Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (4 page)

“On an L1? You’re certain?” Melora answered Keru’s question with a nod, smiling. He definitely wasn’t dwelling on the Typhon Pact anymore.

“Maybe you could remind the rest of us,” Captain Riker said, “why that’s so unusual.”

“Because an ocean is basically a desert,” Melora said. “Life needs water to survive, but it also needs mineral nutrients. On a class-M planet, life in the oceans is richest where there’s mineral runoff from the land masses, and fairly sparse elsewhere. A Léger-type class O has no land, no minerals anywhere near the surface.” She worked the controls to display a cross section, the trim antigrav suit she wore making it easier to lift her arms against an artificial gravity dozens of times that of her native world. She’d mostly given up the holopresence system that Xin Ra-Havreii had designed to let her interact with the crew from her microgravity haven in the stellar cartography lab, since it had been making her too isolated from the crew. But this antigrav suit—the latest gift from Xin, who gave out brilliant inventions as romantic gifts the way other men gave jewelry—was an improvement over the motor-assist armature she’d used for most of her Starfleet career, and over the cruder, bulkier antigrav suit she’d tried briefly last year. “Droplet, for instance, has a metal core thirty-
seven hundred kilometers deep surrounded by nearly three thousand kilometers of silicate rock, and above that is a mantle of high-pressure allotropic ice over four thousand kilometers deep. The outermost ninety kilometers is liquid water, an ocean a hundred times greater in volume than Earth’s. But on most planets of this type, the ocean is virtually barren. Whatever minerals get delivered by meteor impacts are barely enough to sustain a limited microbial population, and the minerals tend to sink to the bottom of the ocean, where the pressure is too great for most forms of life to survive.”

“What’s more,” Keru added, “without deep-sea volcanic vents, there’s no mechanism for conventional life to arise in the first place.”

“Except seeding from space, whether by natural panspermic bombardment or alien intervention.”

Riker perked up. “Could the life on Droplet,” and he smiled a bit at the name, “be evidence of alien intervention?”

“Or perhaps a colony,” Commander Tuvok suggested. “Six years ago, on stardate 52179,
Voyager
encountered an artificial ocean in space created by unknown builders. It had subsequently been colonized by travelers from elsewhere.”

“Monea, yes, I read about that,” Melora said. “But we’re picking up no signs of artificial power generation. At least, as far as we can tell. But we were able to get those biosigns on the dynoscanners. Power readings would most likely be easier to detect.”

“You said meteor impacts could deliver minerals to
the ocean,” Christine Vale said. This month, the deceptively slight first officer’s hair was tinted a rich, deep blue with aquamarine highlights. Melora hoped that was a sign she’d be receptive to exploring this ocean world. “Could the bombardment rate here provide enough minerals to explain the life readings?”

Melora shook her head. “Not in these abundances.”

Riker’s smile widened. “Sounds like it might be worth checking out.”

“You sure you don’t want to follow up on the video broadcasts from the Oraco system?” Vale asked.

“We just surveyed a pre-warp industrial society last month, back at Lumbu,” the captain replied. “And another the month before at Knnischlinnaik. Aren’t you ready for a change of pace?”

“But this one seems more advanced. And those signals are thirty-four years old—the Oracoans could be in space by now.”

“Creating a greater risk of our accidental discovery,” Tuvok pointed out.

Riker nodded. “We can continue monitoring their broadcasts from a distance, send out a probe to intercept more recent signals.” He looked around the room. “Any negatives about Droplet?”

“The density of the asteroidal disk would pose a hazard to navigation,” Tuvok answered. “Once in the system, the sensor interference would be amplified, impeding our ability to chart the trajectories of potentially hazardous objects.”

“We’d still have optical imaging,” Melora replied. “It
would take a lot longer to do a thorough survey, but we could see anything immediately dangerous soon enough to get out of the way.”

“It looks like the planet has a pretty strong magnetic field too,” Keru put in.

“That’s right. Its core is unusually hot; it probably contains many of the same radioactive elements we see in the system’s debris disk, like plutonium and pergium. That makes for an active magnetic dynamo with some unusual energy patterns.”

