The Red King - Michael A. Martin [83]
Raising Jaza’s padd, he turned to face Vale and Tuvok. “Chris, Tuvok, get to the transporter room, or wherever else you need to be to coordinate a large-scale evacuation to Titan and Vanguard. And get Ra-Havreii and his people to work on making sure that big rock is habitable and shipshape for towing. I’ll bring you both up to speed later on how we’re going to handle the Red King.”
Riker glanced back at Frane, whose entire attention was still absorbed by the tragedy that continued to unfold on the viewscreen. He’d hoped that the horrors he was witnessing might galvanize the young Neyel to offer to assist in the rescue of his people. Instead, Frane merely seemed to have frozen in his tracks.
He’s no good to anyone in that condition, Riker thought, imagining how much the presence of another Neyel might help calm the legions of the confused and panicked as they arrived. He briefly considered ordering Hutchinson to escort Frane down to sickbay, where Dr. Ree or Dr. Onnta could evaluate him for emotional trauma.
He decided that there would be time for that later. That is, if there’s any time left for anything later.
Placing his focus squarely on Jaza, Riker gestured across the bridge toward his ready room doors. “Show me what your team has come up with, Mr. Jaza. And do it fast.”
“Can you really put this thing to sleep?” the captain said, seated behind the ready room’s heavy Elaminite desk after having concluded a quick call down to Dr. Ra-Havreii in engineering.
Kent Norellis was surprised at how discombobulated the new Efrosian chief engineer had sounded when the captain had assigned him the task of prepping the ancient O’Neill colony for towing back to the Red King anomaly. Ordinarily, Norellis would have been relieved to learn that he wasn’t the only one aboard whose nerves sometimes got the better of him. Under the current circumstances, however, he decided that he’d greatly prefer the company of unflappable, steel-nerved daredevils.
Now, as the impatient gazes of both the captain and Admiral Akaar buffeted him front and back, the astrobiologist felt as though he were caught in a crossfire between two such men.
“Putting it deeper into sleep is a pretty good metaphor for what we’re proposing,” Norellis said.
Responding to the confused expressions on the faces of both Riker and Akaar, Jaza stepped in, an apparent rescue maneuver that forced excessive heat and color into Norellis’s cheeks.
“At least we believe there’s a way to prevent the Sleeper from fully ‘waking up,’ ” Jaza said.
Riker handed the padd up to Akaar to allow the admiral to review the science team’s notes. “I think you may be straining the metaphor a bit here, Mr. Jaza. Unless I’m reading this wrong, your plan calls for artificially collapsing the spatial anomaly that brought us here in the first place.”
Jaza nodded. “Well, it is the extradimensional conduit through which our so-called Red King—which is nothing less than a rapidly expanding, sapienogenic protouniverse—is able to wreak destruction in this universe.”
Riker made a sour face. “I wish you hadn’t reminded me that some sort of intelligence seems to be guiding this thing.”
“Why?” Norellis said. He almost physically kicked himself for blurting out the question, because the room went silent. Once again, every eye and sensory cluster in the room—Cethente stood motionless in the corner, where he resembled an antique Argelian lamp—was fixed on him.
“Because,” Akaar said in a low, almost sepulchral rumble, “the issue of sentience raises certain unavoidable and perhaps irresolvable Prime Directive issues. As the ranking officer aboard Titan, I cannot simply ignore those issues.”
“Nor can I,” Riker said, looking frustrated, but also determined. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make every conceivable contingency plan.” His icy blue eyes lit squarely on Jaza. “All right. Please explain for us lay people how you plan to go about this.”
“It involves, in essence, ‘jamming’ the neuromagnetic signatures the anomaly is giving off,” the Bajoran said. “Our