Star Trek: The Next Generation: Do Comets Dream? by S.P. Somtow

Author:S.P. Somtow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Star Trek, Fiction
ISBN: 9780743411301
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2003-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

On the bridge, a welter of information and images was being relayed as Captain Picard watched, and his crew analyzed.

Tanith was a beautiful world and, apart from its strange orbit around a double-star system, could have been the twin of Thanet. But Tanith’s civilization was no more. Images of wasteland came flooding in from the ship’s computer as it verified Data’s coordinates.

There were mountains sheared into plateaus. [140] Pockmarks of bombardments. Tanith’s atmosphere, once rich in oxygen, had become a soup of poisons. And the destruction was clearly man-made. Tanith’s death had been caused by a hail of comets—comets just like the one that was now heading toward Thanet. Comets that contained many types of destructive weapons, from primitive thermonuclear devices to viruses to the biological wherewithal for a kind of reverse terraforming—the metamorphosis of a friendly world into an uninhabitable deathworld.

The horror of the present contrasted with the images that were being gleaned from Data’s transmission and which were appearing on screen. They were not images of the pinpoint clarity that would be produced by a Federation computer, but blurred sometimes, and sometimes fringed with a prismatic field; the mechanisms of image retrieval and transmission were clearly quite alien, and had the flavor of a biological origin.

Meanwhile, there was Deanna Troi. She and the girl had already beamed aboard the comet, and a third series of images was being transmitted now, so that the bridge’s viewing area was now a jigsaw puzzle, the pictures complementing each other, contradicting each other too, sometimes.

Picard watched as Deanna and Kio inched their way down the narrow corridor, their footsteps spiraling with the changing gravity. There was something about those walkways that reminded him of his own subjugation to the Borg—the dehumanizing horror of it lived inside him, would always be with him. [141] Even in his dreams of childhood, the idyllic vineyards of his youth, there was always a machine. Watching. Never letting go. What that child must be going through, Picard thought.

The innermost chamber irised open, and he saw the child.

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