Of course, if there was one thing two centuries of Starfleet exploration had proven beyond a doubt, it was that life always proved tougher and more resourceful than science generally supposed, and cropped up in the most unexpected places. Besides, the volume inside the Gum Nebula was immense; even with all those star-formation zones, there was still plenty of room for more hospitable planets. Plus there was a better-than-even chance that exotic life-forms would be found on planets bathed in radiation and racked by cosmic turbulence, employing weird and wonderful strategies to survive. That was why Norellis was here, accompanied by Cadet Orilly, who majored in exobiology. Their assignment was to identify likely places to search for life, and hopefully some less likely but more interesting ones as well.

Melora twisted gracefully about her center of mass, surveying the expanse laid out around them, and reached out to cup Avior in one hand. The simulation actually let her feel warmth from the shrunken red-orange giant. “I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t seem so huge from this vantage point. You really should come up here, give it a try.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Lieutenant, I’d rather keep my feet firmly planted.”

“Your choice, Kent. Though I’d have thought you’d learned your lesson about gravity.” Shortly before Titan’s launch, Norellis and gravity had had a difference of opinion in a vertical Jefferies tube, and as usual, gravity’s arguments had carried the greater force, earning the ensign some quality time with the ship’s medical staff.

“I did,” the human countered. “The lesson is, stay close to the deck.”

“Well, how about you, Cadet?” Melora asked, shifting her gaze to Orilly. If anything, the cadet seemed to be having a harder time than Norellis. Even though the Irriol’s paws gave her a solid quadrupedal footing on the balcony, the two trunks extending from the base of her wide, thick-necked head clutched the railing tightly with their four-fingered hands. The diamond-shaped armor scales covering her body, which Norellis had likened to those of an Earth animal called a pangolin, were slightly raised as if in alarm.

“No, thank you,” Orilly said in her quiet voice, emanating from the rounded mouth between her trunks. “Although this is a marvelous simulation, I am not comfortable with all this…space. It reminds me how far I am from…home.” Her golden-brown scales drooped.

“Come on, Malar, there’s more to life than home,” Melora said cheerfully.

“Not for Irriol. We are very empathic, with our own, at least. To be severed from the Whole, to be alone, it is…difficult.” Melora couldn’t read her expressions well, but she got the impression that Orilly had pulled back from a stronger word. “No offense to you or the fleet…but it is not something we endure by choice.”

“So why are you in Starfleet?” Melora asked.

When Orilly didn’t answer, Norellis stepped in. “I guess you don’t know about Irriol.”

Melora shrugged. “Plenty of species out there. Hard to keep track of them all.”

“If she’s off her world, it means she’s…well…”

“I am an exile,” Orilly finished.

“Oh!” She frowned. “Wait a minute…if your people can’t stand being offworld, then exile must be…”

“The worst penalty on their books,” Norellis said. “Irriol are a nonviolent people. No death penalty, ever.”

“No,” Orilly said. “Worse.”

“So you’re a criminal?!”

“Know that I would never do anything to violate my oath or my duty,” Orilly said in great earnest. “For only by serving my people well can I hope to be allowed back home.”

“Okay, I wasn’t questioning that.” She knew Starfleet would never have let her in the Academy if her behavior had been suspect. “But…can I ask what it was you did?”

Orilly’s trunks wriggled. “It is…difficult to explain to outsiders. And troubling for me to discuss. But it does not correspond to anything your peoples call a crime.”

“Was it some taboo you violated, then?”

“No, much more than that. I did true harm. I did not wish to, but I was foolish and irresponsible and…there was much cost to others.”

“But you didn’t kill anyone.”

She lowered her head. “Lives were lost…but not in any way that the laws or ethics of other worlds would find me culpable for.”

Lucky you,Melora thought. She couldn’t say the same about herself. During the crisis on her homeworld four years ago, she had been directly responsible for the death of a leading citizen, Tangre Bertoran. Starfleet had absolved her of wrongdoing, declaring it a defensive act, but Melora had been harder on herself, and had taken a leave of absence to atone in seclusion.

It struck her that Orilly, in her own way, was also atoning in seclusion, perhaps in some ways a more profound seclusion than Melora could grasp. She wished she could understand the nature of the offense, the better to offer her support to the troubled-seeming cadet. Maybe with time, she could.

“Well, tell you what,” she said. “Let’s get to work, take your mind off things. Computer! Overlay sensor data. Display possible biosigns.”

The computer complied, breaking down the various biosignature types by color coding and labels: spectroscopic results suggesting molecular oxygen and respiratory gases, thermal signatures and energy curves consistent with life processes, Fourier extractions of possible neural EM signatures, and so forth. Titan’s cutting-edge sensors gave them greater clarity over greater distances than Melora would’ve thought possible. The virtual sky around them teemed with signatures; even if half of them turned out to be false alarms, there was enough life showing up in this preliminary scan to keep them busy for years.

“Aah!”

The cry came from Norellis. Melora spun to face him. “What is it?”

He looked embarrassed, and pointed at a sensor reading that hovered next to his head. “I turned my head and there it was, right in my face. Startled me.”

Melora worked the control padd in her hands, telling the holotank’s forcefields to push her gently toward the image. “What is that? There’s no planet there. It’s very close to us….”

“Maybe a ship!” Norellis peered closer. “Or multiple ships. Hard to make them out.”

“Here, let me increase the scale….”

She was interrupted by a keening wail from Orilly. “No!!”the Irriol cried, rearing up on her hind legs and stepping back as though in fear. She bumped into the balcony and lost her balance, toppling out into the free-fall zone beyond. It worsened her panic, her six limbs flailing as if in a futile attempt to flee from… something.

“Cadet!” Melora worked the padd, using the forcefields to catch Orilly and guide her gently back to the balcony. Taking a second to switch on her support armature, she took a deep breath and climbed over the rail into the gravity zone so she could come to Orilly’s aid. But the Irriol’s flailing trunks made her pull back; her bones were somewhat more fragile than those of beings raised in planetary gravities. Norellis moved in and tried to hold her down, but just got knocked aside for his troubles. “Malar, what is it? What’s wrong?” Melora cried, striving to catch her gaze and get through to her.

Orilly met her eyes for a moment, but there seemed to be no recognition there. “Help us!” she cried. “We are dying!”

Will Riker had known something was about to happen before it started.

It wasn’t due to any great captain’s intuition, though. He just knew Deanna Troi, knew her every nuance of expression better than he knew his own. So when she’d abruptly grown distracted as they engaged in light banter with the rest of the bridge crew (well, all except Tuvok—the middle-aged Vulcan tactical officer wasn’t the bantering type), he’d realized that she was sensing something, and readied himself for what she might say or do next.