Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (7 page)

BOOK: Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea
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“What about the floating islets?” Bralik asked. “They’re made partly of calcium carbonate, aren’t they?”

“Yes. We’ve also detected small concentrations of calcium in some other creatures, usually in cutting or grinding mouthparts.”

“Teeth?”

“Hard to call them that exactly, since they’re not set in jaws and not made of dentin. More like chitinous beaks or plates strengthened with calcium.”

“But the floaters have the highest calcium levels we’ve found in any organism here,” Melora Pazlar put in. Eviku turned to face her politely, his gaze not lingering on Bralik. She took it in stride and simply appreciated the elegant taper of his cranial lobes. “We’re pretty sure it’s for the reason Torvig proposed, that they collect and concentrate
decayed matter from the other life that lives on them.”

Ensign Vennoss, a Kriosian female from stellar cartography, asked, “What have you learned from the sample you collected?” Bralik grinned, recalling the amusing account of how the sample had been obtained. In all her years as a geologist, she’d never sunk an island.

“Well, first off,” Pazlar said, “after collecting the sample, we took a look at the insides of the, uh, wounded islet. It was made up of polyp shells all the way through, but the interior ones were empty except for air. It seems the living creatures’ bodies form an airtight seal that’s lacking in the dead shells further inward.”

“Except there are some airtight walls,” Eviku added, “dividing the interior into about a dozen air chambers. We believe that evolved so the islets don’t sink fully when there’s a breach in the outer layer of live polyps.”

“So how did the air get there in the first place?” asked Zurin Dakal. The young Cardassian ensign had been a regular at the Blue Table from the start, even though he had spent most of his tour aboard
Titan
in operations. He had been included as the protégé of Jaza Najem,
Titan
’s now-departed science officer. Jaza had been lost to a time warp over a year ago, and Dakal had subsequently decided to honor Jaza’s wish that he switch his specialty to the sciences. After months of study aboard
Titan
and a post-invasion leave spent taking crash courses at Starfleet Academy, Dakal was now a sensor analyst.

“Same way it gets into Lavena’s swim bladder,” Eviku told him. “It’s extracted from the water by the gills. It then gets pumped into the shells of the dead inner creatures and keeps the whole thing afloat.”

“But there are still gaps in what we know,” Pazlar said. “For instance, we observed some smaller floater colonies living beneath the surface, more active and motile than the large ones. So why do the large ones rise to the surface, when it kills off all the polyps that end up out of the water?”

“What we’re trying to do in the lab is to recreate the conditions of their spawning season in hopes of accelerating our sample’s growth,” Eviku said. “It’s a challenge figuring out what those conditions are.” Bralik enjoyed the smile he gave, even though it was directed at the exciting mystery rather than the exciting Ferengi female seated across from him.

“Sounds like you’re in the same boat I am,” Bralik said, undaunted. “So to speak. This whole system is a mystery.”

“How so?” Chamish asked.

She kept her gaze on Eviku as she replied, though. “All this clutter of asteroids. Normally in a system of this age, most of it would’ve been cleared out by now, condensed into planets or flung away by their gravity.”

“That’s if there were large Jovians in the system,” Pazlar replied. “New Kaferia only has a couple of Neptune-sized ice giants.”

“Which is part of the mystery. This system is loaded with heavy elements, including all those stable or semi-stable transuranics—yurium, celebium, rodinium, timonium. Most systems with that much heavy stuff produce big, heavy planets, superterrestrials and superjovians. The planets in this system just don’t fit its mineralogical profile.”

“Could the abundance of water in the system be a factor?” Dakal asked.

Bralik shook her head. “Water’s common in any system. Beyond the snow line, out where the star’s heat doesn’t dissipate it, ice is one of the most abundant minerals you’ll find.”

“She’s right,” Pazlar told him. “Droplet must have formed in the outer system as another ice giant, then migrated inward, losing its hydrogen and helium. It’s not uncommon. But,” she went on, nodding in Bralik’s direction, “that kind of migration should have cleared out some of the asteroidal debris.”

“Any evidence of past artificial intervention?” Dakal suggested. “Could there have been a planet that was blown apart?”

