Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (33 page)

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
came Vale’s voice.

“I think we’re beyond having the luxury of good ideas. It’s what we’ve got.”

“Strangely, I can live with that. Okay, we’re deploying the first probe.”

Naturally, it didn’t prove that easy. According to the reports Ra-Havreii received from the base camp, as soon as the probe was released from the floater island, sensors showed a pod of squales racing to intercept it. They must have been ready for this, since they managed to catch it within a minute and proceeded to carry it to a barren, dead floater islet on the outskirts of the cluster, pushing it up and out onto the surface.

“I think they’ve made their point,”
Vale said.
“So you’d better make ours again.”

Feeling set upon, Ra-Havreii tried again. He explained to them why the planet’s magnetic field was causing them discomfort and how the probes would repair the problem. He promised them that
Titan
’s crew would gladly leave their world alone once the balance had been restored. He offered them medical help to tend their wounds, assuring them that
Titan
’s medical facilities could provide treatments they would find miraculous. Oddly, Y’lira reported that they reacted to that with amusement.

Finally, he lost his patience. “The simple truth,” he intoned in awkward Selkie, “is that you can’t stop us. You can’t prevent all our probes from descending. And what do you plan to do with the ones you catch and hold on the surface? Everything on this world sinks eventually, you know!”

Y’lira stared at him. “Doctor, I’m unfamiliar with this style of diplomacy.”

So am I,
he silently confessed. But he was fed up with catering to their technophobic superstition. “Just let us do this,” he told them. “You’re only hurting yourselves and wasting your effort by trying to stop us.”

“Uh…Doctor?”

“Don’t worry, Modan,” he said, switching back to Standard. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Doctor!” Y’lira shoved her tricorder in front of him. Its proximity scan showed several new shapes coming in from a distance. Several very large shapes.

“Doctor,”
came Vale’s voice from the main base,
“we’re detecting multiple large creatures moving in. Eviku
says they’re the same armored things the squales used to destroy our warning klaxon before.”

“They’re moving in on us, too,” Ra-Havreii told her. “I think we’d better get out of here.”

“Agreed.”

But that was easier said than done. The gig was surrounded by squales on all sides, in the center of a circle some thirty meters wide. “Oh, no. What do we do?”

“Could we ram one of them?” Y’lira asked.

“They’re heavier than the gig. We’d come to a rather abrupt stop and end up either in the water or in the tentacles of the next squale over. And I’d rather not kill any of them while the others are in a surly enough mood to begin wi—” He broke off, gazing westward.

“Commander?” Y’lira said.

A large ocean swell, a good dozen meters high, was approaching the gig from beyond the circle of squales. “I think I see a way out. Brace yourself.”

The swell soon reached the circle of squales, lifting the ones on the western side higher and higher into the air. The squales took it in stride (or in stroke), remaining in formation despite the warping of the circle. But as soon as the crest of the swell had passed under the squales on the western edge, Ra-Havreii gunned the gig’s engine and drove west at maximum acceleration. The gig rose up the slanted surface, using it as a ramp, and shot into the air as it crested the swell. The gig’s arc carried it clear over the squales, though Ra-Havreii could swear he heard and felt a tentacle slap against the rear of the hull. After a stomach-wrenching moment in free fall, the gig splashed down hard. Ra-Havreii banged his elbow and his teeth slammed together
painfully. But at least they were free of squale encirclement. Not letting up on the throttle, he veered on course for the main base. As much as he hated the floater island, it was the closest thing to a safe haven on this planet now.

Any further thoughts were driven from Ra-Havreii’s head by the immediate need to vomit. He managed to get his head over the side before it came, which was small comfort as his entire digestive tract seemed to be trying to force itself out through his mouth for a good minute to come. When his heaves became dry and finally subsided, he gasped in exhaustion for a while, then looked back and croaked, “There, you damned squid. How’s that for contaminating your precious ocean?”

