Free Ragnarok by Nathan Archer Page B

surface made up of hundreds of identical rounded cells, or facets, reminiscent of the cells in a honeycomb. This pattern was interrupted by several large, dark, irregular openings in the object’s surface.
    Janeway thought something about it looked almost familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
    “What is that, Mr. Tuvok?” Janeway asked. “A ship? A station?”
    “I lack sufficient data to even guess, Captain,” the Vulcan replied.
    “Where is it in the battle?”
    Tuvok tapped a few controls, and a schematic appeared on the viewer; the mysterious globe was near the center of the raging conflict between the P’nir and the Hachai.
    “From the object’s location, and the flow of the battle,” Tuvok said, “it might even be what the two fleets are fighting over.”
    Janeway said, “Neelix?”
    “I don’t know, Captain,” the alien replied. “No one outside the Kuriyar Cluster really knows what started the war. We mostly just thought of it as a personality conflict.”
    “Do you have any idea what that… that thing in there might be?”
    “None at all, Captain.”
    “It’s producing an interesting assortment of radiation,” Chakotay remarked, as he studied readouts at the forward console, one hand tapping illuminated blue and gold keys. “Including some sorts I’ve never seen before—and Captain, including secondary tetryon radiation.”
    “Mr. Kim, could that be where the tetryon beam came from?”
    Janeway asked, turning to look up at Ops.
    Kim hesitated, then said, “It’s exactly on the line we traced back from the tetryon scan, Captain—but that might just be a coincidence. And the secondary radiation might just be from the scan itself, if there’s something in that thing’s hull that reacts to tetryon bombardment.”
    “Or it might be internal resonance. Can you tell me anything more about the object?”
    “I’m afraid not, Captain—with the battle around it, all the debris and those shields and interference from the weapons, we can’t get any decent sensor readings from here. We’d need to be much closer, right inside the battle zone, to get a good look at it.”
    Janeway stared at the screen, considering.
    That mysterious object was tempting—it might be their way home.
    It didn’t look anything like the Array, but it still might be home to the Caretaker’s companion.
    And the carnage, the waste of this immense battle that was going on all around it was appalling. Two advanced civilizations were destroying themselves.
    She remembered the three pitiful little mummies they had found in the asteroid tunnel. Those people were destroying themselves.
    They had to be stopped.
    The Voyager was hardly equipped to interfere directly, even if doing so weren’t a violation of the Prime Directive, but surely, the P’nir and the Hachai must realize how wasteful and destructive this war was!
    Neelix had said that outsiders had avoided this area for centuries—except, perhaps, for arms traders, who would hardly be interested in peacemaking. The battle was drawing near a close, still undecided—thirty years to go, after more than six centuries of ferocious combat.
    Maybe the P’nir and the Hachai would be ready to listen to reason.
    Those children in that asteroid—surely, their relatives would listen to reason!
    The Federation prided itself on providing arbitrators and negotiators for anyone who needed them. Janeway had never been trained for that sort of work—at least, no more than any starship captain had to be—but she could hardly make the situation any worse when both sides were already actively pursuing genocide. In another thirty years, if no one intervened, this entire cluster might be lifeless—or it might be ruled by a single species with a ruined economy and no assets except a massive interstellar war fleet, and wouldn’t that be wonderful for the peace and security of the Delta Quadrant. The eventual victor would probably come sweeping out of the Kuriyar Cluster looking for