Текст книги "The Red King "

Автор книги: Michael Martin

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

A short time later, a shuttlecraft from theWyoming landed on the planetoid. Rescue had arrived. Finally.

But aboard the shuttle, and in theWyoming ’s sickbay, and later still, Tuvok felt the chasm between himself and Akaar growing ever wider. The captain would only speak to him when duty required it.

During the ship’s next starbase visit a week later, Tuvok learned that he was being unceremoniously transferred off theWyoming . His trajectory would not intersect again with Akaar’s for another three decades.

UntilTitan brought them together again.

Chapter Five

IMPERIAL WARBIRD VALDORE,STARDATE 57023.5

Donatra heard the voice, but only barely, as though it was coming from a considerable distance. She felt as though she were floating at the bottom of a well, her eyes swaddled in a heavy blanket of darkness.

Death,she thought. This is death, come for me at last.

But the fire that lanced her side, the stubborn remnant of the wounds she had received during her recent struggles against the hated false praetor Tal’Aura, argued eloquently that she was anything but dead. The blackness that surrounded her slowly morphed into a deep red. She became cognizant that she still possessed eyes, though she had to expend an extraordinary amount of effort just to force them open.

“Commander!” shouted Seketh, the young female decurion who crouched over her. Seketh’s voice sounded far more shrill than it had ever sounded before.

The remainder of her senses beginning to return to her, Donatra felt the hard deckplates beneath her back. Heat from a smoldering duty station across the room warmed the back of her neck. Ozone stung her nostrils, helping her focus her energies. Emergency lighting cast bizarre shadows across the bridge of the warbird Valdore.The broad central viewscreen, which dominated the forward section of the wide, semicircular chamber, displayed a violent hailstorm of static.

“Report,” Donatra said, her throat feeling as rough as ancient granite as she pushed herself up into a sitting position. Seketh hastened to take her arm, helping her rise to her feet.

“Most of the ship’s systems are functioning only marginally, if at all. All propulsion will be down for at least an entire eisae,and we have hull breaches on B and C decks. Damage control teams have already been dispatched. Reports of injuries are coming in from all over the ship, six of them critical. There have been three deaths, including Subcommander T’Kraith.”

Akhh!Donatra thought as she surveyed the details of the systems report, which were scrolling upward on the nearby operations console. My first officer, gone. Still more death during my watch.She thought she remembered having seen something rush toward the ship from the center of Shinzon’s Folly, the mysterious energy cloud that was already becoming known throughout the Empire as the Great Bloom. What had the Bloom—the remnant of Shinzon’s dreaded, and thankfully exploded, thalaron weapon—done to the Valdore? It seemed to Donatra that the vindictive shade of the dead praetor was still taking the lives of her crew, if only indirectly. And that didn’t even take into account whatever had happened to the rest of the fleet.

She found that completely unacceptable. “What exactly happened to us?” she asked Seketh.

“Something hit us, Commander.”

Now vividly recalling the moment of impact, Donatra frowned at the decurion. “Obviously. Were we fired upon?”

“We can’t rule it out, Commander,” Seketh said. “But if it was weapons fire, it wasn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before.”

Moving shakily, Donatra headed toward the command chair, which was mounted atop a riser in the bridge’s center. She took her seat in silence, wondering if one of Governor Khegh’s warships might have cloaked itself, then followed the Valdoreand Titanto the Bloom. Had the Klingons then launched a sneak attack while her attention had been occupied by the Great Bloom, and the missing fleet she sought to recover from its maw? She seriously doubted that Titan’s commander, whom she had aided in the battle to bring down Praetor Shinzon, would have employed such treachery.

The Klingons, however, were another matter entirely.

But hadn’t whatever struck the Valdorecome from insidethe Great Bloom? Her best recollection told her that this was so.

Still, her gut warned her that she still needed to stay alert for cloaked Klingons. Khegh’s skillful ascension to the governorship of a Klingon-Reman protectorate in Romulan space made it clear to her now that the Klingon officer’s blustering churlishness was but a tactic calculated to make him easy to underestimate. Tal’Aura might have fallen for the ruse, but Donatra was determined not to be so foolish.

Liravek, a male centurion with somewhat more experience than Seketh, approached Donatra from one of the bridge’s few undamaged consoles. “I can find no trace of the residual energy particles characteristic of weapons fire anywhere on the Valdore’s hull.”

Donatra’s frown deepened. “Then what has happened to us?”

