Riker glanced back at Frane, whose entire attention was still absorbed by the tragedy that continued to unfold on the viewscreen. He’d hoped that the horrors he was witnessing might galvanize the young Neyel to offer to assist in the rescue of his people. Instead, Frane merely seemed to have frozen in his tracks.
He’s no good to anyone in that condition,Riker thought, imagining how much the presence of another Neyel might help calm the legions of the confused and panicked as they arrived. He briefly considered ordering Hutchinson to escort Frane down to sickbay, where Dr. Ree or Dr. Onnta could evaluate him for emotional trauma.
He decided that there would be time for that later. That is, if there’s any time left foranything later.
Placing his focus squarely on Jaza, Riker gestured across the bridge toward his ready room doors. “Show me what your team has come up with, Mr. Jaza. And do it fast.”
“Can you really put this thing to sleep?” the captain said, seated behind the ready room’s heavy Elaminite desk after having concluded a quick call down to Dr. Ra-Havreii in engineering.
Kent Norellis was surprised at how discombobulated the new Efrosian chief engineer had sounded when the captain had assigned him the task of prepping the ancient O’Neill colony for towing back to the Red King anomaly. Ordinarily, Norellis would have been relieved to learn that he wasn’t the only one aboard whose nerves sometimes got the better of him. Under the current circumstances, however, he decided that he’d greatly prefer the company of unflappable, steel-nerved daredevils.
Now, as the impatient gazes of both the captain and Admiral Akaar buffeted him front and back, the astrobiologist felt as though he were caught in a crossfire between two such men.
“Putting it deeper into sleep is a pretty good metaphor for what we’re proposing,” Norellis said.
Responding to the confused expressions on the faces of both Riker and Akaar, Jaza stepped in, an apparent rescue maneuver that forced excessive heat and color into Norellis’s cheeks.
“At least we believe there’s a way to prevent the Sleeper from fully ‘waking up,’ ” Jaza said.
Riker handed the padd up to Akaar to allow the admiral to review the science team’s notes. “I think you may be straining the metaphor a bit here, Mr. Jaza. Unless I’m reading this wrong, your plan calls for artificially collapsing the spatial anomaly that brought us here in the first place.”
Jaza nodded. “Well, it isthe extradimensional conduit through which our so-called Red King—which is nothing less than a rapidly expanding, sapienogenic protouniverse—is able to wreak destruction in thisuniverse.”
Riker made a sour face. “I wish you hadn’t reminded me that some sort of intelligence seems to be guiding this thing.”
“Why?” Norellis said. He almost physically kicked himself for blurting out the question, because the room went silent. Once again, every eye and sensory cluster in the room—Cethente stood motionless in the corner, where he resembled an antique Argelian lamp—was fixed on him.
“Because,” Akaar said in a low, almost sepulchral rumble, “the issue of sentience raises certain unavoidable and perhaps irresolvable Prime Directive issues. As the ranking officer aboard Titan,I cannot simply ignore those issues.”
“Nor can I,” Riker said, looking frustrated, but also determined. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make every conceivable contingency plan.” His icy blue eyes lit squarely on Jaza. “All right. Please explain for us lay people how you plan to go about this.”
“It involves, in essence, ‘jamming’ the neuromagnetic signatures the anomaly is giving off,” the Bajoran said. “Our computer simulations indicate that the simultaneous strategic detonation of about two dozen warp cores could essentially force the protouniverse—and the spatial rift that brought it here—back into de Sitter space, where it came from in the first place. The protouniverse would vanish, and the rift that let it into our universe would be sealed back up.”
“Preferably the rift would seal up behindus,” Norellis said. “Afterwe retrace our steps through the anomaly’s interspatial corridor back to Romulan space.”
“Assuming that’s possible,” Riker said.
“Again, the simulations we’ve been running look good,” Jaza said. “Of course, the only way to test them definitively is by actual experiment.” He paused momentarily, allowing everyone to consider his words in silence. Then he continued, his tone as serious as the inscription on a granite tomb. “We have exactly one shot at this.”
Riker sighed. “Of course. Okay, let’s assume we get back home, with the spatial rift slamming shut right on our stern. Won’t our Red King simply emerge again in some other universe?”
“Perhaps,”Cethente said in a voice like a carillon. “But it might lie dormant for billions of years first. It might even return here billions of years from now.”
Riker stroked his beard, a look of concern crumpling his brow. “So would we be arbitrarily killing off a universe full of sentience? Or just postponing the Sleeper’s wakeup call for an eon or two?”
Or maybe we’re just letting the Red King continue his dream for another billion or so years,Norellis thought. So we don’t all suddenly pop out of existence like soap bubbles. Or dreams.He was glad that he seemed for once to be exhibiting the good sense not to babble his every errant thought out loud.
“We really can’t say for certain that we’d actually be killinganything ,”Cethente said. “We might simply be transplanting this nascent universe to someother universe. One that possesses no sapience to be wiped out by the, ah, Sleeper’s full and final awakening.”
“Conversely, we can’t prove that we’re notslaughtering an entire universe full of sentience,” Jaza said. “Of course, we all may well be doing that unwittingly every time we use the sonic shower. Or take an antibiotic.”
“Don’t get us started down that path, Mr. Jaza,” Riker said, allowing a small grin to escape. “We’ll all end up as crazy as a Starfleet Academy exophilosophy instructor I once knew.”
Still studying the padd, Akaar shook his head, then handed the device back to the captain. “My objection is less ethical than practical. The power requirements necessary for success are extraordinary.”
Norellis couldn’t argue with that. He could, however, imagine Ra-Havreii’s head exploding like a supernova when he finally saw the equations on the padd.
“I’m afraid there’s no getting around that, Admiral,” said Jaza. “We would need the warp cores of several dozen Neyel vessels to generate sufficient power. But surely we can persuade the locals to help, given the seriousness of the current crisis.”
Riker was shaking his head. “I’ve tried talking with the Neyel military officers we rescued. Several times. They still behave as though they’re prisoners of war, even now. I’m afraid even Frane isn’t very trusting, and he’s the least paranoid of the bunch. I’m sorry, Mr. Jaza—I think you might have better luck trying to persuade Suran and Donatra to let us blow up theirfleet inside the anomaly.”
Akaar actually chuckled at that, a deep sound that made Norellis’s spine feel as though someone had just dipped it into a beaker of liquid nitrogen.
“Actually, the subspace signatures of Romulan singularity drives might make them better suited for this purpose than Neyel warp cores,”Cethente said without a trace of irony. “In fact, we conceived the notion of using multiple vessels in tandem operation after reviewing how the Red King used Commander Donatra’s fleet to destabilize that G-eight star three days ago.”