Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [54]
The sun burned through with a flash.
It never actually touched the Sphere. Dyson’s shell merely liquefied, then vaporized, then parted and blew away.
Someone behind Riker let out a cry. Riker sat stunned, unable for a moment to think or feel.
“Impossible!” one of the officers at the bridge engineering station aft was saying. “Just impossible!”
But there it was, on Riker’s own forward viewscreen. The only view more incredible than the sun eating its way into space was the scene coming to him from the starfish.
As if somehow parachuting down through the vacuum, the still-out-of-control ark was hovering, at what appeared to be merely mountaintop altitude, over a storm that reached from flat horizon to flat horizon. Millions of kilometers ahead, where the sun had set, a pillar of fire rose from the maelstrom and pointed straight into the sky.
This was no ordinary fire, Riker knew. It was air and water falling through the hole, first yanked irresistibly after the sinking sun’s gravity, then blasted back inside the Sphere. Sheets of cooling steam and ionized gas and glittering flakes of snow caught the last rays of the fallen star and threw them to the walls of Dyson, which were bright enough to navigate by. The starfish-eye-view showed rips in the cloud cover, through which whitecaps a hundred times higher than Everest shone—no, not whitecaps, Riker realized: rapids. Everything in the Great Scott Sea—water, air, and over there a whole island—was being drawn toward the crater.
The starfish, though high above what passed for Dyson’s ionosphere, was also being dragged slowly sunward. During the final moments before burn-through, a thin canopy of ionized gas had been hurled into space, hurled at an impossible angle, high over the shores of the Great Scott Sea. Now the starfish, its engines apparently under only partial control, was being carried down by streamers of sunward-bound gas, as a balloon is carried by the jet stream.
Riker feared that it would end for them soon, with their ark dashed upon the rapids. As the seconds passed into minutes, he knew it would end that way, and then Data turned toward him for a moment.
“The rapids themselves appear to be dying, sir” Data said to him before turning back to the screen.
Riker saw that something was rising in the ark’s path, rising higher than the water, higher than the air.
“Impossible!” Riker said, echoing the engineering officer.
“Apparently so,” Data said from his station, “but nonetheless it is happening.”
“Enterprise to Balboa, what do you see?” Riker asked. At Worf s bidding the shuttle showed him a different perspective from the starfish: higher and looking straight down on the hole’s west rim.
Worf had caught sight of the Dooglasse ship caught in a swirl of crystallizing vapor, struggling to maneuver through a snowstorm in space, but it was now shielded within the Balboa’s force field and magnetic cocoon. “Dyson’s Spear,” as he was already calling that comet in his mind, pointed back through the disintegrating waterfalls, back through the hole in the Sphere, with the cocoon of two ships buried in its tail. Hydrogen, oxygen, silicon, and carbon, stripped of their electrons, swept past Balboa’s bow at a significant fraction of lightspeed. The ship’s magnetic field envelope shunted the charged nuclei and electrons to either side, much as the prow of a boat shunts water to port and starboard.
Worf knew that he was unlikely to see such a sight ever again; yet even the cometary spear was a mere detail in Dyson’s vast and violent war dance.
“Riker to Picard,” Riker’s voice said. “Please report.”
La Forge glanced at Picard, sitting next to him in the Cousteau.
“We’re seeing teeth down there,” Troi answered for the captain. “A whole mountain range, rising like teeth out of the sea floor… thirty kilometers high, now. It’s damming the rapids.”