Текст книги "The Red King "

Автор книги: Michael Martin

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A sidelong glance moments later confirmed the worst: the aliens were tearing through Gherran’s ships as though they were defenseless. Within moments, three destroyers had flared up in roughly spherical, roseate eruptions of fire, vessel and crew alike vaporized in an instant commingling of molecular fire and hard vacuum.

As Gherran rattled his terse, precise orders to his own control room staff, the foremost of the alien ships loosed their weapons for a second salvo, their formation passing by without so much as pausing, as though their opposition was unworthy of the invaders’ valuable time. A loud BOOM! shook the control room, as though the vessel it drove had just collided with an asteroid. The deck lurched perhaps forty-five degrees before the inertial compensators set things more or less right. Frane instinctively grabbed a nearby railing, which glowed in the suddenly dimmed lighting. His tail wrapped tightly about one of the railing posts as an added measure of security.

The ship rocked yet again, ringing like some great duranium bell as a console exploded nearby, singeing Frane’s hair and causing his eyeslits to slam shut involuntarily. Fierce heat scorched him, even through his hardened Neyel skin.

When he opened his eyes, he saw clouds of acrid-smelling coolant hissing into the smoky air as various crew members busied themselves putting out fires all around the control room, while simultaneously running the ship’s defensive and offensive systems. On the viewer, another pair of Neyel ships tore themselves apart, their extensive battle wounds finally yielding terminal conflagrations.

Coughing, his stinging eyes watering, Frane noticed a pair of bodies sprawled beside the wreckage of the exploded console, both in the unmistakably awkward postures of death.

One of the corpses belonged to his father.

Not knowing what else to do, Frane knelt beside Gherran, feeling for his carotid artery. His father, the man who had sired and then abandoned him and his mother in favor of his endless duties to a corrupt and belligerent Hegemony, now lay lifeless on the soot-smeared deck. He took one of Gherran’s still, gray hands.

And noticed the bracelet.

Without knowing why he was doing it, Frane took the bracelet and slipped it into a pocket in his robe. He was, after all, his father’s son. And that meant he was next in line to take possession of the bracelet, whether future generations were fated to be or not. If the Sleeper wakes and wipes us all from existence, then this will all be moot anyway,he thought, not certain whether the act of taking the bracelet represented faith or its repudiation. Perhaps that, too, didn’t matter.

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 void, as though viewed from the portals of a ship capable of virtually instantaneous travel, regardless of distance. The stellar cartography lab’s viewpoint had changed to a long, wide-angle view that showed the vast stellar formation from a vantage point far above its galactic north pole, with the periphery of the Milky Way looming deep in the background.

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 Excelsiormore 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 abat’leth.

“So Titanreally hasbeen 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 Small Magellanic Cloud abruptly vanished, replaced by a much tighter view of the same place—specifically, the precise portion of the Cloud in which Titanwas now located. The lab was filled with a holographic image of the spatial rift that had brought Titanhere.

The multicolored, tightly braided tendrils of energy covered hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space. Titanhad withdrawn to a position nearly seventy-five thousand klicks from what Jaza had judged to be the anomaly’s event horizon. Riker had taken this precaution both to protect Titanfrom inadvertently being caught up again in the rift’s embrace, and to get far enough away from the interference generated by its energetic discharges to enable the ship’s sensor nets to obtain some usable scans of the thing’s mysterious interior.

So far, however, the phenomenon was doing a very good job of maintaining its secrets. Riker was thankful at least that it had apparently begun to settle down during the four hours since Titanhad been flung unceremoniously from the energy cloud’s depths. The starship’s bumpy passage had evidently caused considerable disruption to the phenomenon itself, judging from the initial virulence of its energy output compared to its current relatively quiet condition.

Staring up at the image, Vale sighed. “Okay. I can accept that we’re here because I haveto accept it. What I still don’t understand is exactly howit happened.”

“Evidently the spatial disturbance we were helping Commander Donatra investigate within the Romulan Empire,” Tuvok said, “has the capacity to link widely distant regions of space.”

“Like the stable artificial wormhole that connects the Bajor sector to the Gamma Quadrant,” Akaar said.

Pazlar nodded. “It’s a similar phenomenon. But also different.”

“Different how?” said Riker.

“Well, in spite of the strange energetic readings the phenomenon is still giving off even now, we haven’t picked up even the faintest trace of the verteron particles associated with the Bajoran wormhole. If this thing really werea stable artificial wormhole, it would have verterons, as Dr. Bralik might say, ‘coming out the wazoo.’ ”

Riker cracked a small, fleeting smile at that; judging from the few brief encounters he’d already had with Bralik—and from the bits of shipboard scuttlebutt he’d overheard in the mess—he could easily imagine the ship’s often salty Ferengi geologist using that very turn of phrase.

