Ragnarok (3 page)

Neelix shook his head. “No, no. The P’nir are… well, the P’nir are the P’nir. They live by a strict code of their own, a code that doesn’t acknowledge the value of anything that’s not part of the P’nir hierarchy. They don’t recognize any authority or any rights but their own. I’d say that if the Hachai weren’t fighting them, somebody else would be—they don’t make friends easily.”

Janeway’s mouth quirked in a half-smile.

“Indeed,” she said, leaning on one elbow.

“Really,” Neelix said. “The P’nir have never been any good at trade; they prefer piracy. Not that they call it that, of course. If they admitted it was piracy, that would mean acknowledging that other species could own something in the first place, and the P’nir just don’t think that way.” He shrugged.

“At any rate, the P’nir gave up all trade or other contact with other races long ago, because it distracted them from the war effort against the Hachai.”

“They do sound quite unpleasant, Mr. Neelix,” Janeway agreed.

“Oh, they are!” Neelix said. “Captain, if the Hachai spot you, they’ll probably give you one warning before they open fire, but if the P’nir see you and decide to notice you at all, they won’t even do that—they’ll fire or not at the whim of whatever captain you meet.

Please, you really don’t want to take your beautiful, comfortable ship into the Kuriyar Cluster.”

Neelix looked around the bridge for support, but quickly saw that he wasn’t going to get it. Tom Paris, at the forward console, was ignoring the entire conversation and keeping his attention on the helm; on either side of the bridge Harry Kim and Tuvok were listening and seemed interested, but neither of them showed any sign of siding with Neelix, a mere passenger, against their captain.

The first officer might have been willing to argue with the captain, but Neelix couldn’t tell whether Commander Chakotay had heard a word of what he’d said. That man was a puzzle to Neelix; he couldn’t make out Chakotay’s thinking. Right now, Chakotay was sitting in his place on the bridge, relaxed, watching the viewscreen, and Neelix could not read the man’s expression at all. Was he calm? Bored? Angry? Was he studying the screen, or simply watching those little indicator lights above and below the screen?

Neelix couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell whether Chakotay was listening, or ignoring the entire discussion in favor of his own thoughts.

As for Janeway herself, she was listening, as she had been all along, but her mind was made up. She had faith in her ship and her crew, and thought they were ready to face any ordinary dangers, and the possible benefits offered by the Kuriyar Cluster—or rather, by the tetryon beam that might have come from the cluster—were too great to be ignored.

Furthermore, in addition to the possibilities that tetryon beam presented, there was also the question of her duties as a Starfleet officer. The Federation was dedicated to peace. Oh, the Prime Directive did not allow them to intervene directly, but Starfleet had always devoted great effort to peacemaking; the Federation provided negotiators, ferried diplomats, served as arbitrator, and otherwise did whatever it could to end interstellar war.

As a Starfleet officer, Janeway felt it was her duty, if she encountered these warring nations Neelix described, to see if she could help make peace. Under the circumstances that the Voyager found itself in she was not going to go around looking for trouble, and she could have lived with her conscience if they had simply dodged the Kuriyar Cluster in the first place, but adding the mysterious scan on top of that…

Well, she intended to go through that cluster, war or no war, regardless of what Neelix might say.

She wished Neelix would just accept the situation and stop arguing.

She was tempted to throw him off the bridge—but if he really did know something about what lay ahead, if there really were hostile warships out there ready to pounce, the Talaxian’s knowledge might be vital, and they might well need it instantly.

“Mr. Paris,” she said, “scan that system ahead of us, and see if there’s anything we could use.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Paris replied. “I understand the replicators have been malfunctioning again; I’ll just see if I can find a coffee plantation, shall I?”

“That would be fine, Mr. Paris,” Janeway replied, smiling at the joke.

“Or perhaps a sign telling us where to find the Caretaker’s companion.”

“Captain, please,” Neelix said, coming to stand beside her, one hand on the railing. “What would the Caretaker’s companion be doing in the middle of a war?”

