Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [44]
On the far side, completely out of view, the erratically accelerating inner surface of Dyson had crept up and bitten a piece out of its own prototype.
The lesser Dyson never even touched the ground, never did more than dip into the greater Dyson’s stratosphere….but at thirty-two times the speed of sound, a mere dip was enough. The world let wobbled and cracked, smoldered and dragged in its orbit. After more than two hours, it was still flinging sparks and hot coals from the wound. Captain Dalen’s probe showed the hull of the moon clearing the Homeworld’s horizon… and then stopping… and then … instead of rising farther… it came forward and sat down on a sea located halfway between the Bronze Age city and its antipode.
Picard, seated on a saddle to the left of Captain Dalen’s station, gazed at the bridge viewscreen, transfixed. The most astonishing part was the slowness—the stateliness, even—with which things were unfolding. The moon was collapsing into the world at a steady twenty kilometers per second— and it took more than a minute and a half for it to disappear. There went the spheres within the sphere, within the Sphere. There went carbon and phosphorus and sulfur: the most abundant substances in the universe realized finally as the pain and promise of living. There went the marionette people. There went spirit.
Meteors.
Meteors and shockwaves everywhere.
And a third part of the city was uprooted, and hurled into the sea. And the waters boiled, and turned to blood. And the city was not.
The Dooglasse ship was more than two light minutes away when the moon collapsed. The aliens were flying with a Federation comlink, but without benefit of their own subspace probes. They were therefore completely mystified by the real-time transmissions between the Enterprise and the Darwin. Though the alien called Captain Dalen was describing for the alien voice named Riker a moon that had crashed and exploded, Jani’s telescope revealed a moon still hovering above its world.
Then, as the seconds passed, the Dooglasse saw it, too. The horror developed exactly as the Horta alien had said it would, as if foretold by the gift of prophetic vision.
“Riker to Picard.”
“Picard here,” the captain said. He had moved to a station on the port side of the Horta’s command pit. Troi, sitting near him, was tense with worry.
“Are you lofting yet?” Riker asked.
“Not quite ready, Number One,” Picard replied. “Did you record what just happened?”
“Yes, Captain. I advise that you leave while the entrance lock is still intact. I assume it is still functioning.”
“We’ll know when we get there,” said Picard, and he realized that by then the steadily rising tide of chaos might already have ruined the lock mechanism; and there was no other way out of the Sphere. Inertia still held sway over the sun and the Homeworld, as another surge forward brought the inner surface closer to each. On Earth, Picard’s ancestors had witnessed explosions of lava and steam powerful enough to open cracks forty kilometers long. He knew of a man in the Jordan Valley who, long before the first book of the Bible was written, had seen a mountain pitched on its side, then swallowed whole by a fissure wide enough to accommodate all the tribes of Israel. He had actually seen the man’s bones where construction workers had found them, still splayed out in the disquieting pose of startled surprise. He knew of an island that had disappeared in a searing red glare—disappeared so suddenly that men and ships were converted to gas and the waters of the Mediterranean stood up like a wall… stood up, in places, higher than the pyramids; and he knew that these manifestations were of but trifling magnitude by comparison to the quakings and burnings that were about to burst upon Dyson.
Selah … Selah .
RIKER HAD ORDERED Data and the pilot on duty to bring