Ragnarok (10 page)

He did not say that; he merely said, “We’re a long, long way from the Federation, Captain.” He resisted the temptation to add, “Even farther from the Federation than the Demilitarized Zone is.”

“But we’re still a part of Starfleet,” Janeway said.

“Peacemaking is still a part of our mission.” She studied the display on the viewscreen, where the battle seethed with flaring energies.

“Now, how…”

“I’ll serve as one of your ambassadors,” Chakotay said, interrupting her.

He had reached the decision very suddenly, and only in retrospect did he understand it himself. The Federation might not have managed to make a satisfactory peace in the Demilitarized Zone, and he might have his doubts about Starfleet’s actual effectiveness in peacemaking, but peace was still a worthy ideal—the ideal of a just peace, anyway, not the peace of annihilation that seemed to be what the Hachai and the P’nir were headed for, or that the Cardassians intended for the Maquis.

Chakotay did not want to live with the knowledge, when he and the Voyager had left this place and continued on their long voyage home, that they were leaving behind any more devastated worlds like the ones that they had seen on their way here.

Surely, that ideal of peace was worth some effort, some risk.

Janeway clearly believed in Starfleet’s dedication to that ideal, even if Chakotay didn’t, and Chakotay believed in Janeway. Maybe out here, unencumbered by the Federation’s historical and geopolitical baggage, Janeway and the Voyager could do some real good.

Janeway deserved a chance to do that.

And Chakotay also believed in himself. He couldn’t think of anyone aboard the ship who might do a better job at peacemaking than he could.

He had the real-world experience of war to make him appreciate peace.

And he had held that doll in his hands, imagining what it might have meant to its long-dead owner. He did not want any more Hachai to die needlessly.

And besides, that mysterious globe in there just might hold the key to sending them all home.

When he spoke Janeway turned, startled, to look at her first officer.

Chakotay would not have been her first choice. Before coming aboard the Voyager he had been commander of a Maquis ship, fighting an illegal war against the Cardassians, and doing a good job of it—hardly the first place one would look for a peacemaker.

But on the other hand, she had seen that he had a reverence for life, and an appreciation of peace, that he had learned from his Native American ancestors. She had seen his face when they looked at those blasted, ruined planets, and knew that he had suffered at the thought of what had taken place there, the thought of all the innocents who had died.

Chakotay had fought against the Cardassians, yes, but he had joined the Maquis because he had thought it necessary to defend his home, not out of some misguided quest for power or glory or adventure.

Still, even granting his good intentions, a love of peace did not in itself qualify him for the job.

“You aren’t exactly a trained diplomat, Commander,” she said.

“No,” Chakotay agreed, “I’m a warrior.” He nodded at the screen.

“As are they. I think I will be able to understand these people as well as anyone aboard this ship could—except, perhaps, Neelix.”

Janeway could hardly argue with that; she had great respect for Chakotay’s abilities. And she could hardly send Neelix as her ambassador.

She considered a moment longer, then nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Now, we can’t use the transporter, not through all those shields out there; we’ll need to use the shuttlecraft to deliver you.”

“But we only have one functioning shuttlecraft,” Paris protested.

“I thought you wanted to send embassies to both sides.”

“What I want, Mr. Paris, and what we can do, are not always the same thing,” Janeway pointed out acerbically. “However, yes, I intend to send ambassadors to both sides. Unless Mr. Neelix would care to volunteer the use of his ship, our one shuttlecraft will have to deliver them both, that’s all.” She turned and looked up at the Talaxian.

“Oh, no,” Neelix said, lifting both hands from the railing in a defensive gesture. “I’m not taking my ship any closer than this!”

Paris accepted this unenthusiastically.

“Chakotay has agreed to serve as one ambassador,” Janeway said, swiveling to look at the Ops station. “I believe Ensign Bereyt has had some diplomatic experience back in the Bajoran system; Mr. Kim, would you please ask her to join the first officer in the shuttlebay? And we’ll need a crew for the shuttle…”

Janeway began to turn back toward the helm, and toward Lieutenant Tom Paris—the best pilot aboard the Voyager, as everyone knew.

