The Red King - Michael A. Martin [112]
He turned toward Cadet Dakal, who was working the ops console situated at Lavena’s right. “Aft view, please, Cadet.”
“Aye, sir.”
Dakal touched the panel before him, and the image on the viewscreen suddenly shifted to the starfield that lay astern of Titan, and the multitude of Romulan warbirds that followed her only a few hundred kilometers behind.
In another context, the sight of dozens of heavily armed Romulan vessels approaching from astern, and in apparent battle formation, would have thrown Riker’s nervous system straight into fight-or-flight red alert status. Despite the close working relationship he had developed with Commander Donatra, his pulse quickened as he studied the swooping, aggressive lines of the phalanx of warships, several of which moved quickly out of position and back again from moment to moment as they responded to Titan’s navigational hazard data. Brief golden-orange and emerald flashes of light speared the empty space near the dodging warbirds as local space continued its violent process of unraveling. With the assistance of a fleetwide subspace radio-linked computer network, tractor beams and warp fields alike made near constant adjustments to the shifts in ship distances and spatial geometries.
“This had better work,” he said, thinking out loud.
From behind him, a deep, sonorous voice answered. “Your staff has given it a strong vote of confidence, Captain.”
Riker turned and found himself facing Akaar, who stood on the upper bridge, a position that made him look positively gigantic.
“And I agree with them, Admiral,” Riker said, more for the sake of bridge morale than for Akaar’s benefit. There really was no good alternative to optimism, under the circumstances.
But this stunt will either get us home or make us all very dead. We could still end up stuck here while Magellanic space finishes erasing itself.
Riker returned his attention to the main viewscreen. Focusing past the dozen or so ships that were visible in the foreground, he studied the bulbous, slowly spinning shape that Donatra’s warbirds had so carefully shepherded here over the past two days.
The Vanguard habitat lay at the center of the escort formation, whose constituent vessels even now continued weaving and yawing to avoid the rips the Red King was constantly tearing into the fabric of local space, all the while maintaining tractor beam contact with Vanguard. A tactical overlay showed the elaborate cat’s cradle of intersecting beams that linked each ship in the fleet—including Titan—with the ancient O’Neill colony in order to find safety for the two million or so anxious souls contained within. For a moment, Riker could imagine that the Romulan ships truly were the predatory birds they resembled; only rather than pursuing prey, they were guarding a precious egg whose hatching was imminent.
A little more than two million people, Riker thought. Though he was thankful that the numbers of Neyel settlers and Oghen aborigines that had been rescued would enable both species to survive, he couldn’t stop thinking about the nearly two billion that the convoy had been forced to leave behind because of lack of time and resources.
Oghen, a world that had nurtured its own sapient life-forms for millennia—as well as a unique human society for centuries—was now gone forever. Utterly erased from existence by the continued encroachment of an expanding protouniverse.
But those cultures still have a chance to live on, Riker thought, doing his best to maintain a positive outlook. And once we get this habitat someplace where those cultures can take root and flourish, we can finally get to know them better.
As he continued watching the convoy’s almost balletic motions, a flash of wan yellow light erupted momentarily on the asteroid’s rocky exterior, sending a considerable