Текст книги "Over a Torrent Sea "

Автор книги: Christopher Bennett

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

“To seek out strange new worlds, new life,

To go where we have never gone, and meet the people there.

We voyage in the name of peace. We celebrate all life.

Diversity combined: it’s the refrain that guides our quest.

For different voices, even those that frighten us at first

Can join with ours in harmonies we never could have dreamed;

Just as your voices all combine to sing the Song of Life—

A whole that’s greater than the sum, a chord of destiny.”

As she elaborated further on the theme, she heard Alos and the other squale translators begin to improvise upon it, illustrating it by the very act as well as by the words. She reflected that Riker would love the jazzy spirit of it. Together, they developed the theme that all things in the cosmos, even those that are dangerous or painful or discordant, were nonetheless harmonics of the same fundamental tone, the over-arching Song that sang the universe into being. As alien as she and her companions seemed, she told them, they were still part of the same continuum of life and mind.

At this point, Cham began singing too, but not to reinforce her words. His was a counterpoint conceptually as well as musically, reminding the squales of the crisis precipitated by the offworlders. The defender squales not singing her part took his, amplifying it to compete with hers.

Yet it wasn’t truly competition, she realized. Melodically, rhythmically, even thematically, it merged harmoniously with her song rather than clashing. Cham wasn’t trying to drown her out or sabotage her. He was simply adding a voice of caution to the chorus, making sure all sides were heard. In a way, Aili thought, he was even reinforcing her point: even dissenting voices could be part of a single song. An argument didn’t have to be about silencing or sabotaging the opposition; it could be a cooperative act, a way to participate in seeking a resolution to a conflict. Cham wanted the other side to be heard, but only to facilitate a healthy debate.

And maybe, she realized, to give her an opening to address his concerns. “I understand your fear—your dread of losing all you have,” she sang. “That dread is known to us, more so than you could ever dream.”

Aili dug deep down in herself, calling on her memories of the ordeal the Federation had faced at the hands of the Borg. She reached for all the emotions she’d buried away at the time and since: terror for the survival of herself, her ship, her world; grief at the deaths of friends and crewmates; shock, anguish, and sheer incomprehension at the devastation of entire worlds, the elimination of entire civilizations from the cosmos. She knew the squales could not comprehend the events, but she sang to them of the emotions—emotions she’d never let herself face this directly. It was painful, harrowing, and her voice often faltered, but her squale chorus compensated, making her vocal distress a part of the music. When she could not go on, their singing trailed off into a long, sustained chord, a dirge for the dead. It gave her time to gather herself before she went on.

“Like you today, we faced the end of our entire world.

We could have bowed to panic, helped to tear that world apart.

Instead, we let our fear inspire us all to stand as one.

To join in greater chorus, even with our enemies,

And sing a louder, richer song than any could alone—

A harmony that won out over chaos and discord,

Resolved the darkest movement in our cosmic symphony,

And let us start anew, transposed into a brighter key.”

But something was still missing. Aili didn’t feel she’d sold it enough; Cham’s counterpoint was still present, his skeptical melody creating an unresolved chord. The Borg invasion, the loss of worlds—however movingly she sang, it was too abstract for them. As drained as she was, there was one more corner of her soul she had to bare for them.

“Still, there is loss, I know. My grief will be an overtone

In every joyous song to come. For they’ll be incomplete.

They’ll lack a certain voice that I will never hear again.

Miana, sister, lost when I was but a little girl.”

She told them of Miana, of how she had blamed her mother for her death, turning her grief into rage in order to avoid facing it. She faced it now as she never had before. Despite her emotional and vocal exhaustion, she pushed on.

“In all my songs thereafter, Void has sung one of the parts.

But Void must not become the loudest singer in the song,

As it became for me. I feared the loss and pain so much

That I became the cause of loss and pain to my own kin.”

She confessed it all, not hesitating to make herself un-sympathetic. Her purpose could not be served by anything less than brutal honesty. And she needed to drive home the theme of how fear could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By singing of how her own fear of hurting her children had cost her a loving family life, she hoped to underline how their panicked efforts to protect their world would bring just the opposite result.

“We act in fear because we wish to change the course of Fate,

Believing we can stop the surge of oceans if we try.

But if we swim against the Song’s inexorable flow,

We may just smash ourselves upon the shores of death and pain,

Destroyed by our misguided fight against that very doom.

