Текст книги "Over a Torrent Sea "

Автор книги: Christopher Bennett

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After setting up a check-in schedule with the captain—who kept his eyes firmly on her face the whole time—Aili swam off at high speed in the direction of the squale biosigns. Without a timepiece, she’d have to rely on her innate time sense, which could be tricky here. Normally she could rely on the angle of the sun to keep track of time. Though the lack of a solid surface meant the rotation rate was slightly faster at the equator than the poles, the day length was still reasonably close to nineteen hours everywhere on the planet. But subsurface currents could conceivably take her east faster or slower than the average, affecting the angle of sunlight. The check-in schedule would necessarily require a lot of leeway.

But Aili set such thoughts aside after a moment, for it was such a pleasure to be swimming free and clear in the open ocean, unencumbered by clothing. The sense of freedom, of respite from the stifling hydration suit, was delicious. She rejoiced in it, pushing herself faster and faster with her powerful long limbs. She arched her spine back and forth, bouncing in and out of the water, gaining more energy with each bounce. Finally she drove herself down several meters, then angled up and kicked with all her might, adding speed to buoyancy, the ocean’s rippling ceiling plummeting to meet her. As she breached the surface at an angle, she slammed her arms down to her sides, webbed hands flat, for an extra boost.

And then she was free of the waves, a ballistic body in the empty air, sparkling droplets cascading from her flesh as she arced in free fall above the warm blue sea, twisting about her axis to take in the view in all directions. In the distance, she saw Riker in the gig, rising to his feet at the sight of her, no longer afraid to look. Reaching the zenith of her arc, she hovered for an endless instant above the sea, its surface stretching out beneath her, defining infinity…and then gravity had its way and the wet, welcoming blue engulfed her again, the exhilaration of flirting with the sky giving way to the joy of being once more hugged to the bosom of Mother Sea.

She made several more dives into the air as she swam, and not just for pleasure; her high, spinning leaps gave her an overhead view of the ocean, letting her see farther than she could from the surface or below. This was how Selkies hunted for fish or kept watch for predators—less of a concern now than it had once been, but still an issue, for even the Selkies had not tamed the majority of their near-global ocean, and the Federation presence was limited out of respect for their cultural autonomy. And here on Droplet, as Aili was painfully aware, the threat of predators was very real.

In the distance, to the southeast, she saw a hump of darkness in the water, a spume of turbulence. On her next leap, she saw the water settling but still foaming with a trail of bubbles. She recognized the signs: some massive predator had risen up, probably under a school of piscoids or similar creatures, its gaping mouth taking in dozens of them along with a great mass of water and air, the latter of which now drained from the edges of its maw in a torrent of bubbles. The creature would probably circle and rise again, taking several more bites from the sky before it was sated. Aili angled her course to give it a wide berth. Starfleet scientific curiosity was all well and good, but she was swimming alone and buck naked in an alien ocean, so for the moment she was perfectly happy not to learn about any more local predators.

Soon Aili began to hear familiar music echoing through the water, the successive repetitions of varying intensity indicating that the sound waves were oscillating around the deep sound channel, some waves following longer paths around the channel axis than others and taking longer to reach her ears. She swam down toward it, leaving the surface behind. She began her own tentative song; her laryngeal muscles could mimic more than humanoid speech, and now she gave her best approximation of a recurring pattern the translators had identified in the calls of the squales’ various probe creatures. The computer’s best guess was that it was a call for attention, a signal of readiness to communicate. But while she replicated the tones, she made sure to project it in her own voice, in hopes they would understand that her intent was to make contact rather than to deceive.

When she heard a call the computer had tentatively tagged as a response, she stopped swimming, still a hundred meters or so above the channel axis, and repeated her own declaration, waiting for the squales to come to her. But it was a bugeye piscoid that came first. She floated placidly as it swam around her, letting it see every bit of her. At the same time, she felt a series of sharp, loud clicks slicing through the water, sonar pulses taking acoustical images. Were the squales themselves generating them, or was it another species of sensor animal? Either way, she was glad she hadn’t followed Riker’s suggestion to hide a communicator. He was as open-minded as any human she’d ever met, but he still had his unconscious human biases, such as a tendency to think primarily in terms of sight. These sonar pulses, if the squales themselves produced them, would let them see right through her, leaving her far more naked to them than she had been to her crewmates’ eyes. She calmed herself, keeping her metabolism low so as not to appear threatening. Their sonar would detect a racing heart.

