Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (17 page)

For another thing, the pods seemed to be organized around more than just age and sex. Riker got the impression that different pods specialized in different tasks or fields of study. Indeed, Lavena seemed to think that the pod interacting with them was actually an aggregate of two or three pods, given its size and the factionalism she occasionally sensed among them. At the very least, some of the older “males” seemed to take a more wary, defensive stance than the others, reminding Lavena of a security detail shepherding a team of science officers.

The squales lived all over Droplet, though primarily
in certain zones, presumably those where the most nutrients were concentrated by the currents. They had ways of cultivating food, mainly breeding livestock like the so-called flaming idiot fish, but also farming some sort of seaweed, or so Lavena interpreted it. They were actually able to create the stable economic surplus necessary for building a civilization, to have the resources and leisure for large-scale activities beyond survival. But how did that civilization manifest? They had no cities; where were their breeding farms, their schools, their galleries? Was it even meaningful to think in those terms when dealing with a civilization whose environment was perpetually fluid, in more than one sense of the word? What seemingly natural formations on, or below, the surface of Droplet were actually organized and managed in ways that
Titan
’s crew had not been able to discern?

Sadly, the conversation was interrupted when Riker’s combadge activated and Melora Pazlar’s voice sounded from the gig. The squales reacted badly, retreating several meters down. As Lavena followed to calm them, Riker swam back to the boat, clambered aboard, and hit the badge, which was still attached to his uniform. “Riker here.”

“Captain, we…trying to reach you,”
came the staticky reply.
“Bad news.”

Once he’d been briefed, he swam down far enough to get Lavena’s attention and signal her to come over. “What is it, sir?”

“Our observation shuttle reports that
Titan
failed to deflect the asteroid. There was an explosion of some sort, and we lost contact with the ship.”

“Oh, no.”

“They’re picking up reflections from
Titan
—it’s still in one piece. But judging from the way the ship’s moving under the asteroid’s gravity, it’s nearly twice as massive as we thought, and it’s still on course for Droplet, impact in under five hours. We have to assume the ship won’t be able to prevent the impact. I’ve sent two of the shuttles to assist
Titan
, but we need to get back to base camp, batten everything down.”

“Sir, we can’t go now! We have to warn the squales! Tell them to evacuate the impact site!”

“I’d like to, Aili, but can you suggest how? We can only estimate the impact zone, and how do we even describe it without any fixed geography?”

“Please, sir, let me try. Can you get me a projection of the impact zone?”

“I’ll ask Pazlar.”

The impact zone would be some forty degrees east of the dawn terminator and a similar amount south of the equator. Riker suggested that Lavena describe it as the near edge of the equatorial storm belt in the region that would be halfway between sunrise and noon when the impact came in roughly a third of a local day. It was inexact, but she would urge them to evacuate as broad an area as possible.

Riker gave her a good hour to try before calling her back. “I fear we’ve lost their trust, sir,” she said. “First we break our promise to avoid using technology, then I come back making dire warnings and telling them where they’re forbidden to swim. The ‘security’ squales didn’t react well. I think they interpreted it as a threat. They took charge of the conversation, took up intimidating postures, and questioned me pretty harshly. The ‘science’ squales raised some
protests, but they were argued into silence. I think most of them are younger than the others. I just couldn’t get through, sir.”

“Ra-Havreii’s proposed an alternative,” he told her. “We drop a probe at the impact site, one that emits a loud, continuous klaxon—loud enough to be painful to any squale staying in the danger zone. It should force them to evacuate.”

“That seems cruel, sir.”

“I know, I don’t like it. I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary, but we don’t have time to try to get through to them now. Hopefully after it’s over, they’ll recognize that we acted to help them.”

“At least let me go back down to tell them what we’re going to do. Otherwise they’ll take it as an attack.”

And the security pod might just retaliate against two small bipeds out in a lonely boat in the middle of nowhere.
“Try your best, Aili. But be careful. You should take a phaser—”

“No, sir,” she said emphatically. “They’d never listen then.”

