Chapter 9
The Kazon pt. 8
Janeway
Lieutenant Lyndsay Ballard glanced at the crate full of antimatter bottles and tried to make the sour feeling in the pit of her stomach go away.
"We've cleared the atmosphere, ma'am." said Danes.
Ballard nervously toggled the communicator. "We're ready, captain." she said.
'Lyndsay, what are you doing over there?' Harry's frantic voice sounded over the com-line.
"I'm doing my job, sir." Lyndsay replied defiantly, already knowing that he was angry with her.
'We're going to have a long talk when you get back.' said Harry. 'Is the relay link operating?' His image and voice was static filled, with weird pops and whistles in the background.
"The link is working, but your signal is coming in poorly," Ballard replied, snapping back to professionalism.
'There's an electrical storm nearby causing interference.' said Harry. 'Welcome to the wonderful world of radio. Unfortunately, we can't risk a subspace transmission. Make sure you keep close to us. If you wander too far, light-speed lag will start causing problems, too.'
"Understood, Captain," said Ballard, after relaying Harry's last order to Danes. "Everything is ready here."
'Well.' Harry said. 'No time like the present. Hail the Kazon.'
Wrath
"Lord Razik, we are being hailed," said Wrath's communications operator. He turned to look at the First Maje directly. "It is Captain Kim."
"Well by all means," said Razik, "greet him."
"The signal is audio and visual," said the operator. "The video format is new to me, but...it looks like it has its own decoding instructions built into the signal." The operator, who had to be a certified electrical engineer to serve on the First Maje's ship, was plainly impressed. "Stand by."
"These Federations are very clever, aren't they, Maje Jabin?" said Razik.
"Too clever by half," said Jabin.
A picture appeared on the central view-screen, of a blue starfield encircled by two branches of some sort. "I have the signal, Lord Razik," said the comms operator.
The stars-and-branches card disappeared, replaced by an ashen-skinned Kazonoid sitting in what looked like a starship's control room. His-her?-forehead was smooth and his hair seemed to be composed of straight black strands that came out of his head. He wore a simple red and black tunic with a gold badge and small metallic pips on his collar.
The alien bared its teeth. "I am Captain Harry Kim of the Federation starship Voyager. With whom do I have the pleasure of conversing?"
Male, then, thought Jabin. He could barely contain his revulsion. The alien looked like a giant, talking Kazon fetus. Other aliens in the background shared the same appearance, with minor differences. Maybe Kim was some kind of an albino, he thought, noticing a dark skinned alien standing to the right of him, though that one seemed smaller and female, so maybe it was a different species or subspecies. He looked away; the smooth foreheads were making his skin crawl.
"I am Jal Razik, First Maje of the Kazon Ogla. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome you to the Ocampa system."
"I believe Jal Jabin already formally welcomed us to Kazon space." Harry said as he narrowed his eyes.
"Oh dear, yes," said Razik. "You have caused me quite a bit of trouble, Captain Kim."
Kim's signal was poor. Hisses, pops, and whines contaminated the audio, and occasionally the colors of the image would invert or the picture would 'ghost'. Jabin quietly slipped over the comms operator.
"Can't you clean that up?" he said.
"I'm trying," said the operator. "It's coming from their end, though."
Jabin scowled. "What's the signal source?"
"It's coming from the planet. Orbiting at low altitude."
"Voyager?"
"I can't tell, Maje Jabin."
"Are you sure this is a subspace signal? This looks like radio interference."
"Absolutely, Maje Jabin."
Harry was speaking. "Maje Jabin caused me trouble first. However, I'm willing to set aside the whole incident as a...misunderstanding."
"A misunderstanding?" hissed Jabin. "He killed-"
Razik gestured for him to keep quiet. Jabin did.
"In fact," said Harry. "I'm even willing to compensate you for the damage to Maje Jabin's ship."
