Текст книги "The Red King "

Автор книги: Michael Martin

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The woman tilted her head in what Akaar interpreted as a gesture of incredulity. Or perhaps curiosity. “Our worldmay end, but wewill not. And we are at peace with that.”

Akaar shook his head. “The children down there didn’t have the chance to make that decision for themselves.”

The cleric looked at him—or perhaps through him—before responding. “You don’t know whatour children are capable of. Their sacrifice is as meaningful to them as the one you made many, many Oghencycles ago.”

Akaar felt a chill go down his spine. How could she possibly know?

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“You made a sacrifice for someone who mattered to you then, but you were pulled back from the abyss. Your faith sustained you that your sacrifice was right and justified. And you hold on to the anger toward your savior even now.” She paused and smiled at him. “Will you now take away from us oursacrifice?”

Akaar backed away, suspicious. “Did Tuvok tell you any of this?”

She tilted her head again. “I do not know Two-vok.What I know comes entirely from you. I am a goquilavof the Lfei-sor-Paric. I see many things that were,that are.Sometimes things that will be.”

She turned away. “Leave me here now. Take whomever you will take. They will decide later whether they wish to follow the Lfei-sor-Paric ways or not.”

As Akaar carefully backed away another long pace, she turned her head once more to regard him. “But know always that youhave made a decision to put your desires above our faith. How you will live with that is something I cannot foresee.”

As he made his way down the stairs and to the enclave, Leonard James Akaar felt hot tears beginning to stream unbidden down his cheeks.

It was the first time such a thing had happened to him in over three decades.

Chapter Seventeen

SHUTTLECRAFT ELLINGTON,STARDATE 57038.4

Moments ago, an enormous conflagration between normal space and the growing fabric of the protouniverse had destroyed most of the Oghen’s largest moon. Fragmentary debris from the ancient, airless body’s remains were even now raining down through the ionized, smoke-shrouded atmosphere of the swiftly dying planet. The majority of the rubble was arranging itself in a spectacular ring around the planet’s equator.

Beautiful. But soon nobody will be around to see it.

Ranul Keru stared grimly through the forward window of the shuttlecraft Ellingtonas fiery streaks of moon debris plummeted through the atmosphere toward the planet’s surface. He could see in the glass the reflection of the others in his rescue crew as they stood behind him. They were all exhausted and thoroughly beat up. He was trying to be a strong leader for them, but there were times when he felt he could barely even hold onto consciousness. The wounds in his chest hadn’t fully healed, and he knew that he had coerced Dr. Ree into releasing him from sickbay a bit prematurely. Had Ree known that he had intended to participate directly in the evacuation runs over Oghen, he might have had been tempted to place Keru in a restraining field.

But I’m needed here,he told himself. Everybody is needed.There was scarcely a single member of Titan’s crew, with the notable exception of new mother Olivia Bolaji, who wasn’t taking part in the rescue missions in some capacity.

Ensign Reedesa Waen gave him a quick glance, her teeth gritted in concentration. The Bolian woman was a good pilot, even if that wasn’t her primary assignment. He saw beads of sweat forming on the crest of the ridge that bisected her azure face.

“I hope this hailstorm of burning moon rock doesn’t do us in,” she said, keeping her voice steady, even if the calmness seemed a bit forced. “Dodging the spatial distortions is tough enough without also having to worry about boulders grinding us into powder.”

“You’ll do just fine,” Keru said, patting her on the shoulder. He then turned toward the other members of his team: Kent Norellis, the human astrobiologist who seemed to have romantic designs on him, however unwanted; Nurse Kershu, an Edosian whose three arms and highly dexterous hands made her especially valuable during medical emergencies; and Lieutenant T’Lirin, the Vulcan security officer who’d proven herself to be quite tough, not only during the recent raid on Vikr’l Prison, but also over the course of the last three orbit-to-surface-and-back evacuation runs.

“This will have to be our last run,” Keru said, though it pained him to have to say it. “Local space is destabilizing too quickly. We’ve all done the best we can, but we won’t make it home if we attempt any more evac runs.”

Norellis turned to look at a monitor, on which a sensor alarm was flashing. His fingers tapped one of the touch-sensitive panels nearby. “We’ve found another small group of refugees, Commander. Only ten or twelve individuals. But it looks like they’re not out in the open. They’ve taken refuge below ground, in a cavern. I’m having trouble getting a transporter lock.”