“They won’t even—”
Know what it is,
he had been about to say. But if the security pod was already on the defensive, she could bring a bicycle horn and they’d fear it was a weapon. “Just be careful. We need you more than anybody on this mission.”

“Right, sir. No pressure.” She vanished into the murk.

He gave her until the three-hour mark. When he ducked his head underwater, he could still distantly hear her voice, faint but distinctive against the counterpoint of squalesong, so he knew she was alive and well. But he couldn’t call her
back, and he couldn’t wait for her any longer. He ordered Ra-Havreii to deploy the underwater klaxon.

With the speed of sound in seawater around a kilometer and a half per second, give or take, Riker estimated it would take under fifteen minutes for the sound to reach his location. Maybe sixteen minutes later, Aili shot to the surface. “Help me into the boat, quick!” He pulled her in, and she sank weakly onto the deck. Riker realized she was exhausted; she would have been out of breath if she still breathed. He began helping her into her hydration suit. “Never mind that, get the motor running. As soon as I heard the clamor of squale calls from the deep sound channel, I knew the beacon must’ve been deployed…. I lit out of there just before the security goons tried to grab me again. We’ve got moments, and I don’t know if fear of tech will stop them this time.”

Riker moved back to activate the engine, but then he looked around him. “I think it’s too late, Aili. We’re surrounded.”

“And by two pods’ worth. I think they called in another security team.”

Luckily, the squales that ringed the gig seemed content with a blockade for the moment. “They’re wary, sir, but I don’t think they want to hurt us. They’re just protecting themselves.”

Lavena spent a futile half-hour singing to them in Selkie, trying to reason with them. Meanwhile, Riker contacted the
Gillespie
and requested backup, figuring a shuttlecraft would be sufficient to frighten the squales away. But before the shuttle arrived, Pazlar contacted him.
“The klaxon’s gone down, sir. The squales sent some kind of
large, armored creature to intercept and wreck it. They’re returning to the area.”

Riker sighed. “Go back and try again. Stay as long as necessary to get the message across.”

“But sir, what about you and Aili?”

“We should be able to ride out the shock waves safely at this distance. Those squales can’t.”

“Aye, sir.
Gillespie
out.”

Lavena, floating in the water again, looked up at Riker. “I just hope they appreciate what we’re doing for them when this is over.”

“So do I, Aili.”

“Well, maybe
Titan
will come through and deflect it after all.”

Riker looked skyward. He could feel Deanna’s presence through their empathic link, even at this distance, but she seemed distressed, maybe even hurt. He prayed their baby was all right. “Let’s hope so.”

TITAN

W
hen the two shuttles from Droplet arrived at
Titan
, which was still coasting along with the asteroid, Vale immediately assigned them to help the captain’s skiff in its attempt to thrust the asteroid off course. The big rock’s trajectory was changing, but with aching slowness. The
La Rocca
was built for diplomatic functions and recreation, not for power, and the engines and shields of
Ellington II
and
Marsalis
had been rigged for aquashuttle mode. All told, it finally became evident that the asteroid’s course could not be changed enough; at most, they had made its angle of entry shallower. That might ameliorate the impact to some degree, but not enough to spare the Dropletian lives down there.

So with less than an hour to go, Vale proposed a last-ditch plan. “We didn’t want to blow it up for fear that might do more harm than good,” she told the staff, back on the bridge now that the shielding was restored. “But we
can’t prevent the harm anyway, so maybe blowing it up is the only option we have left. We’ve seen how well those bilitrium deposits can amplify an explosion—maybe we should be using that to our advantage.”

She proposed a variation of Panyarachun’s earlier suggestion: instead of trying to detonate shuttle warp cores against the surface of the asteroid, they would position the antimatter canisters from two shuttles as close as possible to the largest and deepest bilitrium deposits they could reach. “With luck, it’ll amplify the blast enough to turn that thing to rubble, and most of it will burn off in the atmosphere.”

“The problem there,”
said Cethente,
“is that the intense radiation still emanating from the asteroid would render our sensors useless.”

