Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (10 page)

Once, Eviku would have found that a thing of simple beauty, but now there was more ambivalence to the sight. The beleaguered buzzfish reminded him of Starfleet, mounting desperate action to fight off the Borg but having to sacrifice so many in hopes that some percentage of the whole could survive. He took comfort in the fact that the buzzfish shoal lived on after the feeding frenzy…but at what cost! He could not help but be reminded of Germu and how much he missed her. How he had never had the chance to say good-bye. Aili’s close call yesterday had left him shaken, afraid of having to bear another loss.

Now that the drama had subsided, he was content to try to put those thoughts aside. He and the others sat atop the
Holiday
’s roof—which had been adapted to function as a deck of sorts—having a leisurely picnic lunch while watching the distant fireworks of a lightning storm on the
periphery of the superhurricane. It was nice to be able to relax on such an agreeable planet. Not only was Droplet nice and wet, and warmer than most of Arken II, but it had a good strong magnetic field as well. Normally he had to wear his
anlec’ven
, an inverted-U headdress made of black magnetic material, to prevent the disorientation Arkenites experienced when removed from the powerful field they’d evolved in. Down here, he could go without the headdress, something he could normally do only in his quarters with their built-in field generator. He felt a certain affinity for the animal forms of this world, which also had evolved with an innate magnetic perception, according to the scans and examinations of numerous sampled species. It was a valuable aid to navigation on a world without landmarks.

It was also agreeable to share a recreational moment with his crewmates again. He’d spent too much time in those quarters in the past few months, alone with his private grief. He took some comfort in the distraction of an enjoyably banal conversation with Commanders Vale and Pazlar about last week’s parrises squares finals, a recording of which had come in the last data burst from Starfleet.

But Vale trailed off in the middle of excoriating his opinion on the Izarian team’s defensive strategy, staring off toward a nearby thunderhead, one of the storms on the outer edge of Spot. “What is it?” he asked, turning to follow her gaze. But he saw nothing; human eyesight was considerably better than his.

“I’m not sure.” She deliberately moved her eyes back and forth, up and down. “Not just a floater in my eye. Anybody have a pair of binoculars?” she called down the hatch in a casual yet authoritative tone. She reached down, and
seconds later binoculars magically appeared in her hand. She stood and searched the sky with them. “There it is. Hey, it is a floater, just not in my eye. An inflated, translucent sack, like a jellyfish, but with some more substantial components hanging from the bottom. Reminds me of an old-style weather balloon.”

“May I see, Commander?” Eviku requested.

Vale handed him the binoculars. “Better look fast before it drifts inside that thundercloud. There.” She tried to point it out to him; with his limited vision, it took a few moments to focus on it even with help from the binoculars’ readouts.

“I see, it’s—aah!” He winced as a bolt of lightning went off right in his line of sight.

“What?”

Eviku blinked, temporarily blinded. “That…scope needs better filters. I may need to see the doctor.” The thunder arrived in the middle of his sentence. “It appears the creature’s at the mercy of the wind. Getting sucked right into a low-pressure region.” He was starting to see the shapes of the two women, which was encouraging.

“It doesn’t seem like a very sensible design,” Pazlar said. “Well, as long as a species reproduces fast enough, evolution doesn’t care how self-defeating a design is.”

“I wonder what it’s filled with,” Vale mused. “Hot air, hydrogen, helium?”

“No helium to speak of on this planet. Hot air’s possible, but the mechanism for heating’s hard to guess. My bet’s hydrogen—that can be produced biologically.”

Eviku could see Vale well enough now to recognize that she was furrowing her brow. Humans conveyed a lot of
expression with their unusually flexible foreheads. “Maybe we should take the shuttle up, try to grab it before it floats into the storm. Could be doing it a fav—”

Suddenly, lightning flashed again, luckily behind Eviku this time. He turned and looked through the binoculars, only to catch the final moments of the gas bag going up in a puff of flame and vapor, while the more substantial components of the creature plummeted toward the sea.

Pazlar turned to the first officer. “About that bet—”

“No takers. Hydrogen.”

The science officer grimaced. “Well, it could be methane.”