“There is no shame in fear, unless we let it make us deaf.

We’ve all known fear and loss; we need to heed each other’s song

And add the voice the other lacks, fill in the aching void—

Not swim alone in fear until we lose our very selves.

Together, we can bring the Song back into harmony.”

She wasn’t sure it was enough; she was afraid it was hokey, sentimental rubbish. And her voice was raw and failing; she couldn’t imagine it sounded very pretty to the squales.

But she must have poured her soul into it, for she could hear a change in the squale chorus. Cham’s counterpoint had modulated, synchronizing with her part of the song and allowing the chord to resolve at last. It was his way of showing that she’d won him over.

And beyond, in the ri’Hoyalina, the squalesong was changing too. There had been mostly silence for a time, as the squales had paused to listen to her song, with only a few voices raised in protest or anger. But now, new voices were singing, repeating her own song, echoing it even as the multiple reflections of the deep sound channel echoed it, turning the song into a round, a canon. Aili realized they were passing the message along, reamplifying it for the benefit of squales farther away. She wasn’t sure if that meant she had convinced them, but at least it meant they were willing to ensure she was heard. Within six hours, she knew, every squale on Droplet would have heard her plea.

But what would they decide?

Not for the first time this day, Christine Vale cursed the speed of sound for being so slow.

Sure, the idea of a layer in the ocean that allowed effectively global telecommunication simply through a quirk of water density was fascinating and elegant, but why did it have to be the layer with the lowest speed of sound instead of the highest? She was used to subspace radio making it possible to speak instantaneously with people twenty par secs away. The notion of having to wait an hour and a half to know the results of an action being taken less than nine thousand kilometers away was infuriating.

Especially given what had been happening in that hour and a half. The compound floater had been eroded down to its last few segments around the base camp; indeed, the camp might have fallen already if not for Ra-Havreii. He and Y’lira had returned to the base an hour ago, making a daring run of the squales’ blockade and driving the scouter gig clear up onto dry ground—though the Efrosian engineer had insisted that any bravery in the act had been inspired by his greater fear of remaining in the water.

Since then, he had somehow figured out a way to conduct a structural integrity field through the organic shell material of the floaters, making them far more resistant to the icebreaker creatures’ attacks. But it took a great deal of power and couldn’t be maintained for long. And it had the unfortunate side effect of making the remains of the island more rigid, no longer flexing with the constant swells of the ocean. More than one segment had snapped off under its own weight when too much of it had been suspended out of the water, overstraining its connections to its neighbors beyond what the SIF could bear. The squales had seemed puzzled by the change at first, but now had modified their attacks to take advantage of it, waiting for swells and then sending the icebreakers in to strike sidelong at the bases of the suspended floater segments.

“I never imagined myself saying this,” Ra-Havreii told Vale as they and Keru watched a segment adjacent to the base rock and twist under just such a bombardment, “but the island can’t take much more of this.”

“Aili, come on,” Vale muttered through clenched teeth, knowing that whatever Lavena had attempted was already completed by now. They were out of comm range of the surviving hydrophone, without the Marsalisto relay through the interference, so there was no way to get a status report. The shuttle had ferried the captain back to Titanand had then suffered an ill-timed engine failure, the delayed result of an attack by one of the electric-tentacled dreadnought creatures; and replacement parts were slow in coming as long as the ship’s industrial replicators were in full-time probe-making mode. The shuttle was on its way back down to evacuate the base, but there was no guarantee Bolaji would make it in time. At least Vale could take comfort in the knowledge that Captain Riker was alive and safe. One way or the other, I won’t have to be the one giving orders for much longer.

“Commander, come quick!” It was Ensign Evesh, calling from the sensor shed. “You need to hear this!” she cried.

Vale jogged over to the waving Tellarite, while Ra-Havreii remained at his equipment, trying to keep the SIF from burning out just a while longer. Keru stayed on guard, watching the icebreakers closely, phaser at the ready in case defensive measures failed. The islet shuddered and heaved beneath her feet; the inertial damper field had been cut to minimum to boost the SIF. She was getting seasick.

But music was coming from Evesh’s console—a chorus of squalesong combined with Selkie, the translator rendering the latter for her ears and filtering out the echoes. “Diffraction leakage from the deep sound channel,” the sensor tech explained. Vale listened for a while and was moved; even after serving with Aili Lavena for a year and a half, she had never learned this much about her.

