Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [11]
Picard nodded at the Horta positioned behind the lowset transporter console as he followed another Horta out of the transporter room, trailed by Troi and La Forge. The science starship Darwin, in a tradition dating back to Lawrence and Woolley, had been spared no expense. She was a giant, roving archaeological villa with warp engines and a pair of new, oversized shuttles attached to her belly. The shuttles, christened the Balboa and the Engford, gave the outside of the Voyager-class vessel, to Picard’s mind, a curiously pregnant appearance.
Inside, as he had been informed, all of the decks, save for the engineering sector and a few dozen cubic meters of hastily furnished “humanoid quarters,” were a maze of tunnels and bare chambers hewn out of what appeared to be solid rock. Picard, lengthening his stride to keep up with his Horta guide, felt almost as though he were moving through a mineshaft. But it only appeared so.
“To the bridge,” the Horta said when they came to the lift. Picard entered with his two officers; the door slid shut behind them. In a few moments, the door in front of them whisked open.
The Darwin’s bridge, even with its rocklike floor, stations with saddles instead of chairs, and consoles and display screens closer to the floor than usual, was not unlike the bridge of the Enterprise. The distant, only dimly lit Dyson Sphere had grown to cover the entire forward view of the wall screen. Dead center, a subspace beacon dropped by the Sagan’s captain called attention to the only truly useful point of reference on Dyson’s otherwise craterless, colorless surface. When Montgomery Scott’s ship, the Jenolen, crash landed on the Sphere, it had produced a thirty kilometer-long stain, or skid mark. This was the only sign of anything like a meteorite impact in all of Dyson’s history. Even at the screen’s highest possible magnification, there was no evidence that the crash had done the slightest damage to Dyson’s shell. What appeared to be twin furrows of plowed-up debris had come, all of it, from the sandpapering the Jenolen’s underside had received; but the skid mark provided an unmistakable reference for orientation, making “Scott Base” the declared South Pole of Dyson. True as a compass needle, the skid pointed the way to the lock that Picard had opened once before. Captain Dalen tilted the view upward from Scott Base. Upward and upward, revealing a landscape that, though he had seen it before, still seemed impossible to Picard.
The Darwin was a half million kilometers above Scott Base, approximately the height of the Moon over Earth. Dyson’s horizon was many millions of kilometers away; yet the surface, which Picard knew was curved, seemed as level as the Utah salt flats viewed from the height of a footstool.
Picard walked toward the Horta captain’s command pit, with Troi and La Forge just behind him, descending a rocky ramp to the captain’s side. He straightened his tunic and said, more stiffly than he hoped, “Captain Dalen, on behalf of myself and my team, we are honored to be aboard your ship.”
“Thank you,” the Horta’s amplified voice replied. “Together, we shall prevail in our mission. Please sit down, if you wish.”
“Oh, I don’t mind standing,” Picard said. Except for the floor, the only other unoccupied and available seating at the moment was an empty saddle to the right of Captain Dalen.
“Enterprise to Darwin. Data here.”
“Yes, Data,” Picard replied.
“We are almost within sight of the lock entrance,” Data’s voice continued. “I think we can open it by tuning its subspace frequencies. I have now run through just over ninety trillion new subspace sequences. Statistically, we should be able to hit the right one by the time we face the lock.”
“Continue,” Picard said, knowing that what “should be” and what “would be” could be galaxies apart. “We can’t let the system lead us in until we