Ragnarok (8 page)

“The thing is,” Neelix continued, “that both sides made the same mistake with the fleets that they’d made all along—they built them to be almost indestructible at the expense of the offensive weaponry. The two fleets destroyed a lot of worlds, you saw some of that, but when they finally met and started shooting at each other, well… nothing much happened, at least at first.”

Neelix pointed past the forward console at the viewscreen. “When the fleets met, that battle out there started—and it’s still going. Any new ship that either side built was sent to join the battle, because if it weren’t, then the other side might win and their fleet would be free to sweep through the cluster. For centuries, the entire industrial production of the Kuriyar Cluster was devoted to pouring more and more ships into that battle, which pretty thoroughly ruined any trade prospects around here, and…”

Neelix caught the hardening of Janeway’s expression and decided against explaining how much money this turn of events in the war had cost honest Talaxian arms dealers.

“Well, as you can see, Captain,” he concluded, “the P’nir and the Hachai have both staked the future of their civilizations on it.

The loser will doubtlessly be so weakened that the winner—if there ever is one—will be able to wipe the loser out completely.

You saw that one planet back there, with the half-finished ship—it’s defenseless. They’re probably all like that.”

“You said, `If there is one’?” Janeway said.

“Your officer says the two fleets are evenly matched,” Neelix said with a shrug. “Maybe they’ll destroy each other completely.”

“Their own version of Ragnarok,” Tuvok remarked, stepping out from behind the sleek gray console.

Neelix blinked, and turned to look at the Vulcan. “Their own version of what?” he said.

“Ragnarok,” Tuvok repeated, stepping down to the central level.

“An old Earth myth, from the Norse cultures of the northwestern portion of the Eurasian continent.”

“I’m not familiar with it,” Neelix said.

Tuvok explained, “The Norse poets claimed that Odin, king of the group of gods known as the Aesir, had traded one of his eyes for knowledge of the future, and that knowledge included the details of the final battle between the Aesir and their bitter enemies, the Frost Giants. In this battle, which they called Ragnarok, both the gods and the Frost Giants would be utterly destroyed, and the world itself would perish with them. Although after Odin’s bargain both sides now knew that this battle would mean their destruction, they were powerless to prevent its occurrence or to alter its outcome.”

Neelix stared at the Vulcan. “What a depressing myth!” he said.

“It is depressing,” Janeway agreed. “The ancient Norse were not a cheerful people.”

“I think it’s fascinating,” Kes said.

“A more widespread Earth myth of a final battle is the prophecy of Armageddon,” Tuvok said, “but in that tale it is confidently predicted that the forces of good will survive and triumph over the forces of evil. That seems less appropriate to the case here before us than the essential despair of the Ragnarok myth.”

“Is there anything we can do about it?” Janeway asked. “I’m not eager to stand by and watch as two cultures destroy themselves.”

She looked down at the smear where the Hachai doll had been, then up at the viewscreen just as two of the alien warships collided and exploded spectacularly.

“One Hachai, one P’nir,” Tuvok remarked. “The balance is maintained.”

“Which is which?” Janeway asked.

“I do not know,” Tuvok replied, turning to look at the screen.

“I am able to readily differentiate the two sides by the design of their ships, but I have no way of determining with any certainty which are the P’nir and which the Hachai.”

“The longer, thinner ships are the P’nir,” Neelix said helpfully.

“The dark ones.”

“Thank you,” Janeway said, as she studied the image on the screen.

Once she had that bit of information, and added it to the memory of the unfinished Hachai ship they had seen on the ground, distinguishing the combatants was easy, despite the haze of debris and the blaze of weapons and energy fields.

The Hachai ships were smooth, bloated, rounded things, leaden gray, some of them painted with broad stripes of bright colors—orange and greenish-yellow, mostly.

The P’nir vessels were dark, jagged masses bristling with protrusions—antennae, gun turrets, and other, less-recognizable features. Where the P’nir showed any color at all, it was either sections painted in deep green or an occasional sigil in rich blood-red.

