Ragnarok (5 page)

“Three hundred years ago they might have been able to blow up planets,” Janeway replied. “That doesn’t mean they can do it now. And that tetryon beam came from somewhere in this direction.”

Neelix threw up his hands in disgust at that.

“Warp one, Mr. Paris,” Janeway said.

Janeway leaned her head back against the smooth gray fabric of her command chair as the Voyager neared the next system. “Slow to impulse,” she said. “We’ll take a look here.”

“Do we have to?” Neelix muttered, as he clutched the railing behind her. “If you insist on traveling through this cluster, I wish you’d at least do it quicker.”

Janeway glanced up at him.

“There’s nothing alive around here, Captain,” Neelix said, leaning over the rail and peering down at her. “Nothing except for the P’nir and the Hachai, anyway, and you’re not going to get any supplies from them.”

Janeway turned away, glancing toward the Operations station.

“Scan the area, Mr. Kim,” she said, ignoring the Talaxian. “Take your time.”

“Captain,” Chakotay protested, leaning over from his own seat, “I’m beginning to agree with Neelix.”

Janeway looked at him in surprise.

“I don’t mean about leaving the Kuriyar Cluster, or deciding to come here in the first place,” Chakotay explained, “but is it really necessary to investigate every system we pass along the way?”

“I think it is,” Janeway replied. “We’re looking for something, Commander—had you forgotten? Whatever it was that produced that tetryon beam might have come from one of these systems.”

“It wasn’t in any of them at the time we were scanned,” Chakotay pointed out. “Why would it be now?”

“Because it isn’t out here in the interstellar void,” Janeway said.

“If it was around here, then either it’s gone completely, or it’s moved into one of these systems and is lost in the clutter.”

“Or it may be farther up ahead,” Chakotay said, “and by taking time to explore each system we pass we may be letting it get away.”

“We may be,” Janeway said. “Sometimes we have to make choices on the basis of partial information, Commander, and whichever one we make may prove to be wrong. I prefer to at least take a quick look at each system we pass.” She glanced down at the crumbling remains of the Hachai doll, a blue-gray lump on the smooth gray panel beside her chair. “If we don’t find what we’re looking for in any of them, at least we might learn more about the Hachai and the P’nir, and anything we can learn about them might be useful if and when we actually encounter those war fleets Neelix keeps warning us about.”

Chakotay’s lips tightened; then he straightened up and turned away.

“Stay on course for the inner system, Mr. Paris,” Janeway said—but as she spoke she was watching Chakotay.

She hadn’t expected his outburst. Perhaps the strain of their situation was getting to him; certainly, the officers and crew had reason for low morale.

Still, she wouldn’t have thought Chakotay would object to their brief side trips. Usually, despite his lack of scientific training, he was almost as interested in exploration and discovery as she was.

Perhaps Neelix’s constant warnings were getting on the first officer’s nerves.

“Mr. Kim,” she called, “tell me about the system.”

“It’s a class-K star, Captain,” Kim reported. “Ten planets—two of the inner ones are coorbital. The coorbitals are just airless rock; the third one shows a runaway greenhouse effect, like Venus. The outer five are ringed gas giants—no carbon-based life possible. Should I scan them all for methane-breathers?”

“Don’t bother,” Janeway said. “Not unless someone there is building spacecraft.” She turned to Neelix. “The P’nir aren’t methane-breathers, are they?”

The Talaxian shook his head. “The Hachai and the P’nir are both carbon-based,” Neelix told her, “and they’re all you’ll find in this cluster.”

Janeway nodded, then turned her attention back to the Ops station.

“What can you tell me about the fourth and fifth planets?” she asked.

“The fifth one looks pretty dead,” Kim reported. “There’s an atmosphere, but it’s thin, not much oxygen. The only moisture seems to be in the polar ice caps, and those are both frozen solid with a mix of water ice and carbon dioxide.”

“Sounds cold and nasty,” Neelix remarked.

“Cold and nasty just about describes it,” Kim agreed.

“And the fourth planet?” Janeway asked.

