Intellivore - Diane Duane [45]
“Any change in the velocity of the vessel?”
“None, Captain. It appears unaware.”
Let’s hope it really is, Picard thought.
Seconds ticked by. Picard found himself listening to his own heartbeat to time them. Finally, “Sensor window closing,” Data said. “The probe will be establishing contact shortly.”
Silence. They all waited …
“Contact reestablished,” Data said.
The silence on the bridge was complete. People stared at the viewscreen, and an image flashed into being there.
It was a planet, about twice the size of Earth, seen as if illuminated by strong starlight from one side. The patterns of the continents, the shapes of the oceans, the ragged shape of the icecap, which was centered on the planet like the boss of a shield, facing toward them as it leaned into its course away from them—all of them were familiar.
“Identification is verified,” said Data. “This is the planet that was associated with the colonization efforts whose disappearances we have been investigating.”
Picard sat quiet for a moment, then almost whispered, “Marignano?”
“Acknowledged, Captain,” said Ileen, and there was a strange sound of enjoyment in her voice. “There it is …”
“Yes, and we’ll discuss it in a while. Oraidhe?”
“I see it, Captain,” said Clif, and there was a sigh. “Z-eight-zero-eight-zero-point-four …”
“So it would seem,” Picard said. “Another one for the books.”
Picard found Beverly in her office in sickbay, looking rather worn, enough so that she didn’t rise to greet him when he came in but simply gestured with her eyes at the seat nearest her desk. “Jean-Luc—” she said.
He sat down, looked at her. “How are you holding up?”
“Oh, as well as can be expected under the circumstances. I’m doing counseling with my staff, they’re doing counseling with me. None of us much likes the kind of care we’re having to deal with at the moment. However, we’re coping.”
“Any improvement in any of your patients?”
She gave him a rather bitter look. “Some of my staff have voiced the opinion that the only improvement likely for any of these people is—” She broke off. “Well. The one that in many cases we can’t give them.”
“Some of them had release documentation on file in Boreal, then?”
“A very few of them. Not nearly enough. Those we can let go, we will … but …” She shook her head. “Never mind. You’re here about something else.” Before Picard had a chance to reply, the doctor turned to her desk screen and tapped at it for a moment. “The first vessel we found,” she said, “the pirate vessel with everybody missing except the Alpheccan left on board—”
“Do we have any indication of where those people went?”
“Not that I know of, Captain. However, the forensics team went over the outer hull as well as the inner—normal technique. They found something that didn’t strike me as particularly significant, early on. These.”
She turned the screen so that he could look at it. Picard found himself examining a wire-frame structure that looked more like a beach ball or soccer ball than anything else. “Why does this look familiar?” he said.
Beverly smiled a little. “It’s a buckyball.”
“Pardon?”
“A buckminsterfullerene. It’s a dodecahedral solid, an arrangement of carbon atoms into a somewhat spherical lattice. It was named after Buckminster Fuller, an Earth scientist and architect who worked with geodesic spheres based on a similar structure. For a long time they were thought only to be artificial: they had industrial uses, and people learned how to make them under very specific requirements of heat and pressure. But then it was discovered that they could occur naturally, and that often, inside that latticework, other atoms, sometimes quite old ones and from sources very different from the original fullerene, could be trapped for long periods—held, as it were, in a kind of molecular stasis and protected from interacting with other compounds in their environment.”
“A sort of cage,” Picard said, “or collector’s box.”
“That’s right. And a couple centuries ago, on Earth anyway, came the first detections of fullerenes in impact craters