On approximately Stardate 54700, Voyager detected a series of energy discharges 5.9 light years ahead of the ship. Long range sensors showed subspace radiation and metallic debris throughout the area, without revealing any apparent cause. The ship proceeded on course, but on reaching the area the crew encountered a series of guided weapons emerging from subspace and exploding all around. The detonations were extremely powerful, producing level 9 shock waves which damaged Voyager's warp drive even from hundreds of thousands of kilometres away.1Initially the crew feared a new and powerful adversary, but soon afterwards a warning beacon was discovered which was transmitting a message stating that the area was a "subspace munitions range" being used for target practice. Voyager attempted to communicate with the owners of the beacon but the warheads seemed able to travel over tremendous distances, perhaps dozens of light years, and there was no way to find those who had fired them.1
Seven of Nine and Icheb were able to recalibrate the astrometrics sensors to detect the minor gravimetric distortion caused when the warheads approached the subspace barrier, giving some warning of their emergence. However, when the ship engaged warp drive a warhead accidentally locked onto it from some twelve million kilometres away. Janeway attempted to destroy the device with a spread of photon torpedoes, but the warhead fired some form of protective cloud ahead of itself and destroyed the weapons. Scanning revealed that the warhead was equipped with a proximity resonance detonator operating at 4.84 GigaHertz, but as soon as an anti resonance pulse was tried the system rotated the frequency to avoid jamming.1
With time running out, Seven of Nine attempted to beam the detonator circuit out of the warhead with a transporter. Locking on to such a small target at such high velocity is extremely difficult, and even using sub micron imagers to enhance the targeting scanners Seven was unable to penetrate the tritanium shielding of the device until it came within point blank range of the Starship. However, the procedure was eventually successful and Voyager survived the accidental attack.1
No contact was ever made with the makers of the subspace warheads, nor were there any further encounters with these powerful weapons.1
References