“And that field,” Keru said, “would interfere with sensors, communicators, and transporters.”

“We’d need to use shuttles anyway,” Vale said. “After all, where would we beam down to?”

“Indeed,” Tuvok said. “There would be many difficulties involved in surveying this planet.”

Riker was grinning widely now. “Come on now, people. The first generations of space explorers didn’t have transporters or subspace sensors, but that didn’t stop them. Personally I’d relish the chance to do some old-school exploring. And when has this crew ever backed down from a challenge?”

The rest of the senior staff was smiling now, catching their captain’s enthusiasm—all except Tuvok, who merely sat back with a stoic lift to his eyebrow, satisfied that his concerns had been voiced. Xin rewarded Melora with a more personal smile, congratulating his lover on her success in selling her case. She smiled back, and Xin turned to the captain. “Shall I begin converting our multipurpose shuttles to aquatic configuration, sir?” he asked.

“As many as you can by…what’s the travel time, Commander Pazlar?”

“Three days at warp five, Captain.”

“All right, then.” He hit his combadge. “Riker to Ensign Lavena.”

“Lavena here, sir,”
came the response, the Selkie pilot’s voice filtered through the hydration suit she wore.

Riker’s grin grew even wider. “Set a new course, Aili. You’re gonna love this one.”

STARDATE 58506.3

Captain Riker had been right; Aili Lavena’s pulse was surging with excitement as she flew
Titan
into the UFC 86783 system—or New Kaferia, as the stellar cartographers had dubbed it, for the star was a virtual twin of Kaferia’s sun Tau Ceti, a smallish yellow-orange dwarf with a dense debris disk around it. Except Tau Ceti’s disk was sparse compared to this one. Aili was as energized by the navigational challenge of reaching Droplet as by the prospect of getting to dive into its oceans. Although she was a pilot by training, she knew she’d be at the forefront of this survey, for her aquatic physiology would let her explore this planet’s depths in ways no other member of the crew could.

But the true depths of this planet, she reminded herself with a slight shudder, were far more profound than even she could plumb. Below ninety kilometers, the pressure became so great that water itself was crushed to solidity, forming exotic crystalline phases with names like ice-seven and ice-ten even at temperatures she would consider boiling hot. At best, she would be able to descend a tiny
fraction of that depth before the pressure exceeded even a Selkie’s tolerances.

First things first, though. She brought
Titan
into the system at a sharp angle to its ecliptic plane, coming “up from below” to avoid the worst of its debris disk and give the sensor techs a good overview of its asteroid distribution. Their estimates of the asteroids’ courses, a constantly updated file of which was tied into her nav computer, were necessarily inexact, limited as they were to optical imaging; more accurate orbit plots would require observing their motion for weeks, as early astronomers had needed to do in the days before subspace-displacement motion sensors. But the rough data she had were enough to let her skirt around the probability cones of any hazardous bodies.

Droplet was in an unusually wide orbit for a habitable planet around a star this cool. With an endless supply of water to vaporize, Droplet had a considerable greenhouse effect, plus the convection in its oceans brought some heat up from the planet’s interior; so the surface was balmy and tropical. Aili had been glad to hear that; though her body was well-insulated and able to adjust to a wide range of water temperatures, she liked it warm. And land-dwelling humanoids definitely liked it warm, which would be a plus if the away team included anyone she wanted to invite for a private skinny-dip. She smiled to herself at the thought.

As the ocean world loomed larger on the viewer, it looked almost like a Jovian; without land masses to break up the airflow, the weather patterns were very regular, with parallel bands of clouds circling the planet, most solidly concentrated around the equator. But as the angle changed,
allowing the bridge crew to see around the curve of the large globe, the cloud bands around the equator broke and swirled around a more circular pattern—one which Aili soon realized was an enormous hurricane. “Don’t tell me,” Riker said. “Hurricanes break up when they hit land. No land means they can get…that big.”

Beside him, Troi’s eyes widened. “Some Jovians have standing storms that last for centuries.”

“Like Jupiter’s Red Spot or the Eye of Vetlhaq,” Vale said.

Riker was grinning now. “How long do you suppose this hurricane has been around?”

