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.