The Red King - Michael A. Martin [51]
“Aye, Cap—”
“Belay that, Cadet!” Jaza shouted, prompting every head in the room to swivel in his direction. Surprise filled the room as quickly as a wildfire fed by pure oxygen.
“Captain?” Dakal said, his own confusion evident even over the tiny combadge speaker.
Troi knew that the usually reserved senior science officer would never have countermanded one of the captain’s orders without an extremely good reason. But what was it?
“Stand by, Cadet,” Will said. To Jaza, he said, “Well, Commander?”
Still scowling at his padd, Jaza said, “I’m seeing a peculiar oscillation in the warp signatures of those ships.”
Without any prompting, Pazlar and Cethente began consulting padds of their own. Though the expression on the Syrath’s exoskeletal “face” remained as unreadable as ever, both he and his Elaysian colleague shone with the same feeling of shocked recognition Troi was sensing in Jaza.
“Peculiar in what way?” Donatra asked. “Are those my ships or not?”
Jaza nodded slowly. “They’re Romulan ships, all right. But their warp signatures seem to have been slightly modified, at least in comparison with that of the Valdore.”
“Modified how?” Will said.
Jaza paused to tap another set of commands into his padd, and then into his tabletop console. In the space above the table, a jagged network of red and blue lines superimposed themselves over the image of the spatial rift.
“These are the same entropic patterns that argued in favor of extant intelligence within the protouniverse,” Jaza said, and touched yet another tabletop control.
Then the image of the rift morphed into that of a sleek Mogai-class Romulan warbird. The colorful overlay of jagged lines remained in place.
“And these are the oscillations I noticed in the Romulan warp fields.”
“They’re the same,” Donatra said. “But what does that mean?”
A bizarre notion occurred to Troi then. Through the link she shared with Will, she knew with certainty that he had tumbled to it as well.
“The Sleeper must have taken control of those vessels,” Frane said, articulating Troi’s flash of insight, though he was obviously seeing reality through the prism of local mythology. “The ships are its arms and legs now. Perhaps they will be used to help cleanse M’jallanish space of our people’s sins. Maybe that was why those ships attacked my father’s military fleet the moment we saw them emerge from the Sleeper’s embrace.”
“So our Red King is…sleepwalking?” Vale said, shaking her head.
“Apparently. For now, anyway,” Will said. Then he frowned. “But if some sentient force living in that protouniverse really has taken control of Donatra’s fleet, then why didn’t it grab the Valdore, too? Or Titan?”
“It may be nothing more than random chance,” Cethente said. “Perhaps the same element of chaos that determined how much damage each of our ships would sustain during their passage from Romulan space.”
“Or perhaps this…Sleeper finds something uniquely attractive about large conglomerations of Romulan warp fields,” Jaza said with a speculative shrug. “After all, Romulan warp drives are based on artificial singularities, whose physics superficially resemble that of emergent protouniverses. A large concentration of such singularity-driven warp fields coming into sudden close proximity might have gotten the entity’s attention in a way that our three vessels simply couldn’t.”
Will’s blue eyes widened. “So you’re saying that the Romulan fleet is…possessed, Mr. Jaza?”
“Well, I’m not claiming that the Kosst Amojan is running riot in the Small Magellanic Cloud, sir. But for want of a more scientific term than ‘possession,’ yes.”
Donatra looked as though she were about to become physically ill. Clearly she lacked any better explanation for her fleet’s bizarre behavior. And she was just as obviously in anguish about the fate of her crews; if some inscrutable alien intellect had indeed seized control of her fleet, all of the personnel aboard those vessels might well already be dead.
Will touched his combadge again. “Chief Bolaji.”
“Bolaji here,” said the conn officer.
“Plot an intercept course, Chief.