The Red King - Michael A. Martin [79]
Nearly twelve hundred kilometers above the surface of Oghen, Titan crossed the terminator into the harsh glare of the system’s primary, a yellow-white F-type star.
“No response from Subdrech’tor Hiam,” said Lieutenant Rager from the aft ops station. “Or anybody else in authority, for that matter.”
“No wonder they haven’t sent any ships to harass us,” Riker said as the Neyel Coreworld displayed its many scars, most of which were apparently of very recent origin. The land masses on the planet’s night side had been dominated by countless fires as panic spread and the cities emptied. Columns of smoke rose like soiled pillars in the spreading daylight, reminding Riker of photographs he had seen of Earth’s Third World War.
Working at the aft tactical station, Tuvok pulled up enhanced images of the planet’s surface, displaying them as insets in the viewscreen’s corners, superimposing them over the view of the planet as seen from orbit. The Vulcan’s efforts yielded a dispiriting pageant of burning cities, panicked, fleeing crowds that looked like swarms of soldier ants, massive vehicular traffic jams, funnel clouds, floods and other extreme weather phenomena, and hasty spacecraft launches—many of which ended quickly in horrific, explosive crashes.
But the strangest sights were the intermittent, multicolored flashes, the angry reds and bilious greens of energy discharges released by the relentless unraveling of ever larger volumes of local space. The effects would vanish as the surrounding space rushed in to fill the spatial voids, like a tear in a curtain being obscured temporarily by pleats wafted in a breeze. Some of these explosions appeared to originate in volumes of space ranging from the size of a human fist to a large house; they were all violent, some of them occurring in the atmosphere, and some in space hundreds of kilometers above Oghen. A new one would blossom at random every few seconds, and the frequency of the energy discharges was slowly but surely increasing. If the latest models created by Titan’s science experts proved to be accurate—and Riker had no reason to doubt that they were—then those conflagrations would become a systemwide inferno that would burn itself out within two days’ time, but not before replacing more than a cubic parsec of space with an expanding, apparently sentience-bearing protouniverse.
Once again, Riker wrestled with the knowledge that his actions—as well as Donatra’s—might have greatly accelerated this growing catastrophe.
Titan rocked yet again beneath his boots. Grabbing the arms of his chair, Riker glanced to his left at Deanna, who seemed to be doing her best to appear composed. But he wasn’t fooled in the least. He quietly reached toward her and took her hand, which she squeezed hard.
“Try to keep her steady, Ensign Lavena,” said Vale, who was seated on Riker’s other side. She was leaning forward in her chair, her wiry body fairly vibrating with tension.
“Sorry, Commander,” Lavena said, scowling down at the conn panel before her. “But some of the waves of spatial distortion are taking us by surprise. The sensors are good, but they’re not perfect.”
“The world ends,” intoned a voice directly behind Riker. He turned to face Frane, who stood behind the bridge’s upper railing, his eyes fixed on the main viewscreen. Akaar and Shelley Hutchinson from security stood nearby, flanking him, though both were as intent as Frane was on the hellish vista unfolding down on Oghen. “Mechulak City. Founder’s Landing. The Great Hall of Oghen. All gone.”
Riker released Deanna’s hand, rose from his chair, and approached the young Neyel. For his sake, and for the sake of everyone else on Titan’s bridge, he tried to impart confidence to his voice. “We’re going to do everything we possibly can to save your people, Frane.”
Frane responded with