“Our cosmic concertmaster,” Bashir said, staring appreciatively out the fore viewport at the ever-shifting vista that lay before them. “I wonder how long it’s been out here, waiting for us to come along and discover it?”
“I’ve already started running analyses on the hull materials,” Nog said. “I don’t have anything conclusive yet, but it’s old. Something like half a billion years old.”
Bashir was speechless. Any civilization capable of building such an enigmatic structure had to be far more technologically advanced than the Federation. But why had they built it? And what had become of the builders?
Ezri’s eyes locked with Bashir’s, and he immediately recognized Jadzia’s quirky I-love-a-mysterysmile.
“Like I said, the thing doesn’t look so dangerous now,” she said. “Any objections to my ordering a closeup inspection?”
Since the Defiant’s Gamma Quadrant explorations had begun, there had been times when Bashir had thought it strange to be taking orders from a lieutenant— who also happened to be the woman he loved, as well as Commander Vaughn’s first officer. But more recently he had begun learning to sit back and enjoy the ride.
He grinned at Ezri. “You’re in charge, Lieutenant.”
Ezri grinned back at Bashir before turning toward Nog. “Lieutenant, let’s have at it.”
Nog parked the Saganin a close orbit, only about fifteen kilometers from the nearest part of the continually changing alien structure. Ten minutes of exterior scans revealed that the hull materials did indeed contain a fair amount of gold, platinum, and other precious metals, along with a number of transuranic elements that Bashir had never seen before. And he still had yet to see a precise repetition of any of the weirdly morphing structure’s surface features—which presumably meant that they had yet to see it make an entire revolution on its axis through higher-dimensional space. Though he wasn’t a specialist in higher-dimensional topology, it was obvious to him that the artifact’s surface convolutions had to be incredibly complex.
Bashir found himself pacing back and forth in the cabin behind Ezri and Nog, who busied themselves at the sensor consoles.
What’sinside the bloody thing?
“Keep trying the deep interior scans, Nog,” Ezri said. “And watch the subspace horizon line. We don’t want to get close enough to that thing’s dimensional wake to fall over the edge.”
“Aye, sir. Compensating.” Nog sounded frustrated as he touched various controls. “I just wish this thing’s shifts in mass and gravity were easier to predict.”
“Over the edge?” Bashir said. “I don’t understand.”
Ezri gestured toward one of the cockpit gauges. “I’ve noticed that the object seems to be causing a very slight drain on the Sagan’s power. I’d bet all the raktajinoon Qo’noS that it’s because the energy is dropping off into whatever dimension the object is moving through to get here.”
Bashir didn’t like the sound of that. “Is it dangerous?”
“It’s negligible so far,” Dax said. “But we don’t want to get much closer to it than this, or it might not stay that way.”
“Oh,” Bashir said. He was gaining a deeper appreciation of Jadzia’s expertise in physics. He wondered if Ezri was aware of how easily she had stepped into her predecessor’s scientific boots.
“Are the sensor beams still just bouncing off?” Ezri said.
Nog nodded. “Mostly, though I’m reading several large, empty chambers a short distance beneath the hull. I think I’m reading a residual power source of some kind deep inside, but I can’t be sure. And scans for life signs are inconclusive.”
Bashir suddenly stopped pacing when the idea came to him. “Why don’t we just knock on the front door?” he said quietly.
Ezri turned toward Bashir and looked at him as though he had just sprouted a pair of Andorian antennae.
“Let’s hail them,” Bashir said by way of clarification. “Maybe somebody’s still home.”
After half a billion years, that may be a wee bit optimistic,he thought. Galactic civilizations tended to have life spans lasting centuries or millennia; those capable of enduring for hundreds of millions of years were rare indeed. But, nothing ventured…
After a moment’s consideration, Ezri nodded toward Nog. “I can’t see the harm in that. Lieutenant?”
“Opening hailing frequencies,” Nog said as his fingers moved nimbly across the console. He looked relieved that no one had suggested that they beam inside to take a look around. “Sending greeting messages in all known Gamma Quadrant languages.”
Thirty seconds passed in silence. A minute.
“I don’t think anybody’s home after all, Julian,” Ezri said with a faint I-told-you-sosmile. “Why don’t you contact the Defiant?Tell them we’re on our way back with the data we’ve gathered so far.”
“Aye, Captain,” Bashir said with a deferential nod, then crossed to a subspace transmitter console on the cabin’s port side.
“Charity!” Nog’s exclamation stopped Bashir in his tracks. Ezri looked at the engineer quizzically, evidently unfamiliar with that particular Ferengi vulgarity.
“Excuse me,” Nog said, composing himself. “I think the doctor might have been onto something. Looks like somebody ishome. Or some thing.”
Ezri’s hands became a blur over her console, evoking for Bashir the stories he had heard about Tobin Dax’s facility with card tricks. “The computer is downloading data. Nog, prepare to purge the system if it looks like anything dangerous.”
“Ready.”
“That power source you detected must be keeping a computer system on-line,” Bashir said to Nog.
“Pretty sturdy hardware,” Nog said, looking impressed as he watched strings of indecipherable alien characters march across one of the cockpit monitors, overlaying themselves across a false-color tactical image of the inscrutable spacebar cathedral.
Bashir felt a tingle of apprehension, recalling a report he had read about a similar alien artifact once having seized control of the computers of Starfleet’s flagship.
“How about it, Nog?” he said. “Is it dangerous?”
Nog shook his head. “Nothing executable. Looks to me like it’s just a text file.”
The information abruptly stopped scrolling. Nog punched in a command that shunted the information into a protected memory buffer.
“A whopping hugetext file,” Ezri said. “Nearly eighty megaquads.”
“So what does it say?” Bashir said, his task at the subspace radio console all but forgotten.
Ezri’s expression was a study in fascination. “It could be the sum total of everything this civilization ever learned about science, technology, art, medicine…”
Nog shrugged. “Or it could be a compilation of their culture’s financial transactions.”
Bashir considered the unfamiliar lines and curlicues still visible on the screen. Before him was something that could be the Gamma Quadrant’s equivalent to the Bible or the Koran. Or an ancient municipal telephone directory.
“It could take lifetimes to puzzle it all out,” Dax whispered, apparently to everyone and no one. Bashir found the idea simultaneously exhilarating and heartbreaking.
Staring half a billion years backward into time, Ezri appeared awestruck, no longer the duranium-nerved commander she had been only moments before. Her current aspect struck Bashir as almost childlike.
“Let’s try running some of it through the universal translator,” Bashir said, intruding as gently as possible on Ezri’s scientific woolgathering. “We can probably decipher some of it by comparing it to language groups from other nearby sectors.”
After a moment Ezri nodded. “What he said, Nog,” she said finally, returning to apparent alertness.