Ragnarok (11 page)

There was no point in nagging Chakotay. After all, he was no reckless daredevil to begin with—she glanced at Tom Paris as she thought that—and he had presumably learned from his experiences.

She watched the screen as the shuttle appeared, the familiar boxy outline silhouetted against the glare of the raging battle; she watched as the outline dwindled with distance, dwindled to little more than a shadowy dot on the flickering mass of light and color ahead.

Janeway didn’t really have a good intuitive feel yet for the scale of the Hachai and P’nir ships, but it seemed to her that Chakotay was going a good bit closer than he really needed to; she quickly called up the shuttle’s telemetry and confirmed her suspicion.

“Chakotay,” she said, “back off; you’re too near. A stray shot could hit you.”

“My shields are at maximum, Captain,” Chakotay replied calmly.

“You’re in a shuttlecraft, Chakotay, not a starship,” Janeway reminded him, “and those people out there are throwing around one hell of a lot of energy.”

“I’ll risk it, Captain.”

Janeway hesitated.

Of course, she could order him not to risk it, to withdraw—but she had to trust her first officer’s judgment. Even more than a starship captain always needed to be able to trust her officers, Janeway knew that to keep the peace aboard the Voyager, with her uneasy mix of Starfleet and Maquis crew members, she had to be seen to trust Chakotay. If that trust wasn’t evident she might well undercut his authority with the Starfleet personnel, or build resentment among the Maquis.

If Chakotay thought he was safe enough where he was, she had to accept that.

“Just be careful,” she said. “Run at the first sign of trouble.

It’s not our fight and we’re outmatched.”

“Understood, Captain,” came the reply. “Now, let me make sure my broadcast is working. Chakotay out.”

And then there was nothing for her to do but wait, Janeway thought, wait and see whether the Hachai or the P’nir would listen to the shuttle’s broadcast offer to negotiate.

She turned and looked about the bridge, trying to find something to keep herself occupied while Chakotay was out there in his tiny little shuttlecraft, facing those thousands of warships.

Neelix, back by the turbolift, saw her looking about, and snatched the opportunity to address her.

“Captain Janeway,” the Talaxian said, “couldn’t we go somewhere else now? Somewhere farther from the battle? Perhaps we could come back when Commander Chakotay has had some time to talk…”

Janeway, concerned about her crew and annoyed at the little alien’s endless attempts to get the Voyager away from the region, turned and said crisply, “Don’t you have some cooking to do, Mr. Neelix?”

“You asked me to come to the bridge to advise you…” the Talaxian began.

“And you did,” Janeway said. “Thank you. Now go away, please.”

Neelix stared unhappily at her for a moment. He thought of asking Janeway to at least allow him to take his own ship from the Voyager’s shuttlebay and go somewhere else, somewhere safer—but she didn’t look as if she was in any mood to be reasonable. He looked about, at Paris and Tuvok and the rest of the bridge crew, none of them looked particularly inclined to be reasonable, either.

He turned and headed for the turbolift. “Come, Kes,” he said.

“We know when we aren’t wanted.”

Kes hesitated, staring at the viewscreen, where a tiny dark shape hung before a seething mass of color and shadow. Then, reluctantly, she turned and followed.

“This is a Federation shuttlecraft, offering our services as a neutral party to aid in any negotiation or arbitration that the P’nir or Hachai might wish to undertake,” the computer voice said. “Please contact us if you are willing to negotiate. This is a Federation shuttlecraft…”

Chakotay tapped a control and the speaker fell silent, leaving only the faint humming and hissing of the shuttle’s life-support systems, but the four people aboard the shuttle all knew the message was still transmitting.

“They don’t seem to be paying much attention, sir,” Ensign Bereyt remarked.

“Give them time,” Chakotay said. “Sometimes if you drum something into someone’s head long enough, it will eventually penetrate.” He settled back in his chair and looked around the interior of the little spacecraft.

Bereyt and Rollins were at the controls; Chakotay and Kim were off, for the moment. Harry Kim had gone back to see if there was any coffee on board.

That hadn’t seemed very important to Chakotay when Kim suggested it, but thinking about it, he changed his mind. Coffee might be useful.