"Oh?" said Razik. Most Kazon, let alone most aliens, wouldn't have been able to read more than mild interest in Razik's voice, but Jabin, who'd known the First Maje since they were shitting their diapers, heard the surprise and excitement. Greedy fat fuck, thought Jabin, resigned. He's going to let Kim buy his way out of his punishment. He knew it was going to end like this. He'd be lucky to see a farthing of whatever Kim paid-Razik was going to stick him with a wrecked ship and no chance to restore his honor.
"In our part of space, several civilizations once issued currency backed by antimatter," said Kim. "Does that sound familiar to you?"
Now Razik couldn't hide his excitement from anyone. "As a matter of fact, the Chalcernodonian crown is backed by antimatter. How ever did you know?"
"A lucky guess," Harry replied with a slick smile. Maybe we'll get out of this after all.
Neelix! thought Jabin. That alien was always picking fleas out of his ass, sorting through garbage, and humming show tunes, and now he was a snitch. "I'll take care of you, too," muttered Jabin.
"A lucky guess indeed," said Razik.
"I'm willing to offer the Kazon-Ogla five kilograms of anti-deuterium as payment for the damage inflicted to your ship."
Razik's entire face shined with avarice. Even Jabin was given pause. Five kilos, an absolute fortune...
"There are two conditions," Harry added.
"Name them," said Razik.
"First, you withdraw your fleet from this system until we leave. Second, we know you've been in contact with the Caretaker in the past. We want to know every detail of that contact. Every word."
"I can send you all our files on the Caretaker right away." the Kazons claim of the array now forgotten. "But leaving the system...for that, we might need something more," said Razik.
"Such as?" Harry asked.
"Such as the secret of your teleporting bombs. Or subspace sensors small enough to fit on a starship."
"I'm afraid I can't offer that," Harry replied. "The laws of my people forbid exchanging our technology."
"How unfortunate," said Razik.
"I can offer you more antimatter," said Harry.
"How much more?"
"Another five kilos," Harry said gritting his teeth. He really didn't want to give over that much but soon he hoped to be back in the Alpha Quadrant. "Five now, and another five we'll leave behind when we leave. You can leave one or two ships to monitor us, but not the entire fleet."
"How will you deliver the first five kilos?"
"As you have probably seen, we're out of the system. I hope you understand that after the arrival of fifteen of your battleships, we thought it might be...prudent if we left."
"An understandable precaution," said Razik.
"However, the starship USS Janeway can ferry the antimatter to you."
Several officers in the control room looked around in confusion, but Razik kept his cool. "That would be acceptable," said Razik. "Perhaps we could meet at the fifth planet?"
"We can meet you in the Kuiper belt," said Harry.
Jabin was only half-listening to the conversation. He was looking for patterns in the static. He eased over to the comms operator again. "Have you seen interference like that before? Solar flares, perhaps?"
"I don't think it's being caused by solar interference," he said. "Look at these static spikes. That looks like nearby lightning strikes."
"An electrical storm?" said Jabin.
"That would be my guess."
"They're in a planetary atmosphere," said Jabin. "Could they...Ocampa?"
"I don't know, Maje Jabin. The pressure on the surface...but I'm no mechanical engineer. And who knows what these aliens can do?"
"Can you tell if it's a gas giant storm or a terrestrial storm?"
"Perhaps. Give me some time to analyze it."
"Quick as you can," said Jabin.
"There's no need for you to come all the way to the Kuiper belt," said Razik.
"We would hate to trouble you," Harry added, trying his best to stay calm.
"It's no trouble at all," said Razik.
"I insist," said Harry with a toothy grin.
Razik leaned back and chuckled. "As you wish, Kim. We eagerly await Janeway's arrival."
"I will dispatch them immediately," Harry replied.
"I will give them our files on the Caretaker as soon as they arrive," said Razik.
"Excellent," Harry replied nervously. "If we have no further business...?"
"None whatsoever."
"We'll be in contact. Kim out." The screen went blank.
"That man must think I'm an imbecile," said Razik.
"What are we doing, First Maje?" said Jabin.
"They're hiding somewhere in this solar system," said Razik. "I trust you are working on that problem already?"
"Yes, First Maje."
"Good. Do you think you can discover where they're hiding without using scouts?"
Jabin looked to the comms operator. The operator indicated he could. "Yes, Maje Razik," said Jabin.
