Ragnarok by Nathan Archer Read Free Book Online

otherwise; there were no signs of defenses of any kind.
    There were also no traces to show that spaceships had ever before visited or left this world; if these were Hachai or P’nir, they were no longer actively involved in any interstellar war—not unless it was fought with weapons and methods unlike anything Janeway had ever heard of.
    That settled, the Voyager’s sensors were directed at the planet itself.
    There were cities—or fair-sized towns, at any rate—and roads connecting them, but the civilization on the planet, such as it was, appeared to be rather primitive. The sensors showed no indication of mechanization. Not only were there no spaceships, there were no aircraft, no electrical fields, no subspace emissions, no radio transmissions.
    Janeway considered that information, and decided not to go close enough for a more detailed visual scan. They had no urgent business here, and the Prime Directive forbade interfering with the local cultures; besides, a visual scan hardly seemed necessary, given the readings.
    The society here was clearly largely pretechnological.
    A reason for that was also clear—no metals could be detected anywhere in the planetary crust. That was sufficiently anomalous to be listed in flashing red on the sensor readout.
    “Is this whole cluster metal-depleted?” Janeway wondered aloud.
    “I don’t know,” Chakotay replied, as he studied a display on the flipped-up panel by his chair, “but you might want to take a look at grid sector 63-24 north.”
    Janeway noticed that Chakotay was sounding more enthusiastic now.
    She tapped keys to shift her own readings to the location he had indicated, and sure enough, there was a significant amount of metal, right there on the surface, hard to miss—iron, copper, titanium….
    This metal was not in a natural deposit, though—it was an artificial structure. The metals had been processed, separated, and incorporated into a construction of some sort.
    “What is that?” she asked. She pondered the readings for a moment, and then decided that a visual scan was called for after all. “Mr. Kim,” she ordered, “give me a better look at that structure.”
    “Telescopic scan working, Captain,” Kim replied. “Onscreen.”
    A moment later Janeway stepped forward, hands clasped behind her back, and considered the image the scanners presented.
    “It’s a ship,” she said. “It has to be.”
    It was bulbous, alien in design—but it did appear to be a spaceship.
    Or part of one.
    “Someone must have crashed there,” Paris said.
    “It looks more as if they were building it,” Chakotay said, getting to his feet and pointing. “See those wooden towers around it? That looks like construction scaffolding.”
    “But there’s no one around,” Janeway said. “It’s abandoned.”
    “Hull corrosion would seem to indicate that it’s been abandoned for a long time,” Kim confirmed. “Fifty or sixty years, at least.”
    “They ran out of metal,” Neelix said, leaning over the rail behind Janeway and Chakotay. “That’s a Hachai design; they were building it there, and they ran out of metal and couldn’t finish it.
    Janeway stared at the screen for a long moment. She tried to imagine the four-armed, stalk-eyed, rounded little creatures building warships.
    Maybe they did—but they weren’t building anymore. She turned away.
    “Maybe they did run out of metal,” she said. “At any rate, no one here has been putting out any tetryon beams recently. No one’s fighting any wars, either, and whatever they’re doing, it’s no concern of ours.
    Take us back out of the system, Mr. Paris—warp two.”

Chapter 6
    The next system, a light-hour out of their path, had fourteen planets; the sixth had once been habitable but was now bare, lifeless rock, stripped of its atmosphere—and of its metals.
    Janeway and Chakotay watched the main viewscreen wordlessly from their seats as the Voyager passed over that broad expanse of utter