Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [56]
The ring of hollow mountains looked real enough, even through the glare of ions against the Balboa’s shields; real enough, and spine chillingly close.
Worf was thrusting hard to starboard, swinging the sun directly into the Balboa’s path, and still the cliffs looked as if they were about to scrape the port side. They were covered in a glaze of ice chips and accelerated hydrogen, and the Balboa shot by too quickly to record even a single snapshot of the black shapes that struggled on a crack in the glaze. They were the size of elephants, the shape of dust mites, faster than cheetahs, and smarter than Data. Like an army of corpuscles gathered at a flesh wound, they spun a fibrous scab that was partly webbing and partly their own bodies. Of this army, only one member recorded the passage of the cocoon. It took notice that the two ships inside appeared to be growing, filed this fact away for future reference, and returned its attention to more important concerns.
Two-tenths of a second later, Worf was piloting in open daylight. In another six-tenths of a second he had swung the Balboa ninety degrees to port and, while preserving all of his forward momentum, was vectoring away from the sun as hard as he could without wrenching the towed Dooglasse ship apart.
Twelve seconds after that he looked around and saw the outer shell of Dyson, as clear and bright as high noon. He breathed a sigh of satisfaction, feeling as gratified as if he had defeated an enemy in hand-to-hand combat, just as Data said from the Enterprise, “The Sphere is slowing.”
“Slowing?” Picard asked.
“It has stopped,” Data added.
Worf gazed at the horizon in awe, thinking of the control of mass and inertia involved in stopping such a large object.
“It is now reversing its motion,” Data’s voice said without emphasis.
Worf muttered a curse and vectored the engines elsewhere, lest the horizon rush up to meet him.
Caught between the sun and the ground—again; but vectoring, this time, far beyond the reach of the urchin spines, the Balboa flew onward. Picard shook his head in wonder and exhaustion and sat back at his station, feeling suddenly unnecessary and insignificant. Down there, on the other side of the shell, most of an ocean had been lost… and a world as old as Earth … and its moon … and whatever lands they had bowled across … and no fewer than two races had probably perished.
He had tried to prevent this damage, but to the Dyson Sphere, it all added up to barely more than a bad scrape. The superplanet, having bled a little, was bandaging up now and moving on at its own super-planetary scale.
Hortas. Sea swifts. Marionettes.
Try as he might, what Picard was certain he would never forget, what he would never escape, was the realization that Dyson took no notice of them.
Dyson’s Web
“RIKER TO DALEN, please come in.”
“Darwin, this is Balboa. Darwin, Darwin, we have made safe exit. Repeat, this is the Balboa, answer if you can hear me.”
Captain Dalen heard the bailings from the Enterprise and the Balboa, but she did not respond. She had sent her last message just a few moments ago.
The message was: “Thanks for the good advice, Jean-Luc.”
No Federation here—not now, not ever—forever. No one was going to assign her to a new site before her exploration here was complete. The Darwin had come down on water—again; And this time she was down for the long haul. This time, the sun had seen to it that her ship would never fly again.
All well and fine, the Horta captain decided. It would take forever to visit all of Dyson’s unexplored shores; and by practical human standards, she and her crew really did have forever.
And—oh, the wonders that lay ahead!
“It’s very close now, Captain.” Lieutenant Jee was speaking, who was at present assisting three other squid with the lashing of the shuttlecraft Engford to the Darwin’s starboard hull. One of the Great Scott Sea survivors had taken Jee’s name, and another had taken Ensign Lenn’s, and another Lieutenant Veere’s, presumably as a sign of gratitude