The four of them might be sitting here aboard the shuttle for quite a while yet, he realized. They had come dashing out here without much of an actual plan—the plan was just “go out there and play ambassador,” talk the Hachai and the P’nir into peace so that the crew of the Voyager could get a good close look at that mysterious globe.

But how could he play ambassador if the people he was supposed to talk to just ignored him?

Well, if they kept on playing that message, sooner or later someone might respond. If nothing else, someone might get sufficiently annoyed at its droning repetition to take a shot at them, and that might stir things up enough to get the other side talking.

Of course, that wouldn’t do them much good if that first annoyed shot hit them. Chakotay looked at the control panels and frowned.

Could this shuttle hold up for more than a few seconds under any sort of attack?

“Ensign Bereyt,” he said, “as long as we have some time to kill, why don’t you and Rollins run a systems check on the shuttle? I don’t think anyone’s had the time to do one lately; B’Elanna Torres has been too busy keeping the Voyager intact to worry about this shuttlecraft, and Lieutenant Carey’s been too busy watching Torres.”

Chakotay noticed Rollins frowning; the barb at Carey had not been well received.

Well, it was too late to unsay the words.

“Yes, sir,” Bereyt said. “I’ll run a diagnostic immediately.”

She didn’t seem bothered, Chakotay noticed, either by his remark or by their present situation. Not all the Starfleet crew had bought into siding automatically with their own against the Maquis additions to the Voyager’s crew, then.

Maybe, he mused, Bereyt, as a Bajoran, was a bit more sympathetic than most to the Maquis cause, or to any other fight against the Cardassians.

Or maybe she had just done a better job of leaving behind irrelevant old feuds; after all, the Maquis and the Cardassians and the Demilitarized Zone were all on the far side of the galaxy, and that nasty little war no longer had much of anything to do with getting the Voyager safely home—or with ending the Hachai-P’nir conflict.

The scale of the Hachai/P’nir war made the Maquis resistance look pretty trivial, really. Any one of those big ships out there could probably have polished off the entire Maquis resistance force in a matter of hours.

Or maybe he wasn’t giving his own people enough credit; after all, the Cardassians had thought that they could wipe out the Maquis quickly, and at least up until the Caretaker yanked him across the galaxy, Chakotay hadn’t seen it happening. The Maquis had been holding their own against the Cardassians—and against Starfleet.

He glanced over at the three Starfleet officers accompanying him.

Harry Kim was bringing four cups of coffee from the tiny galley in the stern; Bereyt and Rollins had started running the diagnostics.

Now they began calling out the results as Kim distributed the cups.

“Shields functioning normally and at full power, sir,” Bereyt announced.

“Warp drive shows minor alignment problem, sir,” Rollins reported an instant later. “It’s harmless right now, but the matter-antimatter mix is less than optimal, and it’ll get worse if we don’t fix it.”

Chakotay nodded an acknowledgment. “Go on with the checklist,” he said.

“Life support fully operational,” Bereyt said.

“Transporter fully operational,” Rollins reported.

A moment later they had run through every system on board; everything checked out except the warp drive. “Ensign Rollins,” Chakotay said, “see what you can do with that faulty alignment in the warp drive.”

“Yes, sir.” Rollins rose from his seat, heading for the access panel for the warp core. Harry Kim, standing to one side drinking his coffee, stepped out of the way.

It only took Rollins a few seconds to get the panel open and to start work. Chakotay watched as he reached in and began making the adjustments; he didn’t seem very comfortable with the job.

But then, why should he? He was no engineer, he was a bridge officer.

Chakotay frowned, wondering if he should go lend Rollins a hand; after all, the Maquis hadn’t had the luxury of excessive specialization.

Every Maquis officer did a little of everything; Chakotay had tinkered with the engines once or twice, when B’Elanna Torres wasn’t available.

Just then Harry Kim called out, “A P’nir ship coming this way, sir!”

Chakotay whirled and looked at the main viewscreen.

The battle loomed before them, filling their entire field of vision; the warships looped and twisted, maneuvering around each other in their intricate dance.

One of the jagged, bristling P’nir ships, however, had indeed come spinning out of that gigantic tangle, swooping toward the shuttlecraft.

Had someone gotten annoyed with them so quickly? Chakotay mentally traced its path back, and decided not.