“Head for their coordinates,” Keru told Waen. “We’re not leaving here empty-handed.”

Moments later, the shuttlecraft was hovering about twenty meters over a settlement that had been built into a series of buttes. But a cursory glance at the rubble and smoke visible everywhere revealed that little of the village was left standing. To make matters worse, the ground itself was bucking and roiling, as cracks yawned wide and spewed plumes of molten magma and fountains of super-heated steam.

“The bedrock is completely destabilized,” Norellis said, his tone edging almost toward panic. “We can’t land. And the caves the survivors are hiding in are too kelbonite-rich to let us beam them out without pattern enhancers.”

“We’ll go in, then,” Keru said. He turned toward T’Lirin. “You, me, and Kent. We’ll each take a pattern enhancer. If we can persuade the survivors to stay in one place, we ought to be able to beam them out safely.”

The shuttle veered to port, throwing them all toward that side of the craft. As they righted themselves and recovered their seats, Waen shouted an apology. “Sorry. A huge gout of magma was erupting right below us.”

Keru felt as though his insides had been sliced open, pain from his recent chest wound. “How do we get to the survivors?”

Norellis pointed through the forward window toward a cave opening on one of the buttes. The entrance was narrow, and the pathway leading to it had already crumbled away, no doubt because of all the recent seismic activity. “Line-of-sight transport. We beam ourselves just inside the opening, one at a time. Risky, but it’s our best option.”

Keru nodded, then looked quickly at T’Lirin. She nodded as well.

“I will go in first,” she said. “I’ve traversed the volcanic plains of the Womb of Fire on Vulcan. I believe this will be easier.”

Moments later, T’Lirin had successfully beamed over to the cave opening, followed quickly by Norellis. Keru was the last to go, feeling the beam engulf him in its disorienting shimmer.

The air outside the shuttle was oppressively hot and acrid-smelling, and Keru immediately began to cough as he made his way deeper into the caves. The situation reminded him briefly of the stand he and the other Guardians had made on Trill, when political terrorists had attacked the caves of Mak’ala.

He heard the echoes of footfalls coming from T’Lirin and Norellis up ahead, as well as a variety of screams and shouts beyond. He rounded a corner to find a broad chamber filled with a chaotic and frightened crowd of refugees. Most of them were members of the bovine native species that the Neyel had apparently enslaved long ago, along with representatives of a number of other sentient races, including Neyel, mixed among them.

As T’Lirin tried to explain to the refugees what would happen during the beam-out, Keru and Norellis arranged the tall, stanchion-style transporter pattern enhancers in a triangular formation that encompassed much of the wide chamber. They couldn’t transport everyone out at once; they would have to do so in three groups.

Norellis took the first group, and while they seemed to flicker and linger a bit too long during their dematerialization, Keru was heartened to hear Kent’s voice over his combadge a few moments later. They had reached the shuttle successfully.

The ground shook and groaned, as if the very bones of the planet ached.

“You’d better get out of there quickly though, Ranul,”Norellis said over Keru’s combadge. “These buttes are starting to collapse around us out here.”

Keru looked to T’Lirin. “You go next.”

The Vulcan woman shook her head. “Respectfully, sir, even though you are the leader of this mission, you must go next.” She pointed at him.

Keru was about to disagree, when he saw that she wasn’t pointing at him, but at his chest. He looked down to see blood seeping through his tunic. Hisblood. His wound had reopened.

“See you on the other side,” he said, then joined a group of lowing, frightened Oghen natives within the triangle formed by the pattern enhancers. A moment later, a shimmering curtain of energy enfolded him, and he felt a momentary sensation of freefall.

Then he materialized in the shuttle, along with the refugees. Nurse Kershu turned toward him and her eyes widened when she saw the blood on his tunic.

“Get T’Lirin out immediately,”he shouted. He’d be damned if he was going to leave any of his team behind.

Norellis yelled into the companel in front of him. “T’Lirin! Are you ready? T’Lirin?”

All that came back was static.

Waen turned back from the pilot seat. “Sir, sensors show there’s been a cave-in. We’ve lost our transporter lock.”

Keru’s heart sank. No. I can’t lose her. I can’t loseanyone .He’d made that promise to himself when he’d agreed to take the job as Titan’s chief of security. Somewhere deep in the back of his mind, his coma visions of despair and bloodwine assailed him.

Waen shouted again from the cockpit, and Keru heard the sound of hope in her voice. “I’m showing life signs, Commander. And they’re on the move.”