“There’s no way of knowing,” Pazlar answered. “I’d just recommend that we avoid getting too close in our shuttles. There’s some ferocious lightning in there.”

As the planet drew still nearer, more detail began to appear. The pole they could see was wreathed in a bright ring of auroras, lost in the blue of the lit hemisphere but vivid and alive against the night side—the visible evidence of the powerful magnetic energies emanating from this planet. Much of the ocean surface was hidden under the clouds, but in the exposed portions, shadings of green were visible. “Algae blooms,” reported Chamish, the Kazarite ecologist, from the secondary science station.

“But where are they getting their nutrients?” Pazlar wondered.

“Any sign of mineral concentrations?” Riker asked.

“With the sensor interference, the blooms themselves are the best sign we’re getting,” the Elaysian science officer replied.

“Wait,” Troi said, trying to lean forward with little
success. “This can’t be right…but I could swear I’m seeing islands!”

Looking up from her board, Aili saw faint specks dotting the ocean surface. When Riker ordered magnification, they came into view more distinctly. The most prominent feature from this angle was a small polar icecap, but hundreds of other bright specks dotted the ocean surface around it. “They could be icebergs,” Vale suggested.

“Not bergs, ma’am,” Aili told her. “Those break off of glaciers, which need land masses to form on. Here, you’d only have flat ice sheets and floes. And they couldn’t survive very far from the poles, not if the ocean’s as warm as Commander Pazlar says.”

“She’s right,” Pazlar confirmed. “And some of them are too large anyway. Look here.” She magnified a portion of the screen, centering on what seemed to be a cluster of islands, each one either a single light-colored disk or a cluster of multiple disks of similar size.

“There’s no way you could’ve been wrong about there being land, is there?” Vale asked.

Pazlar shook her head, studying her readouts with a slightly dazed expression. “Those aren’t land. Not the way we think of it. They’re moving, sir. They’re drifting in the current.”

Riker was out of his chair, his hand on Aili’s seat back as he took a closer look at the main viewer. Glancing up, she saw he was grinning like a kid at his birthday party. “Floating islands? Tell me you’re not kidding!”

“I swear it. I wouldn’t care to speculate about what they are, though.”

Chuckling, Riker turned to Vale. “What was that you
were saying about not having any place to land? I think we’ve just found our first touchdown site.”

Christine Vale looked on with a stern expression as Riker’s eyes roved over the shuttlecraft
Gillespie
, now refitted into a full aquashuttle configuration. Half of
Titan
’s eight shuttles were designed to be reconfigurable for multiple mission profiles, and Ra-Havreii’s engineering teams had managed to convert all four of them in time for planetfall.
Gillespie
’s nacelles had been lowered and modified to serve as pontoons, equipped with stabilizing fins and linear induction thrusters. Searchlights, undersea sensor suites, and extra structural integrity field generators had been added to allow the shuttle to function as a deep-sea submersible. In lieu of the manipulator arms of old submersibles, an undersea tractor-beam rig had been installed below the nose, with a pair of emitters that together would focus the tractor effect at the desired distance, with the individual, unfocused beams exerting minimal effect on the intervening water. All in all, it looked like one hell of a boat, and Vale was looking forward to taking it for a spin.

Assuming the gleam in her captain’s eye didn’t translate into action. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of going down yourself, Captain,” she said, hands on hips.

His eyes turned to her, the gleam giving way to wistfulness. “Don’t worry, Christine. Just an idle thought.” He sighed. “Time to put those days behind me now. I have to be a responsible captain
and
a responsible father. You won’t have to argue with me about who leads the away teams anymore.”

Vale studied him, knowing that he wasn’t too unhappy
about it. He and Deanna had been through a rough time after deciding to conceive a child: first a long, unpleasant set of treatments to overcome their cross-species compatibility issues, then the miscarriage, then the near loss of their second unborn child. It had put a strain on their relationship, but they had come through it stronger and more committed to each other—and to their little girl—than ever. She knew that at this stage of his life, Will Riker was happier to be by his pregnant wife’s side than to go gallivanting around uncharted planets in souped-up shuttles. But there was still a part of him, she knew, that felt nostalgia for that freedom and excitement.