Ragnarok (13 page)

“Tactical onscreen,” Tuvok said.

The heat and fury of the actual battle vanished from the big screen, to be instantly replaced by the cool precision of a three-dimensional schematic computer display representing the battle in diagram form.

A white outline represented the Voyager; red circles indicated the Hachai ships, and blue triangles stood for the P’nir. The red and blue shapes formed an irregular spheroid with fairly clear boundaries.

And the white outline of the Voyager was already well inside those bounds.

Harry Kim arrived aboard the P’nir cruiser in utter darkness.

The glow of the transporter field gave him an instant of vision before it vanished, and he glimpsed a tall, narrow chamber around him, one side of it stacked with dark, rounded shapes.

Then he was fully materialized, the transporter field was gone, and he saw only black.

For a moment he stood there, listening, getting a feel for his surroundings.

The air was heavy and foul-smelling, the gravity was light, at most no more than half of Earth standard, he judged. He could hear nothing but a very faint, steady hum that was probably the residual vibration of the ship’s main drive, filtered through the decks and bulkheads. It was subtly different from the familiar hum aboard the Voyager.

Everything seemed very still. It was hard to believe he was in the middle of a battle.

Then something thudded somewhere, far off, and the deck seemed to shift very slightly beneath his feet—the P’nir ship had probably just been attacked. Down here, deep within the immense vessel, it hadn’t felt like much, but there had probably been a staggering amount of energy released.

Unless that distant thud had been the shuttlecraft coming to rest in the hangar bay, four decks up and a few hundred meters over.

That thought reminded him that Commander Chakotay and the others might need his help, and that he couldn’t just stand here in the dark forever.

Moving slowly, hands extended, he felt his way across the room to a wall; there he put his back to the wall and paused for a moment, thinking.

He hadn’t brought a light. He should have brought one, he told himself—he should have thought of that.

If he’d brought the environmental suit he’d have had a light, since one was built into the helmet, but he’d dropped the suit back on the shuttle before stepping into the transporter, so as not to weigh himself down unnecessarily.

He had a fully charged phaser on his belt—it had been obvious that if he was going to be sneaking around a possibly hostile warship, he needed a weapon—but he hadn’t thought of bringing a light.

Commander Chakotay hadn’t said anything about it; perhaps he hadn’t thought of it either, or he’d thought it was so obvious it didn’t need to be mentioned.

That was a trick the instructors back at the Academy had been fond of—not mentioning some basic element of the problem at hand because, as they always explained later, it was so obvious that it went without saying.

Kim had always hated that particular stunt.

This wasn’t the Academy, though, this was real life, this was an alien starship, and whatever Chakotay had or hadn’t thought or said, Harry should have thought of it. A Starfleet officer was supposed to think of everything. That had been the point of all those exercises back at the Academy.

Well, he told himself, he hadn’t thought of it, and now he just had to live with that, and he’d have to make do with what he had.

Making do had also been a frequent subject of lessons at the Academy.

The room presumably had lights somewhere, if he could find them and turn them on—or did it? Maybe the P’nir didn’t use visible light to see. That greenish glow from the hangar bay might have been unintentional.

Most intelligent species used visible light, though; some were blind, some saw entirely in the infrared or ultraviolet, but most had vision in a range that overlapped with human eyesight.

So there was probably some way to illuminate this room, but Harry had no way of knowing how the switch worked, or where it was.

He could use his phaser to heat something until it glowed; that was a standard Starfleet emergency method for lighting caves, for example.

This wasn’t a cave, though; those bundles he had glimpsed when he first materialized might well be full of something flammable.

Firing his phaser in here could be dangerous. Even if it didn’t set off an explosion or start a fire, it might show up on the ship’s internal sensors and get a security team hunting for him.

He’d just have to do without light, then—at least for now. From the brief glimpse he’d had upon arrival, and the near-total silence, he was fairly certain that the room he was in had been unoccupied until he had appeared in it, so he was safe for the moment.

