So am I,he silently confessed. But he was fed up with catering to their technophobic superstition. “Just let us do this,” he told them. “You’re only hurting yourselves and wasting your effort by trying to stop us.”

“Uh…Doctor?”

“Don’t worry, Modan,” he said, switching back to Standard. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Doctor!” Y’lira shoved her tricorder in front of him. Its proximity scan showed several new shapes coming in from a distance. Several very large shapes.

“Doctor,”came Vale’s voice from the main base, “we’re detecting multiple large creatures moving in. Eviku says they’re the same armored things the squales used to destroy our warning klaxon before.”

“They’re moving in on us, too,” Ra-Havreii told her. “I think we’d better get out of here.”

“Agreed.”

But that was easier said than done. The gig was surrounded by squales on all sides, in the center of a circle some thirty meters wide. “Oh, no. What do we do?”

“Could we ram one of them?” Y’lira asked.

“They’re heavier than the gig. We’d come to a rather abrupt stop and end up either in the water or in the tentacles of the next squale over. And I’d rather not kill any of them while the others are in a surly enough mood to begin wi—” He broke off, gazing westward.

“Commander?” Y’lira said.

A large ocean swell, a good dozen meters high, was approaching the gig from beyond the circle of squales. “I think I see a way out. Brace yourself.”

The swell soon reached the circle of squales, lifting the ones on the western side higher and higher into the air. The squales took it in stride (or in stroke), remaining in formation despite the warping of the circle. But as soon as the crest of the swell had passed under the squales on the western edge, Ra-Havreii gunned the gig’s engine and drove west at maximum acceleration. The gig rose up the slanted surface, using it as a ramp, and shot into the air as it crested the swell. The gig’s arc carried it clear over the squales, though Ra-Havreii could swear he heard and felt a tentacle slap against the rear of the hull. After a stomach-wrenching moment in free fall, the gig splashed down hard. Ra-Havreii banged his elbow and his teeth slammed together painfully. But at least they were free of squale encirclement. Not letting up on the throttle, he veered on course for the main base. As much as he hated the floater island, it was the closest thing to a safe haven on this planet now.

Any further thoughts were driven from Ra-Havreii’s head by the immediate need to vomit. He managed to get his head over the side before it came, which was small comfort as his entire digestive tract seemed to be trying to force itself out through his mouth for a good minute to come. When his heaves became dry and finally subsided, he gasped in exhaustion for a while, then looked back and croaked, “There, you damned squid. How’s that for contaminating your precious ocean?”

But then the water bowed up around a large, dark form, and a sharp armored prow cleaved out through the middle of it, tentacles writhing beneath the bow wave as it drove toward the gig. Ra-Havreii instantly turned back to the controls and pushed the throttle to its limit. “Y’lira to Vale,” he heard the Selenean saying. “We need assistance.”

“Sorry, but we’ve got our hands full right now. They’re attacking the whole island.”

It turned out that Aili had misinterpreted the pod’s intentions slightly. When they took her down to the deep sound channel, it wasn’t just to search randomly for a team from Titan. To her surprise, the squales brought her to a device she recognized as one of Titan’s hydrophone probes. Melo explained that many probes had been blaring noise into the ocean following the asteroid impact, and that most had been destroyed to clear the lines of communication. Aili asked, a bit heatedly, whether it had occurred to any of them that the probes might have been an attempt to make contact. Most had not, Cham replied; inanimate objects were so foreign to them that they had not thought to associate them with intelligent communication. Members of his own pod and some others had considered that the probes might have been analogous to their own engineered helper species, but Cham himself had dismissed the notion, unable to accept that something inanimate (a concept they had needed to coin a new word for) could communicate like a living being. And the majority of squales participating in the global discussion had shared his opinion.

“But they would have called our names,” Aili insisted. “You must have heard the sound.”

Melo acknowledged that some patterns vaguely similar to the names “Riker” and “Lavena” had been heard in the probe chatter, but Cham objected that overall they were too different. Apparently it was an argument they had had before, with Cham and the majority of squales convincing those like Melo that they had imagined the similarity, reading a pattern into randomness because they had wished to find one. Listening to the debate, Aili discerned that the squales perceived the emissions of a speaker differently from those of a living voice. Perhaps the output from the speakers was missing too many ultrasonic overtones, although it sounded to her as though they perceived some additional components not present in humanoid speech. Aili guessed that it might have been the probes’ EM emissions; from the way the squales described the source of the Song of Life, she was coming to suspect that it had some connection to their ability to sense the planet’s strong magnetic field.

In any case, Melo went on, the contact pod had intercepted this probe and figured out how to deactivate it, preserving it for study. The elderly squale was quite proud of his apprentices, Alos included, for having the courage to approach the disquieting object and the insight to shut it down. Aili suspected it had been as much luck as insight, but that didn’t stop Melo from gloating to Cham that his team’s preservation of the object had not been a waste of effort after all.

Aili gave Melo a huge hug, grateful to him for the spirit of curiosity that had led him to preserve the probe intact. At the limited speed of sound through this huge ocean, she’d assumed it would take hours to summon help, and Riker’s condition was tenuous as it was. But assuming there was a receiver close enough to pick up this probe’s signals through the interference, then help could be on the way in minutes.