The bugeye retreated, no doubt returning to give its report. She felt a murmur of squale calls, not distant but quiet, like a huddled conversation. Then for a time there was only darkness and anticipatory silence. The white noise of the ocean, with tenuous hints of movement on the edge of her awareness, possibly only the ghosts of her hopes and fears.

A faint blue light glimmered before her. At first she thought it might be her mind playing tricks, but then it grew steadily brighter, clearer. It was some kind of bioluminescent creature, round and clear-shelled, with arcs of blue and green light chasing down the curves of its internal structure. A squale spotlight, perhaps, sent to give them a better look at her? Or maybe a beacon of some sort? Were its photophores flickering in some kind of meaningful pattern she was supposed to respond to? An intelligence test? She moved her feet gingerly, easing closer but trying not to scare it off. It continued its approach, thousands of tiny clear cilia shimmering as they caught the light, breaking it into a diffraction spectrum of blues and greens. (Red light was rarely found at these depths, since the water swallowed it up over any distance.) Now Aili could see the intricate helical twists in its internal structure, and she wondered if the squales had somehow bred that beauty into it or if it had been natural. They used bioengineering to make tools, but did they make art as well? She reached toward it, not wanting to risk damaging the fragile-seeming creature, but wanting to touch it ever so gently to ensure it was real….

Then something grabbed her from behind, not gently at all. Multiple, muscular somethings that gripped her tightly and clung to her skin with dozens of small suckers. Three of them pinned her legs together and her arms against her sides, hard enough to crush the breath from her if she still had any. The fourth wrapped around her head, wrenching it back and muffling her senses, and she didn’t doubt it was strong enough to snap her neck. As the tentacles dragged her downward, Aili realized the bioluminescent creature hadn’t been an intelligence test but a stupidity test, and she’d tested strongly positive. How could a Selkie not re member that enticing lights in the depths, if not intended as mating signals, were used to lure in prey?

Aili was being dragged down swiftly, which was fortunate, since the tight grip of the tentacles was smothering most of her gill surfaces and she needed the rapid flow of water across the rest to keep her conscious. She felt a broad, sharp beak jabbing into her back, probing her. It confirmed that she was in the grip of a squale. The four-meter chordates were capable of greater stealth than she’d anticipated—and possibly greater aggression. That beak could tear massive chunks from her flesh. She assumed, though, that if that had been their goal, it would have happened already. For now, they wanted her alive—but she got the message from that beak that was now nipping curiously at her backside. If she tried to resist them, she was lunch.

Riker scanned the surface of the water with fading hope, wincing against the glare of the sun. New Kaferia’s light was comparatively mild, but his eyes were sore from probing the ocean for hours. Leaning back in the scouter gig and rubbing the bridge of his nose, he slapped his combadge. “Riker to Gillespie. Anything to report?”

It was a moment before the signal came back from the aquashuttle, laden with static from the kilometers of water it needed to penetrate. “No luck, sir,”came Pazlar’s voice. “We’ve searched all around Aili’s projected course and found nothing. But with the way these subsurface currents flow, she could’ve been taken in any direction depending on her depth.”

“Keep looking. Broaden your search parameters.”

“Aye, sir. We’ll find her.”

The signal cut out and Riker returned to looking. Beside him, Huilan looked up from his ongoing tricorder scan and tilted his head quizzically. “She’s four hours overdue. Do you think it’s still likely she’ll return here?”

“Without knowing what’s happened,” he answered tightly, “we can’t rule out the possibility. We have to be here in case she does.”

“Wouldn’t the captain be able to do more good from the main base? Or Titan? Someone else could’ve taken your place here.”

“A waste of time. We’re here already; we might as well keep manning this post. Besides…I’m not leaving any of my crew behind again.”

“I see,” Huilan said, and Riker grimaced, knowing what would come after a counselor said I see. “Like you left the landing party behind at New Erigol? Including your pregnant wife?”