"Good. Move the scouts between the orbits of the fifth and sixth planets, but hold them there. No need to spook Kim if he's still here."
"He got help from Neelix. He couldn't have just guessed we use antimatter for money."
"Hmm," said Razik. "It looks to me like he's current on his salvage lease."
"Perhaps," said Jabin, "we'll just deal with him later."
"But for now, we'll wait here for Kim's generous 'gift' to arrive. At least now we know the name of the second starship in the system," he said, shooting Jabin a troubled glance, "so we will take care of it first. By then, we should know where Voyager is. After we take care of Janeway, we'll flush out Voyager and take care of them, too. And then, Maj Jabin, we will have a settle accounts with the Caretaker."
"Yes, my lord," said Jabin. "What about their teleporting bombs?"
"Randomly vary the power-up and firing timing on your coilguns," said Razik. "The trick depends on them predicting openings in our shields ahead of time."
"You're betting they can't teleport through shields," said Jabin.
"If they can teleport through shields, we have no chance against them no matter how many ships we bring," said Razik.
"That fact would seem to warrant caution, my lord," said Jabin.
"Ah, but Maje Jabin," said Razik, "If they could teleport through our shields, why would they be hiding?"
Jabin considered that. When he realized he had no good answer, he smiled.
"My lord," said the sensor operator, "the Spyglance is detecting a new warp field in-system, near Ocampa. Configuration unfamiliar, but it'd probably the ship they told us about. It's coming this way at ten times c."
"Half an hour, then," said Razik. "Excellent. All ships, prepare for battle."
Voyager
The connection with the Kazon went dead.
'We're ready, captain.' said Lyndsay over the com-line.
"Go. Your orders are to try to get their information about the Caretaker, but if things fall apart, blow up the Spyglance and get out of there."
"Understood, sir," said Lyndsay Ballard. "Janeway out."
The connection with Janeway broke. There was silence on the bridge. Most of the lights were out to save power and to help cool the inside of the ship.
"Miss Campbell, exterior camera view, please." Harry ordered.
The main view-screen, which had been blank, flashed on. Voyager was sitting on a flat canyon bottom. Harry could just make out the trench walls in the murky distance, hidden by heat shimmers and dust suspended in the impossibly thick, impossibly orange air.
"We're getting fantastic data, Captain," Ahni spoke up. "The seismic readings alone...this isn't like any class N planet I've ever seen, sir."
Harry wished he could be excited. Now the only thing he heard was "seismic". "Is there any danger to us from seismic activity?"
"Not from earthquakes," she said. "We're far enough from the canyon walls we're in no danger from rock slides. It looks like all the loose material has fallen already. The sediment we're resting on is dry and compact; it won't liquefy."
"What about volcanic activity?"
"We're five thousand kilometers from the mid-ocean ridge. That's where most of the active volcanoes on this planet are. The subduction zone we're in doesn't seem to have any active volcanoes associated with it...which is damn weird. Pardon me, sir. Plate tectonics must have frozen already, which is unheard of on class N which tipped over from M so recently."
"If tectonics have frozen, why are we getting seismic readings at all?"
"The crust is frozen, but the mantle is very hot and active. If the star didn't show every sign of being a middle-aged G3V, I would assume this was a much younger planet. And...Captain, without better two more seismometers, I can't tell for sure, but there appears to be a very hot mantle plume directly beneath that tower a hundred klicks from here."
"Did they build the tower in a caldera volcano?"
Ahni shook her head. "The topographic data doesn't look like it. The tower is standing in a river delta, so maybe river sediment buried all of it, but we have good radar data all the way down to the bedrock, and there's no sign of previous eruptions. In fact, there's no evidence of mantle plume volcanism anywhere near here."
"Must be a new plume." Harry noted.
"It would be an odd coincidence if it were." Ahni continued.
"Not if the tower builders wanted to take advantage of geothermal power."
"Captain, the mantle nearby is…fractured. It suggests the plume is rising extraordinarily fast; I've never seen anything like it."
