Ragnarok (7 page)

“How big is that?” Janeway asked.

The screen immediately displayed a scale, indicating that the mass was approximately two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers across—the size of a small star.

“Mr. Neelix,” Janeway said, without turning to look at him, “to the best of your knowledge, could the P’nir or the Hachai build something the size of a star?”

“No,” Neelix said, shaking his head sharply. “At least, I don’t think so.” He stared at the screen, trying to make sense of what he saw there. “But then, all that metal must have gone somewhere….”

“Is that thing just a machine?” Paris asked. “It looks alive!”

“What’s its mass?” Janeway asked. The computer promptly posted a sensor readout down one side of the main viewscreen; upon seeing the figures, Janeway frowned.

“It’s not any ordinary machine,” she said. “For an object that size, with that mass, its density would be lower than most gases.”

“Perhaps it’s hollow?” Paris suggested, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Perhaps it is not one machine, but many,” Tuvok suggested from behind his console. “I believe we have misjudged what we are seeing; I do not believe it to be a single object at all.”

“Increase magnification. Enhance the image,” Janeway ordered.

The blob expanded to fill the screen, and the bridge crew stared in stunned silence as it became obvious that Tuvok was quite right.

The mass was not a single object at all; it was made up of many, many smaller objects, each of them moving independently, each maneuvering around the others. Energy fields surrounded each object, sometimes colliding with each other, and beams of energy flashed back and forth between them.

The objects were ships—thousands upon thousands of starships.

“They’re gigantic,” Paris said, awed.

“The smallest one I can read is about the size of a Galaxy-class starship,” Chakotay observed, as he stepped forward to read the latest sensor reports. “The big ones—well, I’ve seen moons that were smaller.”

“But what are they doing?” Harry Kim asked, staring at the screen.

“Why are they bunched so close? Why are there so many of them? Why aren’t they going anywhere?”

“I would have thought that was obvious, Ensign,” Janeway said, as she, too, stared at the screen. “They’re fighting. We’ve found the war, and where all the metal in this benighted cluster went.”

The Voyager hung in space, deep within the cloud of ionized metal dust, virtually motionless and safely out of range of the thousands of weapons being fired a few light-seconds away.

The Voyager waited, and while she waited, her crew watched.

Paris remained at the helm, Kim at Ops, Tuvok at Security; Janeway and Chakotay occupied the two command chairs. Neelix and Kes stood, observing, Neelix now down by Janeway’s left hand and Kes back by the starboard turbolift.

The Hachai doll had fallen to dust when someone had inadvertently bumped against it; all that remained was a smear of greasy dust on the platform beside Janeway’s chair, dark gray on light.

Janeway started to reach for the doll, then remembered that it was gone. She looked down at the smudge, then back up at the viewer.

What she saw there made no immediate, obvious sense. To the unaided human eye the visual display on the bridge’s main viewscreen was a seething, flickering, incomprehensible mass of fire and shadow.

To the ship’s tactical officer, aided by his sensors and computers, it was something else entirely.

“I count approximately two thousand operational warships that I would describe as either dreadnoughts or heavy cruisers, all of them larger than anything in Starfleet,” Tuvok reported, studying his displays.

“There are also several thousand smaller vessels caught up in the conflict, ranging from the size of a Galaxy-class cruiser down to that of a runabout, and I observe large quantities of macroscopic wreckage in the area that would seem to indicate that both fleets were once considerably more numerous.” He turned away from his screens to address Janeway directly across his console.

“I would estimate, Captain,” he said, “that the resources of roughly fifteen hundred M-class planets would be required to build and maintain these fleets—in short, the total industrial output of this entire cluster.”

“Thousands of warships?” Janeway glanced at the screen, then back at the Vulcan. “That’s almost as incredible as one star-sized machine!”

“You said the industrial output of this entire cluster,” Chakotay said.

“Yes, Commander.”

“This cluster hasn’t got any industrial output!” Chakotay exclaimed.

