Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [43]
Two kilometers away, six more flying fish—he could think of no better name for them—rose from the Great Scott Sea, gathered themselves into nature’s rendition of the missing man formation, and winged off in the same direction the first flier had gone.
“You were right,” Guinan said. “Evolution has taken some strange turns here.”
“Impossible turns,” Picard said, and reminded himself again that Great Scott was only a random sample of Dyson, and probably not even the most interesting place in the Sphere.
He shook his head. Even at supersonic speed, the fish had no hope of flying to safety across light minutes of ocean, even if months remained before the sun fell out of the sky. If only he could save just one of those miraculous creatures, he thought.
“It’s all degenerating into chaos and blunders,” he lamented. “Perhaps the biggest blunders of all time.”
“If it helps you at all,” Guinan said, “there will be almost no one to judge our actions; and even if there were, they would conclude that there is not much we can do with a structure of this size. We have not caused this situation.”
“I wonder,” Picard said, knowing that she lived as one of the last witnesses who could judge the Borg for the crime perpetrated against her people, and he wondered if justice might one day flow from her memory of what had happened. He wanted to voice, again, his suspicions about why an all-consuming neutron star should appear, just as the warp ships arrived from Federation space. Was it time for them to keep a new civilization from making use of the artifact? Or was it simply time to destroy a past they had outgrown?
“You judge yourself too harshly,” said Guinan. “I’ve watched your so-called blunder through Dyson, and—”
“And there’s nothing for me to do.”
“Except what you’ve already been doing.”
“Which is?”
“Shine a little light, Jean-Luc. Save whatever you can. Any step up from nothing is vast.”
“Riker here. Are you just about ready to get the Darwin aloft?” Number One, Picard thought, sounded nervous, worried, and impatient. Riker’s vocabulary always became more varied and colorful when he was worried. In extreme cases it became bureaucratic, as if he were falling back on his Academy training jargon. He was not there yet, Picard realized, so in Riker’s judgment the situation was still potentially manageable.
The glass starfish had sailed, driven by the boosters Geordi and Riker had cobbled together from three of the Enterprise’s shuttles. In accordance with their instructions, the Feynman, stripped of life support and crammed with spare parts from the Darwin, was now strapped to the backs of Nadir and Calypso, providing just enough kick, according to Riker, to guarantee that the water-laden vessel could be maneuvered to a safer location—wherever that magic place, safer, might be.
CAPTAIN’S LOG, STARSHIP DARWIN
SUNSET MINUS: 2 OR 3 DAYS, PROBABLY LESS EGRESS: ASAP
It was Commander Riker who came up with the idea of flooding the Darwin’s lower decks, to provide us with additional space for evacuation of the “squid people.” It seemed a good idea, but I had my doubts about Riker.
“You can trust your life to him,” Picard assured me. “He’s one of the best officers in Starfleet.”
“He is?” I wondered aloud. “I must confess that I’ve had some doubts about his judgment, having heard that he plays poker with an empath and a card-counting android.”
“Precisely my point,” the captain said. “They usually lose.”
WHEN SHE JOINED Picard on the bridge, Captain Dalen had to force herself to believe what the screens showed. Up there in the far sky, on the Dyson homeworld, a remote probe shivered violently from side to side as a stiff breeze came up, then weakened for a moment, then came on again even more strongly. Its source was the southeast. The open pit mine, with its fractured homes and storefronts, resisted the assault of air and dust… for a minute or two … for mere minutes, and no more.
From the summit of the western wall, the probe broadcast a shivering, panoramic view through subspace: a horizon on