“I’ll go,” Harry Kim said.

Startled, Janeway turned back to the communications officer.

“Oh?” she said.

“With the captain’s permission, of course,” Kim said hastily, his voice slightly unsteady. “You’ll need Mr. Paris here, Captain, in case we stir up one side—I mean, if we approach the P’nir first, the Hachai might assume it’s a trick and try to destroy the Voyager…”

“Or vice versa,” Chakotay said. “I agree, Captain—I’d be pleased if you would send Mr. Kim as my pilot, and keep Paris here on the Voyager.”

That statement startled Kim as much as Kim’s volunteering had startled Janeway; he hadn’t thought that Chakotay liked him much.

Of course, Kim immediately realized, it might just be that Chakotay liked Paris even less. Kim had not yet figured out the peculiar relationship between Paris and Chakotay—they seemed to despise one another, and yet to respect each other at the same time. Chakotay had considered Paris a mercenary and a traitor to the Maquis, while Paris, as far as Kim could see, seemed to think of Chakotay as an arrogant idealist, yet the two had saved each other’s lives…

But then, Kim thought, he wasn’t very good at figuring out people’s motives, not even his own. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d volunteered to pilot the shuttlecraft, let alone what was going on behind Chakotay’s forehead tattoo, or Paris’s insouciant smile.

The captain looked Kim over thoughtfully; Kim wondered if she understood his motives better than he did. He rather thought she did.

“Very well,” Janeway agreed. “And I think we’ll want one more person aboard, as a backup, if for nothing else—Mr. Kim, have Mr. Rollins meet you at the shuttlebay.”

“Yes, Captain!” Kim turned to his controls for a final moment, transmitting the order, before rising and heading for the turbolift.

Chakotay, moving with deliberate grace, followed Ensign Kim. He paused in the doorway long enough to say, “Wish us luck, Captain.”

Before Janeway could respond, the lift door had closed and the two men were gone.

“Good luck,” she said anyway, addressing the empty air of the bridge.

“It’s really quite beautiful,” Kes said, staring at the main viewer.

Startled, Janeway turned to glance up at the Ocampa, wondering what she was looking at.

Kes, Janeway saw, was watching the same thing as most of the others on the bridge—the display on the main screen, showing the ongoing battle ahead of them.

“What’s beautiful?” she asked.

“That,” Kes said, pointing at the viewer.

“You mean the battle?” Janeway asked, puzzled. That seemed out of character for Kes. The Ocampa were not a warrior race, by any means; their underground civilization was peaceful, placid, and nonviolent.

What beauty could one of them see in a genocidal war?

“Yes,” Kes replied. She shifted her gaze from the screen to the captain and saw Janeway’s expression. She glanced down at the smear of dark dust where the Hachai doll had lain, and then met Janeway’s gaze again.

“I mean, it’s beautiful if you don’t know that it’s thousands of sentient beings trying to kill each other,” Kes tried to explain.

“It’s visually beautiful, at this distance, however horrible it may really be for the people involved. If you just look at the patterns, at the colors and shapes, then it is, it’s beautiful.”

Janeway turned to look at the screen, trying to see what Kes saw.

They were close enough to the battle now that even without magnification, it was no longer a distant ball of sparkling light; instead it was a sprawling amorphous mass where individual shapes could be made out, weaving about each other, cutting through the cloud of dust and debris left by their destroyed companions. Weapons flashed pink and gold and deep rich blue, energy beams appearing and disappearing, connecting one ship to another for an instant, then vanishing again as shields flared or the target dodged out of the line of fire. Formations arose, as if by spontaneous generation, to sweep through a particular sector or close in on a lone victim, only to break apart again into individual ships seconds later, when the enemy countered the move.

Janeway didn’t see any patterns. The flickering colors of the weapons and the swooping trajectories of the ships looked random to her.

And she didn’t see any beauty in that randomness; unlike Kes, she could not forget that those were ships out there, ships with living, breathing, sentient crews that were trying to kill one another by any means available. She could not forget the sight of those three pitiful Hachai mummies in the asteroid tunnel, killed when their entire world was destroyed by the P’nir, she could not forget that their relatives, three hundred years later, were still fighting and dying out there, and those deaths were what she and the rest of the people aboard the Voyager were watching.