“Perhaps trying to end the war,” Janeway replied, her smile vanishing as she tried not to sound as exasperated with Neelix as she was beginning to feel. “After all, we know from the Caretaker’s behavior in regard to the Ocampa that these extragalactic creatures do seem to be benign in their intentions, if not always in their actions. Perhaps attempts to stop the war have kept her busy—that might be why you’ve heard nothing about the companion’s presence elsewhere, Mr. Neelix.”

“But if she were as powerful as the Caretaker, and she wanted to end the war, she would have,” Neelix protested. “The P’nir and the Hachai don’t have anything close to that sort of technology!”

“But we don’t know how she might think,” Janeway said. “She might be limited in her actions—as we are limited by the Prime Directive, Mr. Neelix. The Caretaker seems to have been bound by a powerful moral code, and perhaps that code won’t allow the companion to intervene directly, But she might be there, trying to talk sense to the Hachai and the P’nir.”

“Well, if she is, it isn’t working,” Neelix said dourly—or at least, as dourly as the little Talaxian could manage. “They were still fighting the last I heard, and whether she’s there or not I expect them to keep fighting for years.”

“Well, whether she’s there or not,” Janeway said, “if we run into the Hachai or the P’nir, perhaps we can talk some sense into them.”

“Ha!” Neelix burst out. “You think you can stop a war that’s lasted centuries?”

“It might be,” Tuvok suggested from behind and above the Talaxian, “that after so long a conflict, the Hachai and the P’nir are ready to see how illogical their war is. Perhaps we can act as the catalyst necessary to end it.”

“I think you underestimate how stubborn they are,” Neelix said without turning.

“And I think you underestimate how stubborn we are,” Janeway retorted.

“Not to mention what we’re capable of handling. Our home lies in this direction, and that tetryon beam, which may well indicate a shorter route home, also came from this direction. We’re willing to take a few risks—” “Captain,” Paris interrupted suddenly, “I think you should see this.”

Startled, Janeway turned away from Neelix to see Paris sitting at the pilot’s console, staring at a display. She rose, stepped forward, and looked down over Paris’s shoulder at the screen.

The readouts indicated that they were approaching the first star system on the edge of the Kuriyar Cluster. It wasn’t exactly on the line Harry Kim had plotted, but it was close, just a few light-hours to one side. There were eleven planets circling a G-type star—seven gas giants, two burned-out cinders too close to the primary for anything resembling humanoid life, and two fair-sized planets located in the habitable zone. Nothing was out of the ordinary in that.

The readings for the two in the habitable zone, however, were not ordinary at all. That was obvious even at a casual glance.

Somehow, she didn’t think they were going to find any coffee plantations here.

“Mr. Kim,” Janeway called without taking her eyes from the display, “I want you to run a full sensor scan on the third and fourth planets in that system ahead of us.”

“Yes, Captain,” Kim replied.

A moment later, still standing at the forward console, Janeway studied the results of that sensor scan, frowning at what she saw.

Both planets might have been inhabited M-class worlds once. They weren’t anymore.

The third planet’s atmosphere was gone, stripped away completely.

The rocky surface was boiling hot, seething with pools of radioactive lava. The heat did not come from the local sun, nor from normal volcanism; something had flash-fried the entire planet, burning away the atmosphere, and the planet had not yet cooled.

Theoretically, a massive asteroid bombardment could have been responsible, but most of the system was free of celestial debris—if there had once been asteroids, all of them had hit something. And the radiation wasn’t anything that asteroid impacts would explain—not unless those asteroids were made up of some very peculiar elements.

And there were no traces of any such elements. In fact, there were no heavy elements present at all.

Something had blasted the third planet into this state, and Janeway knew of no natural phenomenon that would have left quite these conditions.

The fourth planet was not quite as bad. Although the planet’s temperature was unnaturally high, the original surface was not completely obliterated. The atmosphere was still there, but it was a seething fog of radiation and corrosive poisons, totally inimical to carbon-based life.

The sensors detected structures that did not appear natural here and there on the fourth planet, but there was no sign of life anywhere on that entire world—not even so much as anaerobic bacteria.

