A Brief Respite Before the Battle Swallows Voyager Again

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

Chapter 24 is the exhale after Chapter 22’s sprint. For about two pages, Voyager is actually out.

Janeway gets a view of a Hachai dreadnought hull close enough to count rivets and battle scars from centuries of war. Then Paris punches through the gap at warp and they are in relatively open space. Still inside the metal dust and freeze-dried debris cloud that surrounds this fight, but free for the moment. The ship is battered. It is intact.

“Status report,” Janeway orders.

Tuvok says they are clear of the main battle area. Several P’nir ships pursue. The Hachai cannot decide whether to block the P’nir or let them through. Some move to interfere. Others deliberately open way.

Paris reports warp five on heading one-three-one mark eight. Not really going anywhere important. Just going fast.

Torres from Engineering sounds almost cheerful by her standards. Shields held. Real damage is minor. Cracked panels, blown conduits, bruised crew. Nothing they cannot fix with a few hours of downtime. Reserve power is gone, but they can rebuild that if Janeway accepts slower speeds for a while.

The bridge still smells like overheated consoles. Janeway’s hand on the helm panel earlier told her how hard the systems were working. Paris abused the engines. Tuvok abused the phasers. Torres abused every safety margin in Engineering. They bought this moment of breathing room with all of it.

Janeway checks sickbay. For a second nobody answers and her stomach drops. Then Neelix reports in. He is fine. Kes is fine. The doctor is fine, if that counts for a hologram. They are swamped. Burns and bumps and bruises. One crewman cracked his skull against a bulkhead minutes ago. No deaths.

That matters more than anything else in the report. For a battle that looked like the end of the world on the viewscreen, they got out without losing anyone. Yet.

She asks Evans about the shuttle. Nothing yet. Distance and speed make tracking hard.

Janeway does not let him finish the excuse. “Mr. Paris, drop to impulse. Turn this ship around and take us back.”

Paris protests. Back into the battle?

“No,” Janeway says. “Just close enough to be ready when Chakotay comes out looking for us.”

Paris blinks. “You think he will?”

“I intend to at least give him a chance, Mr. Paris!”

It is a small chapter, but it tells you exactly who Janeway is in this book. She will gamble the ship on shield tricks and phaser polarity. She will fire on the Hachai when diplomacy fails. She will cripple a P’nir cruiser by accident and spend the next minutes running for her life. But she will not warp away clean while Chakotay is still inside the war zone on a P’nir ship with a kidnapped captain and an energy projector aimed at his shuttle.

The respite is real. Torres has repairable damage. Neelix and Kes are saving lives in sickbay. Voyager can outrun anything the P’nir have if Janeway wanted to run.

She does not want to run. Paris argued against going back. She cut him off. Not into the battle. Just near enough to catch Chakotay when he breaks free. That is the difference between abandoning your first officer and leaving a door open.

Think about what Voyager just survived. Englobement. Useless weapons until Torres cracked the code. Accidentally becoming the P’nir’s worst nightmare. A warp squeeze between dreadnoughts. They earned ten minutes of warp five in empty-looking space.

On that P’nir cruiser, Chakotay is watching workers finish assembling something that can kill him through shuttle shields. K’t’rien will not explain it unless he surrenders. Tsh’pak wants every trace of the aliens expunged. The hangar is full of guns again.

Janeway is turning around to meet him.

The battle is about to swallow Voyager all over again.

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