“But did it work?” Vale asked as the islet shuddered again. “Are they listening?”

“They must be,” Evesh said. “They’re relaying the sound forward.”

“Okay, but the sound I want to hear is the one that calls off the damn icebreakers!”

Evesh stared. “Would you recognize that if you heard it?”

Vale glared back. “Context is everything, Ensign.” The ground shuddered again. “Case in point.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

“Oh, no,” Ra-Havreii called.

“Oh, no?” Vale called back. “That’s nota sound I want to hear, Doctor!”

“Oh, no.”

“Doctor!”

“The field’s going. I can’t stop it.”

The ground heaved, knocking them both over. Keru somehow managed to keep his footing, though just barely. “Oww…don’t tell me, the dampers too?”

“The whole field assembly! I told you this would happen.”

“Then that means…” She looked up and saw the Cerenkov sparkle as the deflector dome around the base decohered and died.

“It means I should’ve stayed in my nice safe lab at Utopia Planitia. That it should come to this…dying out here in this desolate waste…”

“Hold it together, Doctor.”

“I should’ve known I’d be killed by nature!”

She grabbed him by the front of his uniform. “Would you rather be killed by a pissed-off Izarian?”

He cleared his throat. “Ah. Apologies, Commander. What are your orders?”

She clambered to her feet. “Vale to Marsalis. What’s your ETA?”

The response was barely audible through the static. “Ano…lve minutes, Co…der…. ld on.”

The ground jerked forward three meters and left her behind, landing her on her behind. “Easy for you to say,” she groaned.

Rising only into a crouch this time, she drew her phaser. Keru caught her gaze and nodded, raising his weapon as well. Ra-Havreii’s eyes widened. “It’s come to that, then?”

“I’m afraid so, Doc.”

“Do you think they’ll even penetrate those shells?”

“It’s what we’ve got.”

He nodded. “I understand.” He drew his own phaser and waited.

And waited.

It took a few moments for Vale to realize the ringing in her ears was from the sudden silence. She scanned her surroundings. The icebreakers were veering off, wending their way through the detached floater segments as they retreated from the remnant of the islet.

Evesh staggered out of the sensor shed, breathing hard. “They’re singing a new sound pattern. Part of it is a single Selkie word. ‘Yes.’”

Vale closed her eyes and lowered her phaser. Yes. Thank you, Aili Lavena. Thank you for everything.

CHAPTER S

EVENTEEN

TITAN

Riker climbed out of bed as Christine Vale entered, despite the attempts of Doctor Onnta and Nurse Kershul to keep him down. He was still weak, but he was tired of being off his feet, even if they would only support him for a few moments. “Any word on Deanna?”

Vale shook her head. “Not yet, sir.” His heart fell. “But the news from the surface is good.”

“The probes are being deployed?”

“Yes, sir. Lavena did an amazing job getting them past their fears. They’re letting us drop the probes—in fact, they’re even helping. It’s amazing—they’ve already figured out the deployment pattern we’re using, and they’re offering ways to improve it, based on their knowledge of the deep-sea currents. They may mythologize it, but I think they probably have a better scientific understanding of Droplet’s depths than we do. And Cethente’s actually beenthere.”

“Oh, yes, I heard about that. Is it back in one piece?”

“All four legs are reattached and healing nicely,” Onnta said. “Cethente should be back on regular duty within two days.”

“Good, good.” Riker looked back to Vale. “Aili didn’t come back with you?”

She shook her head, which was still tinged midnight blue. “She still needs to stay as an interpreter. But she asked me to send her best.”

He smiled. “She already gave me that. And more.”

After a moment, he realized the others were giving him a very strange look. “I…I didn’t mean that the way it sounded!”

“Oh, of course, sir,” Vale said. “I’m sure you were completely professional while you were naked together for nearly a week.”

“Hey, I had a thong! Unhh…” He suddenly felt dizzy, his feet giving way under him.

Vale was there, catching him and easing him back into the bed. “Uh-huh. Well, like the old punch line says, the thong is over but the malady lingers on.”

He stared at her. “I don’t remember. Were you always this sarcastic?”

She sighed. “Consider it a defense mechanism. This has not been a good week to be the one making the big decisions. I’m really glad to have you back, sir. Really glad.”

He smiled. “Thank you.” Then he cleared his throat. “Then…could you do me a favor?”