“Unfortunately true,” the Vulcan replied calmly. “However, I worked on the assumption of a level of technology roughly equivalent to our own, reasonably organized and distributed, and working itself to the point of its own destruction to produce these fleets.”

“How could they maintain such fleets, then?” Janeway asked. “If they destroyed their whole industrial base in building them…”

“I would say, Captain,” Tuvok said, “that they did not so much destroy their industrial base as consume it, transferring it entirely to the fleets. The larger vessels here would appear to be fully self-contained and self-maintained—that, combined with the need for maximum firepower, explains their immense size.”

“Then you think these fleets are all that’s left of the Hachai and P’nir technologies?” Janeway asked.

“Indeed,” Tuvok said. “That would appear to be the case.”

Janeway turned and stared at the main screen.

“Incidentally, Captain,” Tuvok continued, “it would appear that the dust cloud surrounding us, and extending for several million kilometers in all directions, is emanating from the battle. The cloud is made up of gases and particulate matter from destroyed or damaged ships. The density increases with proximity to the battle, and within the battle itself the density is sufficient to significantly interfere with our sensors; that, combined with the interlocking energy fields of the defensive shields, was why our initial readings indicated a single construct.”

“Particulate matter?” Kes asked. She was watching everything with intense interest.

“Dust,” Janeway told her.

“Metallic dust, ice crystals, and several other substances, including two varieties of what I take to be circulatory fluid,” Tuvok explained.

“You mean blood,” Chakotay said.

“Or ichor, yes,” the Vulcan confirmed.

“Hachai and P’nir, presumably,” Janeway said.

“Presumably,” Tuvok agreed.

Kes shivered, and looked uneasily at the viewer.

“We’re inside a cloud of blood?” she asked.

“Yes,” Tuvok said flatly.

Janeway looked at the vast, incredibly complex pattern of moving ships, weapons fire, and flaring shields, and asked, “Can you tell who’s winning?”

“At the moment, Captain,” the Vulcan replied, “neither side is winning.”

“You mean it’s a draw? A stalemate?” Janeway turned to look at the Vulcan.

“If by that you mean that no winner will ever emerge, then no, that is not necessarily the case,” Tuvok replied. “If this battle is fought to a conclusion without outside interference and without any major change in the tactics employed, there should indeed be a victor, at least in a technical sense.

There is every indication that the combatants intend to continue to an end, rather than withdrawing or negotiating. Therefore, an eventual winner can be expected, and in that sense, it is not a stalemate.”

“Well, then, which side will win?” Janeway asked. “Can you tell?”

“Regrettably, Captain, I cannot,” the Vulcan admitted. “I have only begun to analyze the battle formations, which are staggeringly intricate—so intricate that they form a system where major disruptions in one time and place might be absorbed without significantly affecting the whole, while elsewhere a single minor change could alter the entire course of the conflict. Above a certain level of complexity such systems cannot be reliably predicted with the resources we have aboard this ship.”

“You can’t even offer us odds?”

“The odds, Captain, would be fifty-fifty. It is already quite clear that as Mr. Neelix told us, the two sides are very evenly matched—so evenly that the loss of a single ship in the right time or place could determine the outcome. And in a battle as hard-fought as this, a ship could be lost to a single crew error or equipment failure at any time.

There is no way to predict such a happenstance—but if the battle continues long enough, it is a statistical certainty that such an event will occur eventually.”

“And when it does,” Janeway said, “when that random ship is lost, the other side will capitalize on it—and win.”

“Not a random ship, Captain,” Tuvok corrected her. The loss would need to happen at the right time and place. Otherwise, the damaged side will adjust, regroup, and wait, and perhaps the next time it will be the other side that suffers. It is only if the loss is at one of the crucial points of the battle that a single such event would be fatal.”

Janeway nodded. “A chaotic system, you mean—where any one event could get lost in the noise, but the right event could trigger a cascade that would change everything.”

“Exactly.”

Janeway frowned thoughtfully.

“Suppose that that event never happens?” she asked. “Chaotic systems can be quite stable at times.”

