Ragnarok (4 page)

Whether the shattering of the planet had been natural or whether a world had been deliberately smashed could not be determined.

There was no sign of any inherent instability in the remaining fragments, but that didn’t rule out a natural impact, or some sort of collapse.

An analysis of the core might have told them more, but the planet’s metallic core was gone; the asteroids were all rock, presumably from the mantle or crust, and all without any trace of useful metals. A few chunks appeared to have once been part of a planetary surface; Janeway thought that she saw certain markings here and there that might even have been the remains of canals or highways.

“Take us in closer,” she ordered, rising and stepping forward for a better view.

Paris obeyed; with shields raised to fend off any stray chunks of rock, the Voyager made its way cautiously into the asteroid belt.

“Was there anything in particular that you wanted to see?” Paris asked, when the ship was within the area where a planet had once orbited.

“Yes,” Janeway said. “That one.” She pointed at one of the chunks of rocky crust that seemed to have structures clinging to it. “The sensors say it’s hollow.”

“Hollow?” Paris looked at the readings, startled. “I don’t show that here.”

“It’s not completely hollow,” Janeway agreed, “but there are cavities in it, and I want a look at them. Match speeds with it, and take us down within transporter range.”

“Aye-aye,” Paris replied.

“Transporter range, Captain?” Chakotay asked, stepping up behind her.

Janeway nodded. “I want a look at whatever is inside that piece,” she said. “I want to see if this really was an inhabited planet, and see if I can find some evidence about just what happened to it.”

Chakotay frowned. “You’re planning to beam over to the asteroid?”

“That’s right.”

“It may not be safe,” Chakotay said. “Perhaps I should go, instead?”

Janeway shook her head. “No,” she said. “I want to see for myself.

Besides, Commander, you don’t have the necessary scientific training.

It’ll be safe enough; I’ll be in a spacesuit, and you’ll be able to transport me back if there’s any danger.”

That was true enough about the training, Chakotay thought.

Janeway had been a science officer before her promotion to captain, and knew more about astrophysics, exochemistry, and xenosociology than anyone else aboard the Voyager—certainly more than Chakotay did; his own background was far less technically oriented. Still, he did not like the idea of the ship’s captain undertaking such a venture.

“I would remind the captain,” he said, “that we will be unable to maintain a transporter lock on you while our shields are up.”

“We can turn the ship so that the stern is toward the asteroid,” Janeway said, “and keep the forward and lateral shields up while lowering the aft shields, just as we would while docking a shuttlecraft. That will allow us full use of the transporter, and it’s very unlikely that any chunk of celestial debris would come at us from that direction.”

Chakotay reluctantly acknowledged that such a proposal ought to work.

“Good,” Janeway said. “Commander, you have the conn. Mr. Kim, Mr. Tuvok, you’re with me.”

A few minutes later three spacesuited figures shimmered into existence on the surface of the asteroid. Harry Kim looked about while Tuvok began scanning the area with his tricorder.

The view was an odd one—the surface seemed as flat as that of a planet, rather than the jagged, uneven shape Harry had expected, but it cut off abruptly no more than a few kilometers away in every direction, as if they were standing atop a narrow plateau.

And where from a plateau he might have seen more of the world spread out below, here there was nothing at all beyond the edge, nothing but the black of space and the clear light of the stars.

“Be careful, Mr. Kim,” Janeway cautioned, as the three of them looked about. “Your legs are strong enough to push you right off into space when the gravity is this low.”

“I know, Captain,” Kim said. “We practiced low-gravity movement at the Academy.”

Janeway nodded. “But at the Academy you had magnetic boots.”

“But my spacesuit—aren’t these boots…” Kim began, looking down, startled.

“They’re magnetic, all right,” Janeway said, “but this asteroid isn’t.

There’s no ferrous metal in it at all. So just move very, very carefully.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kim agreed. “Um… Captain? If you wanted to see the inside of the asteroid, why did we beam down to the surface?”

“Because I want to see the surface, too, Ensign,” Janeway explained, “and because if there’s anything dangerous here, it’s more likely to be in there than out here.”

