The way the seatruck skimmed just above the cresting waves filled Kalico with a sense of magic. She had never seen water this color: true lapis lazuli. That blue so remarkable and enchanting. In order to get a better look, Kalico stood mere inches from the transparency that curved around the vehicle’s entire front. For the moment, she reveled in the illusion that she was flying over the water. Only if she looked down to see the deck beneath her feet, or sidelong where Shinwua stood at the controls, did the illusion shatter.

Behind her, Soichiro Yoshimura was seated in the cabin’s first row of benches, his head bent to his pad as he scrolled through one of the reports penned by Lee Cheng, the biochemist and miracle maker who worked in Port Authority’s hospital. Until their arrival at Donovan, most of the information the Maritime Unit had access to was dated, literally decades old. Since their arrival, Hailwood’s team had been in a mad scramble to review anything that Dya Simonov, Cheng, Turnienko, Allenovich, or Iji Hiro had written about biological pathways, organisms, and especially the miracle of TriNA.

Granted, the research documented land-based species, but the theory was that life on Donovan—as it had on Earth—developed originally in the seas. That ontogeny still recapitulated phylogeny, or that if you know how life worked on land, you’d have a foundation for your study of maