“And how much would that change theirculture? Christine, the last thing I want is to start another interstellar shooting match!”

“You think I do? I just don’t want to see more of my people get killed in someone else’s crossfire!”

That brought them both to silence. Riker was reminded of how many members of Vale’s Enterprisesecurity staff had died in recent months, on Delta Sigma IV and Tezwa. A pall hung over the ready room for a moment. “Sorry,” Riker said, and Vale’s apology overlapped it. He gave her a small, sheepish smile before starting again. “Look. These are both intelligent species. That means they’re both capable of acting on more than instinct and raw survival. I believe there must be some way they can reach peaceful coexistence. Everything I believe, everything this ship is about tells me that there has to be. If this mission is to mean anything, I say we need to try to help them find that path, rather than abandoning them to bloodshed.”

Vale absorbed his words. “Okay. Granted, your motives are valid.”

“And I’ll grant that maybe my approach has been a little one-sided. Maybe I am commanding too much from the heart in this case…and I’d be a liar if I said that seeing Deanna in so much pain didn’t have at least a little to do with that.” He smiled. “So I’m grateful to have such a cold and logical exec.”

She glared at him, and they shared a chuckle, the tension fading. “Glad I could help. I still think you’re wrong, though.”

“And I think you’re wrong,” he replied in equally amiable tones. “So maybe between us we can hammer out a compromise both species can live with.”

Chapter Seven

Jaza Najem realized it would be inappropriate to regard the violent death of a star-jelly as a stroke of good luck. But with the jelly’s corpse only a few dozen meters away in Titan’s tractor beam, Jaza had his best opportunity yet for a detailed sensor scan of the creature’s anatomy. It would have been better to have a live creature whose biological functions he could observe in action, but having a static subject to scan at leisure allowed him to build up a clearer picture of its anatomy. And since this one was in its translucent-shelled default mode rather than armored up, its innards were much easier to scan. To take full advantage of the opportunity, he’d moved from the bridge to the exobiology lab, where he could consult with its staff.

The jelly’s anatomy, as displayed in the lab’s main holotank, followed a basically toroidal structure, a series of concentric rings. The central core apparently contained the creature’s brain—“comparable in size to Titan’s whole saucer section,” Lieutenant Eviku had said with awe. There were sensory organs at both ends of the axis, close to the brain. The dorsal one took the form of a parabolic dish with a central spike, and also served as the weapon emitter, though it was covered by the translucent shell in the creature’s default mode. The ventral sensory organ was a dome at the center of the larger concavity in which the tentacles could rest. The scans suggested it bore some similarities to a transporter scanner/emitter, as well as a subspace transceiver. “Maybe we should have an engineer here too,” Kent Norellis muttered.

The two rings of red lights, one halfway out, the other along the outer rim, seemed to be analogous to warp reactors. It was hard to tell in a dead creature, but their residual activity and sensor profile revealed a fair amount. They were apparently the jelly’s main sources of metabolic energy, and also served as continuum-distortion generators, producing the gravitic and subspace fields which the creatures used to go to warp and maneuver at impulse. A network of wave guides within the creature, wispy and invisible on this scale like its respiratory and circulatory networks, distributed its internal gravitic fields into a planar shape; essentially anything above or below the equatorial plane would be pulled “down” toward it. The two hemispheres of its body would have opposite gravitational vectors, and any conduits right along the equatorial plane would be in free fall—not unlike the “sweet spots” of early starships’ gravity fields. Jaza felt it would be an interesting environment to live in, though Norellis wasn’t so sanguine.

The young human was more concerned with other issues, though. “These have got to be artificial creatures,” Norellis said. “Why else would they have internal gravity?”

“It seems to be a side effect of their propulsion systems,” Jaza said. “A kind of gravitic leakage that’s shaped by the wave guides.”

“But why shape it to be planar like a planet’s gravity?”

Eviku tilted his long, tapering head thoughtfully. “They do have a sessile phase on planetary surfaces,” the Arkenite pointed out. “It stands to reason that their metabolism might require a gravity field aligned that way. It could have evolved naturally.”

Norellis studied the image skeptically. “It sure looksartificial. The way the distortion generators are arranged in regular rings.”

“I’ve seen deep-sea organisms on Arken and Earth with similar arrays of lights.”

Cadet Orilly reared up onto her hind legs for a moment to get a different angle on the holotank display. It wasn’t something Jaza saw her do very often, except to fit into a turbolift. “The generators themselves are clearly organic.”

“True,” Jaza said. “And they don’t function like any warp engines I know about.” How they actually did work was still something of a mystery, as with most of the cosmozoans that possessed FTL or subspace capabilities.

“But how could warp drive evolve naturally?”

Jaza pursed his lips. “Our findings as we approach Vela support the hypothesis that cosmozoans originate in star-formation zones. Those zones can be turbulent in subspace as well as normal space, and that can weaken the boundary between the domains. It’s possible some life-forms could evolve to take advantage of those conditions.” Some cosmozoans seemed to exist partly in subspace to begin with. There were some, like the “vampire cloud” that had destroyed the Farragutin the 2250s and a similar creature battled by the Klingons in the 2310s, which had the ability to change mass and composition, implying that they extended into higher dimensions. For a being that existed partly or mostly in subspace, evolving warp capability didn’t seem quite so implausible. Jaza was still skeptical, but he had to admit his initial certainty was starting to waver.

“But what’s the evolutionary incentive for warp drive?” Norellis asked.

“It would give a clear survival advantage,” Eviku said. “Cosmozoans need energy and matter to feed on, and that means star systems, which are light-years apart. And it allows much faster escape from cosmic disasters.”

Jaza worked the controls for the multispatial sensor array, studying its readings. “It looks as though the distortion generators extend partly into subspace. Although the rest of the star-jellies are strictly three-dimensional.”

“Could the generators once have been autonomous organisms that the jellies incorporated into their anatomy?” Orilly asked. “Like the mitochondria in humanoid cells?”

“Or they could’ve been added by someone later,” Norellis countered. “I mean, that’s obviously the more likely answer.”

“Too many wrong ideas have been called obvious in the past, Kent,” said Jaza. “It’s not a word I like to hear in my department. We should at least consider possible natural explanations for their traits before we assume they must be artificial.”