Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [45]
The starfish? Riker wondered. We’re going to be cramped. It’s likely to get awfully cramped in here before this is all settled.
The Darwin had beamed two probes to the Dyson Homeworld. The first, which dived headlong into the atmosphere, revealed nothing on the Enterprise’s bridge screen, nothing except wind-driven dust illuminated by such incessant lightnings that they blended undetectably into a continuous yellow glare.
The view from space was no more revealing. The blue-green dot, with its miniature version of the Great Scott Sea, was now a ghostly dark sphere. As Riker watched from the captain’s command station, no snow-capped mountain, no patch of blue ocean, shone through anywhere. The bridge was silent except for the intermittent beeps of their equipment; all of the officers on duty were staring at the viewscreen. Riker knew that everyone on the bridge was now feeling inertia’s threat more keenly than any screen or sensor could convey. It hung in their minds’s sky like a hammer readying to shatter a history.
“Selah,” the voice of Captain Dalen intoned. “… Will not we fear, though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah … the world melted … Selah.”
The Horta captain, Riker realized, was recalling the Forty-sixth Psalm. He caught a look of dismay on the face of an officer at his left, then shrugged. An alien archaeologist quoting the Book of Psalms? Well, and why not? Nothing else on this mission had gone as expected.
He feared the possibility of having to bring the Enterprise inside the Sphere; yet he knew that he would do so if the lives of Picard and those with him were endangered … and yet he also knew that if going inside meant certain destruction for the ship and its crew, he would pull away and live with the decision as best he could. He was not a stranger to difficult decisions, even where Picard’s life was involved.
On the right side of Riker’s bridge screen, no voice outfeeds came from the cockpit of the Balboa; but he could see that Worf was double-checking and triple-checking the shuttle’s controls, ready to turn the Balboa into a lifeboat if the Darwin itself failed. He knew how his old friend would take the decision that he, himself, now considered and dreaded.
The Klingon did not look up.
Worf knew that more could go wrong in this operation than could be foreseen. Even the indefatigable Data had given no new warnings. He could guess what the android was doing in this dark field tonight: running increasingly intractable probability curves, trying to predict scenarios for failure, trying to predict the unpredictable. The central disaster was beyond the resources of Klingon, or human, or human-appearing android to prevent, even if given every manner of brute strength already known to them; and the Klingon doubted that there was any technology accessible inside the Sphere that could be brought into play in time. He wondered if this time the Enterprise would be forced simply to stand aside and watch what happened, and his warrior’s will rebelled against the thought, even as his intellect went on bended knee before the realities.
“Captain Picard,” Data called across subspace, “you really should be airborne by now.”
“What is it?” Picard replied from the bridge of the Darwin. “Has Great Scott lurched again toward the sun?”
“That too,” Data’s voice replied, “and something else, far less predictable. The sun is fading toward the red dwarf state. It appears to be dying, sir.”
And how will Dyson’s sun die? Picard thought.
“Have you been able to beam in the additional observation probes?” Data asked. “Especially the solar