“Is there any way to get them out?” Keru asked, pushing the administering hands of Nurse Kershu aside and moving forward through the frightened crowd toward the cockpit’s copilot seat.

“No, sir,” Waen said. “But I think they’re headed for an opening over there.” She pointed to the forward window, toward another opening in the butte wall.

A moment later, movement was visible just inside the dark egress. Keru turned back toward Norellis.

“Kent, beam over anyone who exits the caves. Energize the moment you have a lock.”

As he turned back toward the screens, Keru heard a cacophonous sound, louder than anything he’d yet heard. A moment later, something massive collided with the face of the butte, near the entrance the team had used previously. Rocks and dust scattered from the impact’s epicenter, stone shrapnel banging against the shuttle’s hull.

Waen turned toward him. “Commander, we’re being hit by lunar debris, and it’s only getting worse. We have to go now!”

“Not without T’Lirin,” Keru said. He turned back toward the rear of the shuttle, just in time to watch another quartet of disoriented refugees materialize.

“There she is,” Waen said, pointing. Through the dust-clotted air, Keru saw T’Lirin, her uniform torn and dirty. She was carrying a small Neyel child, and was standing near the lip of the cave.

“Lock onto them now!” Keru yelled back to Norellis.

“Transporter’s down,” Norellis shouted. “I can’t get a lock!”

No!Eyes wide with horror, Keru looked at the screen, saw T’Lirin holding the Neyel child close to her chest, her image swimming in the heated air.

Keru was about to order Waen to take them in as close as possible to T’Lirin when something struck the shuttle, nearly hard enough to turn it over. Keru felt himself fly up out of the seat, and came crashing down against one of the consoles.

He heard screams, and saw flashes of light and showers of sparks and moving bodies, even as he rolled off the control panels and onto the shuttlecraft’s unyielding deck.

A blue hand helped him up. “Sir,” Waen yelled. “If we don’t leave now, everyone we came to save will die.”

Keru looked up at the screens, staring transfixed at the image of T’Lirin. Her face was a mask of utter calm, of acceptance. She raised one hand toward the Ellington,her fingers paired and parted into the shape of a V.

The shuttle shook again. “Sir!” Waen shouted.

“Raise shields,” Keru snarled, his eyes brimming with tears. “Get us out of here, fast.” But he forced himself to watch the consequences of his choice as T’Lirin and her charge dwindled from sight on the surface of the dying planet.

VANGUARD

Davin ran, and she knew she was running for her life.

Stay out of the lights,she told herself, avoiding the huge, mirrored structures that brought external sunlight into this place. She could hear crowds in the distance, could see some of them in the far distance on the opposite side of the place if she looked straight up.

But when she cried for help, no one came to her aid.

She had to assume they were still chasing her. There were four of them when she had last looked over her shoulder, but she was no longer sure there weren’t more. All she knew was that she couldn’t afford to turn to look again, lest they gain on her. Keeping her tail pointed straight behind her, she kept running, hoping she could find a way to elude her pursuers in this strange, curved place– could this really be Holy Vangar, the moon placed in Oghen’s sky by the original Oh-Neyel people?—or at least ascend to the spincenter of the place, where the pull of gravity was said to be weakest.

She knew what would happen when they finally caught up with her. They would brutalize her as though she were a slave. They would have their way with her.

And then they would kill her.

Ignoring the pain in her side, Davin ran into a large shelter stacked at least three metriks high with crates, some sealed, some opened. Some of the opened crates, she saw, contained large sacks of grain and other bulk foods. Others were filled with machinery. Some of the food and other gear looked familiar, as though it had come from her home village on Oghen. The rest looked alien, unfamiliar.

She concluded that all of it had probably been stored here by the strangers who claimed they had come to save the Neyel people from destruction.

No one seemed to be chasing her now. Had she lost them?

She decided she would risk pausing, at least for long enough to catch her breath. Sitting on the corner of one of the crates, she tore open a bag of food and quickly ate her fill, scattering crumbs far and wide. She knew she needed water as well, but didn’t know at the moment where to find any.

This had to be some sort of storage depot. But where was everyone? How can these strangers believe they can save an entire world when they can’t even spare enough people to guard their storehouses properly?

She heard a sharp, clattering noise, as though someone in a far corner had inadvertently kicked something over while blundering about in the darkness.