The unfinished starship on the primitive planet had indeed been a Hachai warship, she realized. Neelix had been right about that.

And the planet had not, she also saw, been preindustrial at all; it had been postindustrial. They had put everything they had, every scrap of metal, into building their share of the immense fleet ahead.

The entire cluster had done that. All the metal, all the technology, everything worthwhile from two great civilizations was out there ahead of her, wrapped up in an immense orgy of destruction.

She wondered whether there had ever been any other intelligent species in the Kuriyar Cluster. If so, they must surely have been caught in the cross fire and destroyed long ago…

Or had they? She glimpsed something in the mass ahead that looked different. “Is there anything in there other than the Hachai and the P’nir?” she asked.

“Wreckage,” Tuvok replied immediately.

“Anything else?”

Tuvok stepped back up and swung into his station, where studied his instruments; on the opposite side of the bridge Ensign Kim, too, initiated new, more detailed sensor sweeps.

“It would seem that there is, in fact, an object present that does not appear to be of Hachai or P’nir manufacture, or of natural origin,” Tuvok said a moment later.

“Show me,” Janeway said.

A blurry image appeared on the main viewer, Janeway knew that it was pieced together from a hundred quick glimpses and then enhanced by the ship’s computers. A blue scale appeared beside it, to indicate its size, as well as outlines of a Hachai dreadnought and a P’nir battleship for comparison. To one side of the screen the computer provided a readout of the thing’s emanations.

The object appeared to be roughly spherical and about two kilometers in diameter, most of its surface made up of hundreds of identical rounded cells, or facets, reminiscent of the cells in a honeycomb. This pattern was interrupted by several large, dark, irregular openings in the object’s surface.

Janeway thought something about it looked almost familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

“What is that, Mr. Tuvok?” Janeway asked. “A ship? A station?”

“I lack sufficient data to even guess, Captain,” the Vulcan replied.

“Where is it in the battle?”

Tuvok tapped a few controls, and a schematic appeared on the viewer; the mysterious globe was near the center of the raging conflict between the P’nir and the Hachai.

“From the object’s location, and the flow of the battle,” Tuvok said, “it might even be what the two fleets are fighting over.”

Janeway said, “Neelix?”

“I don’t know, Captain,” the alien replied. “No one outside the Kuriyar Cluster really knows what started the war. We mostly just thought of it as a personality conflict.”

“Do you have any idea what that… that thing in there might be?”

“None at all, Captain.”

“It’s producing an interesting assortment of radiation,” Chakotay remarked, as he studied readouts at the forward console, one hand tapping illuminated blue and gold keys. “Including some sorts I’ve never seen before—and Captain, including secondary tetryon radiation.”

“Mr. Kim, could that be where the tetryon beam came from?”

Janeway asked, turning to look up at Ops.

Kim hesitated, then said, “It’s exactly on the line we traced back from the tetryon scan, Captain—but that might just be a coincidence. And the secondary radiation might just be from the scan itself, if there’s something in that thing’s hull that reacts to tetryon bombardment.”

“Or it might be internal resonance. Can you tell me anything more about the object?”

“I’m afraid not, Captain—with the battle around it, all the debris and those shields and interference from the weapons, we can’t get any decent sensor readings from here. We’d need to be much closer, right inside the battle zone, to get a good look at it.”

Janeway stared at the screen, considering.

That mysterious object was tempting—it might be their way home.

It didn’t look anything like the Array, but it still might be home to the Caretaker’s companion.

And the carnage, the waste of this immense battle that was going on all around it was appalling. Two advanced civilizations were destroying themselves.

She remembered the three pitiful little mummies they had found in the asteroid tunnel. Those people were destroying themselves.

They had to be stopped.

The Voyager was hardly equipped to interfere directly, even if doing so weren’t a violation of the Prime Directive, but surely, the P’nir and the Hachai must realize how wasteful and destructive this war was!

Neelix had said that outsiders had avoided this area for centuries—except, perhaps, for arms traders, who would hardly be interested in peacemaking. The battle was drawing near a close, still undecided—thirty years to go, after more than six centuries of ferocious combat.