“You want me to say I feel guilty about that?” Riker said, not breaking his gaze out at the ocean. “Of course I do. I also know it was the right command decision at the time. But this is different, Huilan. There’s nothing compelling me to leave. I came out here as her backup. I agreed to let her go out there naked and alone.” He slammed his fist into his hand. “What the hell was I thinking? To let her risk herself like that just to ease my own conscience about a Prime Directive screwup?”

“Do you really need me to answer that?” the S’ti’ach asked.

“I’m not in the mood for the whole ‘communication is worth the risk’ speech right now, Counselor.” He sighed. “We’ve lost too much lately. We all have.”

In the corner of Riker’s eye, he saw Huilan’s big teddy-bear ears flopping as he gave a thoughtful nod. “True. None of us wants to lose any more of our crewmates—not ever, but especially not now. I suppose that explains it.”

Just for a moment, Riker’s eyes darted over to him. “Explains what?”

“The intensity of your concern. It almost seemed as though you have some special fondness for Aili Lavena.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Riker said—almost instantly realizing that it had come out a lot more defensively than he’d intended. He could imagine what Huilan would make of that. True, he and Aili—the ensign—had shared a brief liaison before he’d met Deanna, but it hadn’t meant anything. All right, it had been extremely memorable, but nothing to compare to the partnership of a wife as amazing as Deanna. He saw Lavena only as a crewmate now, and to all indications, she saw him the same way. There was no reason to be defensive or uncomfortable about a purely recreational experience from half a lifetime ago. If he had any “special fondness” for Lavena, it was simply nostalgic appreciation, which Deanna was fully aware of and too secure to have a problem with.

Riker realized he was acting out the whole discussion in his mind without Huilan needing to say a word. It was a habit he’d picked up from cohabiting with an empath; if he didn’t pre-emptively analyze his own motivations, she surely would. Bad enough being married to one counselor—why the hell did I let two others aboard the ship?

But Huilan was distracted by a reading from his tricorder. “Hold on, sir…I’m getting something! Single life form, rising toward us…mass about sixty kilos…vertebrate!”

Riker turned in the direction Huilan pointed, straining his eyes. Soon he saw a sleek blue-green form emerge from the depths, and then Aili was on the surface, waving and swimming toward the gig. He almost reached down to pull her into the boat before remembering that she couldn’t breathe for long out of the water. He just crouched down as she came up and grasped the side of the gig. “I can’t tell you how relieved we are to see you, Ensign. What happened?”

Lavena related the details of her contact and abduction by the squales. “After a while,” she went on, “I was completely disoriented and weakened from lack of oxygen…and that’s when they stopped and let me go. We must have been kilometers away from my course, and very deep—so deep I’m surprised how much oxygen there was dissolved there. Too deep for any sunlight, but there were luminescent organisms there. I guess the squales need light to see too.

“Anyway, they let me go and just…watched me for a while. I repeated the readiness signal, and they responded and began trying to communicate with me. Or at least to test my ability to communicate, to gauge whether I was intelligent or some kind of animal.”

“They’ve seen us with technology; how can they not know we’re intelligent?” Riker asked.

Huilan replied, “To them, technology is alive. They don’t know what to make of these dead metal and composite things,” he added, tapping the side of the boat with his middle right fist.

“Well, I guess I managed to convince them there’s more to me than a great body, since we soon moved on to establishing a baseline vocabulary. It was hard without a UT and with so little anatomy in common. And their song is so complex, I could barely follow it even when they dumbed it down for me. So I figured it made more sense to let them come to me, and I started teaching them some basic Selkie.” She shrugged. “Easier to use underwater than Standard. And I figured an aquatic language would have more concepts the squales could relate to.”

“Excellent call, Ensign,” Huilan said.

“Thank you. But it’s more to their credit than mine that they picked it up so fast. We had a pretty good pidgin conversation going within an hour. Not enough to get into abstract concepts like space exploration and alien worlds, but enough for your basic ‘we come in peace, we mean you no harm’.”

“And what about their intentions toward you?” Riker asked, still with steel in his voice. “Did they explain why they abducted you by force?”

Lavena paused. “As far as I could decipher it, they just wanted to make sure it wasn’t a trap. That there wasn’t some kind of technology or other aliens lurking nearby waiting to strike at them. They wanted to get me alone, away from all that, so they could feel safe interacting with me.”

“Still, I don’t see taking a member of my crew prisoner as a good way to open diplomatic relations.”

