Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [47]
The planet was ready, in its orbit, to be rolled onto the surface of the Sphere, Picard thought. One side of his mind warred with the other, wanting to drag him away from this place. The other side held him spellbound, for there was something fascinatingly violent and dreadfully beautiful in Dyson’s agonies. The place was uplifting and utterly humiliating, horrifying and deliciously obscene. He freed himself by breaking the scene down into mathematics and physics. A mental gag order, self-imposed. It was the only way.
“Will the planet actually roll?” he asked Data. “Or do you suppose it will go through the Sphere? Can you predict what will happen?”
“I am already running simulations, Captain, but I am certain that inertia will continue to hold sway. The planet may not roll easily on the land mass.”
Another view came on-screen. Racing ahead of the old world, glancing back over its shoulder as it retreated, one of the Darwin’s probes showed the first collisions of atmosphere against atmosphere, water against water. Here and there, microscopic shock bubbles focused hydrogen upon hydrogen and blazed forth as fusion—a billion twinkling points of fusion. Had the computer not automatically filtered out the glare, no one would have been able to see, much less understand, what happened next.
First on the upper hemisphere, then all across the old Homeworld, the atmosphere was lifted and slung forward, meaning that the planet itself was being slowed by friction, meaning that anything not solidly nailed down, including air and water and perhaps a continent or two, was being uprooted by the law of inertia, and would continue forward.
“It will roll,” Data said, knowing this for a certainty now. From his station on the Enterprise’s bridge, he saw that the Sphere was holding up well against the old world as it scraped across desert, and forest, and lake. On the outer shell, a fierce lightning storm followed the scrape, a migrating spider’s web of bolts spreading out over thousands of kilometers, and capable of electrocuting whole worlds full of people. They were the only outwardly visible sign of the impact. The concussions of light grew successively brighter as Data watched, and their westward migration slowed perceptibly.
The view from the Darwin’s fleeing probe confirmed for Picard that the Homeworld was indeed lagging behind, requiring the probe to depend more and more upon telescopically enhanced views, with a correspondingly decreasing resolution. But even as the view began to blur, there was much to see— almost too much to take in all at once.
As the Homeworld grazed a lake, its lower hemisphere, more and more of it, was disappearing. And ahead of that hemisphere, Picard knew, no living creatures stirred upon the lake. The forward-flung atmosphere had piled up ahead of the planet and was crashing down upon the sea, setting the very air afire. The shock front of ejected air, and water, and continental dust rolled ashore and kept on rolling toward the eyes of the probe, deforesting a super continent before it, too, began losing speed… and then the Homeworld itself came ashore. Into space was lifted a mighty whirl of fragmenting, liquefying land. From the place where Picard and Jani had viewed an alien Bronze Age city, gigatons of up-thrown rock were being converted into beads of glass. They scattered across the sky like billions of glittering diamonds.
And there were diamonds in the sky, Picard realized. The timbers of the old boat at the bottom of the Horta tunnel, the bones in the old house— they were microdiamonds, now. And as he watched, he knew that the diamonds themselves must presently be bursting into flame and vanishing in puffs of carbon dioxide.