“Commanders?” Torvig called, not having to shout too loudly, for they couldn’t get more than eighty meters apart. “I think you’ll want to see this!”

Pazlar followed at her best pace as Vale jogged over to him and Kekil. At the bottom of the hole they had dug was a hard, light-colored material that appeared porous and slightly sparkly. “It looks almost like seashells,” Vale said.

“Not dissimilar,” Torvig said. “It’s largely keratin. However, there are silicate spicules interwoven inside, increasing its strength, analogously to fiberglass. And there’s a fair amount of calcium carbonate as well. Odd to find heavier elements in such concentration in the native life.”

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.”