Bralik shook her head. “The geology of the asteroids we’ve been able to scan isn’t consistent with that. If they’d been part of a planet, they would’ve differentiated—they’d show the signatures of the different planetary strata they’d been part of, like some being pure metal and others pure rock. At most, some of these asteroids were parts of bigger asteroids.”

“You look disappointed, Ensign,” Pazlar said to the Cardassian youth.

“No, it’s just…it would have been interesting to find signs of intelligence.”

“We can’t find intelligent life everywhere we look. And we’ve got enough interesting puzzles to solve here even without intelligence being involved.”

“Besides,” Chamish said, “we haven’t ruled out intelligent life on Droplet. Our shuttles’ audio sensors have recorded some intriguingly complex calls, though nothing the translators have been able to interpret yet. Ensign
Lavena suspects they come from the large tentacled animals she detected on her initial dive.”

“Perhaps,” Dakal acknowledged. “But at best, they would still be smart animals. Technology is impossible on a world like this.”

Eviku threw him a surprisingly cold look. “Are animals only of worth if they build tools?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“Simply that a technological species would be a more interesting find.”

“You mean you have no interest in life too dissimilar to your own. I had thought that by now this crew had moved beyond such divisions.”

“I resent your implication. Sir.”

“Hold it, both of you,” Pazlar said. “There’s no sense in fighting over something that’s still strictly hypothetical. At worst, you have a philosophical difference. Just let it go.”

Dakal and Eviku both mumbled chastened acknowledgments, but neither offered an apology. Bralik felt Pazlar had been a little harsh to Eviku, but she said nothing more about it, in the spirit of the Thirty-third Rule of Acquisition. “So,” she said, hoping to get things back on track. “Anyone up for a new round of drinks?”

Deanna Troi sat on a coral beach, watching the undulations of an endless ocean and contemplating the strange sensation of the ground beneath her rocking gently like the deck of a large ship. Will Riker’s arms went around her from behind, hands resting atop her ever more ample belly. “Aren’t you glad we came down here after all?” he asked.

She turned to smirk at him. “What, down to the holodeck?”

He gave her a rueful look. “I was just trying to get into the spirit of the illusion.” He turned to the others with them on the beach. (Could it be a beach, she wondered, without sand? The surface below her was somewhere between coral and chitin, but ground down by the action of the waves.) “Not that it needs my help,” Will went on. “It’s remarkably convincing. This is a real-time feed?”

Doctor Ra-Havreii nodded. “From the surface station’s sensor feed.” The away teams had established a base camp on one of the planet’s larger floating islands, a cluster of over two dozen disk-shaped floater colonies fused together, part of an archipelago (or school?) containing multiple such large clusters—suggesting that its latitudes had been fairly calm for some time, devoid of any massive swells or storms that might break up such a large cluster and endanger an away team and its supplies. “I’ve adapted the same software I used to allow Melora—Commander Pazlar—to interact by holopresence with the crew.” He nodded at Pazlar, who stood next to him. Their hands brushed together discreetly, but Deanna sensed the mutual warmth that passed between them. “So it’s highly detailed and current. The only difference is that you have no holo-avatars on the surface, so any change you make in the environment will be simulated only. But I’ve been working on a prototype for a compact mobile emitter robust enough for away missions—”

“Thank you, Doctor. We can discuss that another time.” Underneath Will’s reluctance to sit through another of the Efrosian chief engineer’s ivory-tower technical lectures,
Deanna sensed, was a distaste at the idea of replacing live explorers with simulations, even ones operated by telepresence. It would be safer, certainly, but it grated against Will’s explorer spirit.

That thought led him to gaze out at the ocean, and she felt his wish to be down there for real, without technological intercession. “So what do you think the odds are we can see some squales from here?” he asked.