Harry's head hurt from all the thinking. "Just keep working on it," he said. "Are we in any danger of an eruption?"
Ahni shook her head. "I don't think so, sir."
"Good. Just keep gathering data. We can analyze it when we get home."
"Yes, sir," Ahni Jetal said..
Harry squeezed his eyes closed, trying to focus through the discomfort and exhaustion. Half an hour until Janeway reached the Kazons.
Janeway
"Approaching Kazon battle-fleet." said Danes.
"Drop warp," Lyndsay ordered. "Load the transporter. Keep the shields up until I say to drop them. Phasers on standby."
Janeway dropped to sub-light speed sixty thousand kilometers from the Kazon battle group. "Their shields are up," said Danes. "They're on their guard." He instructed the computer to highlight the e-war ship on the main view-screen. Then he took a deep breath and hailed Jal Razik.
Wrath
"We are being hailed by Janeway," said the comms operator.
"Show me the ship," said Razik.
Janeway appeared on the main view-screen. It was about the same size as a scout, with external warp nacelles mounted on wings.
"Not very intimidating, is it?" said Razik. "Answer their hails."
"They say they're ready to download information about the Caretaker."
"Tell them we don't have the subspace bandwidth to send it quickly," said Razik. "We will have to use a comms laser. Make sure they maintain a constant velocity and heading."
"They have agreed," said the operator.
"It's only a few quads," said Jabin. "They'll see through this."
"Then send them whatever," said Razik. "Payroll reports, sports highlights, pornography, anything. Just keep feeding them garbage until we get a firing solution."
"Yes, Maje Razik," said Jabin.
Janeway
"Here it comes," said Danes. "It looks like it's encrypted, but the computer is cracking it. Standby."
Lyndsay gripped the sides of her chair. "Ensign Danes, be ready to go to warp. Don't even wait for my command. As soon as they start powering their guns, we go to maximum warp. Get us as close to that e-war ship as you can."
"Got it!" Danes said as the computer started bringing up the data. "Looks like there are actual reports about their encounters with the Caretaker here. Video too, standby, generating a codec."
"Show it to me," said Lyndsay.
An inset appeared in the main view-screen. A naked Kazon was having fellatio done on him by a naked female Kazon.
"What a bunch of assholes," Lyndsay grumbled in disgust. The computer sounded an alarm; they had just been pinged by a tracking radar.
"Power up sequence!" said Danes. "Going to warp!"
"We have a firing solution on Janeway." said Jabin.
"Fire at will!" said Razik.
Wrath shook with the power of a full alpha strike-massive overkill for a tiny scout. Every other ship in the fleet fired, too, creating a cone of death a hundred kilometers across, with Janeway right in the middle.
What happened next was so fast not even the computers could keep up.
The subspace sensors detected a massive warp spike from Janeway and saw the ship warping faster than light to a position less than a hundred meters from the Spyglance. But the radar, infrared, and visible light sensors which controlled the guns saw two Janeway's. The confusion lasted less than a tenth of a second, but it was long enough to delay the guns' reaction. Jabin had just noticed something was wrong when Janeway fired on the Spyglance.
Janeway's phasers ripped at the e-war ship's shields. Up close, it looked like a collection of radar dishes glued to a cylinder a third of a kilometer long. The shields, which had been designed by the Kazon to block kinetic weapons and lasers, flickered under particle beam bombardment. Sparks flew from the sensor dishes and the ship's hull.
"Our phasers are getting partial burn through," said Danes.
"Mr. Danes, keep us moving, full impulse. Stay as close to the e-war ship as you can." The e-war ship is unarmed, thought Lyndsay. No transporter bombs here unless we can knock a hole in the shield.
Danes took these contradictory commands and pulled a maneuver that made the inertial dampers wail in agony. Lyndsay was impressed but was thrown around in her seat.
"Hull stresses exceeding safety margins!" shouted Danes.
"Keep moving!" Lyndsay shouted. She keyed the phaser firing buttons and kept blasting the e-war ship. "Bring us across their bow. That's where the subspace array is."
