The Red King - Michael A. Martin [101]
The fanged man closed his eyes, like a cleric in prayer.
The nearest of the attackers dropped his sword and fell to the ground screaming, at least two full metriks away from his prey. The white creature had never touched anyone.
He opened his eyes, which burned with barely contained rage. “Now, gentlemen: Are you willing to be reasonable?”
They dropped their knives and ran.
The horrible fanged creature continued moving forward, heading straight for Davin.
Gods, no. Now he’s coming for me.
She ran again, panicked. Her foot connected with something on the floor, and she sprawled onto her face.
She rolled onto her back, and saw the creature looming over her. She heard other footfalls and saw a motley quartet of armed strangers running toward her as well. Were they also planning to rescue her, only to take her for themselves?
The four new arrivals, two of whom strongly resembled the elves from the old tales, came to a stop beside the fanged man. One of the other two opened a small container on her hip, and Davin could hear liquid sloshing inside it.
Water?
“Let us help you,” the white creature said, extending a large, long-nailed hand down to her. For some reason she didn’t understand, she felt reassured.
“My name is Mekrikuk,” the creature said.
U.S.S. TITAN
“The fleet will be ready to move out in five of your minutes, Captain,” Donatra said. “Since Titan is taking the point, we will await your signal to begin. Donatra out.”
Riker sat behind his ready room desk, staring into the viewscreen that had displayed Commander Donatra’s thoughtful visage only moments ago.
From the time of her initial change of heart about assisting with the evacuation of Oghen, Donatra had again proved herself to be an amenable ally. She and her staff had been nothing but cooperative during the several ad hoc meetings that had been convened so that the engineering specialists could determine the safest, most efficient way to tow the Vanguard habitat to the spatial rift—and then back to Romulan space through the aperture Donatra had called the Great Bloom.
Leaning back in the padded chair behind the heavy Elaminite wood desk, Riker wondered how she would react to the tentative plan that Titan’s science and engineering people had devised: a scheme to seal the spatial rift up behind the towing convoy using improvised antimatter singularity bombs.
Improvised, Riker thought, from the warp cores of about two dozen of Donatra’s warbirds.
Considering the plan’s high cost, would Donatra take advantage of a one-time opportunity to put the Sleeper permanently to bed again? Riker could only hope that she would see the plan’s merits. After all, she would lose only the warp cores in the bargain—not her ships or their crews, assuming that everything went to plan—in exchange for closing the spatial rift forever.
If she went for it, the door to the emerging protouniverse would be barred. The peril now facing entire sectors of Neyel space, and perhaps places far beyond it as well, would be neutralized.
Once Cethente finishes his final round of simulations, it’ll be time, Riker thought. I’ll have to ask Donatra to help carry out the plan. And since I can’t force her to sacrifice any of her warp cores, the decision will have to be up to her.
Jaza had already finished working out the final details of the towing operation, aided by Ra-Havreii, Cethente, a quintet of Romulan astrophysicists and engineers, and a handful of other Titan officers and noncoms.
The plan was to have the entire fleet of Romulan warbirds network their tractor beams and warp fields, in order to tug the Vanguard colony along toward the spatial anomaly at high warp. The job would take approximately two and a half days, not to mention immense amounts of power, and would most likely be risky given the interspatial energy discharges that were popping up with such frequency throughout the expanse between the Oghen system and the rift. Titan’s job would be to keep its enhanced sensor nets alert for those, effectively taking the point and providing