Chakotay's Shuttle Broadcasts a Peace Offer

Star Trek: Voyager: Ragnarok
By Nathan Archer
ISBN: 067152044X

Chapter 13 stays with the shuttle crew while the peace broadcast drones on loop. Computer voice. Federation shuttlecraft. Neutral party. Ready to negotiate or arbitrate. Please contact us. Then it starts again.

Chakotay taps a control and kills the speaker. Message still transmitting. Everyone knows that.

Waiting for someone to care

“They do not seem to be paying much attention, sir,” Bereyt says.

“Give them time. Sometimes if you drum something into someone’s head long enough, it will eventually penetrate.”

Chakotay settles back and looks around the cramped interior. Bereyt and Rollins at the controls. Kim went aft to find coffee.

Coffee turned out to be a good call. They might be here a while. The plan was basically go play ambassador. Talk the Hachai and P’nir into peace so Voyager can inspect the globe. Hard to play ambassador when nobody answers.

Chakotay figures if they keep broadcasting, someone might respond. Or get annoyed enough to shoot at them. That might stir things up. Of course, a first annoyed shot might also kill them.

He frowns at the panels. Can this shuttle survive more than a few seconds under attack?

He orders a systems check. B’Elanna has been too busy keeping Voyager alive. Carey too busy watching Torres. Chakotay needles Carey about that. Rollins frowns. Too late to unsay it.

Bereyt runs diagnostics without flinching. Maybe as a Bajoran she has more sympathy for Maquis causes. Maybe she just left old feuds behind. The DMZ is on the far side of the galaxy now.

Chakotay thinks about scale. One of those warships could wipe out the entire Maquis in hours. But the Maquis held their own against Cardassians and Starfleet until the Caretaker yanked him across the galaxy.

Kim returns with four cups of coffee. Bereyt and Rollins call out results.

Shields normal, full power. Warp drive has a minor alignment problem. Harmless now but will get worse. Life support good. Transporter good. Everything checks out except warp.

Rollins opens the access panel to fix the alignment. He does not look comfortable. He is a bridge officer, not an engineer.

The battle comes to them

Kim shouts. P’nir ship coming this way.

Chakotay watches. The battle fills the viewport. One jagged P’nir ship spins out of the tangle toward them.

He traces its path. Not after us. Dodging a Hachai phalanx. A cluster of gray ships disperses like flower petals.

Kim relaxes. Then tenses again.

A Hachai dreadnought breaks free in pursuit. Both headed toward the shuttle.

The P’nir passes frighteningly close. No hostile move. The Hachai is farther back, not firing yet.

“Damn.” Two more P’nir ships. A whole wing of Hachai responding.

“Not really anything to do with us. Just ordinary fluctuation and drift. Still, I do not think this location will be healthy five minutes from now. Mr. Rollins, please turn us…”

Rollins is still at the warp core panel, hands inside. Chakotay orders Kim to help him. Asks Bereyt about warp status.

Offline for adjustments. Impulse works.

“Get us out of here on impulse. Back to Voyager.”

Bereyt stammers and gestures at the viewer.

Chakotay understands. A firefight now sits between the shuttle and Voyager. The first P’nir ship hooked back across their path. Hachai turned to intercept and sprayed the space with energy beams and missiles. Some missiles slow and fade to near-invisibility. Mines, maybe. Heading back means running into them.

“Move us out laterally. Get clear however you can.”

“Warp drive is back on line, sir,” Rollins calls.

“Wonderful,” Chakotay mutters. Spirits of space have nasty humor. Warp was down maybe ninety seconds. Naturally those ninety seconds were when they needed it most.

Bereyt cannot find an opening. Every gap closes when another ship slides in.

Chakotay asks Kim if he is as hot a pilot as Paris.

“No, sir. I am not much of a pilot at all.”

“Then I will take the conn.”

He slides into the forward seat and studies the display. Bereyt was right. The fleets bubbled up and surrounded them in seconds. They are no longer outside the battle watching. They are in it.

Four people. Lightly armed. Lightly shielded. Amid several thousand gigantic warships.

My take

This chapter is claustrophobic in the best way. The peace broadcast feels pathetic and brave at the same time. Chakotay sitting there with coffee while the universe ignores him.

The maintenance detail matters. Voyager has been through hell since the Caretaker. Of course nobody checked the shuttle properly. That warp alignment problem will matter next chapter.

Chakotay’s internal monologue about Maquis vs Starfleet vs this war’s scale is solid character work. He knows how small his old war looks next to this one. He still thinks his people deserved more credit.

Kim admitting he is not Paris-level pilot is honest. Chakotay taking the conn is the right call. The line about four people in a shuttle inside thousands of warships is a perfect cliffhanger.

Nobody is paying attention to the peace offer. The battle is paying attention to them.

← Previous: Kes Sees Something Beautiful in the Carnage · Next: The Shuttle Gets Swallowed by the Battle →