Besides which, he hadn’t thrown the Prime Directive completely out the window. Getting the squales talking about themselves was a good way to avoid revealing too much about the galaxy beyond.

But at this stage, there was little that he or Lavena could ask coherently about the really intriguing questions: how the squales bred their living tools, how the planet’s life got enough minerals to survive. They were only able to establish the basics. The squales lived in pods of flexible size and composition, not unlike Earth cetaceans. Some pods consisted of mothers and their young offspring, others of adolescents banding together under the tutelage of unrelated adult males. Although it was more complicated than that. For one thing, like many Dropletian chordates, the squales had four sexes, two that were roughly male (in that they only donated gametes) and two that were hermaphroditic, exchanging gametes with each other and both bearing and raising young. (Pazlar’s people theorized this was a hedge against mutation; with four copies of each chromosome, defective genes would be overridden by the majority. Given the frequent infall of asteroids rich in heavy, potentially toxic elements, it was a valuable adaptation.) The squales seemed amused when Riker and Lavena explained that the two of them represented the whole range of biological sexes their respective species possessed. (He didn’t tell them about the Andorians for fear of looking deficient in comparison.)

For another thing, the pods seemed to be organized around more than just age and sex. Riker got the impression that different pods specialized in different tasks or fields of study. Indeed, Lavena seemed to think that the pod interacting with them was actually an aggregate of two or three pods, given its size and the factionalism she occasionally sensed among them. At the very least, some of the older “males” seemed to take a more wary, defensive stance than the others, reminding Lavena of a security detail shepherding a team of science officers.

The squales lived all over Droplet, though primarily in certain zones, presumably those where the most nutrients were concentrated by the currents. They had ways of cultivating food, mainly breeding livestock like the so-called flaming idiot fish, but also farming some sort of seaweed, or so Lavena interpreted it. They were actually able to create the stable economic surplus necessary for building a civilization, to have the resources and leisure for large-scale activities beyond survival. But how did that civilization manifest? They had no cities; where were their breeding farms, their schools, their galleries? Was it even meaningful to think in those terms when dealing with a civilization whose environment was perpetually fluid, in more than one sense of the word? What seemingly natural formations on, or below, the surface of Droplet were actually organized and managed in ways that Titan’s crew had not been able to discern?

Sadly, the conversation was interrupted when Riker’s combadge activated and Melora Pazlar’s voice sounded from the gig. The squales reacted badly, retreating several meters down. As Lavena followed to calm them, Riker swam back to the boat, clambered aboard, and hit the badge, which was still attached to his uniform. “Riker here.”

“Captain, we…trying to reach you,”came the staticky reply. “Bad news.”

Once he’d been briefed, he swam down far enough to get Lavena’s attention and signal her to come over. “What is it, sir?”

“Our observation shuttle reports that Titanfailed to deflect the asteroid. There was an explosion of some sort, and we lost contact with the ship.”

“Oh, no.”

“They’re picking up reflections from Titan—it’s still in one piece. But judging from the way the ship’s moving under the asteroid’s gravity, it’s nearly twice as massive as we thought, and it’s still on course for Droplet, impact in under five hours. We have to assume the ship won’t be able to prevent the impact. I’ve sent two of the shuttles to assist Titan, but we need to get back to base camp, batten everything down.”

“Sir, we can’t go now! We have to warn the squales! Tell them to evacuate the impact site!”

“I’d like to, Aili, but can you suggest how? We can only estimate the impact zone, and how do we even describe it without any fixed geography?”

“Please, sir, let me try. Can you get me a projection of the impact zone?”

“I’ll ask Pazlar.”

The impact zone would be some forty degrees east of the dawn terminator and a similar amount south of the equator. Riker suggested that Lavena describe it as the near edge of the equatorial storm belt in the region that would be halfway between sunrise and noon when the impact came in roughly a third of a local day. It was inexact, but she would urge them to evacuate as broad an area as possible.

Riker gave her a good hour to try before calling her back. “I fear we’ve lost their trust, sir,” she said. “First we break our promise to avoid using technology, then I come back making dire warnings and telling them where they’re forbidden to swim. The ‘security’ squales didn’t react well. I think they interpreted it as a threat. They took charge of the conversation, took up intimidating postures, and questioned me pretty harshly. The ‘science’ squales raised some protests, but they were argued into silence. I think most of them are younger than the others. I just couldn’t get through, sir.”

“Ra-Havreii’s proposed an alternative,” he told her. “We drop a probe at the impact site, one that emits a loud, continuous klaxon—loud enough to be painful to any squale staying in the danger zone. It should force them to evacuate.”

“That seems cruel, sir.”

“I know, I don’t like it. I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary, but we don’t have time to try to get through to them now. Hopefully after it’s over, they’ll recognize that we acted to help them.”

“At least let me go back down to tell them what we’re going to do. Otherwise they’ll take it as an attack.”

And the security pod might just retaliate against two small bipeds out in a lonely boat in the middle of nowhere.“Try your best, Aili. But be careful. You should take a phaser—”

“No, sir,” she said emphatically. “They’d never listen then.”

“They won’t even—” Know what it is,he had been about to say. But if the security pod was already on the defensive, she could bring a bicycle horn and they’d fear it was a weapon. “Just be careful. We need you more than anybody on this mission.”