“Look at it from their perspective, though,” Huilan said. “If an alien materialized on Titan’s bridge uninvited and claimed it came in peace, wouldn’t your first move be to summon security to restrain the intruder and escort it to the brig, just in case? Most first contacts begin with a modicum of distrust.”

“I appreciate how you feel, Captain,” Lavena said. “I was terrified when those tentacles held me. I’m still a little mad at them for being so rough and, well, grabby.” Riker wasn’t sure, but it looked like she was rubbing her backside underwater. “But we’re so alien to them…I can’t blame them for being on their guard. And the fact that they let me go proves they mean us no harm. And they’re willing to talk with me some more. After they escorted me most of the way back here, just before they swam away, they gave me a signal to use when I’m ready to contact them again. Or maybe a signal they’ll use when they want me to come back.” She beamed. “So I’d say we’ve successfully opened diplomatic relations.”

Riker gave her a smile. “No, Aili. You have. You showed great courage today, and I’m very proud of you.”

Her gill crests darkened with blood—a Selkie blush. “Thank you, sir.”

He cleared his throat. “Now…I’d appreciate it if you’d put some clothes on.”

He handed down her undergarment and hydration suit, trying not to look at her or to meet Huilan’s contemplative gaze as he did so.

CHAPTER S

EVEN

TITAN

After returning to the ship and seeing that Lavena got a clean bill of health from Ree, Riker turned in for the evening to be with his wife and child (still in one convenient package for another few precious weeks). It was with regret that he left them the next morning, but duty had its demands.

Reaching the bridge, he was met by the new gamma-shift watch commander, Tamen Gibruch. “All systems functioning normally, sir,” he said in his resonant bass-flute voice. “Surveys are proceeding on schedule.”

“Very good, Tamen.” The lieutentant commander was a member of the Chandir, one of the first of his unaligned species to serve in Starfleet, though Chandir civilians were often seen on worlds and stations in the Federation’s rim-ward sectors and in former Cardassian territory. They were hard to miss, with the distinctive muscular trunks that grew from the backs of their heads and the multiple horizontal furrows that transected their wedge-shaped faces in place of the usual nose and mouth. They were often known as “Tailheads,” a nickname that had initially been derogatory but that many of them had claimed as their own, a proud acknowledgment of their unique anatomy. Riker enjoyed listening to Chandir music; the cranial trunks were filled with large sinus cavities, resonating chambers to amplify their voices for long-distance communication and mating calls, and the furrows contained air passages which they could close off with muscular contraction to change the length and shape of the air column within the trunk, making their whole heads into wind instruments. Alas, when Riker had raised this subject in one of his first conversations with Gibruch, the young officer had demurred that he had little talent for or interest in music, having led a life very focused on career advancement. Gibruch reminded Riker of himself at a younger age, so serious and ambitious, so bent on getting ahead that he forgot to stop and appreciate where he was. The Enterprise-D—and Deanna—had cured him of that, and he hoped that Titanand its crew could do the same for young Tamen—not to divert him from a promising career arc, of course, but at least to help him relax and enjoy himself along the way.

For now, though, Gibruch was still focused on his report. Opening the facial furrow that served as his mouth, he said, “One matter for your attention, sir. The asteroid survey has catalogued a significant body that currently has a one-in-six-hundred probability of collision with Droplet at its closest approach in approximately fourteen hours.”

Riker frowned. “That’s cutting it pretty close. Why wasn’t it detected before?”

“It is approaching from somewhat north of the ecliptic, sir. With our survey limited to visual observation, it takes time to catalogue all the asteroids, and our efforts have focused on the main debris disk where the highest probability of threat bodies lies. Also, its albedo is low, making it harder to detect.” Riker nodded, remembering how difficult asteroid detection could be when limited to optical imaging. Earth had still been discovering new asteroids in its own backyard as late as the Third World War. And Riker recalled how Axanar had been struck by an asteroid that destroyed a major city well into their interplanetary era, due to their governments’ failure to invest in adequate detection efforts.

