Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [38]
“We will be at the Darwin’s side in two minutes,” he announced.
For Riker to send Worf to help the Darwin made sense; the Klingon’s courage could be trusted in any crisis. For her part, Crusher was sure that her medical skills would be useful, even if treating Horta patients might require as much knowledge of masonry as of surgery. But Guinan’s reasons for wanting to come along with them were a mystery. There was, Crusher thought, no real reason for Guinan to be here.
She turned toward the bartender, who was seated on her left. Guinan wore her usual serene, Buddha-like smile; she glanced at Crusher and nodded, as if to reassure her.
“This is truly something to see,” Guinan murmured. “I didn’t want to miss a chance to explore even a little bit of it,” but then her eyes clouded, as if she were thinking of something else. Crusher recalled the crew’s earlier speculations about the origins of the Sphere. She had dismissed the notion that ancestors of the Borg might be its builders, but now, with Guinan at her side, that possibility nagged at Crusher again.
Could that be what had driven Guinan to insist on coming with them? Maybe she was convinced that the people who had all but exterminated her species were indeed the creators of this wonder. Was she here to admire the artifact, Crusher wondered, or to rejoice in its devastation?
The Darwin was not quite a submarine, Picard reminded himself as he emerged through a manual service hatch and stood on top of the vessel under a cloudy sky. Engineering had finally killed all forward propulsion, so the ship was not even much of an ocean-going vessel. Standing on the hull was difficult, at best. Under the influence of the internal subspace fields, all the decks had seemed perfectly level; it was not until he actually climbed outside that Picard realized Darwin was angled down by the bows, nearly twenty degrees.
They were adrift near a group of islands, awaiting repairs and waiting also for Beverly Crusher, Worf, and Guinan to arrive. The sea was as calm as a quarry pool, and there was not the whisper of a breeze. But this would change, Picard knew. Bathy-metric scans had shown that the sea surface was getting hotter already, progressively hotter. Unless someone, or something, in Dyson took control, the progression would continue until atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, dissociated from water, raced away from this place hotter than live steam, hotter than molten glass, hotter than aluminum composite emerging white from a furnace.
There was a clap of thunder overhead, the sonic boom of the Feynman as it slowed to subsonic flight. Picard watched the shuttlecraft drop through the clouds and approach his position, then gave a wave and touched his communicator.
“It is good to see you, Captain,” Worf said over the comm.
“Sorry we can’t let you into the shuttle bay,” Picard replied, “but I think there’s room to anchor up top.”
“Yes, Captain, I have already programmed the landing parameters. We will just fit behind you.”
Picard flagged the shuttlecraft in for final approach to the Darwin’s stern, and the Feynman crossed a small opening in the clouds, through which the vastness of the Dyson Sphere’s far inner surface was partly visible—a sky of land beyond the sky, covering the sky of stars below itself—and he thought of Dylan Thomas’s lines of poetry: “They shall have stars at elbow and foot… And death shall have no dominion.” Except that death was coming to this great inward shore, threatening with two stars—the interior sun, almost at elbow, now, and the onrushing neutron star, at foot.
The shuttlecraft swooped in and hovered over the impulse engines, then settled onto the flat plain just aft of the bridge. Picard breathed deeply of the Sphere’s ancient air, and went forward to greet his crewmembers.
Beverly Crusher came out first, followed by Worf and Guinan. “Captain,” the physician said, moving past him toward an open hatch, “looks like I’ll be getting some experience with Horta physiology after all—” and then, looking around, she added,