were all behind them, and charging forward en masse, in such numbers that the Voyager would almost certainly be utterly destroyed before it could knock them all out of action.

The only sensible strategy was to run.

The only problem was that ahead of them, between the Voyager and the freedom and safety of empty space, were the remains of a Hachai englobement force.

The Hachai were no longer laying down fields of fire or interlocking their shields, no longer linking their isolated ships into a solid wall of destructive energy, but escape would still mean passing directly between two of the immense Hachai dreadnoughts, with no more than a kilometer or so of clearance on either side.

A kilometer was a goodly distance on a planetary surface, but out here in space it was almost nothing. If Paris, at the helm, were to misjudge the angle, they might well collide with one of the dreadnoughts. Or if the Hachai opened fire at that range…

And then Paris hit the warp drive controls, and Janeway didn’t have any more time to worry about it as the scarred gray surfaces of the Hachai ships swept toward them at impossible speed.

You heard what the striped one said back there in our cell,” Chakotay said. “It matches what Neelix told us. The P’nir give their captains immense authority and freedom to act on their own We need to talk to the captain if we want to get anywhere!”

“But the captain doesn’t seem to want to talk to us,” Rollins said.

“Um, Commander,” Kim said, “I think… well, there are a lot of P’nir outside right now. I think they’ve figured out that we’re back aboard here.” He pointed.

Chakotay looked. As Kim had said, there were dozens of P’nir in the hangar, formed up in three lines, all of them pointing their hand weapons in the general direction of the shuttlecraft.

“Move us over by the main door,” Chakotay ordered. “If they blast us with enough to puncture our hull, it’ll go through their hull, as well.

They won’t like that.”

“Yes, sir,” Kim said. He threw power to the shuttle’s lifters, and a moment later the little craft bumped gently against the solidly closed portal.

The P’nir guards watched, then milled about in confusion, looking about for orders.

Kim turned from the controls and said, “If we can’t get to the captain, what if we were to bring the captain here?”

Chakotay snapped his head around to stare at him for a fraction of a second; then he nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Very good. We can’t get a lock on her blind, though—” “I’ll go,” Kim said. “Give me an extra combadge; I’ll tag her with it, and you can get a fix on that.”

“Good,” Chakotay repeated. “Bereyt, scan the ship for us and find some likely coordinates. Rollins, you’ll work the transporter….”

A moment later Ensign Kim flashed into existence in the center of the P’nir cruiser’s bridge.

The bridge was a wedge-shaped space fifteen meters long, its sloping floor highest at the point and a good two meters lower at the curve.

Workstations lined the curve, with an immense viewscreen above them, all in clear view of the one green-painted P’nir who slumped comfortably arms draped over metal bars, up near the point.

That one P’nir was obviously the captain; the paint covered almost its entire torso, and Kim considered this confirmation that body-paint must be, as they had earlier surmised, a sign of high rank.

Even as Kim realized that, the captain screamed, making a high-pitched hissing, whistling noise like a steam boiler about to explode. Several of the dozen P’nir at the workstations started to turn.

“Security! You missed one! It’s here!” the captain shrieked.

Before any of the P’nir could react, Kim ran up the slope and slapped the combadge in his hand against the P’nir captain’s thorax. He simultaneously slapped his own combadge with his other hand.

“Energize!” he said.

The world seemed to freeze, then shimmer, and then he and the captain were aboard the shuttle. Chakotay stood before them, phaser in hand.

The P’nir captain attempted to straighten from her comfortable crouch and immediately whacked her head hard against the roof of the shuttlecraft—she had arrived with no more than a centimeter’s clearance.

The P’nir ducked again and looked about—Kim wasn’t sure whether she was astonished, angry, confused, or what.

Chakotay pointed the phaser up at the P’nir’s face.

“Now, Captain,” he said calmly, “you will negotiate with me!”

The P’nir captain screamed again, as it had back on the bridge; Rollins and Kim winced, and Bereyt clapped her hands over her ears. It tried to straighten up again, hit its head again, and resumed its crouch—the shuttle’s interior simply wasn’t designed for anything as tall as a P’nir.

But then, still crouching, the P’nir charged at Chakotay, its claws spread wide and its serrated arm-parts raised ready to slice.

Chakotay fired his phaser at the alien captain’s head, and then ducked quickly under the vicious swipe of one cutting edge as the stun-beam failed to stop the furious creature.

“Aim for the middle, Commander!” Kim shouted. “Just above the swivel-joint!”

Chakotay fired again, and the P’nir tottered, slumped, and then fell heavily to one side, to lean awkwardly against a bulkhead.

“I hope she didn’t crack her exoskeleton,” Bereyt said, hurrying to the downed P’nir’s side.

Chakotay, once he was sure the P’nir was unconscious, didn’t waste any time on such niceties; he turned and said, “I wish you’d told me that sooner, Mr. Kim. Mr. Rollins, give me exterior audio.”

“Yes, sir.”

A second later the occupants of the shuttle heard the clicking and rattling of a few dozen P’nir moving about; voices murmured quietly, the words indistinguishable. Then a command came from somewhere, plainly audible.

“Destroy the alien craft!” a P’nir voice ordered.

“Shields up, Mr. Rollins,” Chakotay snapped.

“But we’re still next to the hangar door…” Rollins protested, even as he activated the shields.