TITAN

Lieutenant Eviku and Ensign Y’lira Modan stood as Deanna entered the exobiology lab. “Commander!” Y’lira said. “What can we do for you?”

“At ease, both of you,” Deanna said with a smile, unsure whether they were deferring more to her rank or to her very pregnant condition. “I’m here for curiosity, not business. I’m actually getting a little bored stuck on the ship, and I just wanted to peer over your shoulders for a bit, if you don’t mind. Maybe contribute in some way.”

“Of course, Commander,” Eviku said. “You’re always welcome. Would you like to sit down?”

At first, she was inclined to brush off the invitation, but her ankles had other ideas. “Thank you,” she said, gratefully easing herself into an empty seat. Near the seat was an aquarium of sorts, a bit larger and more clinical than
the one in which Captain Picard had kept Livingston, his lionfish. Some kind of invertebrate creature rested on the bottom. “I think your pet is dead,” she said.

“No, ma’am, just…inert,” Eviku replied.

“What is it?”

“It’s the ‘weather balloon’ organism Commander Vale and I observed three days ago.”

She stared. “I thought that blew up.”

“The gas bladder blew up,” Eviku said. “The rest of the creature’s surprisingly durable. Apparently it’s evolved the ability to survive lightning strikes when it gets sucked into storms.”

“Makes sense…I suppose. It seems it would be easier to avoid the storms in the first place.”

“That’s not the only anomaly. The surviving portion consists largely of sensory organs: sight, hearing, odor, pressure, EM fields, even infrared. And there seems to be very little to the brain that isn’t devoted to the sense organs. Although it’s hard to be certain with no significant neural activity, and I’d rather not dissect it.”

“Well, it’s at the mercy of the winds. I wouldn’t expect it to have much of its brain devoted to motor functions.”

“Yes, ma’am, but what does it need all those highly refined senses for if it can barely react to what it senses? Then there’s the question of how they get by without any evident control over their movements. How do they reproduce if the only way they ever encounter each other is by chance?”

“Spores? Buds?”

“Maybe. In any case, Commander Vale’s name for it—a weather balloon—was apt. A sac of buoyant gas with
sensory equipment attached. Now if only we could figure out why a weather balloon would evolve naturally.”

Deanna recalled something he’d just said. “Why don’t you want to dissect it?”

“I’ve been keeping it alive to see if its gas bladder would regenerate after being hit by lightning. As far as I can tell from my studies, it does have that capability. But for some reason it isn’t making use of it.”

“Could the lightning have crippled it?”

“That was my thought, but there’s no sign of damage. It’s like it’s deliberately not healing itself. It’s essentially in a coma, absorbing minimal nutrients—just enough to maintain its physical status quo. And I can’t figure out why.”

Y’lira turned her large, unblinking turquoise eyes toward Deanna, who sensed uncertainty from the golden-skinned Selenean. “With respect, Commander, I’m uncertain how much you could contribute here. We’re basically dealing with animals here.”

“Well…animals have psychology too, Modan,” Deanna said with a shrug. “I’m not in Chamish’s league when it comes to that, but I’m happy to offer my perspective.”

“We could use some,” Eviku said. She sensed his usual low-level melancholy beneath the surface, but for now the Arkenite was caught up in his work. He was one of Huilan’s patients; it wasn’t her place to pry. “The ‘weather balloon’ isn’t the only mysterious creature on the planet. There are other species with disproportionate sensory capability, like the bugeye piscoids. There are creatures that occupy peculiarly broad ranges, such as a genus of zooplankton
that’s been scanned by probes several kilometers down but has also been sampled just meters below the surface. Sea life is usually more stratified than that. We’ve also noted a number of species showing unusual behavior.”

“Such as?”

“We’ve observed movements that don’t have any clear motivation such as the pursuit of food or flight from predators. Indeed, there’s a species of piscoid that the squales feed upon, one that actually swims
toward
them when it hears their calls.”

Deanna blinked. “Seriously?”

“Yes, it’s bizarre. They’re bright orange, so Bralik nicknamed them ‘flaming idiot fish.’” They shared a laugh. It was nice to feel humor from Eviku, though it was all too brief.

