“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.”