The Sagan’s sensors had been probing the region’s field of sparsely distributed icy bodies for the better part of an hour, and had turned up several unanticipated—and so far inexplicable—waves of subspace and gravi-metric distortions, which Nog and the Sagan’s computer had transformed into an ongoing atonal musical performance. But the point sources of these anomalous readings remained elusive. Julian was beginning to feel fidgety, not to mention redundant, in the company of an accomplished engineer and a polymath with lifetimes of potentially relevant expertise. Serves me right for being so interested in so many things—and for letting Ezri bring me along on this mission as her good luck charm.
The “music of the spheres” struck a particularly pungent note, rudely interrupting Bashir’s reverie. “All musicological analysis aside for the moment,” he said to no one in particular, “what haven’t we considered yet as the possible cause of the distortion waves that have been, ah, serenading us for the past hour?”
Ezri’s keen expression brought a vivid picture of Jadzia to mind. Of course,he thought. She’s in Jadzia’s element now.Loving someone possessed of so many facets was a lifelong process of discovery and accommodation.
“From everything we’ve observed so far,” Ezri said, “I’d still say it’s clearly an interdimensional effect.”
Bashir nodded. “But centered exactly where?”
“If we had access to the Defiant’s sensors,” she said with a shrug, “we might know that by now.”
“If the Defiantwere to come any closer,” Nog said, shaking his head, “her warp field and cloaking device emissions would only drown out whatever it is we’re, um, notfinding out here.”
Bashir sighed. “So we’re going to be at this for another few hours, most likely.”
“Looks that way, sir,” Nog said. “Or maybe even longer.”
Even as Nog spoke, another wave of dimensional distortion crashed against the icy comet fragments, causing several to emit a momentary, ear-splitting howl, which faded into discordant background harmonies as the computer automatically cut the volume back to a more agreeable level.
Ezri grimaced. “Kids today. Their music is just noise.”
Bashir agreed silently, suddenly feeling old. Give me one of Frenchotte’s Romulan oratorios any day.
Nog had either ignored or missed Ezri’s jab. He seemed ready to applaud, as though he’d just heard one of Vic Fontaine’s Las Vegas sidemen lay down a particularly adroit jazz solo.
Ezri leaned forward over the console, a worried look momentarily crossing her face. “That one peaked pretty close to our position,” she said.
“But where did it come from?” Nog said as he studied a gauge on his side of the cockpit.
Then the universe abruptly stopped singing. Instead, it opened its maw as if to swallow the shuttlecraft Saganwhole. Or at least that was how Bashir assessed matters during the split second it took him to glance out the fore viewport and shout, “There!”
“Hard to starboard, Lieutenant,” Ezri snapped in a calm, authoritative voice. Seemingly gone forever was the tentative, uncertain Ezri whom Bashir had first met more than a year ago. Nog tapped a quick command into his console and the shuttle lurched, forcing Bashir to grab the back of Ezri’s seat for a moment while the inertial dampers caught up with the sudden shift in velocity.
The cabin lights flickered, went out, and were replaced a moment later by the faint glow of emergency power.
“Engines?” Dax said, her voice full of iron authority.
“We still have impulse power and thrusters,” Nog said.
“Take us out to five-hundred klicks, then bring us about. I want to see this thing from a safer distance.”
An eternity later—though Bashir knew that perhaps only ten seconds had actually passed—the Saganwas parked in a stable orbit, apparently safe from the dark leviathan that had reared up at them from out of the ether.
“What is it?” Bashir asked, his momentary surge of fear giving ground to curiosity and wonder as he looked out the viewport. Whatever it was, the object was enormous. It hung in space, a faintly glowing hulk composed of crosscut planes and angles. Even with his genetically enhanced mind, Bashir had trouble counting just how many intersecting vertices the thing possessed. As the alien structure slowly rotated in the void, each new face it presented seemed entirely different, even after it had made what must have been a complete rotation. Gold, silver, and ruby colors vied for attention on its multitextured surfaces. The object utterly defeated the eye, sometimes appearing to be a tangle of impossibly intersecting Platonic shapes, planes, and lines, other times taking on the aspect of a Gothic cathedral. It brought to mind the visually deceptive works of the ancient Terran artist M. C. Escher.
It didn’t make any sense. Surely, Bashir thought, he ought to be able to keep track of this thing’s architectural lines, however weirdly its alien builders may have arranged them.
“Whatever it is, it looks pretty benign from this far out,” Ezri said after studying the thing in silence for a few minutes.
“I wonder why we didn’t see it sooner,” Bashir said.
Dax stared thoughtfully through the viewport.“Maybe the object’s own subspace distortions are turning the surrounding cometary bodies into a natural cloaking device of some kind.”
“Well, now that we can see the thing, what do you suppose it is?” Bashir repeated.
“The Divine Treasury?” said Nog, his eyes as wide as deflector dishes.
“I certainly hope not,” Bashir said.
“Why’s that?” Ezri wanted to know.
“Well, don’t most Ferengi believe that the Divine Treasury is the first thing they’ll see after dying?”
Nog swallowed hard. “You’re right. I hereby withdraw the comment.”
“Whatever it is,” Ezri said as she glanced at a readout, “it’s about four times bigger than a Galaxy-class starship—at least it is at the moment.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Bashir said. “Are you saying that its sizeis changing?”
Ezri nodded, evidently fascinated by the numbers she saw scrolling past. “As near as I can tell, it’s turning on some sort of interdimensional axis, and different amounts of its mass are peeking through into our universe at different times. It might be a four-dimensional object moving through five spatial dimensions, or it might have an even higher number of macroscopic dimensions. We’re seeing just the shadow it casts in three-dimensional space. And that shadow changes as the thing rotates through higher-dimensional space. We almost flew right into its interdimensional wake.”
“Well, that’s certainly a relief,” Bashir said.
“That we weren’t accidentally swept away into the nth dimension?” Ezri asked, cocking an eyebrow in his direction.
“No.”
“What then?”
He smiled. “It’s one of the conceits of the genetically enhanced, I’m afraid. Unless something is out-and-out incomprehensible, we generally expect to be able to figure it out, and usually rather quickly. So it’s comforting to learn that the thing is an imponderable—like the birth of the Inamuri entity we witnessed shortly after the Defiantentered the Gamma Quadrant.”
Ezri smiled as she returned to her readouts. “I’m not letting you off the hook that easily, Julian. We’ll figure out what this thing is, eventually. The incomprehensible just takes a little longer.”
“Well, we don’t need to know what it is to figure out what it’s doing,” Nog said. “From these sensor readings, it seems pretty clear that this object is the source of all the dimensional distortions we’ve been picking up.”