The Murdered Sun - Christie Golden [10]
"Oh, too bad," said Neelix happily. "Guess we should turn around and vacate this space, right, Captain?"
"Neelix," sighed Janeway, "if you don't mind." Neelix resettled himself in the chair without looking the least bit hurt or embarrassed.
"Mr. Tuvok, you said something about the gravitational pull being strangely low. Please elaborate."
"There is a bit of a mystery here, Captain. The gravitational pull the concavity is exerting on our ship at the present moment is approximately one-seventh of what it ought to be. Since that is an accurate way of estimating the amount of gravitational force within the concavity, I would say that, theoretically, our shields would hold if we decide to venture into it."
Amid the feeling of renewed excitement Janeway could sense rising on the bridge, the captain locked onto the key thing that her security officer had said.
"It's one-seventh what it ought to be," she repeated, "far less than is necessary for its size. Just like this sun is far older than it ought to be. I wonder if there's any kind of connection?"
"Curiouser and curiouser," said Paris, "as Alice said when she fell down the rabbit hole."
Paris's quip had an unforseen effect on his captain. Janeway felt her body tense. "Something is very wrong here, isn't it, Mr. Tuvok?
There's too many things happening in this system that just aren't making any sense."
Neelix opened his mouth as if to further his attempts to get them to leave, but a cold glance from Chakotay caused him to close it again.
"Correct, Captain." Janeway knew that, though he would never admit it, such illogical occurrences were frustrating the hell out of the Vulcan.
"The distance between the sun and the concavity is three trillion miles. The gravitational pull exerted by the concavity is insufficient to siphon off the star's hydrogen at all, certainly not to the extreme extent that it is doing so."
"Let me get this straight," said Janeway. She was starting to become a bit frustrated herself. "We've got a red giant that's too young to be a red giant. We've got a concavity whose gravitational power is too weak for it to be the size that it is.
And we've got hydrogen being pulled across an impossible distance at an impossible rate. Have I got all this right, Tuvok?"
"That is essentially correct, Captain."
Janeway wished she'd gone ahead and had that second cup of coffee.
"Captain!" Kim's voice was urgent. "I'm picking up a hail from the planet farthest from the sun."
Janeway rose, planting her hands on her hips. "Maybe they've got some answers for us. Put it on screen, Mr. Kim."
The figure that appeared on the screen was one of the most fascinating combinations of creatures Janeway had ever seen, and she'd met over a hundred different races in her time in Starfleet. At first glance, the creature resembled nothing so much as a dragon out of old Earth legends. But that first superficial comparison did not hold up to closer examination.
Janeway could not get a proper size estimate nor a complete view of the being as it was seated in a chair that seemed fashioned of equal parts stone and plastic. The pose in itself bespoke a bipedal creature, and from the waist up there was a certain resemblance to a humanoid: a torso, two arms, and a head.
But what arms, strong and ending in sharp-clawed fingers, and what a head.
It was snakelike in form, a shapely diamond. Incongruously large, gentle eyes filled with concern graced a head that narrowed into a pointed muzzle. There were no teeth visible at the moment. The back of the head tapered into a long, sinuous neck that broadened at the base to very human-appearing shoulders. A heavy, multifaceted pendant, winking silvery in the light, hung about that throat. A white mane of hair decorated the head and continued down the length of the neck.
Soft, mottled, pale fur covered all, though the creature wore comfortable drapelike