Ragnarok (9 page)

“Try a Hachai ship, then” Janeway ordered.

“Aye-aye,” Kim said, tapping his controls. “Hailing.”

Before Janeway could say anything more, the viewscreen lit up with the image of the Hachai bridge.

The design was unfamiliar, but intelligible; one Hachai, presumably the ship’s commander, sat in a transparent globe at the center of an open space, surrounded by other Hachai perched at individual stations on at least three different levels—there might well have been additional areas not shown in the transmission.

The Hachai were fat bluish-gray creatures with stalked eyes and four multijointed arms apiece, just like the doll—or like the mummies.

Janeway remembered that the mummies’ legs had been hidden by rubble, and the doll’s legs had been stubby little things that were pushed up into the toy’s rounded bottom; she realized that she couldn’t see any legs here, either. The Hachai presumably had legs, since the doll had had them, but Janeway couldn’t see any. Perhaps they were retractable.

It was oddly pleasant, and oddly surprising, to see these living, breathing Hachai. It helped to lighten the memory of those sad little mummies.

“Your transmissions are not wanted,” the Hachai commander said brusquely. “We will not listen to any of your P’nir trickery.”

“There’s no trickery,” Janeway replied quickly. “We are merely a neutral party who does not wish to see anyone die unnecessarily….”

The Hachai commander interrupted her.

“We must assume your presence is a P’nir trick of some sort,” the Hachai said. “Perhaps it is intended to lure us into some folly, or merely to distract us. If you are not a P’nir deception, if you are truly a neutral party, then leave this area immediately—you are not welcome here.”

“We are not…” Janeway began.

“If you do not leave,” the Hachai captain said, cutting her off again, “we must assume that you are hostile, and we will respond accordingly.

This is your final warning.”

The screen went dark.

Janeway frowned. “Hail them again,” she said.

“Hailing,” Kim said. He shook his head.

“They’re refusing our hail.”

Janeway considered their position. What else, she wondered, could they try?

Her thoughts were interrupted by a shout. “Captain!” Paris called.

“The Hachai are breaking out of formation and coming toward us!”

“Onscreen!” Janeway said, leaning forward in her chair.

Sure enough, a single Hachai dreadnought had pulled free of the battle and was charging toward the Voyager. The bloated gray shape was expanding rapidly on the viewer.

“It’s big,” Chakotay said, unnecessarily; the Hachai ship that was bearing down on them was utterly gigantic, dwarfing the Voyager.

“Red alert,” Janeway snapped. “Maximum shields. Hail them; ask what we can…”

“The Hachai ship is opening fire, Captain,” Tuvok reported calmly. “It appears to be a multi-frequency phased energy beam….”

The “phased energy beam” lit the viewer a vivid red for an instant; the screen flickered, and the bridge lights, already dimmed for the alert, dimmed even further briefly as the ship’s power was diverted to the forward shields. The red light turned the gray carpet almost black, and the soft, colorful glow of the instrument panels stood out in sharp contrast.

Janeway watched as Voyager’s shields easily absorbed the Hachai’s attack without transferring any of the destructive energy to the ship itself.

“She’s veering away,” Paris said. “Breaking off the attack.”

“It was just a warning shot, then,” Chakotay said.

“I would tend to agree with Commander Chakotay, Captain,” Tuvok said.

“The Hachai vessel fired at extreme range, then immediately turned aside.”

“That weapon, Tuvok,” Janeway asked, turning to her right, “what was it? What did you call it?”

“A phased energy beam,” Tuvok replied from behind his console.

“It was not a true phaser, but the product of a similar, somewhat more primitive technology.”

Janeway considered that. Phasers had been the standard armament in the Federation for a century, and the technology had spread throughout the Alpha Quadrant—but apparently it wasn’t so widespread here.

A phaser used a tuned monopolaric beam of coherent energy that could be modulated for various effects, from blocking nerve impulses without doing any other harm to the target all the way up to disrupting the strong nuclear force, which caused matter to disintegrate right down to the subatomic level.

Tuvok said the weapons in use here were something else, however.

“Give me the specs on that.”

“On your screen, Captain,” the Vulcan replied.

