The Red King - Michael A. Martin [27]
Until Titan brought them together again.
Chapter Five
IMPERIAL WARBIRD VALDORE, STARDATE 57023.5
Donatra heard the voice, but only barely, as though it was coming from a considerable distance. She felt as though she were floating at the bottom of a well, her eyes swaddled in a heavy blanket of darkness.
Death, she thought. This is death, come for me at last.
But the fire that lanced her side, the stubborn remnant of the wounds she had received during her recent struggles against the hated false praetor Tal’Aura, argued eloquently that she was anything but dead. The blackness that surrounded her slowly morphed into a deep red. She became cognizant that she still possessed eyes, though she had to expend an extraordinary amount of effort just to force them open.
“Commander!” shouted Seketh, the young female decurion who crouched over her. Seketh’s voice sounded far more shrill than it had ever sounded before.
The remainder of her senses beginning to return to her, Donatra felt the hard deckplates beneath her back. Heat from a smoldering duty station across the room warmed the back of her neck. Ozone stung her nostrils, helping her focus her energies. Emergency lighting cast bizarre shadows across the bridge of the warbird Valdore. The broad central viewscreen, which dominated the forward section of the wide, semicircular chamber, displayed a violent hailstorm of static.
“Report,” Donatra said, her throat feeling as rough as ancient granite as she pushed herself up into a sitting position. Seketh hastened to take her arm, helping her rise to her feet.
“Most of the ship’s systems are functioning only marginally, if at all. All propulsion will be down for at least an entire eisae, and we have hull breaches on B and C decks. Damage control teams have already been dispatched. Reports of injuries are coming in from all over the ship, six of them critical. There have been three deaths, including Subcommander T’Kraith.”
Akhh! Donatra thought as she surveyed the details of the systems report, which were scrolling upward on the nearby operations console. My first officer, gone. Still more death during my watch. She thought she remembered having seen something rush toward the ship from the center of Shinzon’s Folly, the mysterious energy cloud that was already becoming known throughout the Empire as the Great Bloom. What had the Bloom—the remnant of Shinzon’s dreaded, and thankfully exploded, thalaron weapon—done to the Valdore? It seemed to Donatra that the vindictive shade of the dead praetor was still taking the lives of her crew, if only indirectly. And that didn’t even take into account whatever had happened to the rest of the fleet.
She found that completely unacceptable. “What exactly happened to us?” she asked Seketh.
“Something hit us, Commander.”
Now vividly recalling the moment of impact, Donatra frowned at the decurion. “Obviously. Were we fired upon?”
“We can’t rule it out, Commander,” Seketh said. “But if it was weapons fire, it wasn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
Moving shakily, Donatra headed toward the command chair, which was mounted atop a riser in the bridge’s center. She took her seat in silence, wondering if one of Governor Khegh’s warships might have cloaked itself, then followed the Valdore and Titan to the Bloom. Had the Klingons then launched a sneak attack while her attention had been occupied by the Great Bloom, and the missing fleet she sought to recover from its maw? She seriously doubted that Titan’s commander, whom she had aided in the battle to bring down Praetor Shinzon, would have employed such treachery.
The Klingons, however, were another matter entirely.
But hadn’t whatever struck the Valdore come from inside the Great Bloom? Her best recollection told her that this was so.
Still, her gut warned her that she still needed to stay alert for cloaked Klingons. Khegh’s skillful ascension to the governorship of a Klingon-Reman protectorate in Romulan space made it clear to her now that the Klingon officer’s blustering