Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [35]
“No!” cried the Horta. “We will make repairs, no matter what it takes.”
“There may be no time,” Picard said.
“We will make time!” Captain Dalen cried out, and for an instant Picard believed, though impact on the Great Scott Sea seemed a mathematical certainty, that the Horta would indeed gain time and save the Darwin. She would not allow herself to doubt that until she had no alternative.
“Jee!” the Horta captain continued. “Sherd! To the engine room on the double!”
The Interrupted Journey
THE GREAT SCOTT SEA grew balefully on the Darwin’s bridge screen, sweeping up ahead like the galaxy’s largest flyswatter. On the eastern shore, vast stretches of alternating desert and forest blended undetectably into a uniform greenish-brown. Picard saw that they were breaking up into tiny speckles, now. Deserts as wide as the Earth’s moon were becoming visible: white dots against a background of green.
“Impact in sixteen minutes ten seconds,” Data called from the Enterprise, and the eastern shore drifted slowly aft. “Sixteen minutes …”
“Slowing our descent,” Captain Dalen announced from her station, “but we will not be able to slow it enough to turn away.”
Beeps sounded on the bridge. Lights flashed on the panels in front of Picard. One Horta officer on the port side of the bridge slid off her saddle at one station, making a soft scraping sound as she moved across the floor, then quickly pulled herself into another saddle.
The hit from the alien sun station, Picard saw from the readings on his console, had thrown whole sectors of the Darwin’s control systems into chaos. Even though resetting and repairs were now commencing, they were still a labor intensive, interminable series of diagnostics, commands, and physical restructurings. The Darwin’s engineer, Kosh, had come to the bridge; she sat at the engineering station, murmuring instructions to the ship’s computer. La Forge and Kar had rushed down to the engine room, to aid the crew there.
Full control, Picard realized, might come only within that last second separating the ship from the sea; or it might come a second too late.
As islands and great streamers of cloud cover expanded to fill the entire forward view, Picard faced up again to Data’s supposition that the Darwin might well have to be abandoned. Anywhere near this velocity, their first contact with Dyson’s atmosphere would leave no time to call out to the Enterprise for help. They would be dead even before they knew they were about to die. Yet he hesitated to bring the Enterprise in or to give the captain of the Darwin a direct order to prepare for beam-out. As leader of the expedition to the Dyson Sphere, he had the final word, but he hesitated nonetheless. His instincts were telling him to ride this one out, to trust in Dalen and her ship.
“We’re decelerating,” Captain Dalen said, “but we still cannot steer.”
On the screen, the Great Scott Sea was now a perfectly flat wall of water. Instruments gave the distance, but to the eye all comparisons were lost. A new chain of islands came into view and began to grow, and for a moment Picard’s perspective shifted.
Was there still time, he wondered, to bring the Enterprise in, even if he wanted to?
“Still no steering,” Captain Dalen announced, “but still decelerating.”
“Check all shields!” Lieutenant Jee called out to the crew in Main Engineering. Four Horta engineers sat in pits around the engine room’s master systems display console, occasionally poking at a button or panel with a rocky extrusion, as they struggled to regain control of their ship.
Geordi glanced at the wall, where lights flashed on the master situation monitor. They were in big trouble, he realized; the diagram of the Darwin was lit up like a Christmas tree. The steering was still out, the shields failing.
Geordi bent over the console in front of him. The impulse engines were faltering. An alarm suddenly sounded, indicating that the Darwin’s matter-antimatter reaction core chamber was close to a plasma breach.
He was about to warn Jee of the danger when