Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [36]
But there wasn’t any time left. It looked as if the ship was indeed falling a second too far.
Picard asked himself if Captain Dalen was capable of taking the ship to its destruction, leaving no time for the crew to escape. The Darwin, an exploratory vessel, carried two smaller craft, but they were as large as small ships and carried equipment far in excess of standard shuttles. They would be enough to carry away the crew into the great space of the Sphere, and reach the lock, which would then be triggered; and the Enterprise would collect the emerging orphans.
Picard turned in his saddle. “Captain Dalen,” he said, knowing that the shuttles had also been disabled by the attack, “repairs on the Balboa and the Engford?”
Troi had sensed a recklessness in Captain Dalen and the other Hortas, a willingness—almost an eagerness—to take risks. Now, sitting on the bridge, watching them monitor readings and whisper orders to one another, she sensed determination in the Darwin’s captain and her crew, but not fear, not even a trace of fear.
Were these beings completely fearless? she wondered. Perhaps their silicon carapaces and their long lives made them think that they were invulnerable.
Suddenly she felt something else from Captain Dalen. There was a longing inside the Horta, a longing for—what? Vivid, intense experiences to fill the rest of her extremely long life? A desire to feel the danger she faced fully, so that if she survived, the memory of her close encounter with death would make her savor the remaining centuries of her life all the more? Troi sensed all of that, and more, inside Captain Dalen, but there were still no traces of dread, and the counselor feared what might happen next.
The Darwin was falling toward the upper cloud decks now, still decelerating, but glowing cherry-red, as Picard and the others on the bridge waited for word from engineering.
“Engineering?” Captain Dalen asked, her voice sharp. “We must have navigational control in the next three minutes!”
“Doing our best,” Lieutenant Commander Kosh said from her station, a tone of resignation in her amplified voice.
“We’re working on it,” Geordi’s voice added from Main Engineering.
“Will we have it?” sang Captain Dalen.
“If it’s possible,” Kosh replied in almost a whisper.
As they waited in silence, a horizon-spanning streamer of clouds leapt up at them, boomed ions, then parted; and suddenly the ocean burst into view below.
“Twenty percent of navigational control restored!” the voice of a Horta sang out from Main Engineering.
It was not enough, but Picard suddenly knew what Dalen was going to do with it. As deceleration continued, she brought the full twenty percent of navigational power into play, raising the Darwin’s prow as much as possible.
Nothing happened for a moment; then a pocket of hypersonic air caught the ship from below and her hull began to quake and roar. Picard hung on to his console as his saddle shook under him; he heard a sound like that of a stone chipping against stone as a Horta on his left fell from her saddle and hit the floor. Slowly the Darwin levelled off some one thousand meters above the water and rode over it, still decelerating. Picard realized that no more repairs could be counted on in the next two minutes. Atmospheric drag and lift, together with deceleration, would have to serve.
“Picard to Riker.”
“Riker here.”
“We’re going into the water.”
“At what speed?”
“As slowly as possible. There’s no other way to stop and make repairs.”
On the forward view the ocean was rushing beneath the Darwin like a sheet of blue light, more quickly on the human scale than the unperceived swiftness of passage between the stars. The human eye liked comparisons, and did not believe in motion without them.