Ragnarok by Nathan Archer Page A

created the damnedest contraptions.
    Torres liked to think she was pretty good at puzzling out contraptions, even unlikely ones, but that thing ahead had her stumped. She studied the readings and tried to make sense of them.
    For a long moment, as Torres studied and the captain waited, the bridge was silent save for the soft hum of the engines and the faint beeps and chirps of equipment performing its proper functions. No one spoke; the soft shuffling of black-clad feet on gray carpet made no sound.
    At the rear of the bridge Neelix glanced unhappily from one officer to another, obviously eager to speak, but he restrained himself; he knew he had irritated the captain, and that to argue now would irritate her more.
    “Captain, we’ve got a better reading on its size now,” Kim said, breaking the silence. “And… well, it’s really immense. Much bigger than the Array—it’s hundreds of thousands of kilometers across.
    Usually. The size keeps shifting, as if it were expanding and contracting.”
    “Engineering to bridge,” Torres’s voice said, before Janeway could respond. “Captain, I don’t know what it’s for, but if these readings are accurate and that thing out there is a machine doing what it was designed to do, its designers are insane. It’s either deliberately wasteful and destructive, or the worst piece of engineering I’ve ever seen.”
    “Do you think it could have been built by the Caretaker’s companion?”
    Janeway asked.
    “No,” Torres replied immediately. “The Array was wasteful, but it wasn’t sloppy. This design, if it is a design, isn’t anything like the Array.”
    The bridge crew exchanged glances.
    Tuvok cleared his throat. Janeway turned her head to the right to look up at him.
    “Captain,” he said, “I would remind you that we are well inside what was at one time, and what may still be, a war zone. Perhaps this… thing ahead of us is directly related to that conflict?”
    Neelix nodded eagerly, started to speak, then glanced around and thought better of it.
    “Of course it is,” Janeway said. She frowned at how slow she had been to recognize the obvious; perhaps she wasn’t as fully awake as she ought to be. Insane and destructive, Torres had said… what else could it be but a war machine? It might even be whatever had shattered that planet three systems back, the one where she had found the Hachai doll.
    She should have seen that immediately. She had been too focused on the Voyager’s own situation, on the central problem that faced them all—getting home. She had been thinking about that thing ahead in terms of whether it got them closer to that goal, rather than looking at it objectively and seeing it for what it was.
    She couldn’t allow that. That was wishful thinking, to look at everything as a potential shortcut back to the Alpha Quadrant, and wishful thinking was dangerous.
    And their guide had been trying to tell her that all along, had been telling her that she was flying the Voyager into danger.
    Maybe it was time she listened.
    She turned to her Talaxian guide, who had moved slightly to one side, trying to stay out of the way of one of the crewmen.
    “Mr. Neelix,” she said, “tell me more about the Hachai and the P’nir.”
    “Captain?” Neelix hurried to the railing and looked down at her.
    “You heard me,” Janeway said. “I want to know everything you can tell me about the inhabitants of this cluster.”
    Neelix gaped at her in surprise, then snapped his mouth shut.
    Everything?
    These Federation people had never before wanted to hear everything he knew about anything; usually they seemed to want him to shut up. He looked about the bridge at the other officers, to make sure they weren’t preparing to laugh at him for some reason, then turned his attention back to the captain.
    “Why, I hardly know where to begin!” he said.
    “Well, why not start off with a comparison?” Janeway suggested.
    “For example, which of them has the more