Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [48]
And he beheld a crack in the planet, a crack that ran from the lower hemisphere’s contact point with Dyson’s inner hull, all the way to the roof of the Homeworld’s upper hemisphere. More cracks appeared as he watched. They spread out from the center of the nearer hemisphere, yawning wide and filling with fire, and appearing with such suddenness that Picard wondered if it was possible for shockwaves traveling through rock to cover so much ground so quickly.
It did not seem possible; but the old Homeworld did not know any better, so the cracks spread and multiplied anyway, and then the very hemisphere bulged and stretched, tried to roll, and stretched again before his eyes.
“Selah …” Captain Dalen sang.
She called that one right, Picard told himself. Moses’ miracle of the waters, Plato’s lost Atlantis, John’s Revelation—even these wonders were reduced to minutiae by the approach of Dyson’s Homeworld. Its mantle seemed to be parting and peeling away like the skin of an orange, but it only seemed so. For it was stony and brittle. It was actually an ejecta blanket of dust and red sparks and steam. Beneath the spreading blanket, something globular and huge fell out of the world, registering, as it fell, barely perceptible but distinctive Doppler shifts on the probe’s sensors.
“It is definitely rolling,” Data called out from the Enterprise.
“What is?” Picard asked. “What’s left to roll?”
“What falls away, Captain. Scans indicate a ball of nickel and iron.”
“Then the world has spilled its core,” Captain Dalen observed.
“Yes,” said Data. “Just as the mantle shook off its atmosphere and continents, the core has now shed its mantle.”
The maddening scale of events and the relentless, slow motion pace with which events seemed to be unfolding, had a hypnotic quality, even, Data admitted to himself, for him. The fleeing probe was still outpacing the globe by a wide margin. Its sensors were still piercing smoke and lava and steam, reconstructing, on the Enterprise’s bridge screen, a bright orange globe so vast and so real that Data could almost reach out and touch it. The metal core did not shatter as it stretched toward him across the sky. It rolled. He no longer needed the Doppler readouts to tell him this: The globe was definitely rolling— and it seemed that it would roll through the screen and crush everyone on the bridge.
With the old Homeworld down, “sunset” was not far behind. Captain Picard was all too aware of that. For him and his Horta colleague Dalen, only considerations of survival remained—for their crew, and for the the sea swifts on E-Deck aft, who were now pulling the hatch closed behind themselves and saying good-bye to fathers and mothers and siblings and comrades for the last time.
There was no stopping the sun. All the courage and wisdom accumulated during the course of Pi-card’s lifetime were being challenged by the onrushing mass. It humbled him with no effort at all. In the end, Picard knew, only the Darwin, the Dooglasse ship, and the starfish would be his concern; nothing else was possible.
After “sunset” would come Dyson’s long night—a sunless abyss filled with ice. A great nobility was dying all around him, even if it had been sculpted by the ancestral Borg in the remote past; and the great tragedy within the larger tragedy was that the expedition would return home with little more than scraps of knowledge by which to read the story of Dyson’s many lost worlds—if, in fact, they ever returned home.
Seconds—minutes after they should have left by Picard’s reckoning, Captain Dalen ordered one of the surviving probes to gather the last of its power into one intensely focused scan. A fragment of planetary crust, no wider than the city of San Francisco, was tumbling end over end through void. The probe peered through rafts of molten black glass that had, only minutes before, been layers of sedimentary rock. Like blades of grass preserved in amber, the glass enclosed long, long girders: segments of a monorail system. The train was nowhere to be seen, but at one end of the system, a labyrinth of iron bars