“Ah,” Keru said. “A connoisseur.”
Everyone (save the solemn Kekil) seemed to be in a playful mood today. Perhaps it was just the enthusiasm at setting foot on an intriguing new planet, particularly a tropical paradise like this. Droplet’s star was of only moderate brightness and more distant than was typical for an M-class world, but that only served to soften the light, letting Pazlar gaze out at the sun reflections dancing on the waves without being blinded by glare, as she had been look ing out across San Francisco Bay in her Academy days. If anything, it made the warm, sunny scene even more inviting. But the oxygen content of the air, she reminded herself, was a little high; she was feeling a bit lightheaded from it. Something to watch out for. Fortunately, the high water vapor content of the air discouraged breathing it too deeply; Vale had tried a moment before, and was now coughing from the aspirated moisture.
“I’ll have to make a more thorough analysis to be sure, of course,” Kekil added as he placed some of the soil in a sample container.
“Dig down some,” Vale ordered. “I want to know what the island’s made of. Torvig can help you. Meanwhile, I want to check out the flora and fauna.”
“I could check out the underside,” Lavena called hopefully from the shuttle door.
“Not yet, Aili. Run a scan first.” The Selkie sulked her way back inside. No doubt she was eager to get out of her hydration suit when there was a whole planetful of water to flow across her gill crests and keep her skin moist. Melora could sympathize; she wouldn’t mind getting out of her tight antigrav suit and letting the water buoy her up. She was slender, but her bones and muscles had low density, so she figured she could float all right in the moderately saline water at these latitudes—though perhaps not nearer the equator, where the constant rainfall diluted the upper ocean with fresh water. But of course Vale was right to exercise caution.
“Commanders?” Torvig called, not having to shout too loudly, for they couldn’t get more than eighty meters apart. “I think you’ll want to see this!”
Pazlar followed at her best pace as Vale jogged over to him and Kekil. At the bottom of the hole they had dug was a hard, light-colored material that appeared porous and slightly sparkly. “It looks almost like seashells,” Vale said.
“Not dissimilar,” Torvig said. “It’s largely keratin. However, there are silicate spicules interwoven inside, increasing its strength, analogously to fiberglass. And there’s a fair amount of calcium carbonate as well. Odd to find heavier elements in such concentration in the native life.”
Pazlar knelt and took a closer look, activating her own tricorder. Then she looked up at Vale and smiled. “It reminds me of a reef structure, like Terran coral or Pacifican si’hali.”
The human’s eyes widened beneath her fringe of midnight blue hair. “You think this whole islet was grown, like a coral atoll?”
“Exactly. Though I’m not quite certain why it’s light enough to float. It would have to be very porous.”
Vale pondered. “Let’s get back in the shuttle. I want to take a look underneath.”
“I could swim underneath,” Torvig said, sounding as eager as Lavena.
“You heard what I told Aili,” the exec replied. “For our first dive, I’d rather be inside a shielded duranium hull.”
They returned to the Gillespie,and Lavena wasted no time taking it down. The gentle curve of the islet’s surface continued for just a bit below the waterline, then suddenly increased. The sides ran roughly vertically for a few meters before curving inward to form a convex lower surface. The soil and surface plants, naturally, did not extend below the waterline, so the bare surface of the islet was clear for them to see. But this surface had one significant difference from the one Torvig had excavated—for out of every one of the thousands of holes which riddled its surface extended a small set of tendrils.
“It’s alive,” Lavena breathed.
“Take us in closer,” Vale suggested in a similarly hushed tone.
As Lavena complied, the surface resolved itself into a large number of individual units, each one a few centimeters across—an attribute which had been blurred up above by erosion. There seemed to be one set of tendrils for each of the distinct cells of limestone.
“It’s a colony of polyps,” Kekil observed, sounding intrigued.
“Like a coral reef,” Vale said.
“Yes, although the individual polyps are larger here.”
“And reefs usually lead a more sedentary existence,” Pazlar remarked.
“It’s as busy as a reef, though,” Lavena observed. At this range, they could see numerous smaller life forms either attached to the underside of the floater or swimming among its tendrils. Stalks of seaweed resembling attenuated broccoli hung down for several meters. Between the widely-spaced stalks scuttled a number of small crustaceans not unlike yellowish, four-legged tarantulas, clinging to the underside and using elongated mouthparts to dig out organic debris in fissures between the polyp cells, interestingly leaving the actual polyps alone. Turning her eyes in another direction, she saw a more open patch along which crawled several six-pointed starfish with snaky limbs and feathery tendrils. And swimming amid the broccoli seaweed were creatures that appeared very much like fish, although they bore clumps of small tentacles around their mouths and exhibited shifting color patterns on their smooth skins. She couldn’t tell whether they were vertebrates or invertebrates.
“Naturally,” Kekil said. “These floating colonies would be some of the few sources of shelter in this ocean, the few places where life could concentrate and have solid support.”
Torvig looked up, his ears flicking forward the way they did when he had an epiphany. “That could be why the polyps have so much calcium and silicon. As numerous other organisms live and die on them, minerals and other nutrients would tend to accumulate on them in greater concentration than anywhere else.”
“Good call,” Pazlar said. His ears perked up happily, and she resisted the urge to give him an approving pat on the head. “I wonder how it gets its buoyancy. Not to mention how they get into this form, how they start out, their whole life cycle.”