The Red King - Michael A. Martin [28]
Liravek, a male centurion with somewhat more experience than Seketh, approached Donatra from one of the bridge’s few undamaged consoles. “I can find no trace of the residual energy particles characteristic of weapons fire anywhere on the Valdore’s hull.”
Donatra’s frown deepened. “Then what has happened to us?”
Liravek shrugged almost imperceptibly, his composure far more strained than Donatra had ever seen it. “We appear to have been caught in a natural energy discharge of some kind.”
“Originating where?” Donatra asked, though she was becoming certain that she already knew the answer.
Liravek nodded toward the main viewer, whose static had finally cleared enough to reveal an image that was simultaneously familiar and strange. “From somewhere inside the spatial rift.”
Donatra looked toward the multicolored, fiercely beautiful image of what amounted to a gigantic rent in the fabric of space. The florid, grasping hands of the Great Bloom, the fell thing created by dead Shinzon’s overweening ambition, had evidently turned its fury upon the Valdore, just as she had suspected—and just as it had apparently already done to the fleet she had so carefully hidden just inside the energy cloud’s coruscating periphery. As a result, the several dozen warbirds that she and Commander Suran had painstakingly assembled had vanished without a trace. She was now more determined than ever to locate and recover those vessels, and their loyal Romulan crews.
She wondered: How had Captain Riker’s vessel weathered the Bloom’s wrath? Had Titan been drawn here as well?
“Scan the rift and the region surrounding it as carefully as you can for other ships, Centurion Liravek,” she said, her eyes fixed upon the viewer as though her stare alone might tease out the phenomenon’s secrets.
As Centurion Liravek, Decurion Seketh, Centurion T’Relek, and a pair of junior technicians made haste to carry out this order, a chime sounded on the arm of Donatra’s command chair, indicating an incoming message.
“Infirmary to bridge,” said Dr. Venora, the Valdore’s chief medical officer. “We’re being swamped with injuries down here, Commander. What happened up there?”
In spite of herself, Donatra smiled slightly at Venora’s overly gruff tone. Nobody else aboard the Valdore would dare to speak to her in this manner. Except, perhaps, for Commander Suran, with whom Donatra had served under the command of her murdered lover, Admiral Braeg.
Suran, with whom Donatra had uneasily shared control of the Romulan Star Empire’s combined military forces during the many weeks that had passed since Shinzon’s death.
Suran, she thought. Why isn’t he on the bridge?
“I’ll inform you fully once we’ve found a definitive answer to that question, Doctor.”
A pause. “All right. But I’m quite sure that Commander Suran won’t be satisfied with that. Once he regains consciousness, that is.”
Donatra needed a moment to process this news. Suran’s expertise had been quite useful to her on a number of occasions, so she had no wish to see him die. However, there were also times when he had proved to be a real impediment to the plans she had made to expand the military faction’s influence and resource base. If he were to die in service to the Empire, Donatra would lose the value of Suran’s not inconsiderable experience.
But there would be far fewer challenges to her decisions, in that event.
Like my decision to hide the fleet within the periphery of the Great Bloom? asked a small, accusatory voice in a still back corner of Donatra’s mind.
“What is Suran’s prognosis, Doctor?” she said, forcibly pushing her self-recriminations aside.
“His injuries are superficial, Commander. A concussion and some cuts. It would have taken far worse to keep him out of action for long.”
Relief and disappointment wrestled within her breast in equal measure. How long would it be before Suran was back on the bridge, reminding her that she had placed