CHAPTER F

OUR

DROPLET

“Ohh, this is nice.” Commander Pazlar had finally followed Lavena’s lead, stripping out of her antigrav suit and allowing the buoyancy of Droplet’s ocean to shore her up against its gravity. She’d needed Aili’s support to reach the water once she deactivated and removed the suit, and Aili knew how reluctant she was to let anyone see her as weak. The pilot was touched that her superior had trusted her enough to let her help. Perhaps it was because they were kindred spirits of a sort, both dependent on all-encasing technological aids to survive aboard Titan, always set slightly apart from the rest.

Now the two women, Selkie and Elaysian, floated together in their undergarments a few meters offshore from the floater island that housed their base camp. Pazlar had ordered the rest of the team to stay in the camp or on the far side of the island for the duration of her swim, although Commander Keru had insisted on standing by within shouting distance in case some large sea creature found them appetizing. Pazlar had acceded, perhaps in part because Keru would notfind two scantily clad women appetizing.

For a while, they just floated there, gazing up at Droplet’s night sky. The persistent cloud bands that obscured much of the view during the day tended to dissipate somewhat at night, so they could see a wide swath of stars as well as two of the planet’s four captured asteroidal moons, while colorful auroras wafted and flickered to the south. Aili had always loved staring up at the stars in her youth. But unlike then, she now had the comfort of knowing she would be back out among them in a week or two. Still, she had greatly missed the sensation of being in the sea, and this sea was far more comfortable than her own, for there was no family, no peer group to look on her with disapproval for failing to live up to her culture’s expectations.

“So what progress are you making with the squales?” Pazlar finally asked. Her tone made it sound more like casual conversation than a command to deliver a report.

Aili responded in the same spirit. “Well, they’ve been getting closer, and letting me get a little closer to them. I think they’re acclimating a bit. But they still retreat every time I switch on my tricorder.”

“Incredible hearing.”

“Not for a sea creature.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Without my tricorder active, they’ve let me get close enough to see them relatively clearly. They have four large tentacles at the front, but they can fold them back along the body and flatten them out for speed. The mouth is beaked, and has two large eyes behind and above it. They have some vents that I’ve seen them expelling bubbles from; I think they can function like a cetacean blowhole but also as a kind of jet thruster for maneuvering.”

“But not for propulsion?”

“No, they’re too massive for that. They have strong tails with four flukes. They can oscillate them in either direction, using one set of flukes or the other for thrust. I think it lets them switch from one set of muscles to the other, giving them more endurance.”

“I don’t suppose they’ve let you observe much of their behavior.”

“Not visually, but I can hear them talking to each other.”

“Talking? Don’t jump to conclusions, Aili.”

The use of her given name instead of her rank softened the chastisement. Still, she knew better than to respond in kind. “That’s the feeling I get, Commander. They’re constantly exchanging elaborate vocal signals through the…the deep sound channel, like my people do back home, or like the humpback whales on Earth.” She’d almost called the deep sound channel by its Selkie name, the ri’Hoyalina, before remembering to use its Standard name. The channel was a region of the ocean, about eight hundred meters deep here, where temperature, pressure, and salinity conspired to produce the lowest speed of sound. Since any wave passing between two media was refracted toward the one where its speed was lower, the DSC tended to confine sound waves inside it as solitons, much as light was trapped within the opti-cable inside Titan’s consoles and computers. Since the waves propagated in only two dimensions instead of three, it took their energy longer to disperse, so sounds emitted in the DSC could travel thousands of kilometers if loud enough. “We’ve recorded hundreds of distinct sounds being used.”

“Sounds the translator hasn’t been able to find any definite meaning in.”

“That could just be because they’re so alien. The translator couldn’t handle star-jelly communication either. And we know they’rehighly intelligent.”

Pazlar nodded at the reminder of their encounter last year with the vast, jellyfish-like spacegoing organisms. “True, but we can’t jump to conclusions. For one thing, if the squales were intelligent, wouldn’t they be more curious about us? Their avoidance suggests an instinctive fear reaction, one that isn’t being overcome by intellect.”

“Maybe.” Aili sighed. “And they won’t let Chamish get close enough to get an empathic reading.”

“That wouldn’t really prove anything, though. If he couldn’t commune with them, it could be because they’re intelligent.” For some reason, Kazarite psi abilities only worked with subsapient animals; higher cognition interfered with them in some way Aili couldn’t understand. “Or it could be because of some other factor, like the way Betazoids can’t read Ferengi brains.”