All he had to do was get out of here, get back to the hangar and find out what had happened to the others…

At that thought he reached for his combadge, but caught himself before he touched it. His presence on board was supposed to be a secret; it would not do to give it away by calling Commander Chakotay while the first officer was surrounded by P’nir.

Light or no light, he would have to find his own way around for now.

Cautiously, he began feeling his way along the wall, searching for a door.

As Harry Kim groped in the darkness, Commander Chakotay stepped down from the shuttlecraft door and got his first good look at the P’nir—or as good a look as was possible in the low, oddly colored illumination of the hangar area.

He also got his first good whiff of their air. It stank, an oily, metallic stench reminiscent of a badly maintained machine shop. He ignored that, though, and studied the half-dozen beings facing him from a few meters away.

These were the dreaded P’nir.

At least, he assumed these were the P’nir, but they were so motionless he could almost have taken them for sculptures of some sort. And of course, they might have been a slave species, or allies of the P’nir, but for now, he decided to assume that they were the P’nir themselves.

They were tall, about three meters from the tops of their heads to the deck, with gleaming blue-black skin—or perhaps exoskeletons, rather than skin; the surfaces looked hard and brittle. In the sickly greenish light Chakotay could not be sure whether that appearance was accurate; he thought that once he saw these beings move he’d know for certain, but at the moment the six P’nir facing him were absolutely, inhumanly still.

They stood on two legs, with an upright trunk and a head—roughly humanoid. Each P’nir had four arms, however—two on each side of its body, right up at the shoulder—which was rare among humanoids. That, combined with the chitinous flesh, gave them a vaguely insectile look.

The faces weren’t insectile, though; they looked more like blank oval masks. Two pairs of red eyes gleamed from horizontal slits, looking nothing at all like the faceted eyes of insects. Each face had a serrated lower edge that might have indicated a mouth or nostrils; presumably these creatures breathed somehow, but whatever openings they used for that purpose were not visible.

There were no facial features other than the eyes and that serrated edge. If the creatures had external ears or other sense organs, Chakotay didn’t see them.

He did see the weapons in their complex claws, though, and he held out his own empty hands in a gesture of peace—or surrender.

“Go to your left,” a P’nir said—with no mouths visible, Chakotay was not entirely sure which one spoke.

“We wish to speak to your captain,” Chakotay replied, speaking loudly and clearly.

“Go to your left,” the P’nir repeated, and now Chakotay was sure that it was the one second from the left that had spoken, as it made an emphatic gesture with one of its right arms.

The arms bent at two elbows apiece, and the sections between joints remained completely rigid—those were exoskeletons, then, Chakotay was sure. It was very unusual for creatures as large as these to have exoskeletons; the cube square law usually made it impractical. The P’nir must have evolved in a low-gravity environment.

The gravity aboard their ship did seem rather light, in fact; Chakotay lifted a foot experimentally. Yes, it came up very easily.

“Is that the way to meet your captain?” Rollins asked from behind Chakotay.

“Go!” the P’nir ordered, flexing three arms angrily and pointing its weapon at the humans with the fourth.

“I think we should go,” Chakotay said, turning left and ambling along at a speed much slower than necessary, even in the lighter gravity—and it was lighter, definitely; Chakotay estimated it at perhaps one-third of Earth’s, similar to what he had lived with during his long-ago visits to Mars.

He had had enough experience working in low-gravity environments that if he had wanted to, he could have bounded along like a kangaroo—the passages, intended for the much-taller P’nir, provided plenty of room for leaping.

He did not leap; instead, he kept his steps low and slow, and Rollins and Bereyt followed his lead.

The languid pace was not intended to deliberately anger their captors; the P’nir were probably not sufficiently familiar with the movements of soft-skinned sentients to recognize a slow, easy stroll. Rather, Chakotay wanted time to observe, to think, and to plan before they arrived wherever the P’nir were directing them.

Besides, there was no point in tensing up, not until they knew more of their situation.

