“Is this how the heavy elements are kept in play in the ecosystem?”Cethente asked after summarizing this. “These barophile life forms bring them up from the mantle…but then what? How do they get from here to the surface? Convective mixing does not seem enough.”
Cethente watched the barophiles for a while longer, enjoying the intricate dance of light across their surfaces, though it doubted this was a light that its humanoid crewmates could see. “They emit magnetic pulses in complex patterns,”it reported, “apparently a form of communication. The translator detects nothing indicative of intelligence, though. But it is beautiful music. I wish you could experience this.”
But as it continued to travel through the dynamo layer, sinking deeper to where the barophilic life was more abundant, Cethente found that it was not all so lively and beautiful. It began to encounter dead creatures drifting in the convection currents, slowly sinking coreward before being latched onto by other creatures that pierced their bodies with stingers and began sucking out their internal fluids, making them crumple and crack under the pressure. Other creatures were weak and apparently ill, their magnetic calls feeble and distorted. Some were acting erratically, swimming aimlessly or striking out at anything that moved near, whether a prey species or one of their own kind. “They have been poisoned,”Cethente reported after bringing the pod closer to a cluster of them for a more detailed scan. “I read the same nadion and subspace energy signatures as in the asteroid dust. It is sinking here, being consumed by these animals, and it is disrupting their magnetosynthetic processes and their magnetic senses. It is at once starving them and deranging them.”
But Cethente had drawn too close. Not having the instinct for mortal fear, it sometimes acted with insufficient caution, especially when in the throes of curiosity. It had been so caught up in observing these animals’ hyperaggressive behavior that it had not considered how they would react to the pod’s proximity. Cethente was shaken in its cradle as the creatures began to batter at the pod, stabbing at it with their stingers. They were made of sturdy stuff, less sturdy than the pod’s SIF-reinforced duranium hull in absolute terms, but enough to put added strain on a hull and integrity field that were already pushed to the limits by the sheer weight of seventy kilometers of ocean overhead. Deciding it had gotten enough scans for now, Cethente turned the antigravs to full, causing the pod to shoot upward.
A few of the creatures managed to cling to the pod somehow, perhaps by magnetic adhesion. Some fell away as the bathysphere soared upward, but two proved exceptionally persistent, hanging on for dear life and jabbing at the hull with blind ferocity. They were on the upper surface of the pod, perhaps held there by the water pressure itself. But as the pressure and temperature fell, as the magnetic energy sustaining them grew more attenuated, their movements weakened and tapered off. Cethente did nothing to prevent the animals’ deaths; after all, they were dying already, and at least this way it was quicker.
Eventually, the creatures’ bodies burst open, the pressure outside their bodies too low now to contain the pressure within. At this depth, they might as well have been in vacuum—though the pressure was still beyond the maximum amount that protein-based life could withstand. “Remarkable,”Cethente said. “Two totally different biospheres sharing a single planet, but they might as well be on entirely different worlds. There seems to be no way they can ever interact physically. So how can the heavy elements in the deep biosphere be returned to the surface biosphere?”
But it had another reaction that it chose not to record for its crewmates: astonishment and pity at the sheer fragility of non-Syrath life forms. If they were more like us, they would not have lost so much to the Borg. But then, they lose everything, in time. Their whole existence must end in tragedy.
Cethente was philosophical about it, though. After all, for the same reasons Syrath lacked mortal dread, they also lacked any deep sense of grief. It understood regret at losing something valuable, but to a Syrath, even the loss of life memory was a growth experience, a chance for a fresh start. Excitement at new possibilities always overcame re gret before long. That was why it was able to live among these fragile beings, even knowing their existence was doomed.
Not that they would ever know it felt that way, of course. Syrath maintained their enigmatic reputation for very good reason.
DROPLET: THE SURFACE
Riker’s new floater-islet sanctuary—or prison—was somewhat larger and more comfortable than the previous one. It had some larger palm-like growths with wide, round leaves that the plants could apparently angle into the wind to serve as sails. Aili wished Eviku or even Kekil were here to tell her why a tree would evolve this ability. Was it simply to maneuver out from under clouds or away from storms, or was it more symbiotic, the palms actually helping the floater colonies navigate to nutrient-rich areas so that the palms could in turn draw more nourishment from the islets? She could ask Cham or Gasa, but the elder squale reacted to her frequent questions with impatience and the younger might not know. Besides, she missed her crewmates.
For now, though, all that mattered was that the leaves provided Riker with some covering and warmth. There was also a depression holding enough fresh rainwater to sustain him, and a small cave burrowed into the islet by some tool-creatures of the squales, apparently used to store surplus food, but now largely cleared out to serve as a shelter for the weakened human. Some remnants of the surplus seaweed had been left at the base of the cave to rot, its decay producing some warmth for Riker’s benefit, although he clearly did not enjoy the smell. Aili asked the squales if they had anything that could potentially start a fire, perhaps some creature secreting chemicals that generated heat when mixed, but they had little familiarity with the concept. On a world like this, pretty much the only thing that could start fires was lightning, but the high humidity of the air near the ocean surface conducted charge too well for any large voltage differential to build up, so most of the lightning on Droplet was cloud-to-cloud, except in cases where an ocean swell surged exceptionally high.