Ragnarok (6 page)

Janeway woke suddenly, unsure just what had brought her out of her sleep; she had been dreaming of home, of Mark and of her dog, and it had turned into a nightmare where she found them both mummified in an ancient tunnel. Now she was staring up at the stars through the sloping windows over her bed, back aboard the Voyager, among surroundings that were becoming a little too familiar.

“Captain Janeway to the bridge,” the speaker at the head of her bed repeated.

“On my way,” she said, swinging her feet to the floor.

She glanced at a clock and frowned. Unless Chakotay had ordered an increase in speed—a major increase in speed—they should still be in the void between star systems. Why would she be needed?

She didn’t like to think about what might be responsible for interrupting her rest.

She hesitated for a moment; the call hadn’t expressed any great urgency. In an emergency she would have headed straight to the bridge in her nightgown, but as it was, she thought she could spare a few seconds to get back into uniform.

“Lights,” she ordered.

“What is it?” she asked, as she stepped out of the turbolift a moment later.

“Sorry to wake you, Captain,” Chakotay said, turning to face her.

He was standing in the very center of the bridge, behind Lieutenant Paris’s shoulder. A few minutes ago we entered a large, unusually dense dust cloud.” He gestured at the main viewscreen, where bands of shadow obscured most of the stars.

“It’s mostly made up of particles of ionized metals—maybe it’s where all the metal in this cluster went. At any rate, the cloud density is increasing, and I’d have called you soon anyway, but when we got a little way into it the sensors spotted something ahead that I thought you’d want to see immediately.”

Janeway nodded and looked at the viewscreen as she stepped down to the central level. Thanks to the dust there was nothing much to see on the viewer; she turned to a computer display on the forward console.

The sensors, able to look through the dust cloud, told a different story. There was something ahead of them, all right—something strange. It was registering on every sort of sensor, but none of the readings made sense.

For a few seconds she studied those readings silently, trying to see a pattern or logic to them, but nothing revealed itself.

“What is that?” she said at last.

“I don’t know,” Chakotay replied. He frowned and stared at the screen, even though the anomaly didn’t show there except as an occasional glimpse of something that could have been an ordinary star or nebula.

“It’s still too distant to say, and the dust cloud badly distorts our data. It’s huge, though, whatever it is, and its energy output is comparable to the Caretaker’s Array.

It’s too stable to be a plasma storm, and besides, its output isn’t like any plasma storm I ever heard of before. And it’s directly ahead of us, on the line that Ensign Kim plotted; assuming it hasn’t moved, either that thing produced the tetryon beam, or the beam passed directly through it.”

“It’s not generating any tetryon radiation now,” Janeway pointed out.

“No,” Chakotay agreed, “but it’s generating just about everything else.”

That was true, as Janeway could see for herself; whatever it was ahead of them, it was radiating all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, pouring out incredible amounts of energy.

The energy emissions weren’t steady, though; the thing’s output fluctuated wildly, with no pattern that Janeway could see. At one instant light and heat would be spraying out, at the next the thing, whatever it was, would go dark—relatively dark, at any rate; the output never went anywhere near zero. Gamma radiation flickered and flared; radio, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, and charged particles scattered from it, dancing in all directions and skipping wildly up and down the spectrum, diffracting through the dust cloud that surrounded both the object and the Voyager. The bar graphs on the display bounced up and down like so many hyperactive kittens.

The Array had pulsed with energy, almost like a heartbeat; this thing was sputtering like a roman candle.

“Maybe the companion is in trouble,” Paris suggested. It was obvious to anyone that this sort of output wasn’t normal or healthy.

“Maybe it’s not the companion,” Janeway replied. “Maybe it’s something else entirely.”

“But, Captain,” Kim protested from his station, “what else could be throwing around that sort of power?”

“I don’t know,” Janeway said. She glanced at Chakotay, who shrugged.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” the first officer said. “The energy signature isn’t anything like the Array’s—but it isn’t like anything else, either. Not even itself; notice how it changes?”

“Any idea what that means?”

Chakotay shrugged again.

“It’s got to be the Caretaker’s companion,” Kim said.

