A Tetryon Beam Scans Voyager and Everything Changes

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

Chapter 2 picks up right after red alert. Lights dim. Janeway grips the railing and asks Kim if he reads a displacement wave anywhere.

Negative. No other unusual phenomena either.

So Janeway relaxes a little, but only a little. She was half hoping for a violent shortcut home and half dreading the damage that would come with it. Neither happens. The scan just… happened, and now it is gone.

Kim’s homework assignment

Kim reports the beam lasted less than 0.4 seconds. Isolated event. No recurrence pattern. Janeway orders him to dig through sensor records and compare the waveforms to the Caretaker’s scan.

This chapter spends real time on the bridge crew’s inner lives, which is very 1995 tie-in novel energy. Janeway thinks about Kim’s bad luck, fresh from the Academy into this nightmare. Paris should not even be at the helm, but Stadi died in the displacement and he stepped up. Chakotay trusts her but will argue. Tuvok is calm because he is Vulcan. Neelix is openly nervous. Kes is fascinated and not really scared yet.

Paris asks the question everyone is thinking. Was that the Caretaker’s companion checking them out?

Janeway thinks it might be. The Caretaker mentioned a companion who left centuries ago to wander the stars. Same extragalactic origin, same tetryon technology. Nobody in the Alpha Quadrant has ever built coherent tetryon beams. But they are not in the Alpha Quadrant anymore.

The direction that ruins Neelix’s day

Kim’s analysis is frustrating. The beam is clean. No resonance frequencies, no scatter, no Doppler. Pure monoparticulate tetryon radiation, just like the Caretaker’s records. That proves almost nothing except that whoever fired it knew what they were doing.

Source range? Unknown. Kim can give a direction only. He puts it on the main viewer.

It points straight through the center of the Kuriyar Cluster.

Janeway smiles wryly at Neelix. The mysterious scanner lies exactly where he told them not to go.

Neelix basically loses his mind. Surely she is not going to risk the ship to chase a scanning beam?

“I’m afraid I am,” Janeway says. Follow the beam to its source. Paris sounds almost gleeful. Neelix tries to protest again, meets her eyes, and shuts up.

Why Janeway does it

The book makes her reasoning clear. Without a shortcut, most of the crew will die of old age before reaching Federation space, if stress and maintenance failures do not get them first. Neelix wants comfort aboard a ship with Kes and good food. Janeway wants home. She wants Mark. She wants her crew’s families.

It is worth risk. Not foolish risk, but this is not foolish to her. A tetryon beam like the one that brought them here might be the best lead they will ever get.

Tuvok gets military readiness orders. Long-range scanners, shields and phasers on standby. Warp seven.

My take

This is the chapter where the book commits to its premise. Janeway is not blundering in blind. She had already accepted Neelix’s advice to go around the cluster. The scan overrides that.

I also like how Archer uses Paris. He is eager for danger in a way that worries Janeway, but she still trusts him at the helm. Kim’s inexperience shows without making him useless. And Neelix’s silence at the end is more effective than another speech because we already know he thinks this is insane.

The Kuriyar Cluster fills the viewscreen as they accelerate. Whatever made that beam is ahead, and so is the war Neelix warned about.

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