Liravek shrugged almost imperceptibly, his composure far more strained than Donatra had ever seen it. “We appear to have been caught in a natural energy discharge of some kind.”

“Originating where?” Donatra asked, though she was becoming certain that she already knew the answer.

Liravek nodded toward the main viewer, whose static had finally cleared enough to reveal an image that was simultaneously familiar and strange. “From somewhere inside the spatial rift.”

Donatra looked toward the multicolored, fiercely beautiful image of what amounted to a gigantic rent in the fabric of space. The florid, grasping hands of the Great Bloom, the fell thing created by dead Shinzon’s overweening ambition, had evidently turned its fury upon the Valdore,just as she had suspected—and just as it had apparently already done to the fleet she had so carefully hidden just inside the energy cloud’s coruscating periphery. As a result, the several dozen warbirds that she and Commander Suran had painstakingly assembled had vanished without a trace. She was now more determined than ever to locate and recover those vessels, and their loyal Romulan crews.

She wondered: How had Captain Riker’s vessel weathered the Bloom’s wrath? Had Titanbeen drawn here as well?

“Scan the rift and the region surrounding it as carefully as you can for other ships, Centurion Liravek,” she said, her eyes fixed upon the viewer as though her stare alone might tease out the phenomenon’s secrets.

As Centurion Liravek, Decurion Seketh, Centurion T’Relek, and a pair of junior technicians made haste to carry out this order, a chime sounded on the arm of Donatra’s command chair, indicating an incoming message.

“Infirmary to bridge,”said Dr. Venora, the Valdore’s chief medical officer. “We’re being swamped with injuries down here, Commander. What happened up there?”

In spite of herself, Donatra smiled slightly at Venora’s overly gruff tone. Nobody else aboard the Valdorewould dare to speak to her in this manner. Except, perhaps, for Commander Suran, with whom Donatra had served under the command of her murdered lover, Admiral Braeg.

Suran, with whom Donatra had uneasily shared control of the Romulan Star Empire’s combined military forces during the many weeks that had passed since Shinzon’s death.

Suran,she thought. Why isn’t he on the bridge?

“I’ll inform you fully once we’ve found a definitive answer to that question, Doctor.”

A pause. “All right. But I’m quite sure that Commander Suran won’t be satisfied with that. Once he regains consciousness, that is.”

Donatra needed a moment to process this news. Suran’s expertise had been quite useful to her on a number of occasions, so she had no wish to see him die. However, there were also times when he had proved to be a real impediment to the plans she had made to expand the military faction’s influence and resource base. If he were to die in service to the Empire, Donatra would lose the value of Suran’s not inconsiderable experience.

But there would be far fewer challenges to her decisions, in that event.

Like my decision to hide the fleet within the periphery of the Great Bloom?asked a small, accusatory voice in a still back corner of Donatra’s mind.

“What is Suran’s prognosis, Doctor?” she said, forcibly pushing her self-recriminations aside.

“His injuries are superficial, Commander. A concussion and some cuts. It would have taken far worse to keep him out of action for long.”

Relief and disappointment wrestled within her breast in equal measure. How long would it be before Suran was back on the bridge, reminding her that she had placed the security of the Empire in grave peril by losing the fleet?

“Then I will hope for a speedy recovery, Doctor. Keep me advised. Bridge out.”

Donatra rose from her chair, her old wounds aching slightly as she moved toward Centurion T’Relek’s duty station. He was staring intently into a small, console-mounted monitor, and the perplexed expression on his weathered, angular face had drawn her attention.

“What is it, Centurion? Have you found any sign of our fleet? Or of Titan?”

T’Relek turned his dark eyes on her. “The Bloom’s energy emissions are interfering greatly with our sensors, Commander. So the readings we’re getting are inconclusive. Even the subspace bands are jammed.”

“Then we must increase our distance from the Bloom until we’ve cleared the interference it is generating.”

“Yes, Commander. It will be so as soon as the propulsion systems are repaired. But there’s something else.”

She noticed that his look of perplexity had deepened. “What is it?”

“The constellation of Khellian the Hunter has vanished. As have Dhael the Raptor and Ravsam the Sisters.”

Donatra looked over T’Relek’s shoulder so that she, too, could study the starfield that his scans, such as they were, had compiled thus far.

She saw then that it was a completely unfamiliar stellar arrangement, as though the stars had suddenly been re-set, tossed instantly into a new random pattern, like the dice some deity might roll in a cosmic game of Trayatik.

