“Unpredictable, Captain,” Jaza said, shaking his head. “But it’s definitely not an experiment I’d advise anyone to try.”
So I have slightly less than two minutes to decide whether or not to cut and run,Riker thought, facing forward and once again staring into what might have been the very maw of Hell itself. “Maintain present speed for now, Mr. Lavena. Mr. Jaza, Convoy status?”
The Bajoran answered with another glum shake of the head. “There’s no sign of them yet, Captain. There’s been no response to our hails, even on the navigational hazard data channel we’ve been maintaining with them since our departure from the Oghen system.”
The faces of friends and colleagues flashed unbidden before his mind’s eye. Chris. Keru. Tuvok. Frane, his friends, and some two million of Frane’s people and their former slaves.
Riker silently upbraided himself. Now wasn’t the time for grief, personal or otherwise. Even if the worst had befallen both Vanguard and Donatra’s escort fleet, there were still nearly three hundred others aboard Titanwhose lives would depend on whatever he did, or failed to do, next.
He tapped his combadge. “Riker to engineering.”
“Ra-Havreii here, sir,”the designer-turned-chief-engineer said. He sounded utterly weary, but Riker couldn’t spare the time to ask him why.
“Commander, please tell me your engines can still give me warp six or better at a moment’s notice.”
“It was touch and go there for a while during the passage through the rift, Captain. But at the moment my warp drive is, as you humans sometimes say, willing, ready, and able.”
Riker heard a note of cheer enter Ra-Havreii’s voice, and it buoyed him. “That’s music to my ears, Commander. We may need to leave in a hurry, and verysoon. Riker out.”
He stared at the main viewscreen, gazing into the roiling, expanding depths of the inexorably approaching Red King.
“ ‘May’ need to leave, Captain?” Akaar said, his voice a low, almost subterranean rumble.
Riker shot a hard glare at the admiral. “As Mr. Dakal just said, we don’t know what will happen if and when the Red King reaches us. But we also don’t know whether or not we’ll have another chance to recover the convoy, or even to find out what the hell happened to them, if we leave now.” Turning toward Dakal, he said, “Auxiliary power to the sensor web, Cadet. Mr. Jaza, keep searching every cubic meter of that energy cloud’s interior.”
“Understood, Captain.”
“Two minutes until contact,” Lavena said, sounding at least as nervous as she had on that long-ago evening in the embassy swimming pool on Pacifica. Riker realized then that he had to be more than a little overwrought himself, to be recalling that particular incident now,of all times.
The turbolift hissed open, drawing Riker’s attention long enough to allow him to see a weary-looking Deanna Troi step out onto the bridge. She quickly crossed to the chair at Riker’s left.
“You should be resting, Commander,” Riker said quietly, noticing the dark circles under her eyes. “Dr. Ree’s orders.” Now that the fate of Vanguard and everyone aboard her lay in the lap of the gods, he felt acutely guilty about the sense of relief he’d experienced when Ree had persuaded her to return to Titan.
She smiled crookedly, crossing her arms across her chest. “I tried, Captain. I only came up to complain about all the noise. What did I miss?”
He tossed a curt frown her way and concentrated on the emotional-mental link they shared. Let’s hope you didn’t get here just in time for the end,Imzadi .
Don’t mind me, then, Will,she thought back to him. Get to work. And let’s try to stay positive, shall we?
She was right. Settling backward into his command chair, Riker stroked his beard, dismissed his doubts, and tried to project an aura of calm deliberation to everyone on the bridge.
“Anything yet, Mr. Jaza?”
“Negative, sir.” Jaza’s utterance was freighted with an uncharacteristic burden of despair. Riker considered all the times he had nearly lost Deanna forever, and wondered whether the science officer was having similar ruminations about Christine, who had remained on Vanguard. He was aware that the Bajoran had experienced a great deal of loss already, thanks to the decades-long Cardassian occupation of his homeworld. And he had noticed the way that Jaza sometimes studied Vale when he thought no one was looking.
“There’s a great deal of interference inside the phenomenon,” Jaza said. “Continuing scans, active and passive modes.”
Several more eternities passed. Finally, Lavena interrupted one of them. “Forty-five seconds until contact.”
Riker once again found himself gripping the arms of his command chair nearly hard enough to disrupt his circulation. In front of him, the boundaries of the Red King had reached those of the viewscreen. The background stars were no longer visible.
“Thirty seconds,” Lavena said quietly.
“Will?” Deanna said, patient yet clearly concerned.
“Captain?” Akaar said, his tone sharp. “I cannot permit you to commit Titanto an act of w’lash’nogot.”
Riker tore his gaze away from the Red King. Though he wasn’t certain he understood the reference the admiral had made, he gathered that Akaar thought he was contemplating suicide. Doesn’t he know me better than that by now?
In a tone as sharp as Akaar’s, he said, “We’re not going anywhere until we absolutely have to, Admiral.”
Riker glanced to starboard toward the main science station, where Jaza was frowning in apparent perplexity.
“What is it, Mr. Jaza?”
“The Sleeper is… changing,sir.”
Riker rose and approached the railing that separated the lower bridge from the circle of duty stations that surrounded it. “Changing how?”
“It’s thinning out, Captain. Disintegrating.And I think I’m finally picking up the subspace blast wave from the detonations of all those Romulan warp cores, though it’s already become highly attenuated.”
“I’m picking up a large-scale gravimetric flux along the phenomenon’s event horizon,” Eviku reported.
“Meaning?” Riker asked.
“Meaning the spatial rift itself is starting to collapse as the energy cloud continues to spread out and dissipate,” Jaza said. “The protouniverse itself appears to be retreating into de Sitter space.”
“It’s withdrawing back to wherever it came from,” Deanna said, tilting her head as though trying to listen to faint, faraway voices.
Fear clutched at Riker’s heart in earnest then, though it wasn’t for himself or even for his ship. The door out there is slamming shut on the Red King’s heels—and the convoy is still on the wrong side of it. There reallywon’t be another chance to locate them if we can’t do itnow .
“Fifteen seconds, sir,” Lavena said, sounding more than a little apprehensive.
Riker glanced at Akaar, who continued to glare down at him from the upper bridge. Before the admiral could say what was obviously on his mind, Riker touched his combadge as he crossed back to his command chair.
“Commander Ra-Havreii, stand by to warp out of here at my signal.” Riker took his seat, staring resolutely forward as the Red King entered what appeared to be its death throes. He reached to his left and squeezed Deanna’s hand.
Good-bye, Chris. Ranul. Tuvok. Damn!
“Ready, Captain,”the Efrosian engineer said.
“Ten seconds,” Lavena said.
“Captain!”