that sort of pattern, it would be our resident xenobiology and ecology experts.”
“Apparently,” Pazlar said with a nod. “Unfortunately, my expertise in those fields doesn’t overlap all that much with that of the biospheric scientists. My specialties are cosmology and big-bore physics. Since we hadn’t found a clear-cut footprint indicating intelligence the way we had with the Sentries, I still needed a little more convincing at the outset.”
“Sounds like you got what you needed,” Vale said.
The Elaysian nodded. “Torvig and White-Blue crunched the numbers—twice, I might add—and the end results finally made a believer out of me.”
SecondGen White-Blue was the designation of the eight-limbed artificial intelligence that Riker had allowed to remain aboard Titan a few months back, following the starship’s harrowing encounter with White-Blue’s kind, the ancient AI civilization whose members referred to themselves as “the Sentries.” Although Riker couldn’t deny that White-Blue had been invaluable in preventing Titan’s destruction, both at the hands of White-Blue’s own kind and via the destructive energies of their extradimensional nemesis, the Null, he was also keenly aware of how much trouble the little AI had brought to his ship. The fact that White-Blue had violated the ship’s security and privacy protocols on numerous occasions—to say nothing of its having briefly “uplifted” Titan’s main computer to full sentience—left the captain still wary of any judgments White-Blue might care to render. That White-Blue’s conclusions were supported by calculations run by Ensign Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv—a Choblik science specialist whose own sentience depended upon an extraordinary degree of integration between his natural biological form and his bionic components—made Riker feel only slightly better.
Riker’s face felt flushed as he noticed Deanna regarding him curiously from her station at his immediate left. He stood, straightening his uniform tunic as he got to his feet.
“Give me the gist of it, Commander. Why are you convinced that this planet couldn’t have produced its atmosphere on its own the way billions of other planets across the galaxy have?”
“The long and short of it is the balance of gases in this planet’s atmosphere, Captain,” Pazlar said. “You’ll note that the sensors have corroborated Lieutenant Chamish’s early contention that the eighty-twenty nitrogen-oxygen mix we observe here could only have been produced by nonbiotic processes.”
“Are we certain of that?” Deanna asked. “Couldn’t this planet’s atmosphere have been produced by a thriving biosphere that was wiped out by some catastrophe in the relatively recent past?”
Pazlar shook her head, her fine white hair following a heartbeat behind owing to her protective cocoon of micro-gravity. “None of the scans we’ve done so far have turned up any evidence that there’s ever been any life on this planet, let alone life that was catastrophically wiped out after producing a Class-M atmosphere.”
Riker was no scientist, but he had enough scientific training to know that all Class-M planets’ atmospheres were significantly out-of-equilibrium in comparison with those of lifeless worlds. Dead places tended to have atmospheres that were devoid of free molecular oxygen, a gas that tended to get bound up in planetary crusts as oxides, as had occurred billions of years ago on Mars. Lifeless worlds whose atmospheres were “in equilibrium” routinely became anaerobic carbon dioxide hells like Venus, deserts like Mars, or stillborn “primordial soups” like his ship’s namesake, Saturn’s moon Titan.
Facing Pazlar, Riker said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but there are still only two known ways to create an M-class environment, broadly speaking. The action of organic photosynthesis or similar biospheric processes on a planet’s surface over eons is one.” He began ticking off his points on his fingers. “And terraforming technology is the other.”
“That’s the basic shape of it, Captain,” said Pazlar’s image. “We have the evidence presented by the composition of the atmosphere itself. Our survey scans have already determined to a high degree of certainty that no biosphere has ever existed on this world. Doctor Chamish, our senior ecologist, triple-checked the figures.” Although Riker didn’t know Chamish all that well, he understood that Chamish’s people were generally gifted with the ability to communicate telepathically with lower animals, and that their homeworld, Kazar, was renowned for producing gifted ecologists.
“Wait a minute,” Vale said. “I may have stumbled into this exploration business by way of law enforcement and security instead of through a lab, but even I can see a flaw in your methodology.”
Pazlar nodded. “You mean that no matter how many numbers I might crunch, I still can’t really prove to a fare-thee-well that there never really was any biota on the planet.”
“Indeed,” Commander Tuvok said