Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (13 page)

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.

TITAN

A
fter 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
Titan
and 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
shen
told 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
shen
headed 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.