Janeway flipped up the panel by her chair and studied the display. As Tuvok had said, the weapons were not phasers; they projected coherent energy, but it wasn’t monopolaric, which meant it could not be tuned properly. The phase could evidently be shifted up or down, which would alter its effects to some extent, but it would have nothing remotely like the versatility of the Voyager’s own weapons. These beams could not be set to stun, nor could they obliterate matter entirely; they could merely blast.

That blast could be adjusted so that it was delivered as intense heat, or as a cutting beam, or in various other forms, but it was still far less effective than a phaser.

Apparently no one in the Kuriyar Cluster had ever developed the Kawamura-Franklin circuit that made true phasers possible.

“Is that the best they’ve got?” Janeway asked.

“I cannot say,” Tuvok replied, “but it does appear to be their primary armament.”

“Our shields handled it without any problem,” Janeway commented.

“The shot was fired from extreme range,” the Vulcan pointed out.

“However, it would appear that our shields could, indeed, withstand a reasonably heavy assault by such weapons for quite some time.”

“Years?” Janeway asked, looking up at the Vulcan, thinking of Tuvok’s earlier estimate that the battle had thirty years left to run.

“No,” Tuvok said. “The Hachai and P’nir shields would appear to be superior to our own in durability; in our present condition, the power consumption would drain Voyager’s engines relatively quickly, and our shields would then collapse. We could, however, survive at least a few hours of serious bombardment.”

That was interesting; it opened up possibilities. It meant that if necessary, the Voyager could stay to talk to one side even while under attack by the other. That wasn’t ordinarily any part of the role of a negotiator, but the situation here was not an ordinary one.

And there might be another possibility, as well, one bearing on their own needs.

“Could we survive long enough to reach that thing in there, that globe, and find out what it is?” she asked.

Tuvok hesitated.

“Could you rephrase the question, Captain?”

“I’m asking you, Mr. Tuvok,” Janeway said, “what are our odds of reaching that object intact, if we go in there with our shields at full power and making whatever evasive maneuvers we can?”

“Captain, there are too many variables to give an exact answer…”

“An approximation will do. What order of magnitude are we talking about here?”

“Our odds of survival would be several thousand to one against,” Tuvok admitted, his expression slightly pained at having to give so imprecise a response.

“Why, if their weapons are so ineffective?” Chakotay demanded.

“It’s not merely the phased-energy weapons we would need to worry about,” Tuvok explained. “If you observe the battle, you will see that the participants are not significantly more vulnerable to such weapons than we are; the beams are used primarily to force the enemy in a chosen direction.” He gestured at the screen. “What actual damage occurs is inflicted in several ways—by trapping a vessel in a sustained cross fire of a variety of weapons, thereby forcing shield overload and eventual failure; by crushing ships between the shield fields of several enemy ships; by forcing explosive devices or kinetic weapons through shields with pressor beams; but only rarely with the energy beams themselves. This is why the battle is so stable; it takes much careful maneuvering to trap a single enemy long enough to destroy it, and meanwhile the enemy is maneuvering to prevent that entrapment…”

As he spoke, Janeway watched the main viewer and saw the Hachai dreadnought plunge back into the battle, taking a P’nir cruiser from one side and forcing it up against a smaller Hachai ship, while three other P’nir vessels moved into formation, enclosing the smaller Hachai—and on and on, the entire mass of ships all maneuvering around one another, trying to entrap and crush each other, just as Tuvok said.

“I see,” Janeway said. “So you think we’d be trapped and destroyed somehow if we entered the battle zone?”

“Almost certainly. Unlike the Hachai and the P’nir, we have no allies who would come to our aid if either side chose to entrap us.”

Janeway nodded.

“What if we did have allies?” Lieutenant Paris asked. “Suppose we sided with the P’nir? Couldn’t we break the deadlock?”

“Why the P’nir?” Chakotay asked.

Paris swiveled to face the first officer. “Because the Hachai just shot at us, sir!” he replied.

“Just a warning shot,” Chakotay said. “If they had really wanted to damage us they wouldn’t have turned away after a single attack.”

Janeway glanced up at Neelix, whose expression was almost desperate.

“I take it you’d choose to side with the Hachai, Neelix, if you had to choose?”

“If I had to choose, Captain,” the Talaxian said, “yes, I’d pick the Hachai over the P’nir.”

