Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [17]
“Were they trying to hide something?” Picard mused.
Data called out over the link: “It is always perilous to ascribe motives to an alien species, Captain.”
“Quite right, Data. So we’ve little choice but to go in, assuming we’re all curious enough.”
“Oh, I think we’re curious enough,” Captain Dalen said.
“I certainly am,” Geordi added, wanting to explore as much of this engineering marvel’s interior as possible.” Set us down, then, Mr. La Forge,” Picard ordered, then glanced with obvious amusement at the Horta archaeologist saddled beside him, like a royal rock on display in a museum.
Their first landfall in the Dyson Sphere seemed straightforward enough. The Balboa’s docking tube would form an air-filled path to the moon’s surface, and Captain Dalen’s four-Horta away team would simply “walk through” the crust underneath, thus causing the least possible amount of damage to the structure, and Geordi hoped, setting off no alarms. On the other side of the shell, there was atmosphere, cold but breathable. Geordi had dropped two walnut-sized probes on the surface. The Hortas would survive inside, he knew. The sensor readings told him so.
He swept the Balboa into a graceful arc, as if it were a helicopter, then slowed to a hover, flashed his molecular strobes, and landed so gently on the moon’s equator as to leave its thin veneer of helium-three “dust” undisturbed.
“Start drilling,” Picard said. Geordi began to hope that Horta saliva would be enough; this sphere was not sheathed in carbon neutronium, which gave him a clue as to why it was here, and why it was sealed up.
“We’re attached,” Geordi said. “Horta entrance now open, and something like bedrock is below us, at least thirty meters of it, then topsoil. That’s what my readings say.” Lieutenant Jee said, “I will walk through first.” Her amplified voice was slightly higher than that of Captain Dalen.
Jee and the Horta captain, followed by Sherd and Kodo, slid ahead of Picard and Geordi into the shuttle’s service bay, where a double-sized manhole led down to the moon’s surface. Jee and Dalen sank away the moment they touched the ground. The other two team members fell in quickly behind, examining the shaft as they descended, shoring up the walls wherever it seemed necessary. Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole had been much easier, Geordi thought, but the Horta captain seemed to think nothing of it.
After a few minutes, Geordi saw a circle of red light wink on at the bottom of the well. It winked out just as suddenly, and he realized that Lieutenant Jee was coming back up.
As she neared the exit, the Horta cried out, “Confirmed—human suitable atmosphere inside! But dark. Red dark.”
“So how was it?” Picard asked, and the Horta’s answering shudder reminded Geordi of a shrug.
“It was delicious!”
Contagion
THE HORTA HAD made their first landfall thirty minutes before. Now they stood, hard as it was for Captain Dalen fully to accept the reality, on the inside of a sphere—topsy-turvy—inside another sphere—topsy-turvy. The world within the world reflected only the longer, redder wavelengths of light. The weak red light was overpowered by black shadows; and, although she could not see them, vibrations in the ground permitted her and her team to feel strange shapes trying to move secretly forward and back in the dark. So far, they seemed to be keeping their distance; but until Picard arrived with reinforcements, Dalen had decided that she and her Hortas should cluster together, hold their ground and, as the humans would put it, be steady as a rock. There were no life forms here other than plants. So the scans had shown. Dalen did not want to remind herself that, before they had been run through that new Federation computer, the first scans of the inside of the Dyson Sphere had revealed no life signs at all.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” as the captain of the Enterprise was so fond of saying. Does he really understand how much curiouser