“It was first spotted by the computer seven hours ago,” Gibruch went on, “but initial probability estimates were below the threshold of concern, so it wasn’t flagged.” Over the past week and a half, Riker had gotten the hang of how this worked. Visual observation of asteroid trajectories was fraught with uncertainties. You could see where a body was now, but it took days or weeks of observation to narrow down exactly which direction it was moving in, creating a cone-shaped volume of potential paths it could take. The longer you observed it, the more you pinpointed its trajectory, narrowing the cone. Initially, the cones were wide enough that thousands of asteroids showed the potential to hit Droplet or Titan, but in most cases, as those cones narrowed, the planet no longer fell inside them and the threat could be ruled out. This asteroid’s probability cone was narrow enough to be worth noting, but the odds were six hundred to one that it would end up missing the planet after all. No cause for alarm yet.

“Risk assessment if it does hit?” Riker asked.

“Minimal. Its estimated mass is high enough that it could do some damage if it hit solid ground, but here it would simply be pulverized on impact and vaporize a crater in the ocean. The impact of water rushing back into that crater would generate a series of tsunamis, but the science team tells me that those tsunamis would subside to a moderate height within a hundred kilometers or so from ground zero—and with no shallow water, they’d remain broad and gentle, giant swells rather than breaking waves. Nearby sea life would be killed by the concussion, if not vaporized in the impact, but as long as our away teams keep their distance, the wave would affect them no worse than an ordinary ocean swell down there.”

Riker thought about the squales, who would not be able to evacuate the area as easily as his crew. “Could we deflect the asteroid if we had to?”

The answer came from Pava Ek’Noor sh’Aqabaa, who stood watch at tactical on gamma shift. Despite Riker’s reluctance to leave his family, old habit had brought him to the bridge early, before most of alpha shift had arrived. “Yes, sir,” the tall Andorian shentold him. “It might take a lot of tractor power, but we could deflect it successfully. The sooner we act, the easier it will be.” The captain understood that easily enough; it was simple geometry. The closer it was to the planet, the larger the angle it had to be deflected by to miss it.

“Let’s not act in haste,” Gibruch said. “Odds are we won’t have to do anything. No sense wasting ship’s power without need.”

“We’d have to use more power if we waited,” sh’Aqabaa countered.

“But nothing the ship can’t handle. And it’s more likely we won’t need to use the power at all.” His cranial trunk curled upward to rest on his shoulder as he addressed sh’Aqabaa. Was he flirting with her? Maybe there was hope for him yet.

“Thank you both. We’ll monitor the situation. I relieve you, Mister Gibruch.”

“I stand relieved.”

At tactical, Tuvok had now arrived for his shift and was relieving sh’Aqabaa. The shenheaded for the turbolift slightly ahead of Gibruch. “Oh, and Commander?” he said, smiling at the Chandir when the latter turned his impressively appendaged head. “Have fun.”

DROPLET, MAIN SURVEY BASE

Xin Ra-Havreii groaned as the ground—or this benighted world’s fickle excuse for it—heaved beneath him once again, almost toppling him into the pool where Aili Lavena floated, working with him on mnemonic exercises to improve her translation work with the squales. Normally the prospect of a headlong dive into Aili’s strong arms would have been far from unappealing, but the water level in the pool had fallen precipitately, making it a plunge of several meters. All right, admittedly there was a rather gentle polyp-shell slope with plenty of handholds between him and the drink, but blast it, he was a starship designer, not a mountain climber.

The islet he was on—one of the twenty-eight roughly disk-shaped polyp colonies that made up this flimsy pre tender to the title of “land mass”—rocked back in the other direction as the ocean swell peaked and passed beneath it, bringing Aili and the water back upward, the latter almost rising to engulf him, sending him scuttling back from where he sat. The triangular pool Aili occupied was the gap between three adjacent disks, which were fused together by chains of polyps and other symbiotic species, but loosely enough that the whole structure could flex and ride the waves without breaking apart. Intellectually, he could admire the engineering solution that evolution had devised, but he would have preferred to admire it from afar.

Aili laughed as the swell passed and the base island settled down to a level pitch again—for the moment. “I’ve never known you to be afraid of getting wet, Xinnie.”

He restrained a wince at the nickname. “I’d rather not get dragged into there by the retreating water,” he said. “Really, you shouldn’t even be in there, my dear. The undertow could suck you between the islets as they grind together.”

She grinned, dismissing his concern. “I’ve been swimming my whole life, Xin. I can handle myself near shore during rough seas.”

