Ragnarok (12 page)

“Tuvok,” she said, “can they get safely out of there?”

“Insufficient data, Captain,” Tuvok replied almost instantly.

“We don’t know whether the Hachai or the P’nir will target the shuttle, or whether both sides will continue to ignore it.”

“Captain, we have to go in there and get them out!” Paris said.

“No,” Janeway replied immediately, as she stared at the screen.

“If the shuttlecraft can’t escape the battle on its own, then the Voyager probably couldn’t, either. I won’t get all one hundred and forty of us killed for the sake of those four people.”

“But, Captain,” Paris protested, “Voyager’s bigger and stronger and faster than the shuttle; our shields have five times the effectiveness!

At least five times!”

Janeway frowned. Paris might have a valid point. Tuvok had said that the Voyager’s shield could hold up to hours of Hachai or P’nir bombardment; he hadn’t said anything about the shuttlecraft.

Tuvok would probably know what the shuttlecraft’s shields should be capable of, but he wouldn’t know their actual current status.

Well, there was one person on board who should know, whose job it was to know the state of all the ship’s equipment.

“Janeway to Engineering,” the captain said. “Torres, how good are the shields on that shuttlecraft?”

In Engineering, B’Elanna Torres looked up from the warp core monitor panel, startled. Behind her the core itself shimmered a pale blue and throbbed with power.

“Shuttlecraft?” she asked. “What shuttlecraft? I’ve been too busy keeping this ship running properly to worry about the shuttlecraft!”

She glanced at a monitor, then turned and glowered at Lieutenant Carey, who happened to be passing by, padd in hand, on his way to check the neutron flux in the matter-antimatter mixture. “You, Carey,” she snapped, “what sort of shape is our shuttlecraft in?”

“Excuse me?” Carey said, startled.

“The shuttlecraft!” Torres shouted. “The one the captain just asked about! What sort of shape is it in? When did anyone check it out?”

“We did the regular scheduled inspections,” Carey said. “It’s all in the log…”

“Go away, then,” Torres snapped, working the controls to call up the engineering logs.

She read quickly.

The Voyager had only one functioning shuttlecraft aboard at present, so there was no question of which one the captain meant; furthermore, the log included the shuttle’s present crew roster, mission statement, and clearance for launch.

A glance at the present-status report told Torres where Chakotay, Kim, Rollins, and Bereyt were at the moment, which made it obvious why the captain was asking about the shuttlecraft’s shields.

Torres bit her lip. She barely knew Rollins, didn’t know Bereyt at all, but she and Chakotay had been through a lot together, and Harry Kim had been with her among the Ocampa, when the Caretaker had almost killed them both in its attempt to reproduce itself.

What were the two of them doing, risking their necks out there?

She didn’t have enough friends aboard the Voyager that she could afford to lose those two.

The current situation was right there in the status report, but she had to look a good bit farther back in the log to find the maintenance records she wanted. She read through them quickly.

There weren’t any reported problems in any of the shuttlecraft’s equipment, nothing was scheduled for repair—but the date stamp on the last entry made her nervous. She tapped her combadge.

“Engineering to bridge,” she said. “Captain, no one’s done a real systems check on that shuttle since before our little encounter with the Caretaker; it was due for inspection the day after tomorrow. Given the rough ride we all had getting here, and Starfleet’s idea of proper maintenance these days…” She took a deep breath. “Captain, we need to go in there and get it out.”

On the bridge Janeway heard this and shook her head quickly, one sharp little jerk, even though she knew Torres couldn’t see it.

“Impossible,” she replied.

She could see Paris’s shoulders tensing at Torres’s seconding of his own opinion; the red shoulders of his uniform exaggerated the motion, made it stand out from the soothing gray of the bridge walls. She ignored that, and gave him his orders.

“Take us in closer, Mr. Paris, ready to tractor the shuttle away if it breaks clear,” she said. “But we will not enter the battle zone ourselves. It’s up to Commander Chakotay to get the shuttle out of there.”

“Aren’t you going to at least talk to them, find out if there’s anything we can do?” Paris protested.

“No,” Janeway said. “They know we’re here, and they can call us if they need to. The fact that they haven’t done so, Mr. Paris, I take to mean that they’re too busy right now, and I’m not going to distract them.”

