Текст книги "Over a Torrent Sea "

Автор книги: Christopher Bennett

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Pazlar knelt and took a closer look, activating her own tricorder. Then she looked up at Vale and smiled. “It reminds me of a reef structure, like Terran coral or Pacifican si’hali.”

The human’s eyes widened beneath her fringe of midnight blue hair. “You think this whole islet was grown, like a coral atoll?”

“Exactly. Though I’m not quite certain why it’s light enough to float. It would have to be very porous.”

Vale pondered. “Let’s get back in the shuttle. I want to take a look underneath.”

“I could swim underneath,” Torvig said, sounding as eager as Lavena.

“You heard what I told Aili,” the exec replied. “For our first dive, I’d rather be inside a shielded duranium hull.”

They returned to the Gillespie,and Lavena wasted no time taking it down. The gentle curve of the islet’s surface continued for just a bit below the waterline, then suddenly increased. The sides ran roughly vertically for a few meters before curving inward to form a convex lower surface. The soil and surface plants, naturally, did not extend below the waterline, so the bare surface of the islet was clear for them to see. But this surface had one significant difference from the one Torvig had excavated—for out of every one of the thousands of holes which riddled its surface extended a small set of tendrils.

“It’s alive,” Lavena breathed.

“Take us in closer,” Vale suggested in a similarly hushed tone.

As Lavena complied, the surface resolved itself into a large number of individual units, each one a few centimeters across—an attribute which had been blurred up above by erosion. There seemed to be one set of tendrils for each of the distinct cells of limestone.

“It’s a colony of polyps,” Kekil observed, sounding intrigued.

“Like a coral reef,” Vale said.

“Yes, although the individual polyps are larger here.”

“And reefs usually lead a more sedentary existence,” Pazlar remarked.

“It’s as busy as a reef, though,” Lavena observed. At this range, they could see numerous smaller life forms either attached to the underside of the floater or swimming among its tendrils. Stalks of seaweed resembling attenuated broccoli hung down for several meters. Between the widely-spaced stalks scuttled a number of small crustaceans not unlike yellowish, four-legged tarantulas, clinging to the underside and using elongated mouthparts to dig out organic debris in fissures between the polyp cells, interestingly leaving the actual polyps alone. Turning her eyes in another direction, she saw a more open patch along which crawled several six-pointed starfish with snaky limbs and feathery tendrils. And swimming amid the broccoli seaweed were creatures that appeared very much like fish, although they bore clumps of small tentacles around their mouths and exhibited shifting color patterns on their smooth skins. She couldn’t tell whether they were vertebrates or invertebrates.

“Naturally,” Kekil said. “These floating colonies would be some of the few sources of shelter in this ocean, the few places where life could concentrate and have solid support.”

Torvig looked up, his ears flicking forward the way they did when he had an epiphany. “That could be why the polyps have so much calcium and silicon. As numerous other organisms live and die on them, minerals and other nutrients would tend to accumulate on them in greater concentration than anywhere else.”

“Good call,” Pazlar said. His ears perked up happily, and she resisted the urge to give him an approving pat on the head. “I wonder how it gets its buoyancy. Not to mention how they get into this form, how they start out, their whole life cycle.”

“Take a sample,” Vale suggested. “A living polyp for study.”

“Aye, Commander.” She reached for the tractor beam controls. “But considering that they live in this collective form, maybe I’d better take five or six of them.”

“Agreed.”

Pazlar focused the beams and delicately worked a small cluster of the polyps free of the mass. Sensing the disturbance, the polyps in and around the cluster yanked their tendrils back inside. But she ended up dislodging a chunk a good three times larger than she expected. As soon as she pulled it free, a stream of large bubbles erupted out and upward. “Whoa,” she cried, staring as the outrush of air continued unabated.

Vale gently tapped her shoulder. “Umm…Melora…” She pointed upward. Pazlar raised her eyes—and saw that the islet was starting to list to one side.

“Uh-oh.”

“Ensign?”

But Lavena was already spinning the craft around. Pazlar barely managed to retain her tractor grip on the sample as the aquashuttle shot away from beneath the sinking islet. Once they had resurfaced, Lavena turned the shuttle so they could watch. Soon the bubbles stopped rising and the islet began to stabilize—but about half its previous surface was now below the waves. Much of its soil was already washing away, staining the surrounding water.

Pazlar gave Vale a sheepish look. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Don’t feel bad. It was almost a galactic first.”

“How do you mean?”

“A wrecked island setting down on a ship.”

“ Nowcan I go in?” Aili Lavena asked, trying with little success not to sound like an impatient child. Her scans had shown the water chemistry to be safe, and at Pazlar’s suggestion, Vale had allowed her to pilot the aquashuttle to a fairly empty region of the ocean, one which the interplay of currents had left essentially devoid of dissolved iron, without which there was little phytoplankton and thus hardly any of the higher life forms that would be sustained by it—or by each other. It was as safe a spot for a first swim as any.

Vale threw her a look, amused at her tone. “You remembered to wait an hour after eating, right?”

