The Red King - Michael A. Martin [70]
“Chris, you need to know something. Our Reman guest has just given us a strange warning. He said that Captain Riker has to stop his current operation aboard that Romulan ship.”
“That sounds a bit vague,” Vale said, scowling slightly. As worried as she was, she didn’t care much for “mystical portents,” at least not outside the pages of old horror novels. “Did he offer you any specific reason?”
“Afraid not. And he’s unconscious now, so I can’t follow up. But suppose he picked up some sort of telepathic flash of something horrible happening that nobody else has noticed just yet?”
A telepathic alarm from our Red King? Vale thought, well aware that she had rarely been steered wrong by Ranul’s hunches, which he never offered lightly. And she also had to admit that Mekrikuk’s admonition completely squared with her own misgivings—and with the readings that were even now scrolling across Dakal’s and Eviku’s consoles. Not to mention whatever force had just slammed into Titan. There’s obviously something more going on here than simple senior officer jitters.
“Thanks, Ranul,” Vale said. “I’m going to check this out.”
Vale’s combadge chirped yet again, followed by the synthetic voice of Dr. Cethente. “I believe we may have a serious problem, Commander.”
“Looks that way,” Vale said. “Any ideas on explaining it?” She turned her gaze back toward an inset display on the main viewscreen’s port side, where data from the science station was scrolling upward. She glanced in Eviku’s direction and saw that the xenobiologist was looking at her expectantly, as were Frane, Akaar, Dakal, Lavena, Dr. Ra-Havreii—who had evidently stepped out of the turbolift a few moments ago—and the rest of the bridge crew.
“It appears,” said Eviku, speaking very slowly and carefully, “that space itself has begun to…buckle locally. And the effect is accelerating.”
“Cethente?” Vale said.
“Lieutenant Eviku is correct, in my opinion.”
Vale felt her heart begin to race. Though she had never worked with Cethente prior to Titan’s maiden voyage, she was well acquainted with his reputation. His scientific analyses were only very rarely wrong, even when given off the cuff. And he doesn’t even have cuffs. She forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly, calming herself.
“Meaning?” Vale asked.
“Meaning that the rate at which our ‘Sleeper’is apparently rearranging space has abruptly begun to accelerate. It may increase by about an order of magnitude. Perhaps more.”
“And the cause?”
“I can’t prove it conclusively, Commander, but it has to be related to our efforts to force the entity to relinquish its control over those Romulan ships out there. Forcing this emerging intelligence from the Romulan computer systems pushed a substantial part of it back into the very space its emergence has been affecting ever since its initial arrival here. The accelerated breakdown of space appears to be strongest in the immediate vicinity of the Romulan fleet. And the effect is spreading at many times the speed of light, propagating directly through the subspace medium.”
Swell, Vale thought. To Eviku, she said, “What’s in its immediate path?”
“Stellar cartography shows an inhabited system directly in the path of the disruptions,” Eviku said. “It’s less than two parsecs from our current position. At the rate the effect is spreading, the entire system will be devastated. By the time the effect reaches its peak—I’d give it between seven to ten standard days—it’ll be as though this whole star system never even existed.”
“That is the system of the Coreworld,” Frane said, stepping forward several paces. Akaar regarded him the way a herpetologist might study a deadly serpent. “A planet called Oghen.”
“Oghen?” Vale asked, blinking rapidly as she turned her chair so that she faced the Neyel, whose tail switched uneasily from side to side behind him.
“Oghen is home to nearly two billion sentients,” Frane said. “It’s the homeworld of the Neyel Hegemony.”
And it’s maybe a week away from being completely erased from existence, Vale