“It’s on the far side of the primary right now, so the readings aren’t…” Kim began. Then he stopped speaking and stared at the screen.

“We’re picking up lifeform readings,” he said.

Chakotay, who had been staring moodily at Tuvok and the Security/Tactical station, turned abruptly, focusing his attention on Kim instead.

“What sort of lifeforms?” Janeway asked, startled—and pleased.

She got to her feet and stepped up to the forward console, to one side of the helm, to check the screen there.

She had begun to think that the entire cluster was totally lifeless, that anything that had ever lived there was long dead, wiped out by the Hachai-P’nir war. She had seen nothing to back up Neelix’s belief that the war was still going on; the two systems they had visited before this one were completely bereft of life, and there were no indications anywhere of continued activity. They had found no ion trails or energy traces, or any other evidence that starships were still cruising this region of space.

Lifeform readings from the fourth planet were totally unexpected—but welcome.

And the lifeform readings were there, all right—the signal descriptions stretched across the black screen in lines of glowing golden type.

Of course, if those lifeforms down there were either P’nir or Hachai, they might be armed and hostile. The war just might still be going on.

“Shields up,” she ordered, glancing over to starboard, where Tuvok manned his station. Then she looked up at the main viewscreen. “Take us in for a closer look, Mr. Paris, but don’t do anything foolish—Mr. Neelix may be right about the war after all.”

“Aye-aye,” Paris replied. “Ahead one quarter impulse, on heading two-four-seven mark thirteen.”

The planet grew from a distant speck to a blue-white globe that filled most of the main viewer. Sensors detected no orbital fortresses here, intact or otherwise; there were no signs of defenses of any kind.

There were also no traces to show that spaceships had ever before visited or left this world; if these were Hachai or P’nir, they were no longer actively involved in any interstellar war—not unless it was fought with weapons and methods unlike anything Janeway had ever heard of.

That settled, the Voyager’s sensors were directed at the planet itself.

There were cities—or fair-sized towns, at any rate—and roads connecting them, but the civilization on the planet, such as it was, appeared to be rather primitive. The sensors showed no indication of mechanization. Not only were there no spaceships, there were no aircraft, no electrical fields, no subspace emissions, no radio transmissions.

Janeway considered that information, and decided not to go close enough for a more detailed visual scan. They had no urgent business here, and the Prime Directive forbade interfering with the local cultures; besides, a visual scan hardly seemed necessary, given the readings.

The society here was clearly largely pretechnological.

A reason for that was also clear—no metals could be detected anywhere in the planetary crust. That was sufficiently anomalous to be listed in flashing red on the sensor readout.

“Is this whole cluster metal-depleted?” Janeway wondered aloud.

“I don’t know,” Chakotay replied, as he studied a display on the flipped-up panel by his chair, “but you might want to take a look at grid sector 63-24 north.”

Janeway noticed that Chakotay was sounding more enthusiastic now.

She tapped keys to shift her own readings to the location he had indicated, and sure enough, there was a significant amount of metal, right there on the surface, hard to miss—iron, copper, titanium….

This metal was not in a natural deposit, though—it was an artificial structure. The metals had been processed, separated, and incorporated into a construction of some sort.

“What is that?” she asked. She pondered the readings for a moment, and then decided that a visual scan was called for after all. “Mr. Kim,” she ordered, “give me a better look at that structure.”

“Telescopic scan working, Captain,” Kim replied. “Onscreen.”

A moment later Janeway stepped forward, hands clasped behind her back, and considered the image the scanners presented.

“It’s a ship,” she said. “It has to be.”

It was bulbous, alien in design—but it did appear to be a spaceship.

Or part of one.

“Someone must have crashed there,” Paris said.

“It looks more as if they were building it,” Chakotay said, getting to his feet and pointing. “See those wooden towers around it? That looks like construction scaffolding.”

“But there’s no one around,” Janeway said. “It’s abandoned.”

“Hull corrosion would seem to indicate that it’s been abandoned for a long time,” Kim confirmed. “Fifty or sixty years, at least.”

“They ran out of metal,” Neelix said, leaning over the rail behind Janeway and Chakotay. “That’s a Hachai design; they were building it there, and they ran out of metal and couldn’t finish it.