“And you aren’t going after them?”

“I believe I’ve already answered that, Mr. Paris,” Janeway replied sharply.

“But look at that cross fire! They…” Paris caught himself.

“Aye-aye,” he said reluctantly.

He watched intently as the great warships spun and danced through the heavens, the tiny shuttle almost lost among them, like a mouse amid a herd of elephants, ignored but in constant danger of being stepped on.

He expected the shuttle to be caught in a cross fire at any second, to flare up as its shields overloaded and then explode into glittering dust. He watched closely as the shuttlecraft maneuvered, vanishing from sight behind one gigantic ship for a moment, then reappearing briefly before it was obscured by another.

Paris knew that if he were aboard that shuttle, at those controls, he could have gotten it out in one piece—he found himself anticipating the shuttle’s every move, and thinking what he would have done instead, were he the pilot.

He watched Chakotay, or whoever was at the conn, dodging about, trying to keep clear of the swarming combatants. Whoever the pilot was, he was doing the right things, but not quite fast enough—he was missing opportunities. And he was being too conventional—if he’d do something totally unexpected, he might find an opening.

The shuttlecraft dodged madly as Paris watched. Port, port, starboard, down, port, up…

And then Tom Paris blinked in surprise. He’d been thinking that Chakotay had to do something totally unexpected, and Chakotay had just done so—but why had he done that?

“What the hell are you doing?” he said aloud.

At the precise moment that Tom Paris asked his question from the helm of the Voyager, Ensign Rollins, aboard the shuttle, spoke those exact same words.

“What the hell are you doing, Commander?”

“Trying to save our lives,” Chakotay said. “Mr. Kim, hail them.”

Harry Kim didn’t need to ask who he should hail; a few seconds before, realizing he was rapidly running out of room to maneuver, Chakotay had sent the shuttle diving straight toward a P’nir cruiser that was not, at the moment, directly involved in combat with anyone.

Obviously, Chakotay wanted Kim to hail the P’nir ship.

“We’re going to hit their shields in about four seconds,” Bereyt said, her tone oddly calm. “Our own shields will buckle on impact, and the feedback will wreck the ship, even if we survive the collision. Which we won’t.”

That statement used up the four seconds, but by the time Bereyt was midway through her second sentence Chakotay had abruptly veered off, preventing a collision but sending the shuttlecraft skimming over the surface of the P’nir ship’s shields close enough to trigger vivid blue flickers of interference.

“Hailing frequencies open,” Kim said, “but they’re not responding.”

“You aboard the P’nir vessel,” Chakotay said loudly, “this is the Federation envoy, respectfully requesting permission to come aboard.”

Kim’s jaw dropped; Rollins turned to stare at the first officer.

“You want to board, sir?” Rollins asked.

Chakotay looked at the others. “That is what we came out here for, isn’t it? To go aboard their ships and play ambassador?

Well, we’ve come this far; we might as well give it a try.”

Rollins turned back to the controls. “They’re not responding,” he said.

“This is the Federation envoy,” Chakotay repeated. “Let us aboard!”

“They still…” Rollins began.

Just then the cruiser’s main batteries fired, from the side where the shuttle had first approached—but where they no longer were.

“Good.” He turned to see that Kim was in position. “Energize.”

Harry Kim flashed and vanished.

Almost the instant the last sparkle of the transporter effect had faded, while the hangar door was still spiraling shut and the hangar bay was still filling with the thick P’nir atmosphere, a strange, flat voice came from the shuttlecraft’s speakers.

“Leave your vessel immediately,” the voice said. “Emerge unarmed.”

Rollins glanced at Chakotay. Chakotay demanded, “How many of us?”

No one answered, and Chakotay repeated, “Tell us how many of us must emerge unarmed!”

“All three of you,” the voice replied.

The three officers looked at one another.

“Well, I guess we won’t be sending Harry any company just yet,” Chakotay remarked.

“You have eight seconds,” the P’nir voice informed them.

“Comply.”

Chakotay sighed. “Come on,” he said.

Together, the three of them emerged into the green-lit gloom of the P’nir hangar bay.

Aboard the Voyager Tom Paris stared at the sensor reports.

“They’ve been taken aboard the P’nir cruiser,” he reported, his tone disbelieving.