“You’re at the end of your run, girl,” called a sinister voice emanating from the deep shadows beyond the crates.

Adrenaline jolted her body off the crate where she had been sitting and onto her feet. She ran toward the entrance through which she had come.

Another angry figure stood in the portal, silhouetted in the external light, barring her way. She turned left, then right. Two more leering Neyel men approached from either side, both of them angrier now than they had been before, simply because she had run. Then she heard footfalls echoing behind her.

Surrounded. By men who believed that that all rules had been rescinded, now that the end of the world seemed imminent.

Sleeper take you all,she thought.

“Stop!”

Another voice, much more pleasant than the others. But with a quality that seemed to expect obedience. Heavy, determined footfalls approached, bringing that voice steadily closer with each stride.

“I said stop!”the voice repeated.

Davin looked around her. The four men surrounding her had gotten within five or six metriks of her. But they, too, had heard the voice, and all of them had turned toward it.

“Back away, friend, and we may let you live,” said one of the men. A primate chasing away a rival male,Davin thought, feeling curiously detached from what she knew was about to happen next: combat and death, most likely including her own.

Davin finally saw the figure as it reached the fringes of the darkened sections of the storehouse.

“I doubt you are my friend. Why don’t you leave this woman alone?”

“We won’t warn you again, friend,” said another of Davin’s pursuers. Fear colored this one’s voice.

The newcomer strode directly into the wash of ambient light that was streaming in through the main entrance. He was tall and broad in the shoulder, at least as large and powerful-looking as any Neyel male she had ever seen in her life.

But that was where the resemblance ended. He was chalk white, with rough, wrinkled skin, and large, severely pointed ears that brought to mind childhood horror stories of elves.

And fangs that seemed able to rip the throat out of even the toughest-skinned Neyel. Like the Tuskers from the oldest tales of the Oh-Neyel People.

The thugs somehow mastered their fear and drew their weapons, long blades. The white creature kept right on approaching.

“That would be a spectacularly bad idea,” it said.

The men charged, their blades slashing at the air.

The fanged man closed his eyes, like a cleric in prayer.

The nearest of the attackers dropped his sword and fell to the ground screaming, at least two full metriks away from his prey. The white creature had never touched anyone.

He opened his eyes, which burned with barely contained rage. “Now, gentlemen: Are you willing to be reasonable?”

They dropped their knives and ran.

The horrible fanged creature continued moving forward, heading straight for Davin.

Gods, no. Now he’s coming forme.

She ran again, panicked. Her foot connected with something on the floor, and she sprawled onto her face.

She rolled onto her back, and saw the creature looming over her. She heard other footfalls and saw a motley quartet of armed strangers running toward her as well. Were they also planning to rescue her, only to take her for themselves?

The four new arrivals, two of whom strongly resembled the elves from the old tales, came to a stop beside the fanged man. One of the other two opened a small container on her hip, and Davin could hear liquid sloshing inside it.

Water?

“Let us help you,” the white creature said, extending a large, long-nailed hand down to her. For some reason she didn’t understand, she felt reassured.

“My name is Mekrikuk,” the creature said.

U.S.S. TITAN

“The fleet will be ready to move out in five of your minutes, Captain,”Donatra said. “SinceTitan is taking the point, we will await your signal to begin. Donatra out.”

Riker sat behind his ready room desk, staring into the viewscreen that had displayed Commander Donatra’s thoughtful visage only moments ago.

From the time of her initial change of heart about assisting with the evacuation of Oghen, Donatra had again proved herself to be an amenable ally. She and her staff had been nothing but cooperative during the several ad hoc meetings that had been convened so that the engineering specialists could determine the safest, most efficient way to tow the Vanguard habitat to the spatial rift—and then back to Romulan space through the aperture Donatra had called the Great Bloom.

Leaning back in the padded chair behind the heavy Elaminite wood desk, Riker wondered how she would react to the tentative plan that Titan’s science and engineering people had devised: a scheme to seal the spatial rift up behind the towing convoy using improvised antimatter singularity bombs.

Improvised,Riker thought, from the warp cores of about two dozen of Donatra’s warbirds.

Considering the plan’s high cost, would Donatra take advantage of a one-time opportunity to put the Sleeper permanently to bed again? Riker could only hope that she would see the plan’s merits. After all, she would lose only the warp cores in the bargain—not her ships or their crews, assuming that everything went to plan—in exchange for closing the spatial rift forever.