“Of course, sir.”

His eyes went to the top of her head. “I am…really sick…of the color blue.”

She laughed. “I’ll get on it right away, sir.”

“When you can spare a moment.”

DROPLET

It took two days to finish replicating and deploying all the probes, and another half a day before the squales began reporting that the dissonance was fading from their magnetic Song of Life. The Song was not fully restored yet, since it would take time for the dying barophiles to heal and the population to replenish itself. The Song would be subdued for a time, and might even be changed once it returned, since the attrition of some species in the dynamo layer might allow other, faster-reproducing species to gain an edge, altering the “orchestration” of the Song. But the squales saw the Song as an evolving thing, and were confident they and their fellow Dropletian life forms would keep up with the changes. When he came back down to Droplet, Riker told them they had the spirit of true jazz musicians.

“And you were amazing too,” he told Aili when he was reunited with her. “I’ve heard the recording…. I never knew you could sing like that.”

“Neither did I, sir,” she said from where she floated in the water, next to the scouter gig where he sat. She still hadn’t donned any clothing, choosing to “go native” as much for the squales’ comfort as her own; but she now wore a field-damped combadge on a choker around her neck, at least. He still wished she’d put something on, but over the past week, he’d come to associate the sight of her nudity with experiences that were less than pleasant, so it evoked no stirrings in him anymore. “But I guess after living with the squales for a time, learning to think and communicate like them, I couldn’t help but improve my singing.”

He studied her, sensing something beneath her words. “Ensign…are you thinking of staying here?”

Her mouth hung open. “Oh, sir. No.”

“But the squales…they’ve essentially adopted you into their pod, haven’t they?”

“Yes, but…pods change members all the time. It’s like a family in a lot of ways…but it’s really more like a crew. And I already have one of those.” She smiled. “My responsibility is to Titan, and to you. I wouldn’t run away from that. I’ll stay here as long as you need an interpreter, an ambassador. But then I’m going back to the conn.” She winced. “Back to living in that damn hydration suit.”

He smiled down at her. “Maybe there’s a way to make the suit more comfortable. How about adding a pin?”

She tilted her head. “A pin, sir?”

Riker nodded. “A small, round gold pin with a black circle in the middle. To go next to the solid gold one on the collar.”

The Selkie gaped. “Sir?”

“Aili, you just saved a planet. People who save planets get to be lieutenants.”

She was speechless for a moment. Then she grinned. “Well, it’s about time!”

“It certainly is. I—”

“Gillespie to Riker. Come in.”

Riker looked up, though the shuttle was not in sight.

It had been on Titanat last report and wasn’t scheduled to return; it must have come down to relay a message. “Riker here.”

“We’ve just heard from theHorne and theArmstrong,” came Ensign Waen’s voice. “They’re coming in, sir, all hands safe and well. And Commander Troi says there’s an extra passenger she wants you to meet.”

TITAN

As soon as the shuttles had landed, Riker raced inside the Horneand into its aft compartment to see Deanna. The sight of her with their daughter in her arms was the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen. He felt whole in a way he never had before.

He embraced her softly for a long time, the baby between them. She offered her to him without a word, and his arms cradled the tiny girl with great delicacy and care, though it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Her big black eyes looked up at him with awe to match his own.

“ Imzadi,” he said. “Look what we did.”

“Mm-hmm. We did good.”

“I am so sorry I wasn’t there,” he told them both, shaking his head.

His wife stroked his cheek. “You were, imzadi. I felt you.” She nodded at the child. “Something tells me she felt you too.”

His eyes went away from the baby for the first time since he’d first seen her, moving to Deanna. “How much empathy do you think she’ll have? Only a quarter Betazoid…”

“Hey. Don’t sell the Troi genes short. Remember, this is a daughter of the Fifth House. An heir to the Sacred Chalice of Riix.”

“And let’s not forget the Holy Rings of Betazed,” Riker added in a mock-bombastic voice, wiggling his daughter’s tiny hand as it clutched reflexively at his thumb. He frowned and glanced back at Deanna. “Really? I never thought of that. We get theHoly Rings of Betazed?”

She gave a sheepish grin. “Don’t get excited. There are fifty thousand of them. Half the families on the planet are heirs to them.”

“Fifty thousand?”

Deanna shrugged. “The ancient Betazoids were a very holy bunch.”