Kim nodded.

“Also,” she added, “there’s enough loose material in the cavity that transporting directly in might be difficult—you wouldn’t want to arrive with something stuck inside you.”

Kim could hardly argue with that.

“There would seem to be no question that this place was inhabited, Captain,” Tuvok remarked, as he scanned about them with his tricorder.

That was obvious to all three of them.

They had materialized in a broad, shallow trench that had looked as if it might once have been a drainage ditch or perhaps a canal of some sort. As far as they had been able to see from the Voyager the trench might have been artificial, or might just have been an unusually regular natural feature.

From where they stood now, however, there was no longer any possible question. The trench was clearly artificial. Natural features were not edged with square blocks of dressed white stone with intricate and perfectly symmetrical decorative patterns carved into them.

“The planet was certainly inhabited at one time,” Janeway agreed.

“The question is, was it still inhabited at the time of its destruction, or were its people already safely gone by then?”

She swung her own tricorder about, scanning the area, and then pointed.

“That way,” she said. “There’s an opening that leads down into the cavity I want to investigate.”

Together, moving very slowly and cautiously in the asteroid’s feeble microgravity, the three moved along the shallow trench.

At last Janeway paused. “Under there,” she said, pointing at an immense stone slab.

Kim blinked. “How are we going to move that?” he asked. “It must weigh tons!”

“On the contrary, Ensign,” Tuvok replied, as he bent down and hooked his gloved fingers under the edge of the stone. “It masses tons; however, it weighs no more than a few hundred grams.”

The Vulcan lifted, and the stone came up slowly—then spun off into space. Kim stepped back involuntarily, and watched as the slab sailed off toward the stars.

“I hope that’s not going to hit the Voyager,” he said, as he watched the stone tumble away.

Tuvok said, “No, it will not. I would judge, from its present trajectory, that I have merely put it into orbit around the asteroid, and that it will curve around, missing the Voyager by several kilometers.”

“Oh,” Kim said, feeling a trifle foolish.

“It was a good point to raise. Mr. Kim,” Janeway assured him.

“Come on.” She pointed at the spot where the stone had lain.

The opening into the asteroid was rectangular, as clearly artificial as the decorative stonework. Kim stepped up to the edge and looked down.

“It’s dark,” he said.

Janeway turned on her wrist light and shone it down into the pit, revealing a stone shaft.

“And it’s deep,” Kim said. “How will we get down there? Are we going to use the transporter after all?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary, Mr. Kim,” Janeway said, as she stepped up on the rim of the opening and then stepped off, over the pit.

Kim watched, astonished, as Janeway gradually sank down into the pit.

“It seems clear, Mr. Kim,” Tuvok said, “that you did not have enough practice in microgravity conditions at the Academy. If we ever return safely to the Federation, I shall inform Starfleet that this omission in the curriculum should be attended to.”

Then he stepped up on the edge, turned on his wrist light, and stepped off, as Janeway had. He, too, sank slowly into the shaft.

They were falling, Kim knew—but falling very slowly in the asteroid’s tiny gravity. As Janeway had warned him, the danger here wasn’t in falling, it was in drifting away from the asteroid entirely.

Taking a deep breath, Kim stepped up on the rim, as his superior officers had done, and stepped out into the empty space above the shaft.

As Janeway and Tuvok had, he began to drift slowly downward, into the pit.

The sensation was very odd; it did not feel like falling.

Instead, it simply felt as if he had gone from low gravity to zero gravity. However, he could see the walls of the shaft moving past, more and more quickly as he fell—though still slowly.

He was falling no faster than he might have walked when he landed on the bottom—and bounced.

Tuvok and Janeway caught him before he could drift more than a meter or so back up the shaft, and pulled him carefully back down. A moment later the three of them were standing on solid ground—though not as securely as Kim might have liked—and shining their lights around.

The original purpose of this shaft and the chamber at the bottom was not obvious; Kim supposed it might have been a disposal shaft, or for storage of some sort, or even a bomb shelter.