If she went for it, the door to the emerging protouniverse would be barred. The peril now facing entire sectors of Neyel space, and perhaps places far beyond it as well, would be neutralized.

Once Cethente finishes his final round of simulations, it’ll be time,Riker thought. I’llhave to ask Donatra to help carry out the plan. And since I can’t force her to sacrifice any of her warp cores, the decision will have to be up to her.

Jaza had already finished working out the final details of the towing operation, aided by Ra-Havreii, Cethente, a quintet of Romulan astrophysicists and engineers, and a handful of other Titanofficers and noncoms.

The plan was to have the entire fleet of Romulan warbirds network their tractor beams and warp fields, in order to tug the Vanguard colony along toward the spatial anomaly at high warp. The job would take approximately two and a half days, not to mention immense amounts of power, and would most likely be risky given the interspatial energy discharges that were popping up with such frequency throughout the expanse between the Oghen system and the rift. Titan’s job would be to keep its enhanced sensor nets alert for those, effectively taking the point and providing early warning to the rest of the convoy.

Only a few years prior, ten ships had performed a similar towing job, ferrying the Cardassian space station Empok Nor across a distance of three light-years. Now, they had to pull a much larger habitat across about twice that distance, though with far more ships and power to apply to the task. Jaza had argued that the Vanguard habitat’s simple, blunt shape made it a far better candidate for warp-speed towing than Empok Nor, whose rococo Cardassian design had made it far more vulnerable to being sheared apart, either by tractor beam stresses or warp-field variances.

Though the science and engineering specialists had debated for some time, they had emerged from their meetings convinced that it could be accomplished.

Besides, this won’t be the first time the old girl has been dragged across the universe at high warp,Riker kept telling himself. The asteroid colony had once served as an Earth-orbiting laboratory, and it had been ejected into deep space as a consequence of a failed twenty-first century warp-field experiment.

Riker had pointed out to Donatra that once the towing convoy was back on the Romulan side of the rift, her fleet wouldn’t need to tow the Vanguard colony any further. At that point, other Starfleet or even Klingon vessels could be called in to take up the slack in towing Vanguard back to Federation space.

He resumed studying the padd that contained the Vanguard towing data for the next several minutes.

From his combadge, the voice of Ensign Aili Lavena interrupted him.

“Captain, your skiff has just docked onto Vanguard, apparently with minor damage. They managed to recover another twenty-two refugees, most of them children.”

“Outstanding, Ensign.”

Good for Akaar,Riker thought with a grim smile. He’d been wary of the Admiral’s plan to use the skiff—which then constituted Titan’s only lifeboat, other than the emergency escape pods—to conduct a perilous rescue mission for which it wasn’t designed. But the old man had apparently succeeded anyway. Guess that’s why he’s still alive—and vital—after so many decades in Starfleet.

Riker rose from behind his desk, exited his ready room, and stepped out onto the bridge. He stopped as he reached his command chair and faced the main viewscreen. It displayed the half-daylit planet Oghen. But instead of a pleasant, blue-green-brown M-Class world, it looked like one of Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of Hell.

“How many ships are still down—”

Lavena turned toward him, interrupting. “Sir, we’ve just received word that the Ellingtonhas been badly damaged.” Her aquamarine eyes were wide behind her close-fitting, transparent hydration mask.

Riker frowned, feeling his pulse jump. “How badly?”

“She’s accelerating from the surface toward orbit now, but she’s losing power fast. I don’t think she’s going to be able to make Vanguard.”

Riker considered his options. Within the next several minutes, they’d be towing the Vanguard habitat away from Oghen orbit. None of the Romulan ships in the towing fleet could be spared as the delicate preparations continued. That left rescuing the Ellingtoneither up to Titanor one of her other auxiliary craft, all of which were now safely back aboard.

“Ensign Lavena, plot an intercept course toward the Ellington.Inform the Romulans that we will be ready to lead the convoy forward just as soon as we recover the last of our shuttlecraft.”

“Aye, Captain,” Lavena and Dakal chorused as they both went to work.

Riker’s combadge chirped. “Cethente to Captain Riker. I have news for you, sir.”

He touched the badge. “Go ahead.”

“The latest simulations were successful, Captain. We can indeed seal the rift, as hypothesized. With Commander Donatra’s cooperation, of course.”

“Well done, Doctor.”

“I trust that you will now, as you humans say, ‘pop the question’?”

