STARDATE 58506.3

Captain Riker had been right; Aili Lavena’s pulse was surging with excitement as she flew Titaninto the UFC 86783 system—or New Kaferia, as the stellar cartographers had dubbed it, for the star was a virtual twin of Kaferia’s sun Tau Ceti, a smallish yellow-orange dwarf with a dense debris disk around it. Except Tau Ceti’s disk was sparse compared to this one. Aili was as energized by the navigational challenge of reaching Droplet as by the prospect of getting to dive into its oceans. Although she was a pilot by training, she knew she’d be at the forefront of this survey, for her aquatic physiology would let her explore this planet’s depths in ways no other member of the crew could.

But the true depths of this planet, she reminded herself with a slight shudder, were far more profound than even she could plumb. Below ninety kilometers, the pressure became so great that water itself was crushed to solidity, forming exotic crystalline phases with names like ice-seven and ice-ten even at temperatures she would consider boiling hot. At best, she would be able to descend a tiny fraction of that depth before the pressure exceeded even a Selkie’s tolerances.

First things first, though. She brought Titaninto the system at a sharp angle to its ecliptic plane, coming “up from below” to avoid the worst of its debris disk and give the sensor techs a good overview of its asteroid distribution. Their estimates of the asteroids’ courses, a constantly updated file of which was tied into her nav computer, were necessarily inexact, limited as they were to optical imaging; more accurate orbit plots would require observing their motion for weeks, as early astronomers had needed to do in the days before subspace-displacement motion sensors. But the rough data she had were enough to let her skirt around the probability cones of any hazardous bodies.

Droplet was in an unusually wide orbit for a habitable planet around a star this cool. With an endless supply of water to vaporize, Droplet had a considerable greenhouse effect, plus the convection in its oceans brought some heat up from the planet’s interior; so the surface was balmy and tropical. Aili had been glad to hear that; though her body was well-insulated and able to adjust to a wide range of water temperatures, she liked it warm. And land-dwelling humanoids definitely liked it warm, which would be a plus if the away team included anyone she wanted to invite for a private skinny-dip. She smiled to herself at the thought.

As the ocean world loomed larger on the viewer, it looked almost like a Jovian; without land masses to break up the airflow, the weather patterns were very regular, with parallel bands of clouds circling the planet, most solidly concentrated around the equator. But as the angle changed, allowing the bridge crew to see around the curve of the large globe, the cloud bands around the equator broke and swirled around a more circular pattern—one which Aili soon realized was an enormous hurricane. “Don’t tell me,” Riker said. “Hurricanes break up when they hit land. No land means they can get…that big.”

Beside him, Troi’s eyes widened. “Some Jovians have standing storms that last for centuries.”

“Like Jupiter’s Red Spot or the Eye of Vetlhaq,” Vale said.

Riker was grinning now. “How long do you suppose this hurricane has been around?”

“There’s no way of knowing,” Pazlar answered. “I’d just recommend that we avoid getting too close in our shuttles. There’s some ferocious lightning in there.”

As the planet drew still nearer, more detail began to appear. The pole they could see was wreathed in a bright ring of auroras, lost in the blue of the lit hemisphere but vivid and alive against the night side—the visible evidence of the powerful magnetic energies emanating from this planet. Much of the ocean surface was hidden under the clouds, but in the exposed portions, shadings of green were visible. “Algae blooms,” reported Chamish, the Kazarite ecologist, from the secondary science station.

“But where are they getting their nutrients?” Pazlar wondered.

“Any sign of mineral concentrations?” Riker asked.

“With the sensor interference, the blooms themselves are the best sign we’re getting,” the Elaysian science officer replied.

“Wait,” Troi said, trying to lean forward with little success. “This can’t be right…but I could swear I’m seeing islands!”

Looking up from her board, Aili saw faint specks dotting the ocean surface. When Riker ordered magnification, they came into view more distinctly. The most prominent feature from this angle was a small polar icecap, but hundreds of other bright specks dotted the ocean surface around it. “They could be icebergs,” Vale suggested.

“Not bergs, ma’am,” Aili told her. “Those break off of glaciers, which need land masses to form on. Here, you’d only have flat ice sheets and floes. And they couldn’t survive very far from the poles, not if the ocean’s as warm as Commander Pazlar says.”

“She’s right,” Pazlar confirmed. “And some of them are too large anyway. Look here.” She magnified a portion of the screen, centering on what seemed to be a cluster of islands, each one either a single light-colored disk or a cluster of multiple disks of similar size.

“There’s no way you could’ve been wrong about there being land, is there?” Vale asked.

Pazlar shook her head, studying her readouts with a slightly dazed expression. “Those aren’t land. Not the way we think of it. They’re moving, sir. They’re drifting in the current.”

Riker was out of his chair, his hand on Aili’s seat back as he took a closer look at the main viewer. Glancing up, she saw he was grinning like a kid at his birthday party. “Floating islands? Tell me you’re not kidding!”

“I swear it. I wouldn’t care to speculate about what they are, though.”

Chuckling, Riker turned to Vale. “What was that you were saying about not having any place to land? I think we’ve just found our first touchdown site.”

Christine Vale looked on with a stern expression as Riker’s eyes roved over the shuttlecraft Gillespie, now refitted into a full aquashuttle configuration. Half of Titan’s eight shuttles were designed to be reconfigurable for multiple mission profiles, and Ra-Havreii’s engineering teams had managed to convert all four of them in time for planetfall. Gillespie’s nacelles had been lowered and modified to serve as pontoons, equipped with stabilizing fins and linear induction thrusters. Searchlights, undersea sensor suites, and extra structural integrity field generators had been added to allow the shuttle to function as a deep-sea submersible. In lieu of the manipulator arms of old submersibles, an undersea tractor-beam rig had been installed below the nose, with a pair of emitters that together would focus the tractor effect at the desired distance, with the individual, unfocused beams exerting minimal effect on the intervening water. All in all, it looked like one hell of a boat, and Vale was looking forward to taking it for a spin.