But then the water bowed up around a large, dark form, and a sharp armored prow cleaved out through the middle of it, tentacles writhing beneath the bow wave as it drove toward the gig. Ra-Havreii instantly turned back to the controls and pushed the throttle to its limit. “Y’lira to Vale,” he heard the Selenean saying. “We need assistance.”

“Sorry, but we’ve got our hands full right now. They’re attacking the whole island.”

It turned out that Aili had misinterpreted the pod’s intentions slightly. When they took her down to the deep sound channel, it wasn’t just to search randomly for a team from
Titan
. To her surprise, the squales brought her to a device she recognized as one of
Titan
’s hydrophone probes. Melo explained that many probes had been blaring noise into the ocean following the asteroid impact, and that most had been destroyed to clear the lines of communication. Aili asked, a bit heatedly, whether it had occurred to any of them that
the probes might have been an attempt to make contact. Most had not, Cham replied; inanimate objects were so foreign to them that they had not thought to associate them with intelligent communication. Members of his own pod and some others had considered that the probes might have been analogous to their own engineered helper species, but Cham himself had dismissed the notion, unable to accept that something inanimate (a concept they had needed to coin a new word for) could communicate like a living being. And the majority of squales participating in the global discussion had shared his opinion.

“But they would have called our names,” Aili insisted. “You must have heard the sound.”

Melo acknowledged that some patterns vaguely similar to the names “Riker” and “Lavena” had been heard in the probe chatter, but Cham objected that overall they were too different. Apparently it was an argument they had had before, with Cham and the majority of squales convincing those like Melo that they had imagined the similarity, reading a pattern into randomness because they had wished to find one. Listening to the debate, Aili discerned that the squales perceived the emissions of a speaker differently from those of a living voice. Perhaps the output from the speakers was missing too many ultrasonic overtones, although it sounded to her as though they perceived some additional components not present in humanoid speech. Aili guessed that it might have been the probes’ EM emissions; from the way the squales described the source of the Song of Life, she was coming to suspect that it had some connection to their ability to sense the planet’s strong magnetic field.

In any case, Melo went on, the contact pod had intercepted this probe and figured out how to deactivate it, preserving it for study. The elderly squale was quite proud of his apprentices, Alos included, for having the courage to approach the disquieting object and the insight to shut it down. Aili suspected it had been as much luck as insight, but that didn’t stop Melo from gloating to Cham that his team’s preservation of the object had not been a waste of effort after all.

Aili gave Melo a huge hug, grateful to him for the spirit of curiosity that had led him to preserve the probe intact. At the limited speed of sound through this huge ocean, she’d assumed it would take hours to summon help, and Riker’s condition was tenuous as it was. But assuming there was a receiver close enough to pick up this probe’s signals through the interference, then help could be on the way in minutes.

Finding the controls, Aili activated the probe. The squales writhed in discomfort and retreated, and she sang apology to them. Soon, they came to rest at a safe distance, and she turned back to the input. “Lavena to anyone who can hear me. Repeat, this is Ensign Lavena calling anyone from
Titan
. Do you read?”

Even with the base’s inertial damping field on maximum, Christine Vale could feel the ground shuddering beneath her feet as the sharp-prowed leviathans rammed into the floater island over and over. The squales clearly meant business now, even attacking the island itself, and Vale was coming to realize that even this, the largest, most stable piece of “land” on the planet, was still a small, imperma
nent thing. Beyond the field perimeter, though she couldn’t feel it, the cluster of linked floaters was rocking and warping like the ground during an earthquake as the icebreakers (as Vale had dubbed the creatures, wondering if they might actually have been bred for that purpose but not really caring at the moment) assailed it from multiple sides, including below. The squales were directing them purposefully, aiming them at the joins between the outer floater segments, the weakest points. She watched in shock as one segment broke free under a decisive blow and spun away. It was listing, taking on water through a gouge that a misplaced blow had left in its side. Closer to Vale, outside the base’s field perimeter, the small crustacean-and insect-like creatures that dwelled atop the island were retreating inland, along with other creatures that normally lived below but had climbed to the surface to flee the bombardment.

