Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [51]
Coyote came out of the water next and exchanged looks with the other Dissenters. Nobody spoke. Troi perceived a mood of foreboding.
Finally Coyote said, “Maui and Isis have been captured. Caliban is dead.”
There was a prolonged silence. The Dissenters stared down into the water.
Finally Coyote said, “We can’t stay here. We have to move deeper into the caverns.”
Then he spoke directly to Troi.
“Now it doesn’t matter who you are, because we’ve lost Alastor and will have to wander until we find a new home. You can go your own way or stay with us. But the main passage we left is not safe anymore.”
“Can you show me how to reach CephCom through these caves?”
“Only Odysseus knows that, and he won’t awaken for many hours yet. But he no longer has a reason to keep it from you. There is no Alastor left to protect.”
Troi thought for a moment.
“I’ll go with you.”
Chapter Eleven
AT SCIENCE STATION TWO on the bridge, Wesley had searched through physics files for hours. Nothing he’d seen so far suggested a solution for stopping the one-eyes. In fact, he felt he was intuitively closer to the solution when he had started his search.
“Computer, what was the first file I saw?”
The screen displayed the image of the Dance of Shiva, the Dance of the Burning Ground, a symbol of the universe-dance of creation and destruction. Shiva’s four arms and four legs moved in a hypnotic pattern. Wesley could even hear the computer-generated rhythmic tap-tap of Shiva’s drum of Time and the roar of the hoop of flames surrounding him.
Below the image, the screen displayed a list of references to Shiva, as a metaphor, made by physicists over the past several centuries.
Wesley almost told the computer to move on to something else, as he hadn’t meant to call this image up. But he restrained himself. He felt the germ of an idea starting.
The dance of the physical universe, the endless round of light/dark, creation/destruction, life/death; the on-off vibration without which there is no sound or light or life or universe at all …
Wesley knew that even at the subatomic level, the smallest particles, the stuff of which everything is made, oscillate through many states. Matter itself is a dance. He pictured to himself various phases of the dance, the phases of light matter and dark matter—
Dark matter.
A huge proportion of the universe’s total mass is dark matter, the neutrino matter that permeates the void, emitting no light or electric charge but with enough mass to keep the universe from expanding forever. Enough mass to eventually reverse the expansion and collapse the universe into itself, into a singularity. And perhaps out of that singularity would come another explosion, and another universe. Like the endless creation/destruction Dance of Shiva.
Wesley kept thinking about the dark matter, the neutrinos.
He thought maybe in neutrinos there was a weapon to use against the one-eyes, but he wasn’t sure what it would be.
Chops handed Geordi a sterile tech-wipe. He swabbed the sweat from around his VISOR, and then they fell back to work on a burnt console. Chops’ sensor-padded hands moved over the console with pixilated speed while her blind eyes, behind their dark visor, looked off in some random direction.
The warp engines, running at low power, had almost gotten away from them just now. This couldn’t go on much longer. They’d eventually have to force a shutdown to avoid a matter-antimatter catastrophe. But a shutdown would mean no shields and they’d have to use the impulse engines to attempt an escape from the surrounding hostile ships.
If they still had impulse engines. The one-eyes were about to knock those out as well.
Geordi figured the Rampartian ships around the Enterprise were waiting so quietly because they wanted a sure thing, an easy target. Battling an enemy that still had options would make the Rampartians nervous; there would be intangibles, and the Rampartians certainly couldn’t like intangibles