Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [31]
There is a question that resists resolution, yet refuses to go away: How many other races are there inside the Sphere, the uncounted thousands of them?
And on the heels of this question: How many, among those thousands, would react as well as the Dooglasse have? And-is it possible to warn them all? Or even to find them?
As for the Dooglasse: in their ship and in their bodies they carry all the evidence that is likely to be found in the time remaining of their kinship with the galaxy’s humanoid past. What good this might do in humanity’s future dealings with the Borg is questionable, but it is not a matter to be decided here and now.
“Enterprise to Darwin,” Data said over the subspace link.
Picard, sitting forward of Captain Dalen’s bridge command station in one of the Horta saddles, answered the call. “Picard here.” The captain of the Enterprise was holding the helmsman’s position as the call came in, remembering his younger days.
“Captain, I have concluded from precise measurements of the Sphere’s motion and position that, as we have suspected, it is indeed capable of dodging the neutron star.”
Picard frowned. Good news, to be sure, but he could swear he heard some reservations in Data’s voice.
“Now give me the bad news, Mr. Data,” he said.
“In a word, Captain: inertia. As you know, clouds and oceans are held in place on the walls of the Sphere by independently generated subspace fields that, even during spurts of acceleration, defeat inertia and maintain the illusion of normal gravity. But the fields dissipate rapidly beyond a radius of thirty kilometers above the inner surface; and beyond that radius, inertia is winning. “Picard glanced aft at Geordi La Forge and Lieutenant Kar, who were both at the engineering station. Geordi nodded at him, as if agreeing with Data. Kar made a shivering motion that seemed to be the Horta equivalent of a nod.
Picard said, “Odd, then—that the Sphere would have the ability to move, yet be filled with fields never intended to operate outside of continental and oceanic boundaries.”
“Or, at least, filled with fields that are failing to do so, Captain. Nevertheless, something is attempting to make do, trying to keep the sun in its central position as the Sphere moves, by using all the grappler beams from the portals to move the Sphere without leaving behind the sun and planetary bodies.”
“Will this succeed?” Picard asked.
“Briefly, and to a very small degree, it will. There may be a few days’ respite, but I doubt it will matter. As the Sphere dodges the neutron star, the central sun and its planet are accumulating an inertia! lag and will eventually strike the inner surface of the sphere. There simply does not seem to be enough energy, at least in the way it is being used, to prevent it Of course, I am projecting from current use.”
“Might not the energy output increase?” Picard asked.
“Unknown, Captain. If this is an automatic system at work, it may be defective. If intelligence of some kind is at work, it may be working to correct the problem.”
Utterly fantastic, Picard thought. Astrobiologists and astrophysicists, working solely from data obtained during the first encounter with the Sphere, had concluded that Dyson was the fossil remnant of an extinct culture. Now it was living and breathing and doing the impossible: It was moving the equivalent mass of two hundred light years of stars, however failingly, out of harm’s way.
Dead world indeed! The captain told himself again.
And what was it that Data had suggested about intelligence of some kind at work, trying perhaps to fine-tune the grappler beams, trying to drag the sun and the homeworld along? Was it machine intelligence? Or was some distant descendant of the Dysons taking control? And if so, where might he hope to find them, in any of possible dozens of millions of tiny city-states strewn across Dyson’s walls?
“Where do you think the control center for all this might be?” Picard asked. “Perhaps we could make … adjustments, or lend our assistance.”
“Of course, it is doubtful we will