Free Ragnarok by Nathan Archer Page A

Odin’s bargain both sides now knew that this battle would mean their destruction, they were powerless to prevent its occurrence or to alter its outcome.”
    Neelix stared at the Vulcan. “What a depressing myth!” he said.
    “It is depressing,” Janeway agreed. “The ancient Norse were not a cheerful people.”
    “I think it’s fascinating,” Kes said.
    “A more widespread Earth myth of a final battle is the prophecy of Armageddon,” Tuvok said, “but in that tale it is confidently predicted that the forces of good will survive and triumph over the forces of evil. That seems less appropriate to the case here before us than the essential despair of the Ragnarok myth.”
    “Is there anything we can do about it?” Janeway asked. “I’m not eager to stand by and watch as two cultures destroy themselves.”
    She looked down at the smear where the Hachai doll had been, then up at the viewscreen just as two of the alien warships collided and exploded spectacularly.
    “One Hachai, one P’nir,” Tuvok remarked. “The balance is maintained.”
    “Which is which?” Janeway asked.
    “I do not know,” Tuvok replied, turning to look at the screen.
    “I am able to readily differentiate the two sides by the design of their ships, but I have no way of determining with any certainty which are the P’nir and which the Hachai.”
    “The longer, thinner ships are the P’nir,” Neelix said helpfully.
    “The dark ones.”
    “Thank you,” Janeway said, as she studied the image on the screen.
    Once she had that bit of information, and added it to the memory of the unfinished Hachai ship they had seen on the ground, distinguishing the combatants was easy, despite the haze of debris and the blaze of weapons and energy fields.
    The Hachai ships were smooth, bloated, rounded things, leaden gray, some of them painted with broad stripes of bright colors—orange and greenish-yellow, mostly.
    The P’nir vessels were dark, jagged masses bristling with protrusions—antennae, gun turrets, and other, less-recognizable features. Where the P’nir showed any color at all, it was either sections painted in deep green or an occasional sigil in rich blood-red.
    The unfinished starship on the primitive planet had indeed been a Hachai warship, she realized. Neelix had been right about that.
    And the planet had not, she also saw, been preindustrial at all; it had been postindustrial. They had put everything they had, every scrap of metal, into building their share of the immense fleet ahead.
    The entire cluster had done that. All the metal, all the technology, everything worthwhile from two great civilizations was out there ahead of her, wrapped up in an immense orgy of destruction.
    She wondered whether there had ever been any other intelligent species in the Kuriyar Cluster. If so, they must surely have been caught in the cross fire and destroyed long ago…
    Or had they? She glimpsed something in the mass ahead that looked different. “Is there anything in there other than the Hachai and the P’nir?” she asked.
    “Wreckage,” Tuvok replied immediately.
    “Anything else?”
    Tuvok stepped back up and swung into his station, where studied his instruments; on the opposite side of the bridge Ensign Kim, too, initiated new, more detailed sensor sweeps.
    “It would seem that there is, in fact, an object present that does not appear to be of Hachai or P’nir manufacture, or of natural origin,” Tuvok said a moment later.
    “Show me,” Janeway said.
    A blurry image appeared on the main viewer, Janeway knew that it was pieced together from a hundred quick glimpses and then enhanced by the ship’s computers. A blue scale appeared beside it, to indicate its size, as well as outlines of a Hachai dreadnought and a P’nir battleship for comparison. To one side of the screen the computer provided a readout of the thing’s emanations.
    The object appeared to be roughly spherical and about two kilometers in diameter, most of its