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By Root 504 0

have time to find it,” Data said, and Picard nodded in agreement. If only it had been possible to bring the Enterprise inside, to add its great scanning power to the Darwin’s; but the risk was unwarranted. The Enterprise had to stay outside; even if the lock system could be made to work, too much would be at stake to risk trusting the gate while both ships were inside. So little time to do anything, Picard thought. If the neutron star did not destroy the sphere, its own sun would tear it apart from within. It seemed to Picard that two very old giants had come awake and resumed a family feud. And the starships, a pair of fleas crawling around on and in one of the giants, were not smart enough to leap away.

And it gets worse, Picard told himself: Imagine that they’re feuding in a lake of gasoline, and each holds a loaded flare gun—wormhole technology would serve this analogy well—and then imagine that at least one of the giants is senile.

“Just a moment, Captain,” Data said, “some new information is coming in. Yes, I think I know where an inertial control system for the sun might be, and it is in the logical place—orbiting the sun, very close in, three clearly artificial objects.”

“Prepare to depart orbit,” the Horta captain was already saying behind Picard. “Make course.”

“Aye, Captain Dalen,” Picard answered, setting coordinate scans for the position Data had provided. “Away team! Prepare to depart in the next five minutes. We’re readying to leave orbit.”

“Captain Picard,” the Horta said from her command station, “shall we transport the Dooglasse from their ship back to ours once more and take them all with us?”

The question took Picard back for a moment, and he considered. There was no telling what state their ship was in. It might not have what would be required to exit the Sphere at the crucial hour.

The Darwin cruised sunward, laying down a wake of micro-ripples through otherwise fiat spacetime as heat from the cauldron of protons striking antiprotons was dumped effortlessly into subspace. Any large, thick-walled ship not equipped with subspace heat dumps would have been reduced to an expanding ball of plasma the moment its captain ordered up impulse power.

Following slowly in the Darwin’s wake, falling light minutes behind, the Dooglasse engineers did not know subspace, so their ship was little more than a web of ultra light tethers, magnetic field lines, and minute shadow shields. Their matter-antimatter reaction zone burned in open space, meaning that its gamma flare was dumped effortlessly into space itself by a ship that was never intended to intercept and absorb the rays—a fact that had rendered the Dooglasse engine easily detectable on the Darwin’s sensors.

Jani, to Picard’s mind, still seemed to be struggling with the idea that there could be something “outside” capable of destroying his entire known universe. He had turned down Picard’s offer to beam his crew aboard the Darwin, explaining that they must travel in their own ship, which had been so long in becoming as serviceable as it was. When Picard offered to send in a team to check out and perhaps improve the ancient systems, Jani responded with apparent gratitude, but again asked that his group be left to its own resources. Picard understood their pride, and Troi had pointed out that this was a necessary form of self reliance, still growing, which the Dooglasse would need after the Sphere was gone.

Recording every neutrino, quantum fluctuation, string gyration, photon, and electron in its path, the Darwin detected the presence of three small objects, each about six meters across, orbiting so close to the sun that they occasionally dipped below its upper atmosphere.

Picard watched them on the viewscreen for a while. “What do you make of these … sun divers?” he finally asked Data over the link.

“Whiskers,” Data replied. “They have tendrils no wider than a cat’s whiskers; but kilometers long. Subspace mapping suggests that they are acting as transmission lines between the tractor beams and a whole array of whiskered objects circling the sun’s core.