“Back in the twenty-third century, the Intrepiddiscovered several cosmozoans in its survey of the Scorpius-Centaurus Association—and was ultimately destroyed by a cosmozoan resembling a giant amoeba, although that’s generally believed to have been extradimensional in origin. Others have been detected near the Orion Association, the Taurus Dark Cloud, you name it.”

“So what is the nature of the connection?”

“It’s about what life needs to survive, and to come about in the first place. It needs energy, it needs matter. And it needs a certain amount of turbulence—enough to provide the dynamism and change that an ecosystem needs to form, but not enough to destroy its constituents. On a cosmic scale, star-formation zones are the most turbulent regions, full of intense energy and churning interstellar gases.”

“Are they not generally hazardous to life for that reason?”

“To tiny, fragile life-forms like us, yes. But to creatures tough enough to live in interstellar space, powerful enough to journey across light-years? A biosphere made of such creatures would need the kind of energy and rare elements that would be most abundant in those zones.”

“So you believe we can find more of the coelenterates if we proceed toward the Vela Association.”

“Not just the coelenterates,” Jaza said. “I’m hoping to find a whole ecosystem! Something that will reveal more about the common threads tying the known cosmozoan life forms together, the greater processes underlying their creation.”

Pazlar appeared skeptical. “But if ecosystems like that exist, why haven’t we seen them in other star-formation regions that have been surveyed?”

“We haven’t surveyed more than a fraction of the Sco-Cen Cluster, and certainly not its most active region around Rho Ophiuchi.”

“But the Betelgeusians have surveyed the Orion and Horsehead Nebula region in detail. There have been isolated cosmozoans found there, but no large-scale ecosystem.”

“True. All the more reason to go to Vela and see what we find.”

“Keep in mind,” Tuvok told him, “that our mission is to find and contact one specific species, not merely to investigate an abstract scientific riddle. What if we do not find the astrocoelenterates at Vela?”

Pazlar shrugged. “Then maybe we can stop and ask for directions.”

Tuvok sighed, and for a moment was almost nostalgic for Mr. Neelix.

Captain’s Log, Stardate 57148.2

Repairs to the ship’s major systems are now completed, without requiring assistance from the Pa’haquel hunters. On recommendation from Commander Jaza, Titanhas set course for the Vela OB2 Association. The star cluster is over two weeks distant at warp seven, but Jaza advises that if one star-jelly school was found this far from it—not to mention the hunters who follow their migrations—we are likely to encounter others as we draw nearer. He also considers it likely that we will encounter other forms of what he calls “cosmozoan” life, and I have authorized him to use our high-resolution wideband sensor net in his search for such organisms. Perhaps we may discover some nonsentient relative of the star-jellies which the Pa’haquel could be persuaded to hunt instead.

Ranul Keru was a big man, big enough to be intimidating. That was something he did his best to downplay in his personal life, but readily made use of in his security work. And right now, as he loomed over Torvig Bu-kar-nguv—one of the four Academy seniors serving their work-study tours on Titan—he wanted to be intimidating. It should’ve been easy; the Choblik was diminutive in comparison, a meter-high biped built something like a short-furred ostrich with an herbivore’s head, a short neck, and a long, prehensile tail. If not for his bionic arms and sensory organs, the joint enhancements on his legs, the small bionic hand at the tip of his tail, and the polymer-armor plating over his vital areas, Torvig would’ve looked like the kind of small woodland creature who would dart for the under-growth at the first sign of a big, bearish omnivore like Keru. Instead, despite all of Keru’s best looming and glowering, the engineering cadet merely studied him with the same wide-eyed, analytical curiosity he seemed to apply to everything. If anything, Keru found himself intimidated by that stare—or by the cyber-enhanced eyes that did the staring.

Abandoning the staring-contest idea, Keru went for a more overt confrontation. “The access logs clearly show that your codes were used to tamper with the replicator. Do you know what we found?”

“No, sir,” the Choblik said in his flattish, synthetic voice.

A likely story.“We found it had been infested with nanoprobes.That it had been programmed to infuse those nanoprobes into the crew’s food. Nanoprobes that were designed to latch on to their intestinal walls and remain there indefinitely, doing who knows what once they got there.”

“I know what, sir.”

Keru did a double take. “You do?”

“Oh, yes, sir. After all, I did design them.”

A pause. “Then you admit that you did put them in the replicator.”

“Of course, sir. It was the best delivery system for the test.”

Test?All in due time. “So why did you just say you didn’t know what we found?”

Torvig tilted his head querulously. “I didn’t, sir. I knew what was there for you to find, so I hypothesized that they were probably what you found; but I didn’t know for a fact that you had found them until you told me—nor did I know how you might have interpreted the discovery. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, sir.” His words didn’t have the pedantic tone a Vulcan might have used; rather, he sounded more like an eager student reporting on his research methodology.

“All right, then,” Keru went on. “What exactly was it that you were testing for?”

“Exactly, sir? Would you like me to retrieve my detailed notes from my quarters?”

Keru winced at the Choblik’s literalism. “All right, approximately, then. What were you testing?”

“Gut feelings, sir.”

“Gu—what?!”

“Last week Ensign Panyarachun suggested that I was too analytical in my approach to engineering problems, and told me that humans and other species tend to rely instead on their gut feelings. I didn’t understand what relation the gut would have to cognitive decision-making, so I decided to investigate the question.”

Keru blinked a number of times. “Um…Cadet…you do know that’s only a figure of speech, don’t you?”

“Well, yes, sir, but I was curious about its origins, and I wondered whether it might have a factual basis. The nanites were designed to monitor for neurochemical activity in the humanoid digestive tract.”

It would’ve sounded like a ridiculous excuse to Keru if the cadet didn’t already have a habit of formulating such cockamamie hypotheses and means of testing them. He was a devout empiricist, taking nothing for granted, giving fair consideration to any idea no matter how bizarre, and ruling nothing out until he’d tested it for himself. It would be an admirable trait in an explorer, if only he could focus it better. “But why nanoprobes,Cadet? Why break half a dozen regulations to deliver them in secret? Why not just, I don’t know, ask for volunteers?”

“I figured that since I was investigating the cognitive process, it might contaminate the results if my subjects were aware of the investigation. For all I knew, sir, that could’ve been the reason why a correlation between intestinal activity and problem-solving had not been verified in earlier studies.”

Keru glared at him. He just wasn’t getting it. “Didn’t it occur to you, Cadet, how people might feelabout being contaminated with nanoprobes? After all the Borg have inflicted on us over the years, all the grief they’ve caused,” he went on, his voice rising, “did you really think people would take that in stride? That they wouldn’t feel outraged, violated, if these probes of yours had actually managed to get into their systems?”