Behind him, Ensign Bereyt closed the shuttlecraft door before following. That wouldn’t keep out the P’nir if they were determined to get inside but it might deter casual looting—and it would make it that much harder for the P’nir to discover the transporter and figure out what it did.

It was a shame that transporters didn’t work through shields, Chakotay thought, or they could all simply have transported back to the Voyager, rather than allowing themselves to be captured.

And they were captured; while manners varied drastically from one species to the next, the P’nir were plainly not treating them as guests. Their P’nir escorts were armed, while they were not, and they had been ordered to leave the shuttle and go where they were directed, not invited.

Chakotay walked from the hangar area into a high, narrow corridor, and proceeded slowly onward. The corridor smelled just as bad as the hangar, and was lit with the same dull greenish light; the walls were black, with occasional incomprehensible markings on them in red or dark green, always well above eye level. That brought back odd memories of childhood, when Chakotay had so often been surrounded by things made for adults, things far too big for him.

Nothing back home had been proportioned like this, though, nor had he ever before encountered such an unpleasant color scheme.

He walked slowly, and refused to look up at the designs on the walls.

The P’nir weren’t hurrying them, at any rate; probably they didn’t realize that humans could move faster than this.

“Go to the right,” a P’nir ordered from somewhere behind them.

At the next opportunity Chakotay turned right, through an open door into a chamber.

It didn’t look much like a conference room where an envoy might meet with the ship’s captain; the only furnishings were several horizontal bars projecting from two of the walls, above the height of his own head. The bars seemed to be in pairs, one above another but slightly offset. He glanced from the bars to the P’nir, and guessed that those were at the right height for them to lean their four arms on.

For humans—or Bajorans—the bars wouldn’t be much use at all.

He supposed they could swing from them if they wanted to practice their gymnastics.

The chamber walls were black, unrelieved by any of the red or green—hardly cheerful in appearance.

“Tell me, are we to meet your captain here?” Chakotay asked as Rollins and Bereyt stepped into the room.

“No,” the nearest P’nir said. It did not enter the room; instead it pressed a control, and a forcefield flashed into being, filling the doorway with a pale blue glow and sealing the three prisoners in.

Then the P’nir turned and marched away, leaving the three of them sealed in the black-walled, unfurnished chamber.

“What a surprise,” Rollins said bitterly. “So much for diplomacy.”

“Maybe,” Chakotay said. “Maybe not. They haven’t killed us yet.”

Rollins cocked his head to one side and peered sideways at Chakotay.

“Not yet,” he agreed.

“If they were going to, if that was all they planned, they would have done it,” Chakotay said.

“Not necessarily, sir,” Bereyt pointed out. “They might want to make a public example of us—the Cardassians did that sometimes.

Or perhaps some officer wants the pleasure of torturing us to death for his own amusement; a few of the Cardassians did that, too.”

“So I’ve heard,” Chakotay admitted, wishing that Bereyt had kept her mouth shut. This sort of speculation was not going to be good for the morale of the others.

He wondered whether Bereyt really knew what she was talking about. For himself, he didn’t know firsthand of any such Cardassian behavior.

But then, his own war against the Cardassians had been relatively brief, and largely fought openly, in ship-to-ship combat or air-to-ground raids; he had not lived with the grinding, endless terror of the Cardassian occupation the way the Bajorans had.

He had heard the stories, though. The Maquis had delighted in recounting Cardassian atrocities to one another, to help them work up the necessary hatred to maintain their fighting spirit.

Some of the stories had doubtless grown in the telling, as all tales tend to do, but Chakotay had no doubt that there had been a few genuine sadists among the Cardassians who had used the occupation to indulge their perverted tastes.

But it had been only a few, and those had been Cardassians, not P’nir.

“I don’t think it’s very likely that this species goes in for torture,” he said. “I would guess that those exoskeletons would make it difficult to inflict painful injuries without doing very serious damage. The… art would never have been developed.”

“You never know,” Rollins said. “They might have learned on other species.”