The Red King - Michael A. Martin [118]
The Bajoran shook his head in confusion, his nasal wrinkles spreading upward and onto his forehead. “It’s the Dugh, sir. I’m reading extreme stresses on her outer hull. Maybe she isn’t standing up to Donatra’s tractor beams as well as we thought she would.”
Oh, no. Riker paused to study Jaza’s readouts momentarily before turning his attention back to the main viewscreen’s tactical display. Please let me be wrong. “Cadet Dakal, hail Captain Tchev and try to warn him. And get me Donatra.”
“Aye, Captain.”
At that precise instant, the viewscreen blip that represented the Klingon vessel abruptly brightened, then vanished.
Ashen-faced, Dakal turned from his console to face Riker. “Captain, the Dugh’s hull has just collapsed. She was completely destroyed in the resulting reactor explosion.”
Deanna told me you were hiding something, Donatra, Riker thought, a white-hot anger searing the inside of his chest as he returned to his seat. And now I think I know what it was. The chair’s autorestraints gently snapped into place across his thighs as the final seconds before the shock wave’s approach ticked away.
Titan rocked again, this time far more violently than before. The bridge seemed to invert completely before righting itself. The lights failed. Darkness enfolded Riker, as though he suddenly had been plunged beneath the frigid waters of Becharof Lake during an Alaskan winter.
He ceased thinking about the Dugh, the convoy, the Vanguard colony, the away team, the Red King, and everything else.
Chapter Twenty
Ensign Crandall looked up from his engineering boards. If the warp core hadn’t suffused the entire engine room with a deep, blue glow, the junior engineer’s narrow, hairless face would surely have looked as white as a mugato.
“Dr. Ra-Havreii, the warp field is destabilizing!”
But Ra-Havreii didn’t need to look at Crandall’s readouts to understand that. The sudden, random syncopations and dissonances now thrumming up and down the length of the two-story-tall matter-antimatter dynamo that constituted Titan’s heart made the trouble obvious enough to him.
Ensigns Paolo and Koasa Rossini busied themselves rerouting a maze of EPS power taps in an effort to lower the warp core’s steadily rising temperature. Nearby, crouched under the alarm-festooned master situation monitor, Cadet Torvig Bu-kar-nguv worked at the matte-black matter reactant injector controls, using both of his telescoping bionic appendages as well as the grasping hand situated at the terminus of his long, prehensile tail. Other trainees and technicians moved to and fro, comparing what was on their padds to the displays that appeared on various consoles.
Klaxons blared. Titan shook. The computer spoke, its manner irritatingly calm. “Warning. Antimatter containment failure imminent. Warning.”
Sweat sluiced down Ra-Havreii’s back, soaking into his uniform, turning his long white hair lank, and flattening his drooping, gray mustachios against his brown cheeks. He ignored this as best he could while grappling with his steadily rising fear.
He tried not to think about how his predecessor Commander Ledrah had died, roasted to death in this very engine room.
He tried not to recall the explosion that had torn through the engineering section of the Luna, the starship that had served as the prototype for Titan and all the other vessels of her class.
He tried not to imagine the treetop canopy of Efros Delta’s forests accepting his dying essence into the eternal bliss of Endless Sky.
He tried not to visualize the soil of his homeworld tearing itself asunder beneath his feet, leaving him to tumble headlong into the much-feared volcanic fires of the Efrosian underworld.
The ship bucked and rocked again, harder this time. “Warning. Antimatter containment failure in thirty seconds. Warning.”
Moving to the duty console that Crandall was using, Ra-Havreii gently pushed the young human aside. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the sounds the warp core was making as it strained against the combined influences of interspace, subspace, de Sitter