“It’s not after us,” he said. “See? It was dodging that Hachai phalanx.” He pointed to a hemispherical cluster of huge gray ships that was now dispersing, like the petals of a flower blooming.

“Oh,” Kim said. He started to relax—then tensed again. “Sir…!” he said.

A Hachai dreadnought was breaking out of the melee in pursuit of the P’nir ship, and both were headed in the direction of the shuttlecraft.

The P’nir ship passed the shuttle, frighteningly close, but made no threatening move. The Hachai ship, in hot pursuit, was farther away, and not firing yet.

“I don’t think…” Chakotay started to say, then he said, “Damn!”

Two more P’nir ships were coming out after the Hachai, and an entire wing of Hachai were responding.

“It’s not really anything to do with us,” Chakotay said. “It’s just the ordinary fluctuation and drift we’ve been seeing all along. Still, I don’t think this location is going to be a very healthy one five minutes from now. Mr. Rollins, please turn us…”

He paused, as he realized Rollins wasn’t seated at the controls.

Rollins was still working on the warp drive, his hands reaching in through the open access panel. Chakotay looked at the Starfleet ensign, and hoped he didn’t see the man’s hands trembling.

“Mr. Kim,” Chakotay ordered, “go see if you can help Rollins with that.”

“Aye-aye, Commander,” Kim said, as he hurried aft.

“Ensign Bereyt, is our warp drive functional?” Chakotay asked.

“No, sir,” Bereyt replied. “Ensign Rollins had to take it off line to make the adjustments.”

“We have impulse power, though?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then get us out of here on impulse,” Chakotay ordered. “Take us back to the Voyager.”

“Sir, I…” Bereyt stammered, then gestured helplessly at the viewer.

Chakotay’s lips tightened as he understood what she was unable to put into words.

A firefight was going on out there, between the shuttle and the Voyager; the P’nir ship that had been first to break free of the main battle had hooked back across the shuttle’s path, and the Hachai had turned to intercept, but had not followed it directly; instead the Hachai were spraying the intervening space with energy beams and, Chakotay realized, some sort of missiles—torpedoes of some kind, most likely.

Or mines; some of the missiles were slowing, then fading into near-invisibility. If the shuttle were to head back the way it had come, it might well run smack into one of those devices, whatever they were.

“Move us out laterally, Ensign,” Chakotay said. “Get us clear however you can.”

“Warp drive is back on line, sir,” Rollins called from the stern.

“Wonderful,” Chakotay muttered.

The spirits of space, like many of his people’s more traditional spirits, sometimes showed a rather nasty sense of humor. The warp drive had been out of service for perhaps ninety seconds, at most; naturally, those ninety seconds had been when it had been most needed.

To be honest, though, he wasn’t sure he and Bereyt would have reacted in time to avoid entrapment even had they had full warp capability all along. The surge in the battle had happened fast.

“Sir, I… I can’t find an opening anywhere,” Bereyt said.

“Every time I think I see one, another ship moves up to block it off.”

Chakotay frowned. “Ensign Kim,” he called, “are you as hot a pilot as your friend Paris?”

“No, sir,” Kim replied instantly. “I’m not much of a pilot at all.”

“Then I’ll take the conn.” Chakotay slid into one of the forward seats, switched control to his own panel, and studied the situation.

Bereyt was right; the two fleets had bubbled up and effectively surrounded the shuttle in a matter of seconds. They were no longer merely observers near the battle, watching from outside; they were in it.

They were four people in a lightly armed, lightly shielded shuttle, in the midst of several thousand gigantic and possibly hostile warships.

“Captain,” Tom Paris said, “Look!”

The remark was completely unnecessary; Kathryn Janeway was already out of her seat and staring at the screen, watching as one of the almost-random surges in the battle engulfed the shuttlecraft.

One minute the shuttle had been safely outside the combat zone; the next, it was gone. A spurt of battling ships had sprayed up out of the main mass, like a solar flare rising, but instead of falling back it had drawn other ships out after it, as if the battle had grown an immense pseudopod.

And then the entire conflagration had shifted, and the battle’s “surface” had re-formed—between the Voyager and the shuttlecraft.

Janeway stared at the screen, then turned to the Security/Tactical station.