“One small molluscoid with prehensile claws has been observed in contact with numerous small creatures,” he went on, “and it’s hard to say what they’re doing with them, since they’re not just eating them. Sometimes they just seem to
move
things from one place to another. A few times we’ve seen a flying piscoid circling around, holding a smaller organism in its tentacles. In fact, we’ve seen them doing this not far from our own shuttles. It’s like they’re watching us—but if so, why bring other animals along for the flight?”

Deanna furrowed her brow. “Would you say these species are tool users? Like the way some animals use rocks to open shellfish and the like?”

“We’ve seen no evidence of that, or of nestbuilding behavior—none of the usual types of animal tool use. And these species don’t have nearly large enough brains for ab
stract thought, not given the type of neurological structure found on Droplet.”

“Certainly they show no sign of language,” Y’lira added. “The sounds they make among themselves are basic—here I am, where are you, I’m large and dangerous, I’m small and submissive, food is here, danger is coming, I wish to mate, the usual.” Deanna chuckled at the cryptolinguist’s deadpan recital. “But some of them have been noted making odd vocal exchanges with the squales. Although the squales do most of the vocalizing.”

“Does it seem like a conversation, or like some sort of dispute—the squales warning the other forms off when their boundaries are violated?”

“Hard to say, since we can’t get close enough to see. But these species make sounds to the squales—and occasionally to the other animals they interact with—that they don’t make among themselves. So we have no referent for what they mean.”

“And does the same apply to the sounds the squales make to them?”

“The squales’ vocalizations are so complex that we really can’t say.” Y’lira gestured at the receiver in her ear as she mentioned the squale song.

Deanna perked up. “Are you analyzing them now?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’d love to listen to some.” She put her hands on her belly. “Plus it’s good to expose a developing infant to music. It’s been fascinating to sense how her emotional state responds to different musical styles. I’d love to know how she responds to squale song. If it wouldn’t be a distraction, Eviku,” she added.

“No, Commander. I think I’d enjoy that.”

With a nod, Y’lira activated the speakers on her console. Flowing, echoing cries filled the lab, hypnotic in their complexity, uplifting in their beauty. Deanna drank them in, slowing her breathing to minimize the interference for little What’s-her-name, and striving to render herself passive so as not to impose her own impressions on the little one. She was just a receiver, open to the sounds from without and the emotions from within.

But before she could get a clear read from the baby, she was startled out of her meditative state by a new sound from behind her, a sharp, staccato twittering that clearly wasn’t from the speakers. Deanna opened her eyes to see Eviku and Y’lira staring at her with shock.

No, not at her—at the tank behind her. She turned. The “weather balloon” creature was not visibly more active, but there was no question that it was the source of the sounds.

“It hasn’t done that before,” Eviku said. He activated the tank’s scanners. “But its metabolism is rising. It’s coming out of its dormancy. Odd.”

“You think that’s odd?” Y’lira asked. “It’s speaking squale!”

“A sort of pidgin squale, actually,” Y’lira told the assembled department heads two hours later. “Like a very simplified version of the same catalogue of sounds.”

“Are you suggesting that it was actually
answering
the squales?” Ra-Havreii asked with skepticism. Aili Lavena, who had been down on the planet but had been summoned back to the ship for this urgent briefing, was annoyed by
his tone at first. But she reminded herself of the perils of jumping to conclusions.

“We’re not just suggesting it,” Y’lira went on. “After it stopped, we played back the squale calls again. And at the exact same moment in the playback, it began making the exact same pattern of sounds. The sequence it emitted lasted nearly ten minutes, with no overall repetition.”

“And that’s not all,” Eviku put in. “The creature has suddenly begun to regenerate its flotation sac. And at the rate it’s regrowing, it should be airborne within two weeks at most. That’s after days of total inactivity, and from my analysis I’m convinced the creature could remain dormant for weeks and still do the same.”

“There’s only one explanation that fits what we’ve seen,” said Pazlar, who had shuttled up with Lavena. “When we nicknamed this creature a weather balloon, we were more right than we knew. Because that seems to be what it literally is. It drifts around the sky, taking measurements with its various senses, storing what it learns. Remembering it precisely, mechanically. Eviku’s scans of its neural activity—now that it has some—show its brain is tailor-made for that, almost like a digital computer.”