Ragnarok by Nathan Archer Read Free Book Online Page B

doll, and slowly turning it over and over in his hands.

Chapter 7
    Janeway woke suddenly, unsure just what had brought her out of her sleep; she had been dreaming of home, of Mark and of her dog, and it had turned into a nightmare where she found them both mummified in an ancient tunnel. Now she was staring up at the stars through the sloping windows over her bed, back aboard the Voyager, among surroundings that were becoming a little too familiar.
    “Captain Janeway to the bridge,” the speaker at the head of her bed repeated.
    “On my way,” she said, swinging her feet to the floor.
    She glanced at a clock and frowned. Unless Chakotay had ordered an increase in speed—a major increase in speed—they should still be in the void between star systems. Why would she be needed?
    She didn’t like to think about what might be responsible for interrupting her rest.
    She hesitated for a moment; the call hadn’t expressed any great urgency. In an emergency she would have headed straight to the bridge in her nightgown, but as it was, she thought she could spare a few seconds to get back into uniform.
    “Lights,” she ordered.
    “What is it?” she asked, as she stepped out of the turbolift a moment later.
    “Sorry to wake you, Captain,” Chakotay said, turning to face her.
    He was standing in the very center of the bridge, behind Lieutenant Paris’s shoulder. A few minutes ago we entered a large, unusually dense dust cloud.” He gestured at the main viewscreen, where bands of shadow obscured most of the stars.
    “It’s mostly made up of particles of ionized metals—maybe it’s where all the metal in this cluster went. At any rate, the cloud density is increasing, and I’d have called you soon anyway, but when we got a little way into it the sensors spotted something ahead that I thought you’d want to see immediately.”
    Janeway nodded and looked at the viewscreen as she stepped down to the central level. Thanks to the dust there was nothing much to see on the viewer; she turned to a computer display on the forward console.
    The sensors, able to look through the dust cloud, told a different story. There was something ahead of them, all right—something strange. It was registering on every sort of sensor, but none of the readings made sense.
    For a few seconds she studied those readings silently, trying to see a pattern or logic to them, but nothing revealed itself.
    “What is that?” she said at last.
    “I don’t know,” Chakotay replied. He frowned and stared at the screen, even though the anomaly didn’t show there except as an occasional glimpse of something that could have been an ordinary star or nebula.
    “It’s still too distant to say, and the dust cloud badly distorts our data. It’s huge, though, whatever it is, and its energy output is comparable to the Caretaker’s Array.
    It’s too stable to be a plasma storm, and besides, its output isn’t like any plasma storm I ever heard of before. And it’s directly ahead of us, on the line that Ensign Kim plotted; assuming it hasn’t moved, either that thing produced the tetryon beam, or the beam passed directly through it.”
    “It’s not generating any tetryon radiation now,” Janeway pointed out.
    “No,” Chakotay agreed, “but it’s generating just about everything else.”
    That was true, as Janeway could see for herself; whatever it was ahead of them, it was radiating all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, pouring out incredible amounts of energy.
    The energy emissions weren’t steady, though; the thing’s output fluctuated wildly, with no pattern that Janeway could see. At one instant light and heat would be spraying out, at the next the thing, whatever it was, would go dark—relatively dark, at any rate; the output never went anywhere near zero. Gamma radiation flickered and flared; radio, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, and charged particles scattered from it, dancing in all directions and skipping wildly up and down