“Don’t we?” Keru asked. “Remember that ocean in space Tuvok told us about, the one Voyagerencountered? As I recall, their Delta Flyerdove down a good six hundred kilometers. This ocean’s only ninety.”
“The pressure in the Monean ocean was relatively low,” Pazlar said, “or else most of it would’ve been allotropic ice like Droplet’s mantle. Its core generators gave off just enough gravity to hold the sphere together, not so much that the pressure would crush the generators themselves. The Moneans relied on artificial gravity in their ships and habitats.” She turned to Vale. “And even despite that, with pressures of onlya few thousand atmospheres, the Delta Flyer’s shields could barely withstand the pressure differential. And they had it easy. The kind of energies that are at play down inside Droplet could disrupt any shuttle’s shields and integrity systems.”
Vale threw her a glare. “So you’re telling me that the thing we have to do can’t be done.”
Pazlar’s brow ridges shot up defensively. “I’m working the problem, okay?”
Ra-Havreii leaned forward. “The key is differential. The external pressure is less of a problem if the internal pressure is as high as possible.”
“Right,” Pazlar said without meeting his eyes. “The higher the pressure we can achieve inside the craft, the less field energy we’ll need to counteract the rest. It’s the same principle that’s been used by deep-sea divers for centuries.”
“But wouldn’t the pressure eventually get high enough to crush their lungs, no matter how high the air pressure is?” Vale asked.
“There’s precedent from pre-force-field days—divers immersing themselves in an oxygenated fluid. It let them dive much deeper.”
“I’m sorry, no.” It was Doctor Onnta, representing medical in Ree’s absence. The Balosneean leaned forward and shook his golden-skinned, downy-feathered head. “That would only work up to a thousand atmospheres or so. At that point, humanoid enzymatic processes begin to break down. Increase that to tens of thousands of atmospheres, and cellular lysis occurs—the cell walls themselves burst under the pressure. None of us could survive that.”
Vale looked back to Pazlar. “Would a thousand atmospheres internally be enough?” she asked, knowing the answer.
“Not even close,” Pazlar confirmed.
“So if we get the internal pressure high enough to protect the diving vessel, anyone inside it would be turned to jelly.” She sighed. “Can we rig a remote probe?”
“Too much interference. We couldn’t control it or guarantee it would function at all.”
“So do we have anyoptions?”
The Elaysian paused before answering. “There’s one. I hesitate to bring it up because it’s not a sure thing, and it would put one of my people at risk.” Vale just waited until she went on. “But we do have one person aboard who evolved in a high-pressure environment.”
“I should clarify,”Se’al Cethente Qas said to its senior science officer and first officer, “that Syr’s surface pressure is less than two hundred standard atmospheres. You are speaking of a pressure nearly a thousand times greater.”
“But Syrath biology isn’t as affected by pressure as ours,” Melora Pazlar told it. “And even most humanoids can survive a pressure a thousand times normal, with sufficient preparations and time to acclimate.”
“Simulations show your life processes should not be critically affected by the pressures believed to exist in the upper range of the hypersaline layer,” Doctor Onnta said.
“Believed to exist?”Cethente replied. But it was more amused than alarmed. Pazlar and Onnta were right; unlike the fragile protein-based chemistry on which their bodies depended, Syrath anatomy was far more robust, based upon piezoelectric crystal “cells” in a liquid silicate solvent, with genetic information encoded structurally in chains of dislocation loops and electrically in stored potentials, rather than chemically in nucleic acids.
“I know we’re asking you to take a chance, Cethente,” Vale said. “And I know it’s somewhat outside your area of expertise. I could order you to do it; in fact, I probably will if I have to, because it’s the only way to fix this mess. But you deserve to have a chance to volunteer.”
The astrophysicist pondered the decision carefully. It was incapable of the fear that the humanoids probably assumed it was feeling. Syrath were hard to damage and nearly impossible to kill—permanently, anyway. It wasn’t something they revealed to other races without need, not wishing to earn their envy. They might not have been physically indestructible, but their neural information was encoded in the same ways as their genetic information and distributed just as widely through the body; indeed, they were both facets of the same thing. Any sizeable intact part of a Syrath’s body, even if “dead” for weeks, could regenerate in the proper growth medium into a new Syrath with the same basic personality template. True, many memories would be lost, even most if the surviving portion were small enough; but Syrath saw that as a way of getting a fresh start, sparing themselves the tedious sameness of immortality. So while they weren’t reckless with their lives, preferring to avoid the inconvenience of dying, the Syrath had simply never evolved the capacity for mortal fear.
Still, Cethente recognized there was cause for concern here. It could survive most anything, but if the diving vessel Ra-Havreii’s engineers were designing failed, Cethente could be trapped in the ocean depths forever. Its body might be crushed if it sank to where the pressures were sufficiently deep, or it might simply be buried slowly, encased in the hot allotropic ice of the planet’s mantle. Either way, Cethente would be risking a death far more permanent than any of its previous three—and probably far more prolonged and unpleasant, though it could only remember the two less severe ones.
Of course, there was an option, though it would come as something of a shock to the others. It only needed to have a portion of its physical structure survive and be returned home in stasis, and the essence of Se’al Cethente would survive in a new form, and with a new thirdname. It would lack most of its memories of Titanand its discoveries, which would be a grave loss; but at least part of Cethente would live on.