“So if it’s not quite a stable wormhole, then what is it?” Vale wanted to know.

“Perhaps it is an interspatial fissure of the same type that drew Excelsiorhere eight decades ago,” Tuvok ventured, casting a glance at Akaar, who nodded solemnly.

Riker considered that for a moment. He had to concede that Tuvok, a veteran of the U.S.S. Voyagerduring its seven-year Delta Quadrant sojourn, knew at least as much as he did about being hurled instantly to remote parts of the universe. So, for that matter, did Akaar, who had served alongside the Vulcan eighty years ago on Excelsior,the last Federation starship to visit these parts, under circumstances rather similar to those that had swept Titanhere.

Nevertheless, he found something bothersome about Tuvok’s “interspatial fissure” notion.

“I thought Excelsiorwas in the vicinity of the Tholian Assembly when it entered the rift that took it here,” Riker said, recalling the decades-old reports he had reviewed shortly after Titan’s arrival here. He pointed up at the vast energy bloom that now filled over half of the lab’s volume. “The other end of this thing is located inside Romulan space, over three-hundred light-years away from the rift Excelsiorencountered. It seems like quite a coincidence for two spatial rifts located so far away from each other to end up in the same place.”

“Not really,” Pazlar said as she typed another series of instructions into her control unit. “Not if you take into account the multidimensional interspatial topology of this part of the universe.”

A complex schematic diagram replaced the image of the energy anomaly. To Riker’s untrained eye it looked for all the world like a collection of thick blue pipes running into and around each other in an arrangement so busy and complex that it might have given the ancient Earth artist M. C. Escher a headache.

“What, precisely, are we looking at, Lieutenant?” Tuvok asked Pazlar, raising an eyebrow.

“A little something that Jaza, Cethente, and I spent the last two hours putting together while the computer was verifying our initial scans. It’s a map of the subspace topology of a volume of space that encompasses both the Small Magellanic Cloud and most of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants of the Milky Way Galaxy. The mathematics are complex.”

“No kidding,” Vale said, punctuating her observation with a low whistle. “Makes me glad I never opted for the sciences track at Starfleet Academy.”

Riker was growing impatient to get at the meaning of the cryptic diagram that loomed overhead. “Can you get to the point of this, Lieutenant?” he asked, gesturing toward the bizarre tubular agglomeration.

Pazlar nodded. “Certainly, Captain. The reason that two widely spaced interspatial fissures in our galaxy both ended up here, is—as near as we can tell so far—because the Small Magellanic Cloud seems to be ‘downhill’ from almost every location in the Milky Way. Interspatially speaking, of course.”

“Logical,” said Tuvok.

Akaar nodded. “I agree.”

Riker let out a low whistle of his own, wondering whether his senior science officer and stellar cartographer had just invented a mathematical proof of the nonexistence of coincidence—or if they had instead proved that coincidence itself amounted to a previously undiscovered fundamental force of nature.

“Captain, what about Donatra and her ship?” Vale asked. “The Valdorewas only a few kilometers away from us when we were drawn into this…‘Great Bloom,’ or whatever the hell that thing out there is. Is it possible that the Romulans were thrown here as well?”

“That’s hard to say,” Pazlar said. “Jaza and Dakal are still scanning for any sign of the Valdore,or the fleet Donatra believes she lost inside the energy rift. So far, no one has turned up so much as a scrap of debris. Either Donatra’s ships all somehow managed to escape being sent here, or else the phenomenon is still generating too much interference for us to completely trust our sensor readings.”

Riker hated to think that Donatra, who not only had been instrumental in the defeat of the mad Praetor Shinzon weeks ago, but had also just helped him hammer out a tenuous peace between the rival political factions in contention over control of the Romulan Star Empire, might have been killed by the same energy phenomenon that had displaced Titan.He also knew that until the fate of Donatra and her lost fleet was definitively understood, any attempt to return home via the rift would pose an unacceptably high risk.

“Stay on it,” he told Pazlar. “I don’t have any intention of remaining out here indefinitely. We’re going to get Titanback to the other side of that rift. But we need to make an accurate assessment of our chances of re-crossing it in one piece before we can seriously think about going back in there.”

“That’s Jaza’s top priority,” Pazlar said, sounding somber. “As well as mine, and everybody else in astrosciences.”

Silence filled the room for the next several moments, until Riker broke it. “Well, until that’s worked out, we ought to spend some time considering the locals: specifically, the Neyel.”

“ ‘Locals’ is perhaps not the most accurate way to describe the Neyel, Captain,” Akaar said. “Have you taken the time yet to read Excelsior’s official reports about them?”