Sorry, folks,
she thought,
but I don’t think going inland will be much of a defense. They’ll tear this whole thing apart to get to us.
And the force field would be small comfort if the icebreakers managed to hull the floater beneath her feet and sink it, base and all.

Hell, at least that way some of the probes will get sunk.
Vale had ordered the crew to proceed with the deployment, despite the fact that doing so would subject them to squale attack. A choice between saving themselves and saving this world was no choice at all. But so far, success had been minimal. Only a few probes had avoided capture and beaching, and many of those were damaged or off course from glancing blows. At this rate, the percentage that reached the dynamo layer would be too low to make a difference. But they had to keep trying.

She struck her combadge. “Vale to
Titan
. Any luck with those transporters?”

“Commander, this is Torvig,”
came the reply.
“We’re unable to boost the confinement beam sufficiently to ensure a safe transport. I have an idea how to get around the problem, but Mister Radowski is resistant.”

“Radowski?” Vale called, knowing the lieutenant would be beside Torvig in the main transporter room. “What’s the problem?”

“Commander. He wants to rebuild one of the confinement beam emitters into a wormhole generator.”

“Not a wormhole per se, ma’am. More of a subspatial catenation.”

“Torvig, what the hell—” She took a breath. “Ensign, even if your…theory is sound, how long do you estimate it would take to rebuild and test the emitter? In practical terms?”

She heard the little purring hum Torvig often made when mulling over a problem.
“Given current crew allocation, I’d say…about three weeks, ma’am. Assuming success on the initial test.”

“Do you perceive a snag in your proposal, then?”

A pause.
“Ah.”

“Ah. Do you have any
useful
ideas?” You had to love Torvig, but his enthusiasm for his wild hypotheses often blinded him to their practical flaws, and at times it took some prodding to get him focused on the same consensus reality as everyone else.

“Is retrieval by shuttle still not an option?”

“The shuttles are needed to deploy the probes. We have to try to get
some
of these probes past the squale blockade.”

“Hrrmmm…An orbital phaser barrage around your position?”

“I’ll keep it in mind, Ensign. Keep thinking about how to boost the transporter—
before
we run out of island down here. Vale out.”

The island shuddered again, and a treelike stalk a few segments over snapped and fell over.
It may come to using phasers,
she thought. But she was reluctant to give the order. After all, she was the invader here, and her crew had done enough damage to this world. Ship’s phasers could be set on stun, but the effect was unreliable. A hand phaser had feedback sensors that could calibrate the beam strength and duration to the target’s metabolism to keep the effect nonlethal, but that kind of feedback wasn’t possible from orbit. That was why Starfleet policy discouraged the practice. Besides, given the squales’ unusual sensitivity to energy fields, Vale couldn’t be sure that even a stun charge wouldn’t have a more serious effect on them. Even firing to frighten them off might be a bad idea.
Hell, the way things are going, it’d probably just make them madder.

As Vale heard the now-familiar sound of another floater segment being broken away behind her, she almost missed the hail on her combadge. “—salis
to Vale. Come in!”

She tapped the badge. “Olivia? Is that you?”

“Yes, Commander!”
Bolaji, calling from the
Marsalis
, sounded excited.
“You need to hear the signal we just picked up! I’m patching it in.”
A pause, then:
“Go ahead, Ensign.”

A moment later, Vale’s’s annoyance at the distraction vanished when she heard:
“Lavena to Vale. Do you read me?”

Her heart raced. “Holy shit, Aili, is that you?”

Laughter.
“Oh, Commander, thank the Deep! I’m here, I’m fine. Captain Riker is alive, but he’s very ill. We need a rescue shuttle right away. He’s on a floater not far from my position.”

“Bolaji? How close are you to Lavena?”

“About six minutes, ma’am.”