“At least they’re still alive,” Janeway answered, relieved. She had been pacing back and forth across the central level of the bridge, from Ops to Security and back; now she stopped somewhere near the center and said, “Open a channel to the P’nir ship, if you can.”

“Hailing.”

Janeway glanced about the bridge while waiting for a response.

It seemed oddly empty with Chakotay, Kim, and Rollins gone; for a moment she even regretted chasing Neelix and Kes away. The soft hum of the engines seemed to emphasize how quiet it was, and the soothing grays seemed drab.

“Captain,” Tuvok said, “look.”

Janeway’s gaze returned to the main viewscreen just in time to see a Hachai dreadnought swinging out of the melee and moving toward the Voyager.

It would appear that someone was finally going to pay attention to them.

“Red alert!” she called.

The lights dimmed, and the grays turned dark, almost ominous, as red warning lights came on.

Paris seemingly paid no attention; the ship remained on station.

“Lieutenant,” Janeway snapped.

Paris looked up, startled.

“They’re hailing us, Captain,” he said.

“Who is hailing us, Mr. Paris?” Janeway asked. “You mean the P’nir are responding?”

“No, sir—I mean, Captain. I mean the Hachai are hailing us.”

He nodded toward the dreadnought.

“Onscreen.”

The image of the battle vanished, and a Hachai commander in his transparent bubble appeared.

“We warned you,” the Hachai said, without preamble. “Still you send your devices to the P’nir, you attempt to speak to them. We cannot allow you to aid them further. If you remain within six hundred thousand kilometers of any Hachai vessel or installation, we will destroy you.”

“Four of our people have been taken prisoner…” Janeway began.

“No P’nir tricks!” the Hachai shouted. “No more thagn tricks!”

Then the image vanished, and the exterior view reappeared. At the center of the screen the Hachai dreadnaught loomed ever closer, blocking out much of the battle.

A part of Janeway found the time to wonder just what the word thagn might mean, and why the Universal Translator was unable to render it into intelligibility; she supposed it was an obscenity unique to the Hachai. Some interesting possibilities were suggested by eyestalks and retractable legs…

“They’ve ceased transmission,” Paris said, unnecessarily. “And…”

He didn’t need to complete the sentence; when the viewer flared Janeway could see for herself that the Hachai had opened fire.

Accurately, too; the first shot had struck the Voyager dead on.

“Shields holding,” Tuvok reported. “Shall we return fire, Captain?”

“No,” Janeway said. “It’s not our fight, it’s a misunderstanding.

Take evasive action, Mr. Paris, but make no hostile moves.”

“We’re not leaving?” Paris asked.

“No,” Janeway said. “Of course we aren’t. Our people are still in there somewhere. That globe is in there, too. We aren’t going anywhere; just dodge as much of their fire as you can.”

“Aye-aye.”

The ship lurched, and Janeway was unsure whether it was Paris’s piloting or Hachai fire that was responsible. The image on the viewscreen zigzagged wildly for a moment.

“Captain,” Paris said, “should I try to get closer to the P’nir ship that captured the shuttle?”

Janeway had to swiftly weigh several considerations against one another before she could answer that. The Hachai would see it as further proof that the Voyager was part of some P’nir conspiracy if they moved closer—but the Hachai had already made up their minds, and to move farther away from the cruiser would be to reduce the chances of ever retrieving the shuttle or its crew.

“Do it, Mr. Paris,” she said. “Get as close as you safely can.”

“Captain, I would advise against…” Tuvok began.

A Hachai barrage interrupted the Vulcan’s objection; the bridge lights flickered as the shields drained power. The image on the main viewer was now a constant glare of color and light as Hachai weapons blazed, filling the screen.

“Our shields are still holding,” Tuvok reported. “Captain, I would advise against moving the Voyager any closer. You will remember how the shuttlecraft was caught up in the battle when…”

“Yes, I remember,” Janeway said. “We’ll just have to risk it.”

Then she realized that Tuvok, in an utterly atypical action, had stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence before she had interrupted him. She turned, startled, to see what had so disturbed him.

“I am afraid that risk is no longer the appropriate term,” the Vulcan said.

“Why not?” Janeway asked, turning to look at the main viewer.