“This has to be a sensor error of some sort, Commander,” T’Relek said.

Donatra felt her throat suddenly go dry. A horrible, plummeting sensation was developing in her belly. She recalled a report filed a decade ago by Commander T’Reth, who had captained the Imperial Warbird Dracowhen a temporary spatial rift had instantly displaced it by over a dozen parsecs. Had something like that just happened to the Valdore?

“Dispatch a full complement of sensor drones,” Donatra ordered. “Use ordinary EM transmissions for telemetry if you cannot overcome the Bloom’s subspace interference. We cannot afford to wait for functional engines to determine what has become of our ships, Titan,and any Klingon vessels that might have quietly followed us to the Bloom.”

And I must know exactly what has happened to the stars.

It had taken several veraku,a goodly portion of a Romulan day in fact, to receive and analyze the data the drones had collected and transmitted to the still-crippled warbird Valdore.During that time, Donatra had kept some of her bridge crew busy scanning the depths of the Bloom to the very limits of the ship’s sensor acuity, despite the energy cloud’s persistent—and uniformly successful—efforts to withhold its secrets.

She had ordered the uninjured members of her science and stellar navigation staff to keep their eyes and instruments turned outward, toward the brilliant scattering of unfamiliar stars that lay far beyond the Great Bloom in every direction.

Now she almost regretted the alacrity with which her people had discovered the answer to her most salient question: Where are we?

“There is no mistake, Commander,” Liravek said with an almost resigned calm. “The Valdoreis no longer located in Romulan space, or anywhere near Romulan space.”

“But how can that be?” Suran said, almost growling as he stabbed a thick finger toward the majestic energy cloud displayed on the main bridge viewer. Then he adjusted the bandage that swathed his thick brow; he was no doubt still in considerable pain from the fall he had taken when the Great Bloom had lashed out at the Valdorethe previous day. “The spatial rift is obviously still there. And we all know that the Great Bloom is positioned well inside Romulan space.”

Donatra glanced toward Dr. Venora, who stood beside an unoccupied diagnostic console, her lined face framed by her shoulder-length, gray-streaked hair as she kept a watchful medical eye trained squarely on Suran. Donatra closed her own eyes briefly, choosing not to respond to Suran’s remark. He had, after all, regained consciousness only a little while ago, immediately after which time he had bullied Dr. Venora into releasing him earlier than was probably wise.

“The Great Bloom apparently has the capacity to displace objects across vast interstellar distances, Commander,” Centurion Liravek said. “Or even inter galacticdistances. The Bloom we see now is merely the other side of a spatial rift that extends all the way out here.”

“And just whereis here?”Suran asked, sounding ever more frustrated.

“Well inside the small satellite galaxy known on our maps as Enhaire.”

Suran shook his head, which made him wince in pain. “That’s impossible, Centurion. No ship has ever traveled so far out of the galaxy.”

“Perhaps not before today,” Donatra said. “It’s possible that we’re the first.” And there’s always a first time for everything.

She wondered then whether the other ships of the fleet were here as well. But if that were so, then where were they?

A sensor alarm suddenly whooped on Decurion Seketh’s console, whose touch-sensitive surfaces were alight with frantic brightness.

TheValdore may be among the first to get out this far,Donatra thought as she strode toward Seketh’s station. But perhaps she isn’t the only one to have made this voyagetoday .

“What have you found, Decurion?” Donatra asked.

Seketh’s eyes grew wide. “At least one large vessel, and what appear to be several small metallic objects.”

“Debris?”

“Negative, Commander. They read as pressurized, and there appear to be intermittently detectable life signs coming from within each of them.”

“Escape pods, then.”

“I believe so, Commander.”

Donatra nodded. “Are there any life signs on the large vessel?”

“Apparently, Commander, though it is difficult to be certain because of the sensor interference created by the Great Bloom.”

“Can the ship and the pods be recovered?” Donatra asked.

“Possibly,” Seketh said. “Though the power cost and the strain on ship’s systems will be excessive. The escape pods and the other ship are drifting in opposite directions, nearly a thousand k’vahrudeeper inside the periphery of the Bloom than our current position. And they all appear to be spiraling dangerously close to the rift’s event horizon. Unless the Bloom’s energy discharges are fooling our sensors.”

“What is the ship’s configuration?” Donatra asked, only now allowing herself to hope that she stood a real chance of conferring with Captain Riker about a mutual problem.