“We have insufficient data to choose any one hypothesis,” Tuvok remarked.

Janeway glanced up at Neelix, who was still there, now standing well aft at the primary ship’s-status display.

“I never saw anything quite like it before,” the little alien admitted.

“But I could make a guess…”

“So could we,” Janeway said, cutting him off. “If that’s all you can say about it, then I’ll thank you to stay quiet for the moment, Mr. Neelix.” She took her seat and called, “Bridge to Engineering.”

“Torres here,” came the reply.

“We’re reading something ahead, B’Elanna, something very large and energetic,” Janeway said. “We’re pretty sure it’s a construct of some kind, not a natural phenomenon. Assuming someone built it, we’d be interested in your opinion of what they might have built it for. ” “I’ll take a look,” came the reply.

Down in the engineering section, B’Elanna Torres had been cheerfully immersed in fine-tuning the Voyager’s warp core.

After years of making do with whatever decrepit equipment the Maquis could beg, borrow, or steal, it was a delight to get her hands on Starfleet’s latest model, even one that had gotten banged up by the Caretaker’s displacement wave.

Machines, she knew, didn’t look at her warily because she was half-Klingon and known for her temper. She found them much easier to deal with than people. And a modern warp drive was so wonderfully delicate and complex—she could easily have spent months or years tinkering with it, getting it tuned to the absolute peak of efficiency.

The outside world wasn’t about to let her have those months, though; the Voyager’s chief engineer had plenty of other duties to attend to.

This particular interruption was annoying, but it wasn’t until she had switched on the nearest available display that it struck Torres just how odd it was.

Since when did the captain, herself a top-notch science officer, need help in identifying anything?

Torres hadn’t thought about that when she gave her initial response; she had still been thinking about core pressures and resonance frequencies. Now, though, she took a look at the screen and muttered, “What the hell is that?” And although she didn’t say so aloud, she did wonder why in the galaxy Kathryn Janeway thought she, B’Elanna Torres, might do a better job of identifying it than anyone on the bridge.

She began scanning the readings, and then she thought she understood.

That thing out there wasn’t anything a scientist could be expected to identify. Science dealt with the natural universe, and the object ahead did not look natural at all. Science made sense, and that thing out there, with its wild discharges of energy, didn’t.

Engineering made sense too, of course—but sometimes the sense wasn’t immediately obvious. Engineering dealt with the created universe, rather than the natural one, and sometimes sentients created the damnedest contraptions.

Torres liked to think she was pretty good at puzzling out contraptions, even unlikely ones, but that thing ahead had her stumped. She studied the readings and tried to make sense of them.

For a long moment, as Torres studied and the captain waited, the bridge was silent save for the soft hum of the engines and the faint beeps and chirps of equipment performing its proper functions. No one spoke; the soft shuffling of black-clad feet on gray carpet made no sound.

At the rear of the bridge Neelix glanced unhappily from one officer to another, obviously eager to speak, but he restrained himself; he knew he had irritated the captain, and that to argue now would irritate her more.

“Captain, we’ve got a better reading on its size now,” Kim said, breaking the silence. “And… well, it’s really immense. Much bigger than the Array—it’s hundreds of thousands of kilometers across.

Usually. The size keeps shifting, as if it were expanding and contracting.”

“Engineering to bridge,” Torres’s voice said, before Janeway could respond. “Captain, I don’t know what it’s for, but if these readings are accurate and that thing out there is a machine doing what it was designed to do, its designers are insane. It’s either deliberately wasteful and destructive, or the worst piece of engineering I’ve ever seen.”

“Do you think it could have been built by the Caretaker’s companion?”

Janeway asked.

“No,” Torres replied immediately. “The Array was wasteful, but it wasn’t sloppy. This design, if it is a design, isn’t anything like the Array.”

The bridge crew exchanged glances.

Tuvok cleared his throat. Janeway turned her head to the right to look up at him.

“Captain,” he said, “I would remind you that we are well inside what was at one time, and what may still be, a war zone. Perhaps this… thing ahead of us is directly related to that conflict?”