Maybe the P’nir and the Hachai would be ready to listen to reason.

Those children in that asteroid—surely, their relatives would listen to reason!

The Federation prided itself on providing arbitrators and negotiators for anyone who needed them. Janeway had never been trained for that sort of work—at least, no more than any starship captain had to be—but she could hardly make the situation any worse when both sides were already actively pursuing genocide. In another thirty years, if no one intervened, this entire cluster might be lifeless—or it might be ruled by a single species with a ruined economy and no assets except a massive interstellar war fleet, and wouldn’t that be wonderful for the peace and security of the Delta Quadrant. The eventual victor would probably come sweeping out of the Kuriyar Cluster looking for worlds to conquer not out of any vicious need to dominate, but just so they could rebuild their own ruined cultures.

The Kazon-Ogla or some other local power might well prove to be a match for the P’nir or the Hachai, whichever the winner might turn out to be, but still, the rampage and eventual destruction of such a fleet was hardly anything to look forward to. If she were to just change course and travel on past, without at least trying to end this obscene slaughter, Janeway knew that she would be unable to live with herself—and all that was quite aside from the more personally important question of the tetryon beam’s origin, or the nature of that strange spheroid. Had the scanning beam come from that globe? Was the Caretaker’s companion in there?

Janeway had to at least attempt to intervene, to stop the slaughter and to get in there for a look at the globe—but what could she hope to do, with a single, relatively tiny ship?

All she could offer would be words. And before she started talking, it would help if she knew what to say, and knew whether any of these people were even slightly interested in listening to her.

Neither side had signaled the Voyager, or made any threatening moves toward the new arrival. What did that say about their intentions?

“Ensign Kim,” she said, “is there any evidence that either the Hachai or the P’nir have detected our presence here?”

Kim hesitated. “I don’t see how they could miss us, Captain; we aren’t doing anything to hide, after all, and we’re well within sensor range.”

“They may be too busy with more immediate concerns just now,” Janeway said dryly. “I know they could have seen us, but have they?”

“I don’t know, Captain.”

“No one’s scanned us, or attempted to contact us?” Janeway asked.

“Not since the tetryon scan.”

Janeway nodded. That was as she had expected. The Hachai and the P’nir were totally focused on each other. All the rest of the universe had ceased to exist, as far as they were concerned.

She would just have to remind them that there were other people out here.

“Hail them,” she said.

Ensign Kim hesitated. “Hail who?” he asked. “There are thousands of ships out there!”

“Hail all of them, Mr. Kim,” Janeway replied. “Hail them all, and let’s see who answers.”

Harry Kim turned unhappily to his controls.

“Hailing frequencies open,” he said.

“This is Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation starship Voyager,” Janeway said, speaking loudly and clearly. “May we offer our services as a neutral party willing to help you negotiate your disagreements?”

Her message sent, she sat down and waited for a response—any response.

She didn’t really expect the combatants to trust her, or to take her up on her offer immediately, but she did hope to stir up some sort of a reaction. If this message didn’t work, then she would try something else. She was not willing to just fly on past, continuing on the Voyager’s long, long journey home and leaving this insane war to drag on to its sorry conclusion—and also leaving that unidentified object trapped in the midst of the combatants, leaving the origins of the tetryon beam a mystery.

She knew that she might eventually have to do just that, to go on past; she knew that she might not be able to get the combatants to listen to her.

But to live with herself, she had to give it every possible effort first, and she knew that if she eventually did give up and move on, she would spend the rest of her life wondering if there were something more she might have tried.

“No reply, Captain,” Harry Kim said.

She sighed. “Direct a hail to the nearest ship, then, on a tight beam—I don’t care which side.”

“There’s a P’nir heavy cruiser that’s moving along…” Kim began.

Janeway cut him off before he could finish his sentence. “That will do fine,” she said.

“Hailing…” He waited, bent over his console, listening, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Captain, they’re refusing contact.”