Nog came out of his reverie when he noticed that Shar was still looking at him expectantly. He was thankful that Permenter and Senkowski were still preoccupied with their instrument calibrations. Nog tried to put on his best tongoface for Shar, though he didn’t want to appear as evasive as his friend always did whenever he was asked a direct question about his family. Concentrating on that helped distract him from the mounting agony in his leg.
Until he saw the alien ship’s chief engineer extend two of its impossibly slender lower limbs toward one of the countless handholds that covered every bulkhead, loft itself spiderlike toward the ceiling, and fetch several of its tools and instruments with its remaining three appendages.
Watching a creature whose movements so resembled those of a Talarian hook spider made it very difficult not to think about legs, itching or otherwise.
Shar still stared at Nog, his antennae fairly vibrating with unasked questions.
Nog knelt long enough to fetch an EPS pattern tracer from his open toolkit. He focused past the pain in his left leg as he rose.
“I’m fine, Shar. Really. Now let’s finish getting this engine room shipshape so we can get back to the Defiant.”
The alien structure turned slowly end over end, hovering in midair about a meter above the longest table in the mess hall. Commander Vaughn sat at the head of the table, his fingers steepled before him as he watched the object’s ever-changing profile.
How long has it been drifting all alone out there?Vaughn thought, his soul filled to bursting with an almost religious ecstasy at the sight of this marvelous, inscrutable thing. How many aeons have come and gone since its builders turned to dust?
Seated across the table from Vaughn, Ezri Dax absently scratched at her abdomen. Then she gestured toward the hologram that dominated the Defiant’s ad hoc briefing room as she finished relating the tale of the Sagan’s near collision with the ancient object. Dr. Bashir sat beside her, listening attentively. The four remaining chairs were occupied by Lieutenant Sam Bowers, Ensign Prynn Tenmei, and science specialists Cassini and T’rb.
Vaughn looked around the room. Bashir, T’rb, and Cassini began reading the sensor reports that now scrolled across everyone’s padds. But Bowers—whose specialty was tactical and security rather than science—seemed completely entranced by the image of the artifact. Tenmei appeared utterly absorbed by it as well.
Vaughn smiled to himself. Maybe the apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.
Vaughn watched as the artifact turned, shrank almost to invisibility, then grew a series of outsize flanges and sprouted structures resembling the flying buttresses of a medieval cathedral. Then, as ephemeral as a ring of smoke, the thing’s shape changed utterly yet again, adopting an austere, Platonic solid aspect.
“I don’t suppose anybody will mind if the tactical officer asks a really obvious and dumb question at this point,” Bowers said. “But how does this thing change its form? I’ve never heard of any type of architecture capable of doing that.”
“Strictly speaking, Lieutenant,” Bashir said, “it isn’t really changing its form at all.”
“Come again?” Bowers said, looking perplexed.
“Imagine you’re on a boat floating on an ocean,” Bashir said in a professorial tone. “Floating nearby is an iceberg. All you can see of the iceberg is the little bit that’s peeking out of the water. The bulk of it is hidden by the water.”
“All right,” Bowers said, clearly expecting more.
Bashir obliged him. “Now imagine that the iceberg is slowly rotating on an axis that’s deep under the water. You’ll continue to see just a fraction of the ice at any one time—but always a different portion of the whole.”
“And,” Cassini added, “if you row your boat too close to the spinning berg, you’ll be caught in its undertow and get dragged under the water with it. That’s what appears to have nearly happened to the Sagan.”
“Metaphorically speaking,” T’rb added, rubbing at the vertical line that bisected his sky-blue forehead.
“So what isthe thing?” said Ensign Tenmei.
“It could be anything,” Bashir said with a shrug. “A space colony. An observatory. A retail establishment.”
“A police station,” Bowers said.
“An interdimensional ski lodge,” Tenmei said with a tiny smirk.
“A hospital,” Dax said quietly. “Or a church.”
“Whatever it is,” Bowers said, “could it be related to the fight between our alien guests and the folks who attacked them?”
“Until we crack the language barrier,” T’rb said, “the reasons for that conflict will pretty much be anybody’s guess.”
Bowers scowled. “Maybe not. It would help if some of our engineering detachment could snoop around a bit aboard the damaged ship. See if they can find what they’re doing way out on the fringes of this system.”
“Unfortunately,” Vaughn said, “the aliens seem to be supervising every move our people make over there. It looks like interviewing our patients may be our only hope for figuring out the aliens—and the artifact.”
Vaughn noticed the wry smile that had appeared on the doctor’s face at Ezri’s suggestion that the artifact might be a church of some sort. “Regarding the alien object,” Bashir continued, looking in Ezri’s direction as he spoke, “all we really know is that an intelligent and perhaps extinct species built it more than five hundred million years ago for some purpose which remains obscure. We also know that this structure possesses certain higher-dimensional characteristics that we don’t fully understand. We really don’t have any other information—except for the alien text file we downloaded from one of the thing’s internal computers.”
Vaughn smiled back at Bashir. From Vaughn’s perspective, the doctor was a mere pup. Vaughn knew that in his century-long life, he’d very likely forgotten more than even a genetically enhanced thirty-five-year-old could have learned. But Vaughn was often impressed by how painstakingly empirical Bashir could be in the pursuit of knowledge. And he was occasionally amused by the young doctor’s apparent obliviousness to all matters mystical. He recalled the Orb experience that had led to his taking command of this ship—and to this mission. Yes, mortal beings had built the alien artifact; this was not the work of enigmatic gods or supernatural spirits.
But knowing those facts made the thing no less wonderful or awe-inspiring to Vaughn.
Aloud, he said, “That alien text file has got to be the key to discovering the artifact’s origin and purpose.” He fixed his gaze on the Defiant’s security chief. “Mr. Bowers? Lieutenant Nog placed the text file in your care. Please give us a report.”
Bowers touched a control on his padd, and the holographic image of the alien artifact was replaced by scrolling lines of swooping, unreadable characters. “For starters,” Bowers said, “the file is huge.More than eighty megaquads, which is about a third of our computer core’s overall storage capacity.”
“That fact alone is going to put a real strain on our number-crunching—or, in this case, text-crunching—resources,” said Cassini.
“It’s too bad we have to tie up so much of the computer core,” Tenmei said, “with a document we can’t even read.”
“You mean we can’t read it yet,”T’rb said, apparently very sure of his abilities. “Cassini and I have already started running a cross-comparison between this text and samples of written language groups we’ve downloaded from adjacent sectors of Gamma Quadrant space.”
Cassini sounded equally confident. “It might take a while, but if we’ve ever flown anywhere near the Gamma Quadrant’s equivalent of the Rosetta stone, we’ll crack this thing. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Perhaps then we’ll also be able to converse with Dr. Bashir’s new patients,” Vaughn said.