The Red King - Michael A. Martin [8]
Frane noticed only then that his father’s subaltern—Harn, was it?—was shouting at him, his words only barely comprehensible over the blare of klaxons, the beating of Frane’s own heart, and a surreal sense of time-dilated confusion.
“—said we have to get everyone to the evacuation capsules now!” Harn was saying, apparently annoyed at having to repeat himself. “We’re about to vent our ceeteematter. Our Efti’el drive will go critical in mennets.”
One of Frane’s hands was still in his robe pocket, where he worried the beads and stones of the bracelet with quaking fingers. He could see the viewer, which displayed the aft sections of the dwindling alien ships; they were flying on into the space that lay beyond the stirring Sleeper, apparently uninterested in all the death they had so casually dealt. As the strange vessels receded into the distance, like a pack of hunters with sated appetites, their formation remained as perfect as the moment they had first appeared. It made Frane think of encounters with deadly, implacable forces of nature, like the Sleeper itself—encounters which were apparently survivable, at least sometimes.
But he knew he’d received only a momentary reprieve at best.
“You have to evacuate my friends,” Frane shouted to the subaltern, momentarily putting aside his anticipation of the end of the world.
Chapter Two
U.S.S. TITAN, STARDATE 57024.0
“There’s been no mistake, Captain,” Lieutenant Melora Pazlar called with an incredulous shake of her head. Her fine, pale blond hair swayed like the fronds of a shallow-water Betazoid oskoid as she floated unfettered amidst a holographic simulation of the Small Magellanic Cloud, calling attention to the microgravity that prevailed within the stellar cartography lab’s broad, parabola-shaped expanse. It was an environment to which Pazlar—the lone Elaysian in Titan’s varied 350-member crew—was uniquely adapted, and which she insisted be maintained within the lab whenever she was present, which was most of the time.
Gripping his control padd, William Riker also drifted in freefall, a few meters away from the gentle one-sixth g that prevailed on the lab’s central observation platform. He relished the rare feeling of freedom, of unrestrained, uninhibited flight among these simulacra of the stars that lay beyond Titan’s hull. This was a sensation alien to his ordinary experience, and he found it exhilarating. He noted that Pazlar wore only a standard duty uniform, without the antigrav exo-suit that permitted her to function in the ship’s standard one-g sections. It struck him then that the lieutenant, a humanoid whose species had completely adapted to microgravity—“ordinary” one-g environments caused Elaysians excruciating pain and made antigrav technology indispensable to them in such conditions—must feel far more liberated by weightlessness than he could ever imagine.
Silhouetted against the numberless hosts of stars, as well as wide lanes of bright gas and coal-black dust, Pazlar moved with the nimble grace of a desert bird, drifting down toward the observation platform, where the other officers in attendance had gathered. As Pazlar descended, Riker saw in her eyes the verdict he was hoping most not to receive. He entered a command into his padd, and the room’s network of directed forcefields responded by moving him gently toward the platform until he felt the tug of lunar gravity beneath his boots. “It turns out that our initial guesstimate was completely on target,” the stellar cartographer said, hovering just out of the reach of the platform’s artificial gravity. “Unfortunately.”
In response to Pazlar’s padd manipulations, the mass of stars on the screen abruptly receded thousands of parsecs into the intergalactic