Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [16]
A strange group of associations, Data thought. This was what human beings meant when they talked of feelings of foreboding, or of being “spooked.”
Data wondered why. Perhaps it was the very vastness of the Sphere, into which a tiny speck like the Darwin—or the Enterprise—could so easily disappear and end up traveling for eons, like a ghost ship, without ever finding its way out again. Certainly, the loss of any ship was one of many possibilities, nothing more, but it seemed, at that moment, that he was watching the last of her.
As the Darwin settled into orbit around the alien moon, Picard saw on the forward viewscreen that its surface was a smooth eggshell finish. There were “dust” particles clinging to the shell—bundles of heavy helium clumped together with carbon isotopes and other residua of the solar wind. No signs of cratering, however. No meteoritic debris of any sort. Of course not. Every chip of ice, every interplanetary pebble, had been swept up in a cyclopean construction project.
“No sign of an entrance,” Geordi said from his bridge station aft.
“What did they do, seal it up?” Picard asked.
“It seems that way.”
“Or the entrance is expertly hidden,” Picard suggested.
“We may not have time to find it,” Captain Dalen said.
Picard nodded agreement, and said, “Then we should take one of your shuttles down to the surface and see if we can break in.”
“Ah,” Captain Dalen said. “After a few weeks of ceramic foam and false granite, my crew will be more than ready for a new flavor.”
“It may be a surface that even a Horta can’t eat through,” Picard cautioned.
“We will see if that is true. Horta can synthesize what may be needed, and walk through.”
It still startled him, from time to time, to think that Hortas thought of “walking through” solid objects. It was their physical heritage, of course, but something in the way Captain Dalen had spoken made him think that she was also trying to make another obscure Horta joke.” I know you’re sorry not to be going with us,” Picard was saying to Troi, “but I should leave one member of my crew here, and you are the obvious choice.”
“Of course,” Troi said. She knew why; more time spent with other members of Captain Dalen’s crew would give her more familiarity with their emotions, with what was normal for them. Neither protocol nor standard procedure required her to accompany Picard and La Forge to the shuttle entrance, but she had been picking up some disquieting sensations from Captain Dalen. That was yet another reason for comparing with other members of her crew what she sensed inside the Horta commander.
The shuttle hatch was already open, and Troi noticed that the interior of the shuttlecraft Balboa had seats suitable for humanoids as well as saddles for Hortas. Captain Dalen’s pilots were already aboard the shuttlecraft. For her away team, the captain had brought along Lieutenant Jee, introduced earlier to the Enterprise officers as a “young archaeologist.” Two other Horta officers, Lieutenant Sherd and Ensign Kodo, completed the team. Picard and La Forge greeted the Hortas, then followed them into the shuttlecraft.
Troi stepped back as the Balboa’s hatch door slid shut. She had picked up that same disturbing sensation again, and from all of the Hortas present this time. Anticipation, curiosity—those expected feelings were there, but she could also sense them in Captain Picard, in Geordi, inside herself. Something else tinged the feelings she was picking up from Dalen and the other Hortas, a kind of reckless ecstacy, almost a mania, a lust to embrace the unknown.
The feeling faded. Troi told herself not to jump to conclusions about a species she had encountered for the first time so recently. But what she had felt suggested that the Hortas might be too quick to rush into dangerous situations in order to satisfy their powerful curiosity, and that, she knew, could endanger this mission—and all of their lives.
Moments later, the shuttlecraft Balboa was skimming low over the alien moon.
“Still no sign of an entrance,” Geordi observed. Indeed, his surface scans had