There was no beauty in that.

Even if she tried to see it as something more abstract, as simply ships maneuvering rather than living beings killing one another, the bloated gray Hachai dreadnoughts and the spiky, shadowy P’nir cruisers did not fit any of her standards for what made a ship beautiful, either.

The battle seemed closer than it should be, too, she thought as she watched. Either the Voyager had been drifting, or some of the Hachai and P’nir ships had moved nearer to the Voyager in the course of their maneuvering about one another.

That made sense, she supposed; that Hachai warning shot had brought the one ship out this way, and the entire armadas would have shifted slightly to adjust for that. They were closer, no question about it, she realized—she could see more detail than ever.

Kes said she thought it was beautiful; Janeway stared, still unable to see any beauty in it.

As she watched, a Hachai shield buckled momentarily under heavy P’nir bombardment, and a burst of golden energy from one P’nir battery tore through the side of the ship; gas spouted forth, freezing instantly into a glittering white cloud as it dispersed into the vacuum of space.

Three tiny tumbling shapes appeared, dark specks springing forth from the crystalline cloud—the corpses of Hachai crew members who had been sucked out through the ruptured hull.

The deflector shield was restored quickly—Janeway could imagine the near-panicky crew rushing to seal off the damaged sections, to reroute power and redirect the overlapping energy fields—and the Hachai ship sailed on, out of danger, its own weapons firing at two smaller P’nir vessels, its attacker swerving off in another direction.

The cloud of white crystals spread and dispersed, mingled with a band of dark metallic dust to create a swirling spiral of light and shadow.

The three corpses were lost amid the drifting debris.

“Beautiful?” Janeway said, imagining those three corpses, their skin oils boiling away into vacuum, their internal fluids leaking out in spraying droplets as the bodies spun endlessly through space, three sentient lives destroyed, three people killed for nothing.

They would drift on forever, like the remains of the P’nir orbital fortresses, or like the asteroidal remains of that shattered Hachai world. As their fluids evaporated into vacuum they would become three more freeze-dried Hachai mummies, until someday they might fall into a star, or burn up in a planet’s atmosphere.

If some star traveler were to recover the bodies, centuries from now, they might well crumble to dust, as the Hachai doll had done.

And that all assumed, of course, that they weren’t caught in the cross fire and reduced to their component atoms before they ever left the battle zone.

Janeway saw no beauty in any of that.

Kes looked at the glittering dust, the colored lights flaring and spattering through the vast flock of great ships as they swirled about one another, the constant interplay of shape and movement.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

“I must agree, Captain,” Tuvok said, looking up from his console.

“The maneuvering of the two fleets is magnificently intricate, the equations describing their interactions quite elegant. The beauty of such things is undeniable.”

Janeway suppressed a shudder. Much as she liked and admired her security chief, the dispassionate Vulcan attitude could still be unsettling at times.

“Janeway to Chakotay,” she said, to distract herself, “are you prepared to launch?”

“Yes, Captain,” came the first officer’s reply. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Janeway signaled to Paris.

Captain, it’s not too late for me to go,” Paris said. “Harry Kim doesn’t belong…”

“Mr. Paris,” Janeway snapped, “I want the shuttlebay doors open and the shuttle cleared for launch. I do not want an argument!”

“Yes, Captain,” Paris replied quietly, turning his attention back to his controls. “Shuttle is cleared for launch,” he announced.

A moment later Chakotay’s voice came over the comm again.

Shuttle away,” he said. “I’ll start broadcasting immediately, Captain, and then move in closer, away from the Voyager.”

“Not too close,” Janeway answered. “We can’t afford to lose the shuttle—or any of the four of you.”

“Don’t worry, Captain,” Chakotay replied. “I’ve had experience at this sort of thing, remember—I know how close I can cut it.”

Janeway bit back a response, resisting the temptation to remind Chakotay that at least once he’d misjudged, which was how he’d wound up aboard the Voyager instead of still commanding his own little ship in the Maquis guerrilla war against the Cardassians.