Janeway stared at the screen for a long moment. She tried to imagine the four-armed, stalk-eyed, rounded little creatures building warships.

Maybe they did—but they weren’t building anymore. She turned away.

“Maybe they did run out of metal,” she said. “At any rate, no one here has been putting out any tetryon beams recently. No one’s fighting any wars, either, and whatever they’re doing, it’s no concern of ours.

Take us back out of the system, Mr. Paris—warp two.”

The next system, a light-hour out of their path, had fourteen planets; the sixth had once been habitable but was now bare, lifeless rock, stripped of its atmosphere—and of its metals.

Janeway and Chakotay watched the main viewscreen wordlessly from their seats as the Voyager passed over that broad expanse of utter desolation.

When they had seen what little there was to see, Janeway ordered, “Take us out.” She slumped in her chair.

“Aye-aye,” Paris replied, and the image on the screen began to withdraw.

“When we found that that last system was still inhabited,” Chakotay said quietly, leaning over toward the captain, “I’d hoped that it was a good sign, that we’d find more. Those first two systems, those three destroyed worlds… those saddened me.

Seeing those ruins ate at my spirit.”

Janeway glanced at him.

He met her gaze.

“Yes, that was why I objected to visiting the third,” he said.

“I didn’t want to see any more of death, devastation, and destruction.”

He pointed at the Hachai doll. “That toy you brought back with you brought it home to me—these were people who lived on these worlds, people fighting and dying out here, people who might have worn different shapes than ours, but people with spirits like ours, with families and loved ones. The child who owned that doll had died, probably without ever knowing why, and certainly without deserving such a hideous death. This war of theirs destroyed millions, perhaps billions, of people on both sides—and for what? It’s even more senseless than the Cardassian imperialism—from what Neelix said, no one even knows why these people were fighting!”

“It happens,” Janeway said. “You’ve seen war before. You’ve fought, yourself.”

“I know,” Chakotay said. “But to have the entire Hachai and P’nir civilizations destroyed, both their races completely wiped out…”

“There were still survivors in the third system,” Janeway said.

“There were people there,” Chakotay said, “but we don’t know for certain they were survivors; we didn’t get a good look at them, to see if they were the same as that doll. They might have been some other species entirely, one that wasn’t involved in the war.” He straightened up.

“I hope they were survivors,” he said. “Maybe, if they are, they’ve learned something. Maybe they’ll rebuild, someday, and venture off their planet into space, and maybe this time they won’t make the same mistakes.”

Janeway shook her head. “They don’t have any metals to work with,” she said. “They’ll probably never be able to leave that planet.”

Chakotay didn’t reply.

“Even if they never leave, never rebuild their lost technology, it’s a better fate than that,” Janeway said, pointing at the viewer, where the barren surface of the sixth planet gleamed dully in the light of its sun.

Chakotay nodded. He could hardly argue with that.

And right now he didn’t feel like arguing with anything—except perhaps whatever gods or spirits ruled this cluster, yet had allowed such a catastrophe.

As they left the fourth system and its blasted sixth planet behind, Janeway stepped up to the forward console and consulted the Voyager’s star charts; ahead of them lay an empty stretch.

The four systems they had passed through were in an outlying arm of the Kuriyar Cluster, and ahead lay the cluster’s heart, but for the moment they faced several light-years of empty nothingness.

Janeway looked at that emptiness and felt suddenly tired.

At first she thought that the devastation was getting to her, but then she realized that she had been on the bridge almost constantly for the past eleven hours. Some part of her mind was telling her that this was her chance to rest, that her crew could manage without her for a while.

There were no more star systems to investigate for a dozen light-years.

“Commander,” she said, “take the bridge; I’m going to get some rest.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Chakotay said.

As Janeway left the bridge she saw that Chakotay had settled into his chair, his face and body seeming to sag—he was probably tired, as well.

The last thing she saw of the bridge, as the door of the turbolift closed, was her first officer picking up the fragile, crumbling Hachai doll, and slowly turning it over and over in his hands.