Star Trek Voyager #3: Ragnarok by Nathan Archer

Author:Nathan Archer [Archer, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Star Trek fiction, General
ISBN: 9780671520441
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 1995-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Harry Kim arrived aboard the P'nir cruiser in utter darkness.

The glow of the transporter field gave him an instant of vision before it vanished, and he glimpsed a tall, narrow chamber around him, one side of it stacked with dark, rounded shapes.

Then he was fully materialized, the transporter field was gone, and he saw only black.

For a moment he stood there, listening, getting a feel for his surroundings.

The air was heavy and foul-smelling, the gravity was light, at most no more than half of Earth standard, he judged. He could hear nothing but a very faint, steady hum that was probably the residual vibration of the ship's main drive, filtered through the decks and bulkheads. It was subtly different from the familiar hum aboard the Voyager.

Everything seemed very still. It was hard to believe he was in the middle of a battle.

Then something thudded somewhere, far off, and the deck seemed to shift very slightly beneath his feet--the P'nir ship had probably just been attacked. Down here, deep within the immense vessel, it hadn't felt like much, but there had probably been a staggering amount of energy released.

Unless that distant thud had been the shuttlecraft coming to rest in the hangar bay, four decks up and a few hundred meters over.

That thought reminded him that Commander Chakotay and the others might need his help, and that he couldn't just stand here in the dark forever.

Moving slowly, hands extended, he felt his way across the room to a wall; there he put his back to the wall and paused for a moment, thinking.

He hadn't brought a light. He should have brought one, he told himself--he should have thought of that.

If he'd brought the environmental suit he'd have had a light, since one was built into the helmet, but he'd dropped the suit back on the shuttle before stepping into the transporter, so as not to weigh himself down unnecessarily.

He had a fully charged phaser on his belt--it had been obvious that if he was going to be sneaking around a possibly hostile warship, he needed a weapon--but he hadn't thought of bringing a light.

Commander Chakotay hadn't said anything about it; perhaps he hadn't thought of it either, or he'd thought it was so obvious it didn't need to be mentioned.

That was a trick the instructors back at the Academy had been fond of--not mentioning some basic element of the problem at hand because, as they always explained later, it was so obvious that it went without saying.

Kim had always hated that particular stunt.

This wasn't the Academy, though, this was real life, this was an alien starship, and whatever Chakotay had or hadn't thought or said, Harry should have thought of it. A Starfleet officer was supposed to think of everything. That had been the point of all those exercises back at the Academy.

Well, he told himself, he hadn't thought of it, and now he just had to live with that, and he'd have to make do with what he had.

Making do had also been a frequent subject of lessons at the Academy.

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