Neelix nodded eagerly, started to speak, then glanced around and thought better of it.

“Of course it is,” Janeway said. She frowned at how slow she had been to recognize the obvious; perhaps she wasn’t as fully awake as she ought to be. Insane and destructive, Torres had said… what else could it be but a war machine? It might even be whatever had shattered that planet three systems back, the one where she had found the Hachai doll.

She should have seen that immediately. She had been too focused on the Voyager’s own situation, on the central problem that faced them all—getting home. She had been thinking about that thing ahead in terms of whether it got them closer to that goal, rather than looking at it objectively and seeing it for what it was.

She couldn’t allow that. That was wishful thinking, to look at everything as a potential shortcut back to the Alpha Quadrant, and wishful thinking was dangerous.

And their guide had been trying to tell her that all along, had been telling her that she was flying the Voyager into danger.

Maybe it was time she listened.

She turned to her Talaxian guide, who had moved slightly to one side, trying to stay out of the way of one of the crewmen.

“Mr. Neelix,” she said, “tell me more about the Hachai and the P’nir.”

“Captain?” Neelix hurried to the railing and looked down at her.

“You heard me,” Janeway said. “I want to know everything you can tell me about the inhabitants of this cluster.”

Neelix gaped at her in surprise, then snapped his mouth shut.

Everything?

These Federation people had never before wanted to hear everything he knew about anything; usually they seemed to want him to shut up. He looked about the bridge at the other officers, to make sure they weren’t preparing to laugh at him for some reason, then turned his attention back to the captain.

“Why, I hardly know where to begin!” he said.

“Well, why not start off with a comparison?” Janeway suggested.

“For example, which of them has the more advanced technology? Do you know? Would either of them be capable of building a weapon that size?”

She pointed at the displays at the Ops station.

Neelix immediately saw that she didn’t really want to know everything about the Hachai or the P’nir, his explanations of how to use Hachai funerary customs in salvage-rights negotiations, or the P’nir code of honor as applied to starship repair, would have to wait until some other time. What Captain Janeway really wanted, now that they had come across something other than blasted ruins or harmless primitives, was information about what to expect up ahead.

Neelix started to reply with a stream of warnings about the incredible power of Hachai and P’nir weaponry, but then he caught himself. He didn’t want to annoy anyone, or amuse anyone, by exaggerating, and besides, these people had already seen those ruined worlds.

Exaggeration wasn’t needed, and he wanted the captain to listen. He looked at the clouds of dust on the main viewer and weighed his words carefully before he spoke, and then kept himself, as much as he could, to the exact, unadorned truth.

“Their technologies were always pretty evenly balanced,” he said.

“After all, how else could their war drag on so long? Even if it’s over now, as you seem to believe, it lasted for centuries.”

Janeway nodded. “Go on,” she said.

Neelix thought for a moment, planning out his words, then said, “Well, both sides were said to be masters of defensive technology—before the supply finally ran out outside this cluster, the Hachai shield generators were always in great demand, a very profitable item whenever you could get hold of one.” He smiled in fond recollection. He liked profitable merchandise.

He was about to say more when Janeway interrupted him. “Were the Hachai shields better than the P’nir shields?” she asked.

“Not really, but you couldn’t get P’nir shields,” Neelix explained.

“Not so far back as I’ve ever heard, anyway—certainly not in my lifetime.”

“Could either of them have built something like that?” Janeway gestured at the displays.

Neelix hesitated, then admitted, “I don’t know. I’m not sure I understand your readings….”

“We’re through enough of the dust cloud to be within visual range of the object now, Captain,” Kim reported, interrupting the Talaxian.

“Onscreen,” Janeway said.

The viewer lit up with coruscating waves of color, too bright to look at safely. Janeway raised an arm, shielding her eyes.

“Filter that down,” she snapped.

The glare vanished, revealing a rounded, irregular mass that seemed to be made up of swirling dots of polychrome light and shadow. It shifted shape constantly, like a gigantic amoeba, and a fine mist of debris seemed to be emanating from it, spreading slowly out in all directions and blending seamlessly into the dust cloud.