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 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.