Whatever it had been built for, the room at the bottom of the shaft was now simply a space cluttered with debris.

“What are we looking for, Captain?” he asked.

“That,” Janeway said sadly.

Kim swung his own light around to where Janeway’s beam pointed.

“Oh,” he said.

They were huddled in one corner, half-buried under rubble. There were three of them, a large one and two small ones. The large one was roughly Kim’s own size, though shorter and rounder, while the others were perhaps half as big.

They were shriveled and gray, mummified by long exposure to vacuum, but they had obviously been living creatures once; each had a head and four arms. Their legs, if they had any, were hidden under the wreckage.

They didn’t seem to have had any eyes, Kim thought at first, and then he reconsidered—those things on their heads that he had at first taken for antennae really looked more like eyestalks.

“It would seem that the planet was still inhabited when it was destroyed,” Janeway said.

Tuvok scanned the pitiful little corpses with his tricorder, and said, “These creatures do appear to have died as a result of the planet’s destruction, Captain—the dates and the manner of their death are consistent with that hypothesis. However, we cannot be sure that these were intelligent beings, rather than lesser indigenous fauna.”

Janeway reached down and picked something from the hand of the smallest of the mummies.

“Can’t we?” she said. She held out the object.

It was a bit of fabric, sewn and stuffed into a specific and recognizable form.

A doll, in the shape of one of the four-armed, eyestalked aliens.

It wore a tiny shirt that bore a decorative design, stitched into the fabric—a design identical to one of those on the stones they had seen on the surface of the asteroid.

“Animals don’t make toys in their own likeness, Mr. Tuvok,” Janeway said.

“Indeed,” the Vulcan replied.

Kim looked at the little rag doll, then back at the mummies, and he shuddered inside his spacesuit. The situation was clear. A parent and two children had taken shelter, and had been trapped in here when the end came, and now they were still here, dead for three centuries…

“We’ve seen what I wanted to see,” Janeway said. She tapped her combadge. “Three to beam up.”

Fifteen minutes later the three of them were back on the bridge of the Voyager, the alien doll still in Janeway’s hand. She looked it over.

It was brittle and on the verge of turning to powder; three centuries in hard vacuum had boiled away every trace of any sort of fluid or moisture the fabric had ever contained. Already, one of the four rolled-cloth arms had come off and both the tiny eyestalks, which had been made of some sort of stiffened thread, had disintegrated. The two stubby legs were jammed up into the rounded base of the doll, but that was how they had been to begin with—it wasn’t anything that the long exposure to space had done.

“Mr. Neelix,” she said, “do you recognize this species?” She held out the toy.

Neelix studied it without touching it.

“It looks something like a Hachai,” the Talaxian said. “If it had those two little things on its head, with eyes on the end…”

“It did,” Janeway said, pulling the doll back and looking down at it for a long moment.

It was blue-gray in color, darker but otherwise not too unlike the color of the Voyager’s interior walls, and she wondered whether that was its original hue, or whether the dyes in the fabric had been damaged by vacuum—or by something else, before that, when its owner was still alive. She remembered a few dog toys that had started out some bright color and been reduced to muddy browns or grays in fairly short order.

She smiled at the memory of those well-chewed toys, but the smile vanished quickly.

This hadn’t been a dog’s toy; it had been a child’s. That child had wound up dead.

The mummies had been gray, but they had been covered with dust.

Then she looked up at the viewscreen, at the panorama of asteroids that had once been a planet. “So that was a Hachai world?” she asked.

“And the P’nir destroyed it?”

“I would assume so,” Neelix said.

Janeway nodded thoughtfully, and set the doll carefully aside.

“Mr. Paris,” she said, “take us out of this system, on a heading of eight four mark three-seven.”

“But that’s straight on into the heart of the cluster,” Neelix said.

“Yes, of course,” Janeway replied.

“But that’s… that’s where the P’nir are!” the Talaxian protested.

“If there still are any P’nir, Mr. Neelix,” Janeway agreed, “then yes, they’re probably somewhere ahead of us.”

“Captain,” Neelix said, “do you really want to risk running into people who could do this?”