“So would I, I think,” Janeway said, thinking of the huddled family in the tunnel and the little rag doll, “but then, I don’t know anything about the P’nir, everything we’ve seen so far has been from the Hachai side.”

“I don’t think you’d like the P’nir as much, Captain,” Neelix said.

“But does it matter? You’re not going in there.”

Then he saw the expression on Janeway’s face.

“You aren’t, are you?” he asked, horrified.

Janeway sighed. She was not particularly eager to answer Neelix’s question.

Reluctantly, she said, “No, we’re not going to get ourselves openly involved in the battle. We’re not going to help the Hachai against the P’nir, or the P’nir against the Hachai.

Choosing sides in this conflict would be a clear violation of the Prime Directive.”

“It would also probably get us all killed,” Chakotay pointed out.

“Even if we did manage to break the stalemate and give the victory to one side or the other, the chances that we’d survive doing it…”

He broke off, groping for words, then looked helplessly at Tuvok.

“Assuming that the side we choose to attack reacts in a logical manner by concentrating their forces against the new threat,” the Vulcan said, “and further assuming that we attempt to withdraw at our best possible speed when unable to fight effectively, our chances of survival would be roughly three in one million.”

Janeway glanced at her old friend. “Not one in a million?” she asked, smiling crookedly.

“No,” Tuvok said. “Three in one million. Or approximately one in three hundred thirty-three thousand, if you prefer to state it that way.”

“So much for tradition,” Chakotay said.

“The logical thing for us to do,” Tuvok said, “inasmuch as we are not equipped to intervene effectively, would be to detour around the battle entirely, and to proceed on toward the Alpha Quadrant.”

“And ignore that tetryon beam?” Paris protested. “And that round… thing in there?”

“Precisely,” Tuvok replied. “The evidence linking the spheroid to the tetryon beam is largely circumstantial and is inconclusive. Even adding in the additional time and energy required to make the detour, our odds of arriving home safely are measurably better if we do not involve ourselves in the conflict here.”

“No,” Janeway said, “We can’t just go. That would leave the Hachai and the P’nir fighting each other until one side is wiped out.”

“This is true,” Tuvok answered. “The continuation of the battle to a final conclusion is unfortunate, but I see no way to prevent it.”

“But we have to try,” Janeway said. “We can’t just walk away from mutual genocide. We have to try to stop it.”

“You already did try,” Neelix protested. “And they shot at you.”

“We didn’t try hard enough,” Janeway insisted. “Neelix, all of you, don’t you realize what will happen here when the battle finally ends?

Whichever side it is that finally wins, when they’ve finished this fight they’ll go home, and they’ll find that their worlds are ruined—ruined or completely gone. They’ll see that they’ve stripped themselves of all their resources, everything they ever had, to build these fleets. When the war is over, the victor will have nothing left except the fleet—whichever side it is will have to use that fleet, whatever’s left of it, to survive.”

Neelix’s eyes widened.

“You mean…” He leaned on the railing and looked at the viewscreen.

“I must admit, Captain, that the notion of a P’nir war fleet with nothing to stop it from rampaging across the galaxy is not a very happy one.”

“Oh? Would a Hachai fleet be that much better?” Chakotay asked.

“Oh, yes,” Neelix said, “unquestionably. You can bargain with the Hachai.”

“Even when they’ve got you at gunpoint?” the first officer said.

“Well… that certainly does put one in a less advantageous position?”

Neelix admitted. “But really, the end of the war is still thirty years off, and what choice do we have? The captain tried to talk to them!”

“They didn’t believe us,” Janeway said. “We need to try again, some way they will believe—send an ambassador to each side, perhaps…”

“We don’t even know what they’re fighting about,” Paris said.

“That would be something the ambassadors would find out,” Janeway said.

Chakotay looked at his captain. “You’re determined to do this?” he said.

“Absolutely,” Janeway replied immediately. “The Federation is dedicated to bringing peace; it’s Starfleet’s primary purpose.”

Chakotay’s expression did not reflect his thoughts, but he could not help remembering that his own recent encounters with Starfleet, prior to coming aboard the Voyager, had been anything but peaceful. He doubted any of the Maquis back in the Demilitarized Zone would say that the Federation was primarily dedicated to bringing peace—except perhaps when speaking with bitter irony.