Huilan cackled. “Only if you obtain it from the mess hall.”

She stridulated a laugh of her own. “Ohh, all right. Come along.” She led him out into the corridor. “At least the lift won’t be too crowded if it’s just you and me. Still, I wish there were a more comfortable way to get there. You know what this ship should’ve been designed with? Ramps between decks. Maybe if they’d built the corridors in a continuous spiral, connecting each level to the next….”

“Oh, yes, I’d like that,” Huilan replied. “Then I could ride a scooter to where I needed to be, save myself a lot of walking. Maybe we could propose it for the ship’s next refit.”

“What a good idea! Yes, we really should. Let’s see, what else could we propose? How about replacing the seats with holographic projections that could be reshaped for each user?”

“Why not make the whole bridge a holodeck, adjustable for any use?”

“Oh, that’s good! And how about this….”

Chapter Five

STARDATE 57159.4

It was four days before Titanmade another cosmozoan sighting, though what they found was not a star-jelly. Rather, it was a Black Cloud—a living dark nebula of the type theorized in the twentieth-century fiction of Earth astronomer Fred Hoyle. “We detect radio emissions and shaped magnetic fields throughout the Cloud,” Jaza reported in a briefing, “linking thousands of point sources into a network. These are probably clumps of particulate matter, small asteroids and planetesimals, with organic molecules laid down in complex chains. Collectively they make up its brain.”

“Is it intelligent?” Vale asked.

Jaza shook his head. “The neural activity is too simple. Little more than stimulus-response and motor control. The magnetic fields shape its interior structure, giving it a gaseous anatomy of sorts for transporting nutrients and waste through its ‘body.’ They can change its shape, too. In fact, we discovered it that way, by comparing our subspace sensor scans of its current shape with the visible-light image through an optical telescope, showing how it looked over a decade ago.” He displayed the images side by side on the obs lounge monitor. “See how it’s taken on a spindle shape, oriented radially outward from that protostar nearby? At first we thought it was just a conventional cometary globule until we saw how quickly it’s changed shape—and I should add that for a living nebula drifting through interstellar space without warp drive, a dozen years or so is very quick. It’s actually reshaped itself to present the smallest possible profile to the protostar, to minimize erosion from its T Tauri winds.”

Riker smiled at Jaza’s enthusiasm, but said, “That’s all very interesting, Commander, but does it help us find any star-jellies?”

“No, I suppose not. But it does suggest we’re on the right track. The closer we get to the Vela Association, the more species we’ll probably see.”

Indeed, it was only another day before their next find. At first it seemed like they might have found a star-jelly, since the sensors detected similar compounds in the creature’s hide. But as Titangrew closer and refined its scans, the creature turned out to be a spheroid mass only a few hundred meters in diameter, seemingly inert, although sensors detected faint biological activity inside it. Jaza concluded it was hibernating for its interstellar journey, and backtracked it to a nearby blue star. On approaching that star system, Jaza’s people discovered numerous other creatures of the same species occupying the cometary disk around it. By observing numerous individuals in different phases, they were able to reconstruct their life cycle fairly quickly. “When they drift into a system,” Jaza explained, demonstrating with sensor images and computer animation on the obs lounge monitor, “they open up and deploy vast solar sails to collect energy. They also use the light pressure to maneuver through the system. They latch onto the cometary chunks and mine them for CHON.”

Riker had read enough science officers’ logs to recognize the shorthand for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the essential building blocks of carbon-based life. “In simpler terms, they feed on them.”

“Yes, but more like a plant drawing nutrients from the soil, with the solar sails analogous to photosynthetic leaves. They use the CHON and the solar energy to reproduce themselves. Once the offspring are grown, they break off and deploy their solar sails, using them to accelerate out of the system, as well as to save up energy for the long journey ahead. Like Bajoran sailseeds spilling out into the wind. They seem to point themselves toward the brightest stars in the sky—which makes sense, since those are either the nearest or the most energetic.”

“Why would they evolve that way?” Vale wondered. “Why not just stay in one star system, where they know there’s enough energy and matter to live on?”

“Well, they don’t seem to be anywhere near intelligent—”

“Pardon my anthropomorphizing,” Vale said.

“But I’d assume it’s because in a turbulent region like this, a given star system could be struck by disaster at any time. Cosmozoans that evolved interstellar migratory behavior would thus have a survival edge.”

“What about the star-jelly-like compounds in their shells?” Riker asked. “Are there any other signs that the species are related?”

“Hard to say for sure. I’d say they’re related in the sense of being part of the overall ecosystem of the Orion Arm. So it stands to reason they’d be made of similar stuff. Also as spacegoing creatures that procreate in star systems, they may have evolved similar shell chemistry for similar needs. I don’t yet have enough information to say if they’re directly related.”

“All right, then, how about this: if the ‘sailseeds’ contain compounds the star-jellies need, is it possible the jellies might feed on them? If we follow them, could they lead us to the jellies?”

Jaza mulled it over. “Cosmozoans generally live very far apart, at least this far out from the core star-formation region. It would be fairly unusual for one to come across another, for the same reason that Starfleet encounters with them have been fairly infrequent. So I doubt we’d see them feeding on one another very much, at least not until we get closer—assuming I’m right that there’s a fuller ecosystem at Vela.

“Since they can travel at warp, star-jellies would be better off just hopping to the nearest inhabited planet to find biomass—and given their replication abilities, they could convert CHON from comets directly just as the sailseeds do.” He pondered. “Still…species with similar needs might seek out similar conditions. So tracking sailseeds might help us find our way deeper into the biosphere, which would increase our chances.”

Vale sighed. “Maybe instead we should find some Pa’haquel and ask how theytrack the jellies down.”

“Somehow,” Riker said, “I don’t think they’d tell us.”

“Probably,” Jaza suggested, “they’re more familiar with the jellies’ habits and migration patterns. Or maybe they can scan for some kind of ‘spoor’we don’t know how to recognize.”

“Or maybe they can tap into some sensory ability of the jellies they kill and inhabit.”

Jaza pondered the captain’s suggestion. “Perhaps. Some kind of empathic center in the brain, possibly.”

Riker looked at him sharply. “So to find an empath…”

“Maybe it takes an empath.”

Deanna was very quiet for a while after he made the suggestion. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that,” she finally said.