The Garden - Melissa Scott [16]
"Interesting," Chakotay said, and Paris rolled his eyes. The first officer had, it seemed, a gift for understatement.
Janeway acknowledged the comment with a nod. She stared at the screen for a moment longer, her hands on her hips, then turned back to her chair. "Well, there's no point in hovering out here wondering. Mr. Tuvok, find the likely range of those platforms."
Tuvok touched controls, and the planet in the screen was suddenly surrounded by a red haze. "This represents the zone of greatest danger from the platform-mounted phasers. As long as we stay outside of that, our shields should be able to handle an attack, and our far greater mobility will move us quickly out of danger."
"Very well," Janeway said. "Take us on in, Mr. Paris, just to the edge of the red zone-and be ready to raise the shields at the first sign of an attack."
"Aye, Captain," Paris answered, and touched his controls to adjust the course. "Going in."
Voyager eased forward, sliding easily along an invisible line in space. Paris watched the image swell in the viewscreen-a lovely planet, more green than blue, streaked with clouds that obscured the surface from their visual scans-and wondered just what was hiding under those pretty clouds. Already, the first of the platforms was just visible, a boxy, odd-angled shape studded with antennae and a single shallow dish that had to be the phaser mount. It looked like an old-style ship's phaser, the kind that Starfleet had declared obsolete a hundred years ago, but Paris wasn't sure if he found that reassuring. Those phasers had worked well enough, after all, and there were a lot more of them on the orbiting stations than there were phasers on Voyager.
A buzzer sounded softly, warning him that they were approaching the end of the preprogrammed course, and he took a deep breath, switching from autopilot to manual controls. "We're coming up on the defense zone's boundary now, Captain."
"Any response from the platforms?" Janeway asked, and Paris found himself tensed for the answer.
"Nothing, Captain," Tuvok said.
"You don't suppose they haven't seen us?" Paris said, and heard Chakotay laugh softly.
"I hope not. I wouldn't want to surprise them."
"I have no information on that," Tuvok answered. "We have not been scanned on any frequency that we normally monitor."
"I've finished our preliminary scan," Kim said, "and I'm getting very odd readings, Captain."
"Such as?"
"I'm still not getting clear life signs," Kim said, "but I have found definite signs of habitation."
"Put it on the main screen," Janeway said.
Paris caught his breath as the planet's disk vanished
from the screen, to be replaced by a series of towers that rose from an elliptical complex of shorter buildings. Their surfaces gleamed, as though they were washed with rain, but the sky shone clear and blue behind them. "What the hell are they made of?"
"I can't tell," Kim answered. "It could be either metal or stone or something in-between that the computer can't recognize."
"Well, it took an advanced civilization to build it, whatever it's made of," Janeway said. "What about life signs, Mr. Kim?"
"Still inconclusive, but-"
Whatever Kim would have said next was drowned in the sudden flat crack, more light than sound, that filled the screen. Paris flinched away, keeping his hands on his controls with an effort, but the white brilliance seemed to pass over and through him, blinding him completely. He bit back a cry, of fear or warning, he wasn't sure which, and groped for the controls again, finding them by touch alone.
"What the devil was that?" Janeway demanded, and to Paris's amazement she sounded more annoyed than anything. He blinked, tears filling his eyes, and the haze faded from white to green, began to clear a little. "All stations, report!"
"All systems