The Red King - Michael A. Martin [10]
The multicolored, tightly braided tendrils of energy covered hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space. Titan had withdrawn to a position nearly seventy-five thousand klicks from what Jaza had judged to be the anomaly’s event horizon. Riker had taken this precaution both to protect Titan from inadvertently being caught up again in the rift’s embrace, and to get far enough away from the interference generated by its energetic discharges to enable the ship’s sensor nets to obtain some usable scans of the thing’s mysterious interior.
So far, however, the phenomenon was doing a very good job of maintaining its secrets. Riker was thankful at least that it had apparently begun to settle down during the four hours since Titan had been flung unceremoniously from the energy cloud’s depths. The starship’s bumpy passage had evidently caused considerable disruption to the phenomenon itself, judging from the initial virulence of its energy output compared to its current relatively quiet condition.
Staring up at the image, Vale sighed. “Okay. I can accept that we’re here because I have to accept it. What I still don’t understand is exactly how it happened.”
“Evidently the spatial disturbance we were helping Commander Donatra investigate within the Romulan Empire,” Tuvok said, “has the capacity to link widely distant regions of space.”
“Like the stable artificial wormhole that connects the Bajor sector to the Gamma Quadrant,” Akaar said.
Pazlar nodded. “It’s a similar phenomenon. But also different.”
“Different how?” said Riker.
“Well, in spite of the strange energetic readings the phenomenon is still giving off even now, we haven’t picked up even the faintest trace of the verteron particles associated with the Bajoran wormhole. If this thing really were a stable artificial wormhole, it would have verterons, as Dr. Bralik might say, ‘coming out the wazoo.’ ”
Riker cracked a small, fleeting smile at that; judging from the few brief encounters he’d already had with Bralik—and from the bits of shipboard scuttlebutt he’d overheard in the mess—he could easily imagine the ship’s often salty Ferengi geologist using that very turn of phrase.
“So if it’s not quite a stable wormhole, then what is it?” Vale wanted to know.
“Perhaps it is an interspatial fissure of the same type that drew Excelsior here eight decades ago,” Tuvok ventured, casting a glance at Akaar, who nodded solemnly.
Riker considered that for a moment. He had to concede that Tuvok, a veteran of the U.S.S. Voyager during its seven-year Delta Quadrant sojourn, knew at least as much as he did about being hurled instantly to remote parts of the universe. So, for that matter, did Akaar, who had served alongside the Vulcan eighty years ago on Excelsior, the last Federation starship to visit these parts, under circumstances rather similar to those that had swept Titan here.
Nevertheless, he found something bothersome about Tuvok’s “interspatial fissure” notion.
“I thought Excelsior was in the vicinity of the Tholian Assembly when it entered the rift that took it here,” Riker said, recalling the decades-old reports he had reviewed shortly after Titan’s arrival here. He pointed up at the vast energy bloom that now filled over half of the lab’s volume. “The other end of this thing is located inside Romulan space, over three-hundred light-years away from the rift Excelsior encountered. It seems like quite a coincidence for two spatial rifts located so far away from each other to end up in the same place.”
“Not really,” Pazlar said as she typed another series of instructions into her control unit. “Not if you take into account the multidimensional interspatial topology of this part of the universe.”
A complex schematic diagram replaced the image of the energy anomaly. To Riker’s untrained eye it looked for all the