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-so smile. “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 is home. 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 huge text 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.
An alarm klaxon abruptly shattered the moment. “Collision alert!” Nog shouted, as he manhandled the controls and threw the Sagan hard over to port. Bashir had a vague feeling of spinning as he lost his footing, and his head came into blunt contact with the arm of one of the aft seats.
He struggled to his knees, shaking his head to clear it, holding onto the chair arm. He looked up at the main viewport.
The alien cathedral had suddenly sprouted an appendage. Or rather, a long arm, or tower, or spire had just rotated into normal space from whatever interdimensional realm served to hide most of the object’s tremendous bulk.
Though the spire couldn’t have been more than a few meters wide, it was easily tens of kilometers in length. It had no doubt been concealed within the unknowable depths of interdimensional space until that moment.
And it appeared to be rotating directly toward the Sagan very, very quickly. Bashir felt like a fly about to be swatted.
“Nog, evasive maneuvers!” Ezri shouted, her mantle of authority fully restored.
“Power drain’s suddenly gone off the scale, Captain,” Nog said, slamming a fist on the console in frustration. “The helm’s frozen.”
“Looks like we got a little momentum off the thrusters before the power drain increased,” Dax said calmly. “Maybe we’ll get out of this yet.”
Or maybe we’ll drift right into the flyswatter’s path. Bashir clambered into a seat immediately behind the cockpit and started to belt himself in. Then he stopped when the absurdity of the gesture struck him. We’re either getting out of this unscathed, or we’re going to be smashed to pieces.
He rose, crossed to the subspace transmitter, and tried to open a frequency to Defiant.
Only static answered him. He glanced across the cabin at Dax, who was shaking her head. “Subspace channels are jammed. Too much local interference from this thing.”
“Our comm signals must be going the same place as our power,” Nog said.
Into this thing’s interdimensional wake, Bashir thought.
“Brace for impact!” Dax shouted.
The lights dimmed again, then went out entirely, and a brief flash of brilliance followed. Bashir felt a curious pins-and-needles sensation, as though a battalion of Mordian butterflies was performing close-order drill maneuvers on his skin. Darkness returned, and seconds stretched lethargically into nearly half a minute.
Once again, the emergency circuits cast their dim, ruddy glow