“Not all of them,” said Chief Bralik, who’d been called in to consult on the geology. “I can rig a good old-fashioned gravity sensor. It can find the parts that match the density of bilitrium. Just like everything else in this system, it’s just a case of going back to the way they did it in the old days.”

Vale nodded. “All right. Do it.”

SHUTTLECRAFT MARSALIS

Within twenty minutes, Bralik had beamed over to the
Marsalis
with her gravity sensor. As soon as that had been accomplished,
Titan
began thrusting away on impulse, falling behind the asteroid, both to gain distance from the explosion and to decelerate for orbital insertion. Under
Bralik’s supervision, Ensign Waen piloted the shuttle into the fissure blown by the previous explosion. The Ferengi cast her eyes about at the rock formations that glittered in the shuttle’s spotlights. “A fortune in transuranics, and we’re about to blow it up,” she lamented.

“Plenty more where that came from,” the Bolian pilot said, tilting her smooth blue head to glance at Bralik. “Literally.” She furrowed her faintly striped brow. “Do you think this will protect the squales?”

“I think, young one, that sometimes you have to do
something
even when the odds are that it won’t bring you any profit. Because then you can at least say you tried.”

Waen did not look comforted. “Is that a Rule of Acquisition?”

“No, dear. It’s a rule of getting by.”

Bralik’s console beeped, and she checked the readout. “Density readings consistent with a large bilitrium deposit at three forty-eight mark twenty,” she announced. “A second deposit beyond the opposite wall, maybe sixty meters deep. Close enough.” She tapped in a few calculations, sent the result to Waen. “Place the canisters at these coordinates.”

“Got it, Chief.”

A moment later, Bralik felt the shudder of canister ejection, then a low hum as the tractor beam engaged and moved the canister into position. “Careful!” she called as she noticed the beam spreading a bit beyond the canister. “We’ve seen what can happen when this rock drinks up tractor energies.”

But before she even finished, an energy discharge arced between the walls of the fissure, conducted through the
residual rock vapor from the earlier explosions. Some mineral deposit must have had a residual charge still stored, just on the threshold of eruption. The discharge triggered a new explosion, and debris pelted the shuttle. “Shields holding,” Waen called. “Canister’s still intact.”

“Don’t count your latinum yet, honey! Look!”

The walls were moving. The fissure was collapsing in around them.

TITAN

Vale watched in alarm through the viewscreen static as the asteroid began crumbling apart in slow motion, the fissure closing to trap the
Marsalis
. “Get them out of there!” she called, not caring how.

“No transporter lock,” Kuu’iut called. “The radiation.”

“Vale to
Ellington
. Can you tractor them out before the fissure finishes collapsing?”

“We’re working on it,”
came Olivia Bolaji’s voice.
“Waen’s heading for the exit. We’re trying to shore it up with our tractors.”

Vale watched tensely as the shuttle’s beams strained to hold apart the massive chunks that were slowly crashing together. Energy discharges flashed inside the closing fissure, clouds of rock vapor bursting out and splashing over the shuttle’s shields. Finally, the
Marsalis
scraped its way past the rock walls and out into space, nearly sideswiping its sister shuttle. “Both shuttles, back to the ship, now! Kuu’iut, what’s happening?”

“The asteroid is breaking into three large pieces. They’re still in contact, but no longer physically joined—just resting against each other. But they’re shifting.”

“As soon as the shuttles reach a safe distance, blow the antimatter.”

“The canisters might not stay in range of the bilitrium.”

“All the more reason not to hesitate!”

“Aye, ma’am. Shuttles are at minimum safe distance—detonating.”

At least the detonator signal was strong enough to pierce the radiation; the explosion that erupted from inside the asteroid was satisfyingly brilliant and violent-looking through the static. The asteroid blew out into an expanding cloud of dust, and Vale gave a tentative sigh of relief.

But then Kuu’iut gave his somber report. “Not enough contact with the bilitrium. The explosion was unconcentrated, much of the energy lost to space.” As the dust began to clear, Vale saw that the asteroid was still in only three very large chunks, huddled fairly close together though drifting slowly apart and tumbling separately.