The decurion studied her readings for a moment longer, then looked up again, her eyes widening further. “It’s Klingon!”

“Tactical alert!” shouted Donatra.

Whatever punishment the Valdorehad suffered during its passage through the Great Bloom, the Klingon warship she now approached had clearly experienced far, far worse. It had been in no condition to put up a fight when the Valdoretractored her, along with the nearby quartet of escape pods, away from the immediate vicinity of the Bloom’s hazardous event horizon. The Klingon vessel, which belonged to the large, heavily armed and armored Vor’chaclass, apparently no longer possessed even the capacity to be coaxed into a deliberate, self-immolating warp core breach to prevent her from being captured by Romulan personnel. Because the larger vessel was so much more damaged than any of the escape pods, Donatra made rescue operations on the former a higher priority than of the latter.

Donatra studied the battered, broken Klingon ship, beyond which drifted four tiny, dented and scorched escape pods. She marveled that anyone aboard the Klingon vessel had survived its countless hull breaches, even as a pair of its officers materialized on the warbird’s primary transporter stage before her, Suran, Dr. Venora, and a heavily armed Romulan security team.

“I am Commander Donatra,” Donatra said, stepping toward her two guests a moment after they had finished materializing. “You are aboard the Imperial Warbird Valdore.”

The taller of the pair of Klingon figures who now stood on the transporter stage was a fierce-looking male whose thick, rough-textured forehead bore an angry wound that oozed a viscous lavender fluid. His heavily mailed though distressed leather uniform bore the rank insignia of a ship’s captain in the Klingon Defense Force. Beside him stood an equally imposing if slightly smaller female, who appeared relatively uninjured and whose uniform markings identified her as a lieutenant. Their sharp, snaggly teeth reminded Donatra of the summer during her childhood she had spent tending thraiinon her uncle’s waithfarm. What she recalled most about that experience was that thraiinwere vicious, smelly, and thoroughly repugnant creatures, however succulent their flesh might taste.

Animals,Donatra thought as she eyed the Klingons, feeling the profound, visceral revulsion she always experienced when in the presence of these people. Unlike thraiin,Klingons lacked even the single redeeming characteristic of being edible—or so she had been told. How could we have allowed the likes ofthese to establish a beachhead in Romulan space?

The male Klingon puffed up his chest in an apparent effort to compensate for the shabby condition of his uniform. “I am Captain Tchev, master of the I.K.S. Dugh,”he said, gesturing toward the female beside him. “My second officer, Lieutenant Dekri.” Coldly eyeing the armed guards who now flanked him and his third in command, Tchev added, “And we would appear to be your prisoners.”

Donatra smiled mirthlessly. “I thought our respective empires were allies now, Captain. You are our guests.”

“That was during the war,” Tchev sniffed. “How many of the rest of my crew now number among your ‘guests’?”

“Besides yourself and your second officer,” Donatra said with studied calmness, “we have identified thirty-four other surviving personnel on your vessel, which we have taken in tow.” At considerable cost,she added silently, regretting the huge drain the salvage operation was placing on the Valdore’s power resources. “We are in the process of bringing your people aboard this vessel, for their own safety.”

“And what, exactly, do you intend to do with them?”

“All of your personnel will be well accommodated,” Donatra said, nodding. It had been relatively easy to convert one of the Valdore’s empty cargo bays into an impromptu detention area nearly as secure as the ship’s brig.

“And I will ensure that they will receive whatever medical care they need,” Dr. Venora told the Klingon captain, prompting Donatra to raise an eyebrow slightly in the physician’s direction. Venora, who had been practicing medicine aboard Imperial military vessels for nearly a century, frequently did not see fit to seek her considerably younger commander’s leave before speaking her mind. It was a trait that Donatra found both invaluable and annoying.

Dekri hawked and spat a noxious, yellowish mass onto the transporter stage. “None of our crew will ever allow a Romulan bachHa’to lay hands upon them. They would take their own lives before accepting such a soiling.”

“Good,” Suran said, staring with evident disgust at the spittle-dabbed transporter. “That would greatly simplify matters for us. Would they prefer to commit suicide here, or back aboard your wreck of a ship?”

Venora scowled at him. “Is that any way to talk to our wartime allies, Commander?”

“A great deal has happened since the Dominion War, Doctor, just as our esteemed Captain Tchev has suggested,” Suran said, evidently disgusted by the good doctor’s naïveté.

“Why did you follow us to the energy cloud?” Donatra asked Tchev, cutting off the exchange between her colleagues.

