Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [55]
Mountains? Geordi wondered, peering at his instruments. How? Dyson’s powers-that-be had failed to move their sun. How, then, had they managed to plow so much mass into mountain ranges so quickly? And then he guessed that force fields covered with mud and water would look much like mountains.
Hollow mountains.
It seemed as good an explanation as any, except that his instruments were showing—what had Data called it? Dimensional folding?
Whatever it was, it was now manifesting along the entire hull of Dyson. Geordi could no longer be certain of what his scans were showing, because the multiple thousands of subspace microverses manifesting up, down, starboard, port, forward, and aft were beyond measure. Soon, Dyson would be completely invisible to his scans. From his engineer’s perspective, the Sphere was about to drop out of the universe.
He was beginning to suspect that Dyson’s powers-that-be were quite insane. He glanced at Worf next to him, but the Klingon was a stone figure.
“Picard to Riker!” Picard’s voice said.
“Riker here, Captain.”
“Where is the neutron star? Still on the same course, I presume?”
“Still on trajectory, Captain,” Riker said, sounding, to himself, less awed than he felt. Then, after a long silence, he added, “As last predicted, it has missed the Sphere.”
Yet another miracle, he thought, in a string of miracle-moments that numbed the mind’s ability to absorb. Riker wondered then if the Dyson Sphere had altered his capacity to ever be surprised by anything again.
The neutron star missed? Impossible, Picard thought. Like everything else about Dyson, it seemed impossible: For all the effort on the part of those who had sent it, they had missed! The images transmitted from the Enterprise showed the neutron star moving away, clearly unable to compensate for the Sphere’s last-minute maneuvering.
Ahead of the Balboa, cometary streamers were still gushing up through the hole. Picard stared at a bright foaming mass of what looked like waves breaking at the foothills of a mountain range. The breakers had to be utterly huge to be seen across the gulf that separated him from the shore, and yet the distance was shrinking before impulse velocity. He swung one of the Balboa’s scopes aft, toward the Dooglasse ship, where Jani and his crew would be looking around in bewilderment, and perhaps in terror, at a world that was darkening rapidly. Night was falling for the first time in their history, but no stars were coming out to light the darkness, except for the grappler flares, visible only in computer-enhanced green, and now becoming invisible altogether.
Geordi saw that the starfish’s engines, too, were becoming invisible, though the ark appeared to be gaining control now, as it made headway against the ionosphere’s current. His scans from the Balboa showed the starfish descending toward an old river delta before its engine signature gave him—for want of a better explanation—the illusion of folding into subspace and winking out.
The engineer was certain that a sufficiently powerful telescopic view would allow him to see the starfish, still out there somewhere, still in the visible wavelengths of light, still moving under its own power—but there was no time for collecting more pieces of the Dyson jigsaw. The wide course correction Worf was making to avoid an uprushing snowstorm—one of Dyson’s reefs—took all of Geordi’s attention from the starfish, and suddenly the edge of the mountain range was flying toward him, threatening to swallow the Balboa. The rim seemed closer than it ought to have been, given Worf s piloting skills. It was as if… as if the opening were contracting.
Geordi tore his gaze away from the mountains— on one side the night surf, on the other side a deep well with a comet stuck in it—long enough to take a glance at his altimeter. It showed nothing—nothing sensible, at least. According to Balboa’s instrumentation, Dyson no longer existed.
The instrumentation of his own senses and his own common sense told him otherwise, of course, as the Balboa and its cocoon plunged through the ionosphere