Cethente signed off, leaving Riker chuckling despite his mood. On the main viewscreen, the Ellingtonhove into view, struggling its way clear of Oghen’s gravity well.

“Mr. Dakal, open a channel to Commander Donatra.”

As he waited for Donatra’s image to appear before him again, he considered Cethente’s peculiar choice of idiom. “Popping the question,” of course, was a term reserved for a proposal of marriage. Such things were extremely serious.

It occurred to him then that to Donatra, the request he was about to make might seem moreserious than even that.

VANGUARD

Dr. Ree and Dr. Venora were processing the latest group of refugees as they beamed in from the captain’s skiff. As the group milled about, near panic, Tuvok saw Admiral Akaar leaning up against one of the habitat’s walls, wincing.

Tuvok approached him warily, but respectfully. “Do you require assistance, Admiral?”

Akaar stared at him, his gaze inscrutable. It didn’t appear to reflect pain from a physical wound, nor did it harbor the kind of simmering anger that Tuvok had seen in his erstwhile friend’s eyes three decades ago—and over the course of the past week.

It was something else entirely.

“Yes. I do need your help,” Akaar said, reaching toward Tuvok. “I twisted my ankle badly during the rescue.”

Tuvok allowed the much larger man to put his arm around his shoulder, and helped him limp over to a recessed alcove amid several crates of relief provisions. Akaar sat down on top of one of them.

“I’ll get one of the doctors,” Tuvok said and turned to leave.

“Tuvok, wait,” Akaar said.

The Vulcan turned back toward his Capellan superior. “Sir?”

Akaar hesitated for a moment, then spoke, his voice low. “I broke the Prime Directive down there, or at least its spirit. Not in a casual way or even an obvious one.” He paused, then continued, his words spilling out as if the confession had to leave his mouth quickly. “The people I rescued were religious believers who abhor high technology. Rather than help themselves, or allow us to help them, they had chosen to commit suicide, and to kill their children, even as Oghen disintegrated around them.”

He paused for another moment then, looking down. Tuvok remained silent.

“I did not carewhat they wanted,” Akaar said. “I wanted to save them. I wanted their people to have a chance to survive and rebuild. I wanted their childrento grow up with an opportunity to make their own decisions about their futures. So, essentially, I abducted them.”

Tuvok nodded. “You made a command decision, Admiral. You did what you felt was right.”

Akaar stared up at him, his eyes haunted, but said nothing.

Tuvok remained still. “Do you have something more to share?” he finally asked.

“There will undoubtedly be repercussions,” Akaar said at length. “What would youhave done?”

Tuvok squatted on his haunches, bringing his eyes to a level just below those of Akaar. “I would have done what I felt was right as well,”Tuvok said. “Regardless of the repercussions.”

Akaar shut his eyes for a moment and let out a long breath, his shoulders deflating. When he opened his eyes again, they sparkled as tears played at the edges of his eyelids.

“I am sorry, my old friend,” Akaar said finally, his deep voice trembling. “I have wasted so much time in anger.”

Tuvok put his hand forward and laid it gently on the Capellan’s shoulder. Though it was a supremely un-Vulcan gesture, it seemed perfectly appropriate at the moment.

“That is why it is sometimes good to abolish emotions,” Tuvok said very quietly. “Anger, and hurt, can be a cancer in one’s heart.”

Despite all his training and suppression of emotion, Tuvok felt regret and sorrow percolating into his own consciousness as well.

And one other emotion…

Hope.

U.S.S. TITAN

Olivia Bolaji looked over at Noah Powell as he watched the viewscreen with her in sickbay. He had come to be with her and her baby—to “keep them both safe,” in his words—while almost everyone else aboard Titanwas preoccupied with the rescue mission over Oghen.

I shouldn’t let him watch this,she thought, wondering if the boy had fibbed about his mother having given him permission to watch the events unfolding on the planet. Still, the ongoing disaster was only indistinctly visible from Titan’s current orbit, hundreds of kilometers above the surface. She made up her mind to deactivate the screen if Noah seemed to be becoming disturbed by anything he was seeing.

Bolaji was grateful to have learned several minutes ago that her husband had emerged from his sole foray down to the planet unscathed. The Ellington,silhouetted on the viewscreen against the raging fires of Oghen, hadn’t been quite so lucky. Now, apparently, Captain Riker was in the midst of rescuing the shuttle’s passengers and crew.

“So why didn’t they save any of the animals?” Noah asked. “On the Vanguard?”