“Given how imager-shy they are, sir,” Pazlar replied, “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

The squales had become as much a running joke over the past few days as a source of genuine, growing curiosity. Multiple explorer teams had reported sensor readings of moderately large chordates in groups of six to twelve, built something like large dolphins or small whales but with several large tentacles toward the front and a cephalopod’s ability to flash vivid colors on their skin. They seemed to be a match for the creatures Aili Lavena had glimpsed on her first dive. These “squid-whales,” a nickname soon shortened to “squales,” repeatedly showed up at a moderate distance from the away teams, hovering in the vicinity, but at every attempt to approach and investigate them more closely, they donned camouflage colors—suggesting their skins contained color-changing chromatophores like Terran cephalopods—and retreated in haste. Optical scans from
Titan
showed pods of them traveling on the ocean surface, suggesting they were air breathers, yet when approached they dove deep and seemed able to remain submerged for hours. The biologists believed they had a dual respiratory system like the Argoan sur-snake. Bugeye piscoids had repeatedly been detected at the same times as
squale contacts, suggesting they were associated somehow, like pilot fish and sharks.

“But you do think they’re the source of the complex calls we’ve been hearing?” Riker went on.

“There does seem to be a correlation with their proximity.”

Will nodded. “Very well. Keep me posted. Dismissed.”

Ra-Havreii and Pazlar exited together, holding hands, and Deanna felt their amused approval at how their captain and diplomatic officer presumably intended to make use of the simulation. Lovemaking while extremely pregnant was difficult but not impossible, and being in the water—or a force field facsimile thereof—increased one’s options.

But for now, Will was still busy taking in the sensory experience of Droplet, and she was content to share in his feelings. Yet there was a bittersweet tinge she couldn’t ignore. “You wish you could be down there for real, don’t you?”

He cradled her against him, a hand atop where their daughter rested in her womb. “I am exactly where I want to be,
imzadi
. Now and forever.”

She showed her appreciation for his sweet talk, but then said, “It’s all right, Will. You don’t have to reassure me of your commitment. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have regrets. I miss beaming down to new worlds as much as you do. I understand perfectly.”

He threw her an uncertain look—more puzzled than skeptical. “Do you really? To be honest, I’m not sure when the last time was you went on an away mission. It’s been months.”

“I suppose it has. This pregnancy’s gone by so fast I guess I lost track.”

“But you didn’t have to give it up so soon. That contact with the Chir’vaji a couple months back…there was no medical reason you couldn’t have gone yourself.”

“I figured Christine could use the diplomatic practice.”

“But the way they revere parenting, I was surprised you didn’t take advantage of that.”

“It wasn’t necessary. They were agreeable enough without it.” He just looked at her,
felt
at her, until she relented. “Fine. Okay. I’ve been erring on the side of caution. Can you blame me, Will? I don’t want anything to happen to her.” Deanna’s hand moved protectively over their child.

“I understand that,” he said, his voice breathy. “You know I do. But the Caeliar healed her. They healed you. You’re both as strong as an ox. As…oxen. Anyway…” They shared a chuckle, defusing the moment. “I just worry that you’re living too much on the defensive. You can miss out on so much that way.”

She considered his words. “I know that’s true. But sometimes, up to a point, a little extra caution isn’t a bad thing. Will, we’ve all been through hell. Not just you and me—the Borg took so much from everyone. It’s instilled all of us with a keen awareness of…of loss. And if we need a little time to deal with that, to retreat into our comfort zones for a little while, that’s simply part of the healing process. It’s not healthy to stay there too long, but it shouldn’t be rushed through either.”

“And you’re picking that up from the whole crew,” he said with deep sympathy. “Carrying that for all of us.”

She clasped his hand. “I’m trained to cope with other people’s negative emotions. Not to let them get confused
with my own. But it can be…saddening.” She reflected on some of her most troubled patients over the past few months. Lieutenant Kekil had lost most of his family when the Rigel Colonies had been attacked, but his natural pride and stoicism made it difficult for him to face his grief. Pava sh’Aqabaa from security had a triple burden to deal with: not only the loss of kinfolk in the bombardment of Andor, but post-traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt after coming back critically injured from the joint raid on the Borg reconnaisance probe—a raid that the other five members of her team had not returned from at all. And then there was Tuvok, who still struggled with depression over the loss of his son. That tragedy had undone all their work together to build new methods of emotional management to replace the Vulcan control that his years of cumulative cerebral injury and strain had left in tatters. They had needed to begin again from the ground up, and it was slow going. Even without Vulcan discipline, Tuvok’s natural stubbornness was fully intact.

BOOK: Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea
7.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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