“You’ve never had to deal with two shores clashing together! I doubt anyone other than Jason or Odysseus has.” Commander Vale, a fan of classical Earth literature, had treated the command crew to holoprograms of her ancestral world’s ancient maritime myths during their three-day approach to Droplet.

“Oh, stop worrying so much! This is fun, you should try it.”

“My dear, I’m seasick enough on the land.”

“It could be worse,” came Melora’s voice from behind him, startling him. Her elegant sylphlike frame was so lightweight, especially in her antigrav suit, that he hadn’t heard her footfalls. “Just be glad the island isn’t spinning like the young ones do. Now, that would be a fun ride. Just imagine the ground spinning you, twirling and twirling, the horizon rushing around you…” She was clearly enjoying his discomfiture, maybe even trying to make him revisit his last meal in reverse. She had a good chance of succeeding.

“Oh, Melora, don’t be mean,” Aili said.

“Why not? It’s fun—you should try it.”

Ra-Havreii rested his head on his knees and tried to distract himself with engineering. “Gyroscopic stabilization,” he said.

Silence. “Uh-oh, I think I broke him,” Melora said.

He ignored her. “I just figured out why the young floater colonies spin. It stabilizes them against turbulence. They resist being flipped over.”

“Sorry, not quite,” Melora said. “In their young, fully submerged phase, they can thrive just as well either way up. But you’re on the right track.”

He looked at her. “Please—enlighten me.” He strove to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, for he was genuinely curious.

“The polyps have organs similar to statocysts—a type of balance organ found in many simple invertebrates. Those are sacs with a small amount of inert mass inside, surrounded by sensory hairs. When they move—”

“Its inertia presses it against the hairs on one side, letting the animal sense its direction of motion. Yes, yes.”

She glared at him. “Well, the polyps have something similar, but based on rotation. Instead of an inert mass, it’s a fluid that presses against the side hairs from the centrifugal effect. It gives them a sense of direction and orientation.”

“Then why, pray tell, do they stop spinning when they mature? Have you figured that out yet?”

“Sure. But you’re the engineer, you tell me. Or are you too sick to think straight?”

Aili was looking back and forth between them. “Would you two like to be alone?”

But Ra-Havreii had taken the gauntlet, not wanting Melora to think he couldn’t out-cogitate her on his worst day. “Well, obviously,” he said, masking his embarrassment that he hadn’t seen it right away, “it’s the square-cube law. Only the surface shells contain live polyps, which propel the colony with their tendrils. The surface area, and therefore the number of polyps there are to spin it, rises as the square of its length. But the volume, and therefore the mass they need to propel, goes up as the cube of the length. So it becomes exponentially harder to spin as it grows.”

Melora clapped slowly, sarcastically. “Very good, Doctor. So why does that lead to them rising to the surface once they mature—killing half the colony in the process?”

“Well…” He cleared his throat. “Naturally, they, umm…they need…something that they can only obtain onthe surface. Nutrients to sustain their larger biomass?”

“The juveniles can float to the surface anytime they want, by extracting more oxygen into their flotation bladders. They just don’t have to stay there, since they can expel it again. Why would they choose to throw away the lives of half the colony by staying on the surface permanently?”

“Especially,” Aili put in, “when there’s a risk that a swell could flip them over and kill the other half? Remember, they’re more symmetrical when they’re young.” The mature ones kept growing deeper once they surfaced, naturally becoming asymmetrical since new ones were growing only on the underside. Over time, that lowered their center of mass and gave them greater stability. But Ra-Havreii realized, once Aili pointed it out, that the younger, more symmetrical polyps would be risking the entire colony when they first began their surface existence. What could be worth sacrificing half and risking all for?

“Maybe,” he ventured, “by surfacing and allowing photosynthetic plants to grow on them, they gain access to a new source of nourishment?”

Melora tilted her head approvingly. “Good guess, but you’re overlooking something. The polyps on top still die. The insectoids and animals that inhabit these islets do enough moving around between above and below that the live polyps underneath can collect additional nutrients from their bodies and waste, but the polyps aren’t adapted to survive out of the water. Besides, it takes years, maybe decades for a surface ecosystem to develop enough to provide sufficient nourishment. So what does that leave?”