“That’s a myth, ma’am. Especially for a Selkie.”

Finally, Vale grinned, letting her off the hook—so to speak. “Okay, Aili. But don’t swim too far from the shuttle.”

“Thank you, ma’am!” Aili was already out the door, standing on the short platform that extended from its base (which Keru had dubbed “the plank,” for some reason). She was eager to get out of her hydration suit, but had to wait until it had drawn its water supply back inside its storage capillaries, for she would need that water once she donned the suit again. Once that was done, she hastened to shed it. She could survive in the open air for a few minutes at a time, as long as enough moisture remained in her gill crests. She couldn’t take in a breath of it the way she could have back in her amphibious days, since her lung had now closed off and become a flotation bladder, but she opened her mouth to taste the breeze. Its flavor was strange and alien in many ways, yet there was the familiar salty tang, the fresh, wet flavor of ocean air. Oh, how I’ve missed that.

Once out of the suit, she transferred her combadge to the front of the brief, backless undergarment she wore before tossing the suit into the shuttle. Her preference right now would be to strip fully nude, but Starfleet had its standards of decorum. This would have to do for now.

A sense of ceremony made her pause briefly, but eagerness overcame her. She dove into the water as though it pulled her into itself. For several moments, Aili remained completely immersed, her nictitating membranes shut, reveling in the too-long-missed sensation of diving in the open ocean. The confines of the glorified fishtank she called her quarters were nothing compared to this. Here, currents wafted across her smooth blue-green flesh like cooling breezes, carrying exotic, information-filled flavors to her tongue and scents to the receptors in her gill crests. Distant sounds shivered through the water, resonating through her body—the low ostinato of wind playing percussion on the waves, the chirp and chatter of distant schools of fish, a hint of distant moans and creaks that could be larger life forms. Land-dwellers had the bizarre notion that the sea was silent; in reality, being out of the ocean was like being deaf for her. Out there, sound was a thing of the ears, a tenuous disturbance in the air; down here, it was a tangible thing that permeated one’s whole being. She was made mostly of seawater, closely matching its density and chemistry, and sound waves passed through her as though she were part of the sea, her flesh resounding in tune with the rest of this great instrument.

She opened her eyes now for the complete experience, for up here near the surface, the sea was alive with light as well. She bathed in the rain of gentle yellow-orange sunlight as it danced across her limbs, adding its own intricate marbling to the mottled blues and greens of her flesh. She observed the shifting patterns of the light as it illuminated the water, her practiced eye discerning information about the wind, currents, and purity of the sea around her. As expected, this stretch of ocean was largely barren of algae or plankton, giving her a clear view for hundreds of meters around and below her.

But what was this? Near the limits of visibility, she saw a glint of movement. She tapped her combadge and spoke softly, needing no breath, for muscles vibrated her larynx. “Lavena to Gillespie. I think I see something swimming nearby. At your five o’clock low,” she added, checking the position of the aquashuttle above her. “I’ll try to get closer.”

“Acknowledged. But be careful.”

“Don’t worry, it looks small.”

She began swimming slowly at an oblique angle toward it. As she drew closer, she began to discern its appearance. It was another of the tentacled fishlike creatures, but its head seemed to consist mostly of an enormous pair of forward-facing eyes, its tiny mouth tentacles barely visible below them. Eyes that seemed to be watching her. Soon she had no doubt: the grandocular piscoid was gazing directly at her as she approached, yet not fleeing. Was it simply unsure what to make of a form as alien as hers?

Taking a chance, she kept coming closer, but slowly, doing her best to appear unaggressive. She halted her approach a few meters away from it, letting it get a good look at her. It swam around her, scooting sideways as it kept its gaze locked upon her, surveying her from all sides.

Belatedly, Aili remembered her wrist-mounted tricorder, and deciding that turnabout was fair play, she switched it on. But no sooner did she begin the scan than the piscoid abruptly darted away, heading for deeper waters. Determined to get the scan data she should have collected already, she impulsively swam in pursuit.

Her combadge soon crackled. “Ensign, you’re ge…ng too f…ay. Los…gnal…”

“I’ll be fine,” she called back. Vale could be such a worrywart sometimes. She was enjoying the chase, enjoying the freedom of this vast ocean, and there was certainly nothing dangerous about the little bugeye fish she was pursuing, nor was there likely to be much of anything else inhabiting this barren stretch of ocean. The bugeye must have wandered off from its school and lost its way. It was probably half-starved.

Though it did seem to have plenty of energy for swimming, she realized after a while. They were getting deeper now, not too deep for her body to adjust quickly, but enough for the light to begin to fade, along with the susurrus of the wind upon the ocean’s roof. She began to notice a high-pitched piping coming from the bugeye piscoid, almost beyond her auditory range, and probably beyond that of most humanoids. A distress call?she wondered. She was no expert, but that suggested some sort of social structure. But what could it be calling to?

