Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [42]
We had to tell them that their practical engineering could not overcome mathematical certainties. We had no choice. We had to.
From now on, through liftoff, Captain Dalen had decided, all of her crew and all of the personnel with Picard would stay close to the Darwin and on full alert status. By her decree, there would be no further exploration of the islands. She was taking no chances, with billions of desperate, rocket-capable creatures somewhere underfoot and apparently on the move.
The last of the repairs on the Darwin and its shuttles were completed just ahead of the 1700 dinner break, nearly three hours early. More cautious commanders, Dalen supposed as she ate her way through a mass of Federation ceramic foam flavored with a few nuggets of sand and quartz, would have applied those extra hours to an early liftoff and a windfall against the margin of error. But Picard’s android officer Data and his first officer Riker had a plan for beaming clusters of pulse engines into the holds of the shuttles Calypso and Nadir, strapping tractor devices to their hulls, and sending them into Dyson uncrewed. The shuttles had become strap-on, robotic engines, hastily modified to give the starfish the added push it so desperately needed.
Captain Dalen, meanwhile, had ordered the Darwin’s two lowermost decks to be eaten completely hollow and flooded, providing room for no fewer than two hundred additional refugees. The upper decks would therefore become even more cramped and the water would render the ship as sluggish as an asteroid; but Captain Picard had agreed with Dalen that it was a good plan. Unfortunately, it was impossible to know what Dyson would produce tomorrow, or even during the next hour. Here, Dalen thought as she finished her meal and emerged into one of the ship’s recreation areas, a good idea could easily be ruined by surprises that made it impossible to think the whole plan through in advance. Here, she mused as she turned around to look at the new passage she had created, even the best of plans had a way of failing spectacularly.
Within an hour, aliens were filing through a submerged gangway door—two hundred and fifteen of them, filing through in utter silence.
Picard and Guinan watched from the roof of the Darwin, as if they were standing on a beach. “Look there, Jean-Luc,” she whispered. “Do you see— circling beneath the squid?”
He followed her gaze, and alarm ran through him like shock from an overloaded phaser.
“It’s—”
“It’s harmless,” she assured. “It won’t hurt them.”
But it was a dark, ominous shape—huge and winged. It crossed Darwin’s prow, seemingly indifferent to both the squid and the starship.
“Intelligent?” the captain asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” said Guinan.
“Which means it understands the danger.”
“In a manner of speaking,” came the reply.
Its head was at once eaglelike and serpentlike when it broke surface, not more than fifty meters away. Then a neck, more than five meters long, followed it out of the water. The skin, gleaming and dripping, was at once like the skin of a dolphin and like the skin of a machine. Then a pair of wings followed the neck out of the water, flapping fiercely.
At first sight, Picard was certain he was viewing an animal. Then the neck had made him wonder if it might be a machine; but once its body was completely out of the water, he knew it was an animal… he knew this even after a jet engine roared to life under each wing and, stiffening its spine and sucking in air, the creature overflew the porcelain city,