“We will tell you nothing, Romulan taHqeq,”Tchev growled, displaying his brown, uneven teeth.

“Perhaps not willingly,” Suran said. “However, we could always acquaint you with our mind probes.”

“I have been trained to withstand the highest settings on a Klingon mind-sifter,” Tchev replied, raising his chin contemptuously. “Your interrogations hold no fear for me.”

Glaring at Suran, Dekri bared a phalanx of sharp, crooked teeth that looked every bit as unattractive as Tchev’s. “I doubt you would dare to try it. Not with a Reman-Klingon alliance poised in the skies above your Empire’s capital city.”

Suran appeared unruffled by Dekri’s threat. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed yet, but we’re a long way from Romulus at the moment.”

Donatra was growing impatient with Suran’s sparring with the Klingons. “It doesn’t matter, Suran. It’s perfectly obvious why the Klingons are here. Governor Khegh must have observed the Valdoreflying from the vicinity of Romulus to the Great Bloom, with Titanat her side. He would have been remiss not to have dispatched a cloaked vessel in an attempt to discover the reason behind this joint voyage.”

Donatra met Tchev’s stare, which gave away little other than a Klingon’s characteristic belligerence. But that, in itself, told her that the Klingons were very likely still completely in the dark about why the Valdoreand Titanhad quietly left the vicinity of Romulus together. Were it otherwise, would Tchev not boast of his knowledge?Donatra seriously doubted that neither Tchev nor Dekri were aware of the Romulan fleet that the Great Bloom had unexpectedly swallowed the previous day.

“Regardless,” Donatra continued, “we will now commence rescuing the personnel aboard your escape pods.”

Tchev tipped his head, frowning. “What are you talking about, Romulan petaQ?”

“Excuse me?” Donatra said, carefully blanking her face so as not to register surprise.

“We launched no escape pods,” Dekri said, her bulbous head lofted haughtily. Donatra decided she didn’t much care for the lieutenant’s stare, which she now noticed was drifting away from her face and moving down her torso in an appraising, almost lascivious manner.

Revolted, Donatra turned to face the decurion who was in charge of operating the transporter console. “Have you obtained a transporter lock on the personnel contained in those escape pods?”

“Yes, Commander.”

Donatra turned back to Tchev. She fixed him with a hard stare as she continued addressing the decurion. “Scan the life-forms within. Are they Klingon?”

“No, Commander,” the junior officer said, surprise evident in his tone.

“Do you recognize the species?”

“Not all of them, Commander. One pod contains several biosignatures that I’ve never seen before. But all the rest of the life signs…” He trailed off momentarily as he tapped commands into his console, as if double-checking a result that couldn’t possibly be correct.

“Well?” Suran demanded, scowling. “Do you recognize any of the rest?”

The decurion looked up from his instruments, his pale features presenting a study in incredulity. “They’re human,Commander.”

Frane grasped the bracelet nearly hard enough to crush some of its more ancient stones. To avoid doing just that, he carefully wrapped the bracelet around his left wrist, the way his father had worn it.

Quaking in fear as she pressed up against him, Nozomi established a similarly viselike grip on Frane’s other hand, while her tail wrapped around his waist almost tightly enough to cut off his air. The Oghen pairbond, g’Ishea and Fasaryl, as well as the sensory portions of Lofi, the multipartite Sturr, crowded behind him in an effort to see what he was seeing. The five of them were all that remained of the Seekers After Penance.

Gazing through the small, round window of the evacuation capsule, Frane watched with mounting horror as the graceful, predatory-looking ship made its slow, menacing approach. Though the vessel had taken a fair amount of exterior damage, its appearance was unmistakable.

It was definitely the same type of ship that had comprised the flotilla that wiped out his father’s military vessels scarcely an Oghenturn earlier.

“So they’ve come back to finish us off,” Fasaryl said, his multiple stomachs gurgling loudly in evident terror.

“Be quiet,” Frane said. “And please try to keep your innards under control.” He had been in close quarters with the Oghen pair for too long, and could tell that he was growing irritable because of it. Immediately regretting his brusqueness, he turned toward the cowlike creatures and continued speaking in milder tones. “The other ships attacked from a much greater distance. This one appears to be only a handful of klomters away.”

“And they have other concerns as well,” Lofi said, one of her sensory stalks crossing over Frane’s shoulder and bobbing close to the glass. “They appear to be towing another ship.”