“If nothing happens to change the balance,” Tuvok said, “I would estimate that this conflict will continue until all ships on both sides run out of power. Whichever side is still able to maneuver when the other has totally exhausted its resources will emerge victorious—but I am unable to determine which side that would be.”

Janeway nodded. “And at the present rates of fire, how long do you think this state of exhaustion would take to occur?”

“You understand, of course, that due to the debris cloud and the shields, I have only very imprecise readings on most of those ships, Captain, and can therefore do no more than make a rough estimate.”

“Estimate, then.”

“Both sides seem to be using matter-antimatter reactors even though they show no signs of warp drive capability, and both also appear to have backup fission/fusion power systems that could, should they choose to do so, use the cloud of drifting wreckage as fuel; furthermore, although they are employing a great many energy weapons, you will have noticed that the majority of those weapons are high-efficiency, low-yield devices, thereby conserving resources. Their shields, too, appear to be carefully tuned and highly efficient—more efficient than our own, I would say.”

“And?”

“And I would estimate, Captain, that they can maintain this level of conflict for another thirty years.”

Janeway blinked, startled, and turned to face Tuvok.

“Thirty years?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not possible,” Janeway said. “Space battles last minutes, or hours, not years!”

“Based on my own experience prior to encountering this phenomenon ahead of us, Captain, I would say that your generalization is sound,” Tuvok agreed. “However, after studying the levels of damage being inflicted, analyzing the debris in the area and the contents of the dust cloud surrounding us, and measuring the background radiation, I am forced to conclude that the fleet action ahead of us has already lasted between six and eight hundred standard years.”

“Six and eight hundred…?”

Janeway stared at him. “How can they keep a battle going for centuries?”

“The capital ships appear to be fully self-contained, Captain,” Tuvok said. “In theory, they could fight on indefinitely.”

“But what kind of people could do that?” Janeway demanded, looking at Neelix.

The Talaxian held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“The Hachai and the P’nir do have some undeniably odd behaviors,” he said.

Neelix was not certain, at first, whether the captain was speaking literally when she said to tell her all about the Hachai and the P’nir and their ancient, interminable war. He glanced uneasily about the bridge, and saw that everyone who was not actively involved with the controls or instruments was staring at him—Tuvok on one side, Harry Kim on the other, and Chakotay and the captain right there in the middle.

They did look as if they wanted him to tell them about it. He cleared his throat.

“Well, as I said before,” he began, “the Hachai and the P’nir were always very good at defensive technology. They made the best shields in the quadrant, very highly tuned, very efficient equipment. They were both great believers in the value of defense.”

Neelix paused and looked around, to see whether he should continue.

“Go on,” Janeway told him.

“Well, as I heard it,” Neelix said, “long ago, when the war began in earnest, both sides built defenses, and skimped on offensive weapons, and they insisted on staying with that sort of arrangement, despite what some of my… despite the attempts of certain parties to sell the Hachai some very good offensive weaponry at real bargain prices, prices that they were foolish to turn down…”

“Mr. Neelix,” Janeway said warningly. The Talaxian stopped, startled, and looked at her.

“I assume these parties who dealt with the Hachai included Talaxians?”

Janeway asked.

“Well, they might have,” Neelix admitted.

“Never mind the comments on Hachai foolishness,” Janeway said.

“Get on with the story.”

“Of course, Captain,” Neelix said. He cleared his throat, brushed both hands down the front of his rather gaudy jacket, and continued.

“As I was saying,” Neelix said, “both sides emphasized defense over offense, and the result was a stalemate. As I heard the story, both sides eventually came up with the same intended solution to the stalemate. Each side built a fleet of immense warships that were meant to sweep through the cluster, destroying anything that opposed them, and exterminating the enemy, planet by planet. These warships were entirely self-contained, with no need to return to base between attacks, so as to avoid any chance of their enemies ambushing supply runs, and so they could take as long as they needed to batter down planetary defenses.”

Janeway nodded. “Go on,” she said.