And then the shuttle lurched, knocking everyone to the deck, and Gibruch instinctively knew that that baptism of blood had passed beyond mere metaphor. The second dreadnought had been drawn by the bouquet of blood spreading through the sea. Mistaking the shuttle for another squale, it had slammed its thick, battering-ram prow into the side, knocking the vessel into a drifting spin. The clang reverberated so loudly through the water that every squale for kilometers around must have looked up from what it was doing and thought, “What was that?!”

The dreadnought recoiled, the unexpectedly hard skin of the shuttle having given it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience a headache. But that apparently just made it mad, and it whipped its tentacles around the port-side hull, trying to deliver a fatal shock. The insulated hull kept its current from getting a foothold, but it went on trying with mindless determination. “No cause for concern, sir?” Eviku snapped.

“Belay that, Lieutenant,” Gibruch ordered. Still, he didn’t want to take any chances. “Bolaji, take us up.”

“My pleasure,” Bolaji replied. But it was a struggle to get the shuttle into the air; the leviathan held on relentlessly. Bolaji had to kick in enough power to lift the whole creature out of the water, yet still it clung, mindless in its frenzy. Soon he felt a tremble and a surge of speed, telling him the dreadnought had fallen away, and the sensors confirmed it. But there was still a thick tentacle adhering to the forward port by its suckers. The creature’s own weight had torn it free.

“I…I don’t understand,” Eviku said once the shuttle had gained some altitude and he had regained greater calm. “It’s not normal for predators to be so reckless. Their survival depends on being fit and intact. Sacrificing a limb like that, even after it should have known we offered no nourishment…what could drive it to that?”

“I don’t know,” Gibruch said. “But until we find out, I think going out swimming on this planet is definitely a bad idea.”

ELSEWHERE ON DROPLET

If there’s one good thing about this captivity,Aili Lavena reflected on more than one occasion, it’s that I get to do plenty of swimming.

Indeed, she could hardly do otherwise; without a hydration suit, she couldn’t function out of the water for long. Of course there was more oxygen in the air, but her gills needed water between their countless tiny filaments to function; otherwise the filaments would clump together and have too little exposed surface area to absorb sufficient oxygen. Out of the water, her membranes could only hold their moisture for a few minutes before shriveling up.

Which made it somewhat awkward to interact with Captain Riker—although she recognized that he would feel even more awkward if she could be up there on the islet with him, having no clothes of any kind. She’d declined to wear the kind of woven-grass garment he sported, stating that it would probably not hold up to the amount of swimming she had to do; besides, she imagined it must itch terribly, though she felt no urge to seek confirmation from him.

It was hard for Riker, she knew, being stranded on that little saucer of land with nothing to do, virtually no tools or resources to make anything with, virtually no food to forage for. He could swim reasonably well for a human, of course, and sometimes joined her in gathering food from beneath the floater or simply swimming for exercise. But he couldn’t last without air any longer than she could last without water. And he was still weak from his injuries; he seemed to have gotten hurt worse than she had in the tsunami, or else he was healing more poorly for some reason.

She kept him company as best she could, but there was only so much they could talk about: Academy stories, navigation problems, music, the Pacifican yacht races, the most tasteless Borg jokes they could think of. They both shied away from more serious topics, such as what might have become of Titanor what their chances were for rescue—and of course they avoided talking about their past.

So, truth be told, Aili was relieved to spend the bulk of her time either foraging for food or conversing with the squales. Luckily the members of the research pod were still interested in continuing the language lessons—although she soon realized that was because they still wished to interrogate her about the asteroid impact and her people’s role in it. She was saddened that they shared the defender pod’s mistrust of her. Indeed, when the lessons first resumed, she hadn’t felt so fortunate, for one of the defender squales had grabbed her bodily again and kept her under close, intimidating guard at all times. She was pretty sure it was the same pseudo-male that had restrained her before, and she was starting to think of him as “Grabby.” But over the past few local days since then, once it had become clear she was eager to participate in the conversation, the researchers had grown more comfortable with her and talked Grabby and his team into keeping their distance.

Well, “comfortable” might not have been the word. Aili had noted that all the squales were acting more tense and agitated over the past few days. She had soon discerned that they had reason, when the defender squales guarding the perimeter came under attack from a school of large chordate predators with broad, delta-wing fins, not unlike the rays of Earth but with long, scissorlike double beaks bracketing a flexible, prolapsing maw that shot out to engulf what the beaks severed. Grabby lost a tentacle and another defender lost a tailfin before the rest of the pod closed in and harried the scissor-rays off, firing bursts of intense concentrated sound to stun them. Aili was tempted to consider Grabby’s fate poetic justice, but she couldn’t bring herself to take pleasure in such a serious amputation and couldn’t help but be moved by the way his fellow defenders held and comforted him and the other injured male as they took them away for, presumably, medical treatment. She wondered if it would involve the womblike things she and Riker had apparently been placed in. But when she asked about it, the squales declined to answer.

The next day, Aili had found herself under attack from a large molluscoid that used its long, narrow conical shell to thrust at her like a jouster’s lance. Only quick reflexes saved her from being impaled, but she lost part of one gill fringe before two of the younger research-pod squales arrived and assailed the creature, crushing its shell and tearing out and consuming the innards. It was hard to be unambivalently grateful after seeing that, but she reminded herself it was simply the cycle of nature.

Those same two squales began spending an increasing amount of time with her, taking the lead in the language lessons. These two pseudo-males—one each of the two roughly masculine sexes—were apparently fairly new apprentices in the research pod, having left their maternal pod less than a Dropletian year before, and they were still rich with the open, inquisitive spirit that drove squales of their age to seek apprenticeships, often going through several specialist pods before settling on a preferred career. They watched with fascination as she swam, taking note of how her alien form functioned in the water, carefully examining the details of her body. She did her best to cultivate their curiosity, guiding the conversation toward a mutual exchange of knowledge, offering them a share of the food she harvested, even engaging with them in play. One or two adults always hovered nearby, ready to strike if she attempted anything untoward, but they allowed the young ones their freedom to engage her. What was the game Commander Vale mentioned when we were prisoners of the Hreekh? Are these the “good cops” I’m supposed to open up to?If so, that was fine, since she was here to be open.