“How can you tell?” Frane said, squinting into the blackness. Lacking Lofi’s extraordinarily sensitive vision, he thought he’d have to take her word for it.

Then he saw it: a hole among the stars, a slowly moving region of blackness that obscured the tendrils of energy visible within the ragged edges of the Sleeper. A shape that resembled a large vessel of some sort. It evidently lacked the power even for running lights, and had a swooping, tapered shape similar to the profile of the vessel that was apparently towing it.

“They attacked before,” Fasaryl said. “They’ll attack again.”

“We don’t know that,” Frane said, though he had to admit he felt every bit as frightened as the Oghen.

Then Fasaryl vanished in a shimmer of light, followed immediately by Lofi, who shrieked in pain at being teleported away in pieces, since her multipartite body had not been gathered into a single unit when the aliens’ teleportation beam found her. Frane heard g’Ishea lowing in panic, her hooves clattering frantically against the capsule’s floor as she, too, vanished.

Before he could utter a single word of comfort to the terrified Nozomi, the shimmering light returned, claiming them both.

The next several hours were a blur of terror for Frane. He recalled little, except that he had been separated from the other Seekers After Penance, and had been permitted neither to see nor to speak with Nozomi. They had been taken by sallow-skinned men and women who resembled nothing more than the marauding, green-blooded elves from out of the centuries-old legends of the People of Oh-Neyel. His captors had confiscated almost every bodily adornment from him, including his pilgrim’s robe and underclothing, and had struck him when he’d tried to prevent them from snatching away the ancient story bracelet he had removed—had it been only yesterday?—from his father’s corpse. After taking even that, they had drugged him, as best as he could recall through his current state of befuddlement, and had shouted at him repeatedly in a tongue he couldn’t understand.

At some point they had evidently shaved his gray scalp, and a gray-haired, pointed-eared woman with an oddly kind face had attached slender cables to his skull. She spoke several unintelligible commands into a handheld control device.

Red, raging red pain followed, during which he screamed and pleaded and babbled and cried and laughed like a lunatic. He had been a Seeker After Penance, and now he had found a surfeit of it. A black pit of unconsciousness opened next, and he fell gratefully into it, tumbling end over end over end into oblivion.

Then he slept. He dreamed that the Sleeper had at last come fully awake, sweeping away the alien ships, the evacuation capsules.

And every planet his people had ever colonized, exploited, and ruined.

After an eternity, he came awake in a pool of cold sweat, suddenly disappointed that the Sleeper had notrisen to relieve his misery once and for all. The kind-faced elf woman he had seen earlier was staring beneficently down at him. She spoke to him in an almost gentle voice.

To his enormous surprise, he understood her words this time.

Standing beside Dr. Venora, Donatra watched the sleeping alien patient through the infirmary’s one-way transparisteel window. The strange semihumanoid creature, now dressed in a short-sleeved, open-necked infirmary smock, lay unconscious on one of the treatment beds, a rumpled white sheet draped over flesh that looked as gray as that of a Cardassian, and nearly as tough as that of a Nasat.

“You’re sure you’ve overcome the language barrier?”

Venora nodded, a rueful expression on her lined face. Donatra knew that she avoided using coercion on her patients whenever possible. But the doctor had bowed to the necessity of expediting the information-gathering process. And the missing fleet hadto be found, after all.

“The sessions with the mind-probes greatly accelerated the work of our translation matrix,” Venora said, glancing down at the padd in her hand. “It might have taken an entire eisaeotherwise merely to parse his language. We seem to have managed it in just a couple of veraku,possibly because it appears to contain certain elements of Federation Standard.”

Donatra’s eyes widened at this surprising revelation, and she nodded an acknowledgment. “Well done, Doctor. I wonder how the language of the Federation managed to spread so far from its source.”

“I imagine that must have happened the same way their human biosigns got out here.” Venora offered her superior a small, lopsided grin. “But since human migrations aren’t my area of expertise, Commander, I’ll concentrate instead on matters of medicine and physiology. The biomonitors show that he’s regaining consciousness. You may speak with him now. His name is Frane. So far, I’ve had time to learn little else.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Donatra said, then strode toward the infirmary door. Venora followed her to the patient’s bedside, as did a pair of armed guards.

Donatra looked at the recumbent figure on the infirmary bed; the sheet draped over it did not obscure the rough gray hide, the opposable thumbs on its feet, nor the long, thick-thewed tail that dangled limply onto the deck-plating.