“The war did this?” Janeway asked, turning to Neelix, who had come up beside her. “The P’nir, or the Hachai?”

“I don’t know, Captain,” the Talaxian replied. “I told you, no one comes here. But I would assume so.”

Appalled, Janeway studied the sensor readouts again, and noticed something new.

Both planets were surrounded by clouds of orbiting wreckage—but there was something odd about the drifting debris. Janeway frowned, and checked the planetary scans again.

There were no metals.

The orbital wreckage was mostly organic—plastics, fabrics, and what were almost certainly corpses. The rest was lighter minerals. There were tons of organic material, but virtually no metal.

How could that be? Every starfaring species Janeway had ever heard of used metal to build their ships. If that wreckage didn’t come from spaceships, where did it come from?

And if it came from spaceships, why wasn’t there any metal left?

She looked at the reports on the planetary surfaces again. She had already noticed that there weren’t any heavy elements, but now she looked more closely and realized just what that meant.

The planetary crusts had been stripped of every trace of useful metals.

The planetary cores were the usual nickel-iron, and the star was young enough that the system should have been rich in heavy elements; the planets’ crusts should have shown scattered deposits of iron, copper, lead, titanium…

The metals must have been there once.

They weren’t now.

Even if the natural deposits had all been mined out to build the civilizations that had presumably once flourished here, the metals should have still been present somewhere, even if only in the form of slag.

“Where’s all the metal?” she said aloud.

“Gone for warship hulls, most likely,” Neelix said.

Janeway turned to stare at him.

“I told you, Captain,” he said, “the Hachai and the P’nir have been fighting for a long time. They’ve stripped whole planets to build their fleets.”

“And that orbiting debris?” Chakotay asked, stepping up to join the pair at the forward console.

“The remains of their defenses, I suppose,” Neelix said. “I think this would have been a P’nir system; the P’nir are said to be fond of orbital fortresses.”

“Those defenses don’t seem to have worked,” the First Officer remarked.

“Of course not,” Neelix agreed. “No defense can hold out forever against a really determined attack. And the Hachai are pretty determined people.”

“Of course not,” Janeway said, appalled.

“Now, Captain,” Neelix asked, his tone wheedling, “do you think we might change course, so as to not run into the Hachai fleet that did this?”

Janeway turned and looked across the bridge to Ensign Kim, behind his console in Ops. “When were these worlds destroyed?” she demanded.

“Just a minute, Captain,” Kim said, as he studied the readings.

Then he looked up. “Judging by the vacuum evaporation of the surface molecules from objects among the orbital debris,” he said, “I’d estimate that the objects I picked as samples have been drifting untouched here for roughly two hundred standard years.”

Janeway stared at Kim for a moment, then straightened and nodded.

“I hardly think, Mr. Neelix,” she said, “that any war fleet would still be in the area, looking for stragglers, after two centuries.”

She took another look at the viewscreen, at the image of the blackened ruins that had once been inhabited worlds, then stepped back and settled into her seat.

“I don’t think anyone here was producing any tetryon beams, either.”

“They’d be too busy fighting,” Neelix replied. “Anyone anywhere in the Kuriyar Cluster would be. There’s nothing here that’s going to help.”

“You don’t know that,” Janeway replied.

“But I knew that there was a war here, didn’t I?” Neelix protested.

“Yes, you did,” Janeway agreed, “but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing but a war. And in fact,” she added, “I would guess that your war here is long since over. A conflict at that level of ferocity could not possibly have been sustained for so long.”

Neelix looked at the screen.

“I hope you’re right, Captain,” he said. “I’d like to think so.

But the war was still going on the last I heard.”

The next star system that the Voyager approached might have had a habitable planet orbiting it at one time; what it had now was an asteroid belt and three gas giants.

They weren’t going to find any supplies here, either; that was obvious.

And this time no one made any jokes about coffee plantations.

A quick analysis indicated that the asteroid field was not part of the system’s original structure; a small planet had been destroyed to create it. By tracking orbital patterns, Harry Kim estimated that the destruction had taken place some three centuries before.