“Captain.” It was Tuvok, coming back from the cockpit. “Commander,” he added, then nodded formally to the child, to Riker’s great amusement. “It is gratifying to see you reunited.”

“Thank you, Tuvok. I want to thank you for everything you did to keep my family safe.”

“I did my duty as a Starfleet officer, Captain. However, I consider this particular duty to have been an honor as well.”

“Oh, Tuvok, you old softie.” Deanna grinned. “The fact is, Will, he went above and beyond. And I don’t think you’ll be hearing any more complaints about his performance. Isn’t that right, Tuvok?”

The Vulcan closed off somewhat, but he had a serenity about him that Riker hadn’t seen since Deneva was destroyed. “I stand ready to serve, Captain.”

But just then, Deanna let out a giggle as if she were sharing some private joke with Tuvok. “Well, go on, show him.”

“Show me what?”

Tuvok handed him an isolinear chip. “A video recording of the birth, from my tricorder.”

Riker’s eyes widened, along with his grin. “Tuvok! You took baby pictures?”

“I monitored the event as a security precaution. To ensure the safety of mother and child.”

Yet Riker could see the gleam in Tuvok’s eye, a sense of gratification that he could allow a fellow father to witness the birth of his first child. “Thank you,” he said, and he could swear he saw the faintest hint of a smile on the Vulcan’s face in reply.

Growing serious, Deanna said, “Speaking of which…Doctor Ree would really like to talk to you, Will.”

They went out into the shuttlebay, where Nurse Ogawa and her son were in the middle of a joyful reunion, holding hands and telling each other about their respective experiences. Keru and T’Pel stood near them, basking in the warmth of the scene. T’Pel’s eyes widened at the sight of her returned husband, and though she and Tuvok only exchanged a simple nod, Riker believed he’d gotten to know them well enough to see the mutual relief and love beneath the surface.

The scene wasn’t entirely happy, though. Nearby, Ree stood in restraints, surrounded by the security team. Riker came forward to meet him, still cradling the baby. Ree looked at him in surprise. “You…trust me to be near her?”

“Why not, Doctor? You delivered her.” Deanna had shared everything she thought and felt about her experience through their empathic link. He knew they were in agreement on this. “There still needs to be a hearing, but it’s just a formality. I understand why you did what you did.”

“I stole your pregnant wife. Attacked a security team. Hijacked a shuttle.”

“And you did it all to protect my little girl. Do you have any idea how reassuring that is, Doctor? To know that anyone who wants to hurt this child will have to get past the most dangerous and relentless member of my crew to do it?” He took Ree’s shackled manus in his hand and shook it. “Thank you, Doctor Ree. Now don’t ever do that again.”

Ree gave a formal, heartfelt bow, then let Tuvok and the security team lead him away.

Deanna was by his side. “Does he really have to be in the brig?”

“Regulations,” Riker said. “We’ll have the hearing as soon as possible, I promise. But if anything, I think maybe he needs this. He’s obviously very guilty about what he did—I think he wants to feel he’s paid his dues.”

“Hey. Who’s the psychologist in this family?”

He beamed. “Family. We’re really a family now.” He admired his daughter a while longer.

Then he furrowed his brow. “I think we’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

“I don’t think the young lady and I have been formally introduced.”

Deanna nodded. “Oh. A name. I wanted to talk with you about that.” She huddled up against him, stroking the baby’s head. “We’ve all lost so many people this year. You and I lost the one that would’ve been her brother or sister. I want to name her in honor of someone we knew far too briefly. A friend whose life was cut short much too soon…because she tried to save mine.” She whispered the name in his ear.

He smiled. “I like it. In fact…I think there’s someone else lost too soon that I’d like to commemorate. In honor of this world, and the one who saved me from going too soon.”

“The repairs are almost complete,” Vale reported to the command crew. Riker looked around the conference lounge, pleased to see the whole group reunited again. Even Lavena was finally back aboard and back in her hydration suit—fidgeting like crazy, but visibly glowing with pride at the new pip on her collar. “When they rebuilt this ship, they built her to last. Even after all the damage we took, the spaceframe is as solid as ever and all systems are virtually good as new. We should be ready to set course to our next destination within the day,” the first officer continued. “Whatever we decide that destination will be.”

“That’s it?” Lavena asked. “After all this, the relationship we’ve built with the squales, we’re just going to up and leave? There’s still so much we can learn about them, and they about us.”

