Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [25]
PICARD SAT on a cushion in the Darwin’s small ready room, an odd, granite chamber in the Horta hive—which had graciously been provided to him by Captain Dalen. A slab of rock, something like a table top without legs, sat on the floor to hold the small screens and controls.
It was ironic, Picard thought, that after progressing beyond the abuses of market economies, Earth’s clever and humane Federation should find among the stars the ultimate corporate nightmare, the Borg, who literally incorporated anything that moved and had something to offer, and destroyed anything that did not. The Borg appreciated any good thing they encountered. He had to give them credit for that.
Presently, as he turned his attention away from the killing star to the world beneath the false moon, as he looked at the deep scans of a hauntingly beautiful city dating back more than a thousand centuries and entombed beneath a hundred meters of volcanic ash, he wondered if this was really one of the Borg’s beginnings.
A full day was gone from the available thirteen before the neutron star struck, and with every passing hour decisions would be made about what should be explored, what data gathered, before his group had to abandon the Sphere. Now that they had made contact with the Dooglasse, they would also have to consider the possibility that other biological life forms still lived here, and be on guard against any that might be hostile.
Anything that could be added to the Federation’s knowledge of the Borg was important enough to override other avenues of exploration. As Rome had wished to add to its knowledge of its chief rival, the north African city of Carthage, so the Federation had to expand its knowledge of the Borg, with however small increments. Clues to their ancestry, and to the ancestry of all humanoid species, might arise from the Dyson homeworld below, or they might lie somewhere in the language of the Dooglasse, buried as deeply as any physical remains.
An electronic beep at his ready room door interrupted his reverie.
“Come,” Picard said.
The door opened and Troi entered. “One of the Dooglasse has offered to go down with us to the city,” she said. “It’s certainly worth a few hours. It’s probably the oldest city in all of Dyson, and it’s remarkably intact. No other area has turned up from our scans to offer any greater interest.”
“Then we’re going,” Picard replied. “If we have time enough to explore only one square block of the homeworld, especially with the help of one of the Douglasse, this should be it.”
“We have so little time here,” Troi said, stating the obvious, “that one really wonders what to see first.”
“One place after the other, until the little time we have runs out. Our decisions are limited, and some of them are going to be very hard.”
“I know,” Troi said. “What can possibly become of the Dooglasse? What can we tell them, Captain, if anything? How do you tell an entire race that they’re doomed?”
Picard left his painful answer unspoken: You save them, or else you tell them nothing.
Forty Hortas were now on and inside the Dyson homeworld. Picard listened as Jee and Sherd reported that the city appeared to have been unearthed and reconstructed by no fewer than three successive civilizations—each, in its own turn, entombed by the same volcano. The youngest of those civilizations predated the false moon (and by implication the Sphere itself) by more than a thousand years. It had left behind what appeared to be restaurant, on whose flatware a set of oily finger smudges looked as if they had been placed there by a Dyson homeworld only yesterday,