But there were other sounds down here, Aili realized—not echoing from afar, but nearby, in the direction the piscoid was swimming. Whistles and creaks and low, guttural groans, coming from multiple sources. She slowed her descent and checked her tricorder. Its sensors had limited ability to penetrate the water, but it was able to register a number of large shapes, maybe four meters long. What were they doing here? There was nothing to eat, save the lone bugeye.

And a lone Selkie.

She decided to change strategy, halting her pursuit and instead trying to boost her tricorder gain. The picture on its tiny screen couldn’t give her nearly as much informa tion down here as her full suite of senses could, but a later analysis of the data could be informative. From what she could tell, the creatures had fairly streamlined, torpedo-shaped bodies, but with several tentacles extending from the front, or what seemed to be the front. Their calls were growing closer now, and seemed to intensify in response to the bugeye’s keening—perhaps a hue and cry after prey, but it almost seemed like…

A new reading caught her eye. In her preoccupation with the large creatures ahead, she had been slow to notice the faint life reading registering behind her. That was puzzling, but such a weak reading was probably distant enough not to require her immediate attention, at least until she’d gotten a full scan of the creatures ahead.

Or so she thought until a tendril of fire tore across her thigh and she began to pass out….

“Aili? Wake up.”

She found herself deaf again, back in the confines of a tiny sheath of water with only the dead dryness of air around it. Weight pressed her against a hard surface. She was back in her hydration suit, back in the aquashuttle. Her vision focused on the burly figure above her—Ranul Keru, who was packing up a medkit. As chief of security, he was a trained medic.

“What happened?”

“Something stung you,” Vale told her. “When you suddenly swam off, we submerged and came after you. We saw you get attacked by some kind of jellyfish.”

“Jellyfish?”

“More or less,” Kekil said. “A large spherical scyphomedusan form with tendrils extending in all directions.” Now that the details of her last moments of consciousness were coming back, Aili realized that the weak life signs behind her had been due to the tenuousness of the creature, not its distance. The tricorders would have to be recalibrated.

“Venomous?” Aili asked.

“Not to worry,” Ranul Keru said. “Thanks to differences in biochemistry, the venom wasn’t as harmful to you as it probably is to the native life forms. And it only stung you a few times.”

“You stopped it?”

“We didn’t have to,” he replied, looking a bit nonplussed.

At her puzzled look, Vale elaborated. “We were trying to get to you, readying the tractor beams to pull it away, when a large, very fast fish of some sort dashed in straight as an arrow and gobbled the jellyfish thing right up.”

“And didn’t get stung?”

“There are aquatic species that are immune to jellyfish stings,” Kekil said. “Even some which take the stinging barbs and integrate them into their own anatomy as a defense. Obviously this fish was a natural predator of the medusans. It’s just lucky for us it came in at just that moment.”

Aili noticed Vale’s uncertain expression. “Commander?”

“Call me a cynic, but I’m not one to believe in luck. It’s an anomaly, like the presence of so many life forms around here where there’s nothing to feed on, nothing to draw them.”

“Except us,” Lavena said. “The fish with the large eyes certainly seemed curious.”

“Maybe,” Vale replied. “Anyway, Ensign, you should rest. Not enough you had to be the first person to go swimming in Droplet’s oceans, you had to be the first one to get attacked by a native critter too. Try to stop hogging all the excitement in the future, okay?”

CHAPTER T

HREE

U.S.S. TITAN, STARDATE 58513.8

“So how’s the fishing?” Chief Bralik asked as she settled down at the Blue Table with a drink and a bowl of tube grubs. Naturally the science department’s weekly informal gathering was filled with chatter about the discoveries on Droplet over the past few days, but Bralik had been kept busy surveying the rest of the system. The Blue Table gatherings were a great chance to take a break from one’s own, often insular work and connect with other points of view on the universe. Bralik was thus a regular member of the sessions, always keeping her ears open for new knowledge that could profit her and her fellow Ferengi.

“They aren’t fish,” Lieutenant Eviku told her. “There are no true vertebrates on this world.”

“Really?” Bralik leaned forward curiously. The Arkenite exobiologist’s bald, tapering skull and large, backswept pinnae appealed to her sense of aesthetics, so she enjoyed flirting with him, though he remained completely unaware of it. She wasn’t sure whether it was because Arkenite and Ferengi sexual cues were mutually unintelligible or if it was simply that Eviku was charmingly naive. But she chose not to press the issue. Like many in the crew, he had borne a deep sadness since the Borg invasion. He spoke of it to no one, but no doubt he had lost loved ones and would need time to heal.

Now, though, he had science to talk about, so that kept him engaged. “There isn’t enough calcium in the ecosystem to allow for full bony skeletons,” Eviku explained to her in his slow, thoughtful voice. “The highest life forms, including the piscoids, are chordates with cartilaginous pseudovertebrae. The majority of forms are invertebrates of various types, though. Even many of the chordates have tentacles or chitinous exoskeletons of the sort generally seen in invertebrate species.”

“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 Titanin 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 Titanand 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 Titanshowed 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, feltat 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.”