Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [51]
“It’s difficult to imagine how,” Captain Dalen said.
“No?” He turned in his saddle to look back at the Horta captain. “Just imagine that we are still back there, amongst those islands.” Picard mused on that for a moment; an idea was coming to him. “But the more I think about it, Dalen, that could turn out to be exactly where we want to be.”
“Are you mad?” the Horta captain said, her voice rising as she drew herself up in her saddle. “Are you completely out of your mind?”
Picard ignored the accusation, turning back to the viewscreen. “We must go out behind that star! We can follow the sun into the sea. It’s the only way you can save your ship.”
There was a pause and then finally Dalen said, “Then maybe it’s time for us to be bold, Jean-Luc. I can’t think of anything better to do, and I am now beginning to see the reason in your madness, so I am going to follow your advice. In fact, the more I think about it, the sorrier I am that I didn’t think of your idea myself.”
“Riker?” Picard asked. “Did you get that?”
“Yes, Captain, and so did the other two ships …” Riker fell silent.
“What is it, Number One?” Picard asked, sweeping his gaze toward the bottom of the great bowl in which a chain of islands was obscured now, before even the most powerful of the Darwin’s magnifiers, behind a veil of mist and storm, and the glare of a cherry-red sun, down there in the bottom.
The voice of Data came back to him: “We are calculating the time remaining until ‘sunset,’ and trying to take into account new surges of subspace activity.”
“Where?” Picard asked.
“Everywhere,” Riker’s voice said. “Mostly the surges are concentrated around grappler points— and in a huge rim forming beneath the Great Scott Sea. But they’re spreading everywhere, Captain.’**
“Geometric or arithmetic?”
“Geometric, I’m afraid.”
“I see,” said Picard, realizing that whatever would happen, would happen soon. It seemed to him that Dyson was bracing itself for the impact, preparing for the sun to go through.
But if such abilities existed, why not use them to prevent the sun from going through? It made no sense to him, and yet at the same time it made all the sense in the world: The efficiencies of man were not the efficiencies of Dyson.
“Data?” Picard asked.
“It seems, Captain, that you will have to follow the sun too closely for comfort.”
“But can it be done?” Picard demanded.
“Yes—with full shields up.”
“And the Dooglasse ship? And the starfish?”
“They will have to be towed behind you.”
“That doesn’t leave a great deal of power for shields,” Riker added.
“Close,” Picard said. “It’s going to be close.” He knew how small the chances were that his desperate plan would succeed.
“Make course!” Captain Dalen shouted, her mechanical voice filled with the glee of a child.
A very determined child, Picard thought.
“I sense them,” Troi said as she listened to the alien cries. “I sense the sea swifts—trapped.” Her hands clenched into fists, but there was no one to strike at, no one from whom a price might be exacted for all this suffering.
The cries came from the Darwin’s communicators, filling the bridge with the sound of rasping, of whistling, of voices rising to a high pitch and then falling again. A comlink was picking up the calls of the sea swifts who had remained behind in the Great Scott Sea. To Troi, they sounded like the whale songs of Earth, the calls of the sea dragons of Betazed, and the songs of birds; and yet there was an undertone in their sounds that she had never heard before. She did not know what they were saying, but the emotion in their cries was both understandable and unbearable.
“As the sun begins to plunge down,” Guinan said, “Mothers are crying out to their children …”
Troi thought she glimpsed tears in Guinan’s dark eyes.
“What are they saying?” Captain Picard asked.
Troi knew the answer to his question before Guinan replied, “I hear mother crying to child, child crying out for father, grandfather to grandchild. I hear people crying, ‘I love you.’”
The cries rose sharply in pitch, then ceased abruptly. Without any warning