“Yes, but they’re usually not inhabited.”
Keru blinked. “And this one is?”
“Undoubtedly. We thought the oh-two levels might be from water vapor dissociation, but there’s a strong ozone line in its spectrum too, meaning the oxygen has to be biogenic. Plus there’s a substantial chlorophyll signature. It’s hard to get more detailed readings at this distance, due to the sensor interference.” As she’d mentioned at the start of the briefing, UFC 86783 had an unusually dense disk of asteroidal debris for a system of its age, one rich in exotic minerals and radioisotopes that interfered with scans. “But we’ve managed to cut through the interference enough to get dynoscanner readings suggesting abundant higher-order life.”
“On an L1? You’re certain?” Melora answered Keru’s question with a nod, smiling. He definitely wasn’t dwelling on the Typhon Pact anymore.
“Maybe you could remind the rest of us,” Captain Riker said, “why that’s so unusual.”
“Because an ocean is basically a desert,” Melora said. “Life needs water to survive, but it also needs mineral nutrients. On a class-M planet, life in the oceans is richest where there’s mineral runoff from the land masses, and fairly sparse elsewhere. A Léger-type class O has no land, no minerals anywhere near the surface.” She worked the controls to display a cross section, the trim antigrav suit she wore making it easier to lift her arms against an artificial gravity dozens of times that of her native world. She’d mostly given up the holopresence system that Xin Ra-Havreii had designed to let her interact with the crew from her microgravity haven in the stellar cartography lab, since it had been making her too isolated from the crew. But this antigrav suit—the latest gift from Xin, who gave out brilliant inventions as romantic gifts the way other men gave jewelry—was an improvement over the motor-assist armature she’d used for most of her Starfleet career, and over the cruder, bulkier antigrav suit she’d tried briefly last year. “Droplet, for instance, has a metal core thirty- seven hundred kilometers deep surrounded by nearly three thousand kilometers of silicate rock, and above that is a mantle of high-pressure allotropic ice over four thousand kilometers deep. The outermost ninety kilometers is liquid water, an ocean a hundred times greater in volume than Earth’s. But on most planets of this type, the ocean is virtually barren. Whatever minerals get delivered by meteor impacts are barely enough to sustain a limited microbial population, and the minerals tend to sink to the bottom of the ocean, where the pressure is too great for most forms of life to survive.”
“What’s more,” Keru added, “without deep-sea volcanic vents, there’s no mechanism for conventional life to arise in the first place.”
“Except seeding from space, whether by natural panspermic bombardment or alien intervention.”
Riker perked up. “Could the life on Droplet,” and he smiled a bit at the name, “be evidence of alien intervention?”
“Or perhaps a colony,” Commander Tuvok suggested. “Six years ago, on stardate 52179, Voyagerencountered an artificial ocean in space created by unknown builders. It had subsequently been colonized by travelers from elsewhere.”
“Monea, yes, I read about that,” Melora said. “But we’re picking up no signs of artificial power generation. At least, as far as we can tell. But we were able to get those biosigns on the dynoscanners. Power readings would most likely be easier to detect.”
“You said meteor impacts could deliver minerals to the ocean,” Christine Vale said. This month, the deceptively slight first officer’s hair was tinted a rich, deep blue with aquamarine highlights. Melora hoped that was a sign she’d be receptive to exploring this ocean world. “Could the bombardment rate here provide enough minerals to explain the life readings?”
Melora shook her head. “Not in these abundances.”
Riker’s smile widened. “Sounds like it might be worth checking out.”
“You sure you don’t want to follow up on the video broadcasts from the Oraco system?” Vale asked.
“We just surveyed a pre-warp industrial society last month, back at Lumbu,” the captain replied. “And another the month before at Knnischlinnaik. Aren’t you ready for a change of pace?”
“But this one seems more advanced. And those signals are thirty-four years old—the Oracoans could be in space by now.”
“Creating a greater risk of our accidental discovery,” Tuvok pointed out.
Riker nodded. “We can continue monitoring their broadcasts from a distance, send out a probe to intercept more recent signals.” He looked around the room. “Any negatives about Droplet?”
“The density of the asteroidal disk would pose a hazard to navigation,” Tuvok answered. “Once in the system, the sensor interference would be amplified, impeding our ability to chart the trajectories of potentially hazardous objects.”
“We’d still have optical imaging,” Melora replied. “It would take a lot longer to do a thorough survey, but we could see anything immediately dangerous soon enough to get out of the way.”
“It looks like the planet has a pretty strong magnetic field too,” Keru put in.
“That’s right. Its core is unusually hot; it probably contains many of the same radioactive elements we see in the system’s debris disk, like plutonium and pergium. That makes for an active magnetic dynamo with some unusual energy patterns.”
“And that field,” Keru said, “would interfere with sensors, communicators, and transporters.”
“We’d need to use shuttles anyway,” Vale said. “After all, where would we beam down to?”
“Indeed,” Tuvok said. “There would be many difficulties involved in surveying this planet.”
Riker was grinning widely now. “Come on now, people. The first generations of space explorers didn’t have transporters or subspace sensors, but that didn’t stop them. Personally I’d relish the chance to do some old-school exploring. And when has this crew ever backed down from a challenge?”