The universe sang to the shuttlecraft Sagan.

In a manner of speaking.

If, Julian Bashir thought, one was willing to apply a rather liberal dollop of imagination to the cacophonous sounds reverberating through the cabin.

“It’s beautiful,” Nog said, leaning forward in the copilot’s chair, smiling into the faint glow of the cometary cloud visible through the viewports. Something, gods only knew what, was causing the crystalline ices of the region’s various frozen bodies to resonate like tuning forks at various shifting frequencies. Of course, those vibrations couldn’t generate actual sounds in the vacuum of System GQ-12475’s Oort cloud, but the Sagan’ s sensors were capable of measuring the vibrations and rendering them in the shuttle’s cabin as something audible—if not entirely enjoyable.

Unless, Julian thought, one happened to share Nog’s sometimes rather outré musical tastes.

“Absolutely beautiful,” the young Ferengi engineer repeated, indicating a visual display of an icy ten-kilometer-wide body that suddenly glissaded back and forth through an entire series of overtone pitches. The timbre was an eerie mating of glass harmonica and chainsaw.

From the portside seat, Lieutenant Ezri Dax fixed Nog with a good-natured scowl. “‘Beautiful’ isn’t the first adjective that springs to mind, Nog. I guess nine lifetimes just isn’t long enough to acquire a taste for free-form splitter music.”

“Free-form, yes,” Nog said, wrinkling his nose. “Splitter, definitely not.” It appeared that the word “splitter” had left a bad taste in his mouth.

Standing behind the cockpit seats, Bashir smiled at them both. “Sounds more like Sinnravian drad,” he said, keeping his expression carefully neutral.

“Exactly, Doctor.” Nog grinned as he examined a sensor display. He sounded impressed. “Humans usually aren’t very familiar with the atonal minimalists.”

“Humans aren’t blessed with the same…auditory endowments as Ferengi,” Bashir said, not wishing to be drawn into the aesthetic debate he sensed was brewing.

“Humans usually can’t stay in the same room with drad,” Ezri deadpanned. “But Julian is knowledgeable about drad. And splitter. And other diseases as well.”

Nog pouted, and Julian forced down a smile. Serious work lay ahead, after all. After Shar had mysteriously opted out of this survey mission—a development that Ezri had proved oddly reticent about discussing—Nog had stepped in enthusiastically. Of course, the Sagan’ s visit to this system’s comet halo had at least one major engineering-related application: the use of cometary bodies, because of their crystal lattice structure patterns, as sites for high-bandwidth, long-range sensor relays. Nog had seemed rather excited about the prospect of using a solar system’s Oort cloud bodies as natural enhancers for a small number of devices that might provide detailed scans of distant habitable planets—as well as advance warning of the presence of potentially hostile sentients—from as far off as a light-year.

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 Defiant were 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, not finding 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 Sagan whole. 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 Sagan was 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 size is 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 Defiant entered 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.”

“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-mystery smile.

“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 Sagan in 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’s inside 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 raktajino on 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-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 throughout the cabin. The forward viewport revealed the alien cathedral hanging serenely in the void, its spire no longer visible, its overall shape morphed into even wilder congeries of planes and angles.

Dax heaved a loud sigh. “Our residual momentum must have carried us clear. Couldn’t have missed us by much, though.”

Bashir couldn’t help but vent some relief of his own. “Thank you, Sir Isaac Newton.”

“Ship’s status, Nog?” Dax said.

“Most of our instruments are still down, but our power appears to be returning as we drift away from the object’s wake. We’ve already got some impulse power and at least a little bit of helm control. And the subspace channels are starting to clear up, too.”

For a moment, Bashir felt dizzy. He assumed either the inertial dampers or the gravity plating must have taken some damage.

“What just happened to us?” he said.

“My best guess is we passed right through the edge of the thing’s dimensional wake,” Nog said. “It’s a miracle we weren’t pulled into wherever it’s keeping most of its mass.”

Bashir had trouble tearing his gaze away from the starboard viewport and the weirdly graceful object that slowly turned in the distance. A miracle indeed. That something like this even exists is something of a miracle, I’d say.

For a moment he thought it was a pity that he didn’t believe in miracles.

A burst of static issued from the cockpit comm speakers, then resolved itself into a human voice. “…mei, come in, Sagan. This is Ensign Tenmei. Sagan, do you read?”

“Go ahead, Ensign,” Dax said, frowning. It was immediately obvious that something was wrong aboard the Defiant.

“I’m afraid we’re in need of Dr. Bashir’s services, Lieutenant,” said Tenmei.

“Is someone injured?” Bashir said over Ezri’s shoulder, the alien artifact suddenly forgotten.

“We have wounded aboard, but they’re not ours.” It was Commander Vaughn’s voice, deep and resonant. “They’re guests, and some of them are in pretty rough shape.”

Bashir wasn’t relieved very much by Vaughn’s qualification. Injured people were injured people, and he was a doctor. “Acknowledged, Captain,” he said as he watched Nog launch a subspace beacon.

Good idea. We’re going to need to find our way back here when we have more time.

Dax took the sluggish helm and gently applied power to the impulse engines. “We’re on our way, sir.”

“Too bad the Defiant’ s not carrying an EMH,” Dax said to Bashir as they got under way.

“I far prefer flesh-and-blood help in my medical bay,” Bashir said. Strangely, he felt no urge to explain about the mutually antipathetic relationship he shared with Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, the inventor of the emergency medical holograms that were found on so many Starfleet ships these days. In fact, he found that he was no longer in the mood for conversation of any sort. As the alien cathedral dropped rapidly out of sight, he gathered his energies for the triage situation that he presumed lay ahead.

But the alien cathedral’s ever-changing shadow still moved very slowly across the backdrop of his thoughts.