"They're firing some kind of particle beam weapon at the Spyglance," said Jabin. "The shields are only partially containing it. They're doing terrific damage to the sensor arrays."
"The sub-light sensors don't matter," said Razik. "Just keep them off the subspace array. All nearby ships, fire your point defense into this area," he said, his fingers dancing across a touch screen as he spoke. "Don't worry about the Spyglance; PD rounds won't penetrate its shields."
Janeway whipped across the bow of the e-war ship, right into a cloud of bullets. The shuttle's shields flickered continuously, rapidly eroding away. The phasers flashed uselessly against the Spyglance's reinforced forward shields.
"Warp out!" Lyndsay growled. The warp drive roared for less than a second, and they were ten thousand kilometers away from the fleet. "Micro-torpedoes ready. Targeting the e-war ship."
"Warping back." said Danes.
The warp engine lit up again. Janeway fired its entire magazine of grenade-sized antimatter missiles in one burst. The missiles struck the bow of the Spyglance just as Janeway came to rest at the stern. Danes hit the impulse throttle and Janeway skimmed over the e-war's ship dorsal side, raking it with phaser fire. They passed the bow, where the shields were still fizzing and glowing, enough to block transporters but not much else. Janeway gave the ship a solid phaser shot in the face. They penetrated, splitting one of the detector's hexagonal cells before the shields recovered. More point defense bullets chewed away at the tiny ship however. They warped off again, this time to three full light seconds away.
"Janeway to Voyager," Lyndsay said breathlessly.
'This is Kim.'
"Captain, the subspace array is protected by heavy shields. We managed to knock them down momentarily and damage one cell, but we can't penetrate them again with what we have left. What are your orders?"
'We're not going to get another opportunity like this.' Harry told her. 'Warp back to transporter range, try to goad the battleships into firing their main guns so they can damage the e-wars shields. Kill as many as you can, transport a torpedo into the damaged section and get out of there.'
"Yes, sir." Lyndsay replied nervously. "Warp to within twenty-five thousand kilometers of the Kazons. Be ready to drop shields"
"They're back," said Jabin. "They're making an attack run on us."
"Could they make it any more obvious?" snorted Razik. "Well, let's oblige them. Target them with main batteries."
"Main guns powering up," Danes reported. "You take over from here and lower the shields. I'm going to go back to the transporter room and activate the automatic transport sequence."
From behind the cockpit Lyndsay heard the whine of the transporter.
Danes had minored in transporter operations at the Academy. He had a knack for the finicky machines, an instinct for their operations that bought the USS Janeway and her crew approximately ten extra seconds of life.
When the transporter beam struck the Kazon shields, it "bounced" and the antimatter bottle re-materialized on Janeway's transporter pad. The problem was, the bottle's containment field was on a five second timer. And there wasn't enough time to cycle the transporter again.
He did the only thing he could do. With one hand, he convinced the computer to open the airlock, and with the other, he raised the emergency force-field to keep the rest of the ship from depressurizing. He snatched the bottle off the pad just as the doors blew open, and, pushing off the deck as the air rushed out, leaped off the ship with a bottle of death clutched to his chest. He was three kilometers clear of the shuttle when the seals fell and antimatter touched matter, searing and vaporizing him with enough raw gamma rays to kill a Brontosaurus.
Lyndsay knew she was dead even before she heard the radiation alarm. "Voyager, this is Janeway," she said. "We have taken severe damage. We will try to complete our mission." Pause. "Harry, I wanted you to know that I had a crush on you in the Academy. I love you and please tell my family I love them too when you get Voyager home." She sent Voyager a copy of all the data the Kazons had sent her, then cut the com.
The world was starting to spin. Big dose, she thought. She'd be unconscious in seconds, but she focused long enough to put a course into the computer, made the sign of the cross and prayed the isolinear chips hadn't all been fried, hit the "engage" button, and then slumped over into a coma.
The Federation shuttlecraft Janeway lit her warp engines one last time. She slammed into the weakened forward shields of the Spyglance at warp 3 with nearly five kilograms of antimatter still on board. When the dust cleared, there was nothing left of the Spyglance but a slowly spreading field of molten junk.