No Man's Land by Christie Golden - used book

1st edition 1st printing paperback, vg++ In stock shipped from our UK warehouse, The ancient Iconian Gateways are plentiful even in the Delta Quadrant, and in the fifth Gateways book, No Man's Land, "Voyager" encounters a whole cluster of them. First it's just an alien canine on a planet supposedly devoid of animal life, but soon the skies are filled with alien ships and disorientated crews from dozens of different species from across the galaxy, all lost and far from home. The crew of "Voyager" is used to that feeling, so Janeway takes control of the situation and offers to take the other ships with her through a dangerous patch of space she has dubbed "no man's land". Several dozen agree to come along, including a Hirogen hunting ship, the aggressive Todanians, who hold slaves, the Kuluuk who are so timid they can die of fright, and two other races with a long-standing feud. It's a fairly straightforward problem--get through a Mutara-type nebula without losing any ships--made complicated by the tensions between the alien species, most of whom have never encountered one another before and are slow to develop trust. The quoted distances imply that it would have been much quicker to go around the nebula than through it, but if we allow the author that slip, this is a well-constructed story. Janeway wants to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Gateways, leading to the now-familiar final image of a captain stepping into the unknown, to be described in the final volume, What Lay Beyond. --Elizabeth Sourbut