At Riker’s side, Deanna leaned forward. T’Pel was taking care of the baby so the two of them could both attend the briefing, though he knew Deanna was just as eager to get back to their daughter as he was. For now, though, she was the ship’s diplomatic officer again. “Aili, we’re all very grateful for the job you did with the squales,” she said. “It was a remarkable piece of diplomacy. I’m glad to know we have someone who can fill in for me when I’m busy with parental obligations.” A chuckle went through the room, though Lavena didn’t join in. “But the Prime Directive is clear. Just because interference has happened, that isn’t a license to keep interfering. We have to minimize the interaction as much as possible, just as we did on Lumbu.”

“But that isn’t fair to them! The squales are scientists and explorers just as much as we are. They have an intense curiosity about the universe, and we’ve just opened the door to a whole new realm of it.”

“Then we need to let them build on that knowledge at their own pace,” Christine Vale countered. “We don’t do them any favors by giving them knowledge they aren’t ready for yet.”

“Who says they aren’t ready? Just because they don’t have warp drive?” Lavena laughed. “Look at what the squales have accomplished. They have a biotechnology far more advanced than our own—and they’ve developed it all, built an advanced technological civilization, without metal, without stone, without even having hands! Can you imagine how long that took? They’re a much older civilization than yours or mine. They had genetic engineering before your species even learned to domesticate animals. And in a lot of ways, they’re a more advanced civilization than ours. Is it fair, is it even meaningful, to use warp drive alone as the only benchmark for whether a civilization is ‘advanced enough’ for contact?”

“It is not the only benchmark,” Tuvok put in. “However advanced their technology may be, the squales responded to our arrival with aggression and xenophobia.”

“It’s not like we didn’t give them reason. Our devices were hurting them from the moment we landed. And we should’ve left well enough alone with the asteroid.”

“And there’s another reason, Aili,” Deanna said. “The Prime Directive is as much about our lack of readiness as theirs. It’s about keeping us from being incautious in a contact situation. The squales are very, very alien. Who knows how else we might clash with the best of intentions?”

Lavena straightened. “Then doesn’t that make this a symmetrical issue? What gives us the right to make the decision unilaterally? Shouldn’t we at least give them a say, let them decide if they think we’reready for further contact?”

“I think she’s right,” Riker said. “This is their world. And we’ve done enough harm trying to make decisions on their behalf. The Prime Directive exists to keep us from imposing our will on other races, but unilaterally deciding to deny them further contact can be just another way of imposing our will.”

“But do we have the right to reinterpret the Prime Directive?” Vale asked. “If the rules are going to be changed, isn’t that for Starfleet Command and the Federation Council to take up? There’s a reason why the Directive uses space travel as its standard. It says something about a species’ readiness to accept the idea of being part of a larger cosmos, their curiosity about other forms of life, their ability to reach out to them. However advanced the squales’ biotech may be, the idea of space travel is totally new to them. It could be generations before they’re ready to cope with it.”

Suddenly Lavena wore a knowing smile beneath her suit visor. “Commander, I think you should come down to Droplet. There’s something Melo mentioned to me that I really think you should see.”

Lavena’s invitation extended to Riker, Ra-Havreii, and Pazlar as well as Vale. Christine was uneasy about leaving the ship without both its command officers, but Riker assured her that they would be safe in squale…tentacles. She wanted to convince the captain to stay behind, continue recuperating, and spend time with his family, but she could tell that Lavena’s little secret had fired his curiosity and nothing would stop him.

Their destination was one of the woodlike lattice structures that the squales used as secure facilities. They found that the top spiral of the lattice had been bred to fold open in response to a vocal command, irising out in an intricate, flower-petal pattern that was beautiful and stunning to see on such a scale.

The aquashuttle wouldn’t fit in there, of course, so the visitors donned scuba gear to dive in—all save Lavena, who went in nude save for a combadge choker and wrist tricorder. Hardly regulation, but everyone except Ra-Havreii seemed to be taking it in stride. They were accompanied by Melo, the leader of the astronomy pod Lavena had bonded with, and by another pod leader from a bioengineering group, but not the one Lavena and Riker had dealt with before. Reportedly this pod specialized in breeding life forms devoted to meteorological and astronomical research, such as the “weather balloon” creatures that had first tipped the crew off to the squales’ sentience. Lavena had dubbed this squale Anidel after a famous astronomer from her world.