The Red King - Michael A. Martin [60]
Maybe Frane really is the best shot the Federation will ever get at making a successful re-contact with the Neyel, he thought, wishing, as always, for broader shoulders whenever such a crushing load of responsibility seemed determined to settle onto them.
“He’s obviously projecting his people’s historic motivations onto us,” Deanna continued. “As well as his own related personal feelings of guilt. It’s certainly understandable, considering his cultural baggage. The Neyel have spent the last few centuries building a star-spanning, hegemonic empire across the backs of whole worlds of indigenous slaves. It’s probably difficult for Frane to imagine that our own Federation could have come about in any other way.”
Riker nodded, though he had to suppress an inward shudder. There but for the grace of blind luck and even blinder gods go we, he thought.
“How did your own Neyel-related fishing expedition go this morning?” Riker said, content that there was little else to say at the moment about Frane.
Deanna turned in her chair, apparently to make certain that her subjects weren’t eavesdropping. She faced him again a moment later, and spoke very quietly. “I’m not sure yet. The only thing I am sure of is that Akaar and Tuvok still have some unresolved issue between them, though both refuse to discuss it.”
“Do you sense it might be anything I need to worry about?” Riker asked. What he didn’t need now were distractions stemming from old interpersonal conflicts.
Deanna shrugged. “That’ll have to be up to them.” She gave him a wry smile. “Remember, Will, I’m an empath, not a precog.”
His combadge chirped, interrupting the discussion. “Vale to Captain Riker.”
“Riker here. Go ahead, Christine.”
“You wanted hourly reports on the chase, Captain. Titan and Valdore are still slowly closing on the Romulan fleet. We’ll be within transporter range inside of two hours. And none of the ships are showing any sign of having noticed us yet.”
Very strange. “Any challenges yet from Neyel military vessels?”
“No, sir. And Jaza has been scanning constantly. He even found a way to increase sensor net acuity by cannibalizing and replicating some of the circuitry from those Tal Shiar listening devices we picked up back in Ki Baratan, in the Romulan Senate chambers. We’ve detected a few warp profiles, but no Neyel ships have expressed any real interest in us, and they’ve made no active scans.”
That struck Riker as even stranger, given the Neyel’s historic penchant for paranoia and aggression. Perhaps the sainted Ambassador Burgess had done her peacemaking job here a mite too well.
“Any change in the fleet’s warp field oscillations?”
“Negative. They’re still displaying the same electronic ‘thumbprint’as the Red King.”
Riker exchanged a significant glance with Deanna, and he knew at once that her thoughts were mirroring his own. The intelligence that’s evolving inside our restless new protouniverse really has gone…sleepwalking.
“There’s something else, Captain,” said another businesslike voice. This one belonged to Jaza. “I’ve just completed some new long-range scans on the G-eight star system that lay along the fleet’s heading when we first detected their warp signatures yesterday. The fleet has passed through the system, and the primary star has been…disrupted.”
“Disrupted how?”
Magnetospheric distortions are kicking up huge flares and prominences, some stretching nearly fifty million kilometers from the photosphere.
Riker blanched, as did Deanna. Neither of them were astrophysics specialists, but they both knew that such huge solar events in either the Sol or Betazed systems would be considered unparalleled catastrophes. Starfleet would respond with nothing short of planetwide evacuations.
“Inhabited planets?”
“Local stellar cartographic data is incomplete. But if there were any typical M-Class worlds in that system, there certainly aren’t any there now .”
Riker felt his body slacken, and his chair shifted backward to take up the suddenly