Riker nodded. “I have, Admiral. But apart from Mr. Tuvok’s original astrometric observations and Dr. Chapel’s medical and biological reports, they didn’t take long to read. In fact, they left me with a lot more questions than answers. So I’m going to have to rely on your prior experience with the Neyel.” He trained his gaze on Tuvok next. “And yours as well, Commander.”

Both Akaar and Tuvok nodded, but didn’t look at one another.

Vale shook her head, looking embarrassed. “With the repairs I’ve been coordinating and all the other emergencies I’ve had to deal with since Titangot dumped here, I’m afraid I still know next to nothing about these Neyel—other than the fact that they’re supposed to be a long-lost offshoot of terrestrial humans.”

“One might accurately describe them that way,” Tuvok said. “Despite their alien outward appearance, the Neyel were– are—entirely human at the genetic level.”

“According to Excelsior’s reports,” Riker said, “the Neyel were the descendants of the scientists and engineers who worked aboard one of Earth’s early L-5 colonies.”

“One of the hollow-asteroid spacehabs that Zefram Cochrane’s team used to develop his prototype warp drive?” Vale asked.

“The same,” Riker said. “The Vanguard colony had been thought destroyed in an accident during a warp-field test several years before First Contact. Instead, its imploding warp fields sent it on a very long voyage. Of course, no one on Earth knew that at the time.”

“The Neyel had been cut off from Earth for nearly two and a half centuries when Excelsiorfirst encountered them,” Tuvok said. “However, they had already evolved into a form that bore almost no outward resemblance to the mainstream branch of humanity that went on to participate in the founding of the Federation.”

“But how can that be?” Vale said. “How could they have evolved such a fundamentally different physical form in such a short time?”

“Genetic engineering,” Riker said.

Akaar nodded. “Apparently born of rather urgent necessity.”

“Amazing,” Vale said, her eyes widening. “You’d think their ancestors would have remembered the lessons of the Eugenics Wars at least as well as we do. I mean, those times had to still be within the living memories of at least some of the Neyel’s ancestors when they left Earth.”

At least for those who’d managed to survived the nuclear strikes and bioweapons attacks of the Third World War,Riker thought. He would never forget the devastation that had still been evident on his home planet only a decade after the outbreak of that horrible conflict, having seen it up close during the Enterprise’s mission to stop a Borg attack on twenty-first-century Earth.

“Do not judge them too harshly, Commander,” Akaar said to Vale. “From what little we were able to glean from their history, the progenitors of the Neyel found basic survival to be an extreme challenge after they were cut off from your homeworld.”

Tuvok nodded. “Indeed. Had they not used gene manipulation—to add microgravity-adapted grasping tails and feet to their phenotypes, for example, or to increase their resistance to hard radiation or accelerate their maturity to reproductive age—they might have died out more or less immediately, or at least been rendered sterile.”

“Right after we first arrived here, you said something that struck me as fairly ominous, Commander Tuvok,” Vale said. “You compared the Neyel to the Romulans. Since we might find ourselves stuck here in Neyel territory for at least a little while, I hope you were just being melodramatic.”

“Vulcans are never ‘melodramatic,’ Commander,” Tuvok said, tipping his head in what might have been either curiosity or umbrage. “We found the Neyel to be highly aggressive, ethnocentric, territorial, and paranoid in the extreme.”

“That’s understandable, considering the lousy hand they were dealt,” Riker said. “Their ancestors were a relative handful of humans who were suddenly forced to live on their own in a totally unexplored universe, dependent on an L-5 habitat that wasn’t designed to be completely self-sufficient. Yet they left the Sol system years before Archer did—hell, before Cochranedid—and settled a huge swath of space that no other human would visit for centuries. Along the way, they must have faced all sorts of dangers no human had ever seen before.”

Riker wondered momentarily what hewould have done in their place. Though the forebears of the Neyel had been presumed killed, they had survived and persevered, utterly isolated from the relentless march of human history. And while they had been preoccupied first with survival, and later with conquest and empire-building, the main branch of mankind back on Earth had progressed from its early post-thermonuclear-war phase to the creation of a grand interstellar democracy that would eventually span more than one hundred and fifty worlds.

One branch had yielded an idealistic Federation, born of cooperation. And apparently another branch had instead created a hegemonic empire, forged in the fires of conquest.

But Riker knew that Earth’s upward social evolution had by no means been inevitable. Only a few years before the destructive Romulan-Earth War of the twenty-second century, and the subsequent coalescence of the Federation, first contact with the Xindi had cost millions of human lives. The Xindi attack on Earth had spawned the xenophobic Terra Prime movement, and might very well have placed human culture on precisely the same distrustful, aggressive trajectory that Neyel civilization had evidently taken.

And the Neyel path was never set in stone either,Riker thought. Their empire grew out of the decisions they made both as individuals and as a society. And those decisions would have created consequences of their own as time went on.

That idea brought to mind a salient question.

Turning toward Akaar, he said, “Excelsior’s reports said nothing about follow-up Federation contact with the Neyel after 2298.”

Akaar nodded. “That is because no such contact has occurred.”

Riker smiled, relishing the prospect of gently correcting the admiral whose presence had made Titan’s maiden voyage so much more difficult than he had anticipated.

“That isn’t entirely true, Admiral. A good deal of human-Neyel contact may have gone on for some time after 2298.”

A look of comprehension dawned in the large Capellan’s dark eyes. “Burgess.”

Tuvok again raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Indeed.”

“Who or what is Burgess?” Vale asked.

“Aidan Burgess was a Federation special envoy whom Excelsiorferried to a diplomatic meeting with the Tholians,” Tuvok explained. “She ended up settling a war between the Tholians and the Neyel, using rather unorthodox means.”

Akaar nodded. “Means that included appropriating one of Excelsior’s shuttlecraft and taking it on a one-way journey through the rift that linked Tholian space with the region in which we now find ourselves.”

“I can only think of one reason any human diplomat might do something that extreme, Admiral,” Vale said. “This Federation envoy must have planned to live among the Neyel and teach them how their human cousins deal with their problems without A: wiping each other out or, B: trying to conquer the known universe. Am I right?”

“Essentially,” Akaar said. “Or so we have hoped all these years.”

Vale offered the admiral a thin smile. “So how did the ambassador’s plan work out?”

Akaar answered with a mirthless smile of his own. “We are the first Starfleet personnel since the time of Excelsior’s encounter with the Neyel who may have the opportunity to answer to that question.”

Riker’s combadge chose that precise moment to chirp. “Engineering to Captain Riker.”

“Go ahead…Dr. Ra-Havreii,” the captain said after tapping the badge. He had almost used the name of Commander Ledrah, Titan’s recently deceased original chief engineer, and hoped that no one had noticed his near-lapse.

“The repairs and replacements of the burned-out bridge stations are all nearly complete, Captain. And the shield generators will all be back on line within the next three hours. All other systems are already working within acceptable norms, though I believe we can still improve engine performance a great deal.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Commander,” Riker said. Titan’s new Efrosian chief engineer would take some getting used to, but not because Riker had any real concerns about the man’s competency. Xin Ra-Havreii had, after all, been Titan’s principal designer at Starfleet’s Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards, and therefore knew the vessel’s every specification better than any other living sentient being did.

“The damage control teams have already put right the new hull breach deck five sustained during our passage through the anomaly, Captain,”Ra-Havreii continued, reminding Riker once more of the recent battle over Romulus, which had not only placed the Efrosian in charge of Titan’s engine room, but had also left Lieutenant Commander Keru, Titan’s tactical officer and security chief, critically injured. During that skirmish, the deck in question had taken a fair amount of damage; although the engineering teams had sealed that breach within hours of the battle, Titan’s abrupt transit to this region of space had evidently stressed those same weakened portions of the hull beyond their tolerances yet again.

“A lot of the repairs still don’t look very pretty,”Ra-Havreii went on. “But in a few hours I expectTitan to be essentially ‘ship shape’ once again.”

“Good work, Commander. And thank you. Riker out.”

His errant recollection of the death of Titan’s first chief engineer reminded him that he had another duty to perform, and that it had to be tended to very soon. The timing of this sad task was dictated not by a duty roster or a Starfleet regulation, but rather by certain strict cultural requirements of the planet Tiburon, the homeworld of the late Lieutenant Commander Nidani Ledrah, who had perished horribly during the recent skirmish between Romulan and Reman forces.

According to Tiburon funerary custom, the deceased had to be formally eulogized and interred no later than one thirty-two-hour Tiburoni day following the onset of death. Very soon, that time would be up.

As if on cue, Riker’s combadge chirped yet again. This time, the subdued voice of his wife, Diplomatic Officer Deanna Troi, issued from the small gold chevron on his chest.

“Will. It’s almost time.”

“Understood, Deanna. Thanks.”

After Deanna signed off, Riker regarded Vale, Pazlar, Tuvok, and Akaar, all of whom wore dour expressions and drifted in weightless silence.

Riker gestured toward the weird energy phenomenon that still loomed high overhead, all but filling the stellar cartography lab. “Let’s revisit all of this a bit later. After the memorial service.”

Lieutenant Commander Nidani Ledrah was about to embark on her final voyage.