Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

around the equator. But as the angle changed,allowing the bridge crew to see around the curve of the large globe, the cloud bands around the equator broke and swirled around a more circular pattern—one which Aili soon realized was an enormous hurricane. “Don’t tell me,” Riker said. “Hurricanes break up when they hit land. No land means they can get…that big.”
    Beside him, Troi’s eyes widened. “Some Jovians have standing storms that last for centuries.”
    “Like Jupiter’s Red Spot or the Eye of Vetlhaq,” Vale said.
    Riker was grinning now. “How long do you suppose this hurricane has been around?”
    “There’s no way of knowing,” Pazlar answered. “I’d just recommend that we avoid getting too close in our shuttles. There’s some ferocious lightning in there.”
    As the planet drew still nearer, more detail began to appear. The pole they could see was wreathed in a bright ring of auroras, lost in the blue of the lit hemisphere but vivid and alive against the night side—the visible evidence of the powerful magnetic energies emanating from this planet. Much of the ocean surface was hidden under the clouds, but in the exposed portions, shadings of green were visible. “Algae blooms,” reported Chamish, the Kazarite ecologist, from the secondary science station.
    “But where are they getting their nutrients?” Pazlar wondered.
    “Any sign of mineral concentrations?” Riker asked.
    “With the sensor interference, the blooms themselves are the best sign we’re getting,” the Elaysian science officer replied.
    “Wait,” Troi said, trying to lean forward with littlesuccess. “This can’t be right…but I could swear I’m seeing islands!”
    Looking up from her board, Aili saw faint specks dotting the ocean surface. When Riker ordered magnification, they came into view more distinctly. The most prominent feature from this angle was a small polar icecap, but hundreds of other bright specks dotted the ocean surface around it. “They could be icebergs,” Vale suggested.
    “Not bergs, ma’am,” Aili told her. “Those break off of glaciers, which need land masses to form on. Here, you’d only have flat ice sheets and floes. And they couldn’t survive very far from the poles, not if the ocean’s as warm as Commander Pazlar says.”
    “She’s right,” Pazlar confirmed. “And some of them are too large anyway. Look here.” She magnified a portion of the screen, centering on what seemed to be a cluster of islands, each one either a single light-colored disk or a cluster of multiple disks of similar size.
    “There’s no way you could’ve been wrong about there being land, is there?” Vale asked.
    Pazlar shook her head, studying her readouts with a slightly dazed expression. “Those aren’t land. Not the way we think of it. They’re moving, sir. They’re drifting in the current.”
    Riker was out of his chair, his hand on Aili’s seat back as he took a closer look at the main viewer. Glancing up, she saw he was grinning like a kid at his birthday party. “Floating islands? Tell me you’re not kidding!”
    “I swear it. I wouldn’t care to speculate about what they are, though.”
    Chuckling, Riker turned to Vale. “What was that youwere saying about not having any place to land? I think we’ve just found our first touchdown site.”
    Christine Vale looked on with a stern expression as Riker’s eyes roved over the shuttlecraft Gillespie , now refitted into a full aquashuttle configuration. Half of Titan ’s eight shuttles were designed to be reconfigurable for multiple mission profiles, and Ra-Havreii’s engineering teams had managed to convert all four of them in time for planetfall. Gillespie ’s nacelles had been lowered and modified to serve as pontoons, equipped with stabilizing fins and linear induction thrusters. Searchlights, undersea sensor suites, and extra structural integrity field generators had been added to allow the shuttle to function as a deep-sea