The Red King - Michael A. Martin [9]
Riker had had no doubt that the readings and measurements taken by his Bajoran senior science officer, Jaza Najem—and repeated several times over the past several, emergency-filled hours—were indeed accurate, much as he would have preferred otherwise. He knew that Jaza would have asked Chaka, Titan’s arthropod-like Pak’shree computer specialist, to subject the initial cartographic findings to the most rigorous computer analysis regimes possible. And Dr. Cethente, a tentacled, exoskeletal Syrath with an uncommon grasp of spatial relationships, would certainly have examined all the astrophysical details very closely as well. There was simply no refuting the conclusions reached about Titan’s abruptly altered whereabouts.
The captain looked around the room toward the three others who had accompanied him down to stellar cartography. Fleet Admiral Leonard James Akaar wore his customary impassive expression. His iron-gray mane, which was usually pulled back into a single, tidy ponytail, trailed behind him, unfurling to shoulder length. A meter to Akaar’s left, Commander Tuvok stood attentively; he was still serving as Titan’s temporary security chief and tactical officer while Ranul Keru lay comatose in sickbay. The Vulcan’s brow was only slightly furrowed, though Riker couldn’t tell whether or not this was because of Pazlar’s report or something else entirely.
For much of the past day, Riker thought he had noticed a fair amount of mutual discomfort in both Akaar and Tuvok, both of whom seemed to be carefully avoiding making eye contact with one another even now. Before they had left Romulan space, Akaar had confided to Riker that a decades-old personal conflict had interrupted a close friendship between these two men, a relationship that had begun during their service together aboard Hikaru Sulu’s Excelsior more than eighty years ago. Although the admiral hadn’t revealed the specific circumstances behind this falling-out, he had given Riker the impression that both men were now prepared to let bygones be bygones; Akaar had, after all, been eager to rescue Tuvok from Vikr’l Prison, and Tuvok had shown Akaar a Vulcan’s typically reserved gratitude during their subsequent reunion aboard Titan.
But now, judging by the apparent unease between them, Riker was no longer so sure that they had set aside their old differences. Maybe being married to a veteran counselor is just making me hypersensitive to body language, he thought. But I think I could cut the tension between those two with a bat’leth.
“So Titan really has been tossed clear out of the galaxy,” said Commander Christine Vale, Titan’s ever-efficient executive officer.
“The stellar-cartographic records don’t lie,” Pazlar said, spreading her delicate hands in a helpless gesture. She had come to a full stop along the same plane the platform occupied, though she remained a good two meters beyond the effects of its artificial gravity. “And neither do the multiple sensor-scans Jaza and Dakal did in every bandwidth all the way from subspace radio to X-rays. According to the relative locations of every pulsar detectable from here to the Milky Way’s Orion Arm, we’ve just been thrown two hundred and ten thousand light-years from our previous position in Romulan space.”
“Into a completely different galaxy,” Vale said, clearly still trying to get her mind around the idea.
“We’re actually well inside one of the relatively small, irregular satellite galaxies that orbits our own,” Pazlar said as she entered another series of manual commands into her padd. “Elaysian astronomers refer to it as the Minor Outlier. But the more familiar Federation designation is the Small Magellanic Cloud.”
The stars and nebulae and dust lanes of the