Ragnarok (24 page)

Janeway, watching the pickup on video from the bridge, didn’t wait for the big doors to finish closing; she turned to Paris and said, “They’re aboard! Get those aft shields back up, Tuvok; Paris, get us out of here.”

“Out of the sphere?”

“And out of the battle!” Janeway ordered. “Get us into clear space any way you can, and then get us away from here, warp eight!”

“With pleasure, Captain,” Paris replied, as he reached for the controls. “With the greatest pleasure!”

The moment the Voyager burst out of the side of the derelict four P’nir heavy cruisers began spraying heavy fire at it—not just energy weapons, but also high-velocity projectiles of some sort.

Tuvok immediately returned fire, but it quickly became evident that during the Voyager’s stay in the First Federation sphere the P’nir had analyzed their records, and had finally realized that it took time for the Voyager’s phasers to penetrate the P’nir shields. The cruisers were taking evasive action, dodging one behind the other, so that no single ship’s shields were exposed for more than a few seconds.

That still gave Tuvok opportunities, but fewer of them; he was no longer able to pick and choose his shots, or to target specific ships.

Instead, to have any real effect, he had to fire at whichever vessel in the P’nir formations he could keep a lock on the longest.

Paris, who had had a brief rest during the shuttle docking, was at his best; the Voyager dodged, wove, and spun its way through the maelstrom, until some forty minutes after exiting the derelict it charged toward the outer edges of the battle—and was forced to turn aside.

A Hachai phalanx, a solid wall of warships each a dozen times the size of the Voyager, their shields interlocking into a single immense barrier, blocked their path.

Paris cursed, sent the ship into a roll, brought it around the edge of the phalanx, cut through a flock of P’nir ships, and headed for open space—only to be met, once again, by a Hachai barrier.

“What the hell is going on here?” Paris demanded.

“It would appear,” Tuvok said, “that the Hachai are deliberately obstructing us.”

“But why?” Janeway asked. “Mr. Evans, hail one of the Hachai ships.”

Evans obliged.

“They’re responding!” he said, startled.

“Onscreen,” Janeway said.

The image of a multi-tiered Hachai bridge and its captain’s transparent central globe appeared on the viewer.

“Greetings, honorable Kathryn Janeway,” the Hachai captain said, directing both its eyestalks toward her. “How may we help you?”

Janeway blinked in surprise. This was certainly a different reception from any treatment she’d received from the Hachai before!

“You can let us past,” Janeway replied. “Let us out of here, and you can go on with your war!”

“Honored ally,” the Hachai said, “we do not wish you to depart!

Your weapons are splendidly effective against the P’nir; please, stay and wield them!”

Janeway suddenly understood.

“You don’t still think it’s P’nir trickery?” she said, bitterly.

“If this is P’nir trickery,” the Hachai replied, “it is far too subtle for us, and we are fooled. You have wreaked havoc upon our foes; we humbly beg your forgiveness for our earlier doubts, and for all our misunderstandings.”

“You’re forgiven,” Janeway said. “Now let us go!”

“But you will depart, and your weapons would be lost to us,” the Hachai protested. “Stay and fight beside us! Is not our ancient enemy your own foe?”

“No,” Janeway said. “We don’t wish to harm the P’nir; we have merely defended ourselves. We came here to make peace, not war!”

“And what is a better peace than victory?” the Hachai asked, gesturing emphatically.

“A peace of cooperation,” Janeway said. “A peace of mutual understanding!”

“Captain,” Paris said, “if we don’t get out of here soon, the P’nir are going to be able to corner us against the Hachai screens.”

“Hachai captain, whatever your name is, I ask you again,” Janeway said, “let us pass!”

“We cannot,” the Hachai replied. “Not when you offer us final victory, after all these centuries, after a hundred generations of Hachai have fought and died to destroy the P’nir. Would you taunt us so? Would you show us the prospect of triumph, and then snatch it away?”

“You’re damn right I would,” Janeway growled. “Listen to me, Captain—we are going to leave here. We can do it with your cooperation, or we can do it by going right through you. In case you’ve forgotten, our weapons can pierce your shields, as well as the P’nir’s. Now, either you let us through, or we will cut our way through, and Hachai will die needlessly. It’s your choice—what will it be?”

“Please, Kathryn Janeway,” the Hachai captain pleaded, waving its eyestalks, “do not do this thing!”

“Then don’t force me to it!” Janeway shouted. “Get out of my way!”

“Captain, the P’nir have us boxed in,” Paris called. “I can’t find an opening.”

“Tuvok!” Janeway shouted, “Make us an opening! Mr. Paris, choose your course, and I don’t care whether you take us out through P’nir or Hachai!”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

An instant later the Voyager’s phasers lashed out, and a second after that the red beams tore through the hull of a Hachai destroyer.

The Hachai ship shuddered and slid out of formation, leaving a gap.

Paris swung the ship about and slammed on the warp drive, sending the Voyager out through the hole where the destroyer had been—straight out into open space, at warp four and still accelerating.

For the moment, all was well aboard the Federation starship Voyager.

While there were still repairs being made, and they were, as always, shorthanded, there were no life-threatening emergencies.

The engines were working well, life support was functioning, the hydroponics plant in the forward cargo bay was flourishing; they were well clear of any inhabited systems or hostile craft. All but one of the people injured in the battle had been treated and sent back to their duties; Ensign Kim had been the most seriously injured, and was still under orders to rest and take care of himself.

The Hachai and P’nir fleets were both far behind them, with no chance of ever catching up.

The ship’s department heads—and a few others—were gathered in the captain’s ready room for a review of the ship’s present situation.

“The Voyager herself isn’t badly damaged at all,” Torres reported.

“The shields held up beautifully, all things considered. The shuttlecraft, though—well, we can fix it, but it’s going to take a lot of work. It got pretty badly banged up when that P’nir ship exploded.”

“Well, we have plenty of time before we reach home,” Paris said.

The others pointedly ignored him.

“I did warn you, Captain,” Neelix said. “I told you to stay clear of the Kuriyar Cluster. Didn’t I tell you it was dangerous?”

“Yes, you did, Mr. Neelix,” Janeway agreed. “Thank you for your warning.”

Neelix smiled, then realized that the captain had definitely not said anything about heeding such warnings in the future; the smile vanished.

He hesitated, then decided there was no way he could protest gracefully.

He debated for a moment whether to protest anyway—he didn’t always insist on being graceful. Kes shot him a glance that decided him.

“Let it drop,” her face said, and after another moment’s hesitation Neelix let it drop.

“We still don’t know where that tetryon beam came from, do we?”

Harry Kim asked; he had insisted on attending, despite the doctor’s orders.

“I believe we do,” Janeway said. “It seems to have come from the First Federation vessel.”

“From that derelict?” Paris said. “It couldn’t have come from that burnt-out hulk!”

“The tetryon beam did, in fact, originate from the derelict,” Tuvok said. “During our stay within the vessel I ran a full sensor analysis, and located a tetryonic device that had apparently still been functional.”

“You put that in the past tense,” Paris remarked.

Janeway nodded. “The device appears to have been energized by one of those energy weapons—probably P’nir. The beam struck it, activating and powering the tetryon generator for a fraction of a second.”

“Captain, could we have salvaged the device somehow?” Chakotay asked.

“Or could we reproduce it from the sensor records?

Perhaps we could use a tetryon beam to contact the Caretaker’s companion….”

Janeway shook her head. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “All that was left of it by the time we got there was slag—the same blast that activated it destroyed it.”

“That,” Tuvok said, “was why the tetryon beam’s duration was so brief.

The sensor logs will show you quite a bit about it, Commander, should you care to examine them—but not enough to allow us to build our own device.”

“If you ask me, that derelict and its stupid tetryon beam weren’t worth risking the ship over in the first place,” Torres muttered.

“That wasn’t the only thing we were risking the ship for,” Chakotay reproved her. “We were hoping we could do some good, that we could give the Hachai and the P’nir a way out of their war.”

“It’s a shame we couldn’t do more,” Janeway said. Her voice turned bitter. “Instead of stopping the battle, we wound up fighting them ourselves—we did a lot of damage, probably killed hundreds on both sides, and for what? The war’s still going on.

I suppose it’ll go on until one of them destroys the other, and even then, it’ll probably just spread to somewhere else. Thirty years more in the Kuriyar Cluster, and who knows how long after that?”

“On the contrary, Captain,” Tuvok said, “I am not certain that the war between the Hachai and the P’nir will continue more than another few hours.”

Startled, everyone in the ready room turned to look at the Vulcan.

“Just what are you talking about, Mr. Tuvok?” Janeway demanded.

“As is standard practice in any such situation, I have continued to intercept both Hachai and P’nir subspace transmissions since we left the vicinity of the battle,” the Vulcan calmly replied.

“It would appear, from the communications we have recorded so far, that the two sides are negotiating, and that a quick cessation of their hostilities is a very real possibility.”

“But… but…” Neelix said, “but why? The Hachai and the P’nir have been fighting each other for centuries! Their war is legendary!”

“Indeed,” Tuvok agreed. “And all other sentients in this region have avoided them, as a result. We, however, did not. Our interference has reminded them that other starfaring species exist.”

“But why should that make them stop fighting?” Janeway asked.

“Why should they be suddenly interested in peace just because there are other people in the universe?”

“It would appear, Captain,” Tuvok said, “that the Hachai and the P’nir are not so much interested in making peace with each other as they interested in forming a military alliance, joining forces against their common foe.”

The others stared at him blankly.

“Against us,” the Vulcan said. “It would seem that the effectiveness of our weapons, and the captain’s ruthlessness in shooting at a Hachai ship that had just declared itself our ally in order to make good our escape, made quite an impression on both parties.”

“Against us?” Paris protested. “But… but we’re just one ship! All the rest of Starfleet’s on the other side of the galaxy!”

“They don’t know that,” Janeway said, understanding. “We never told any of them where the Federation is. We never got that far.”

“Exactly,” Tuvok said. “It would seem extremely unlikely that the proposed Hachai/P’nir alliance will ever be able to locate its enemies.”

Janeway considered that prospect for a long moment, then nodded.

“And by the time they do,” she said, “they may well have forgotten why they were looking for us. Peace might become a habit for them, just as their war had.” She nodded.

“It’s not the sort of peace I’d have preferred,” she said, “but it’s better than nothing.” She looked at the others.

“Isn’t it?” she asked.