The Red King - Michael A. Martin [116]
“We didn’t survive the destruction of the Coreworld only to die in the Sleeper’s shadow,” he told her, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. “Riker will see us safely beyond His reach.”
“How can you be so certain of that?”
He wasn’t certain, not in the slightest. But if he didn’t cling to hope, then what did he have left? He considered mentioning a Starfleet mission report he had listened to shortly after he had first come aboard Titan; the translated audio recounted how a much smaller number of vessels had successfully tractored an enormous space station across an interstellar distance. There was no reason to doubt that Titan and the Romulan flotilla could accomplish the same feat with Holy Vangar.
As he gazed silently into her deep, dark eyes, a sudden inspiration seized him, prompting him to put aside the space station tale. Instead, he raised his right hand, allowing the sleeve to draw itself back in Vangar’s gentle, spin-generated artificial gravity.
“I’m certain we’re going to make it because I still have to take this back to where it belongs,” Frane said, holding his story bracelet up and turning it into the dim light so she could see it clearly.
“Your father’s wristlet?” Nozomi said, clearly puzzled. “But there’s no way to bring it home, Frane. The Sleeper has swept the Coreworld away.”
His answer was interrupted by a low rumble that he felt coming up from beneath the stone floor—“down” being the direction of Holy Vangar’s outer crust—just before he actually heard it. Then came a roaring detonation whose report swiftly reached deafening proportions even as it rocked the Holy Vessel far more roughly than any previous blow the habitat had sustained.
An alarm klaxon, unused for ages and nearly inaudible beneath the rising din, echoed across the cavernous gallery.
Then darkness fell, and panicked screams drowned out everything else.
I.K.S. DUGH
“Captain!” Dekri shouted. Her voice strained to be heard over the violent thrumming of the Dugh’s overtaxed engines.
“Report, Lieutenant,” Tchev said, turning his command chair toward his de facto first officer’s station. His gauntleted hands gripped the arms of his chair as though he might be thrown loose from it at any moment.
“I am detecting variances in the tractor beams the Romulan fleet has attached to us,” Dekri said, sending an illustrative graphic to the bridge’s central viewscreen. It presented a wireframe rendering of the Dugh, tethered to perhaps a half-dozen straight lines attached to structurally strategic portions of the Klingon warship’s compromised hull. Some of those energy tethers appeared to be pulling more tightly than others.
“Do you see what they’re doing, Captain?” Dekri said, fear and anger coloring her words.
Tchev bared his teeth as he studied the torsions that threatened to pull the Dugh’s starboard impulse generator apart. “Lock whatever weapons we have upon the Valdore! Send all available hands to battle stations.”
The hull moaned, making a sound like Gre’thor’s massed hordes of Fek’lhr.
“At once, sir,” Dekri said, in tones that made it clear that she realized how hopeless the situation was. She knew as well as he did that the Dugh was in no shape for combat. But they would die in battle because of this order, at least technically. He prayed it would be enough to get him and his crew into Sto-Vo-Kor.
“Ensign Krodak! Get me Titan. Riker must be told what those cowardly Romulan petaQ are trying to—” Tchev was interrupted by a sound as thunderous as an eruption of the Kri’stak Volcano on Qo’noS, followed by infinite darkness.
U.S.S. TITAN
“The Vanguard habitat has begun venting atmosphere, Captain,” Jaza reported, his manner calm but intensely concerned. “I’m reading unprotected bodies in space. That last spatial disruption evidently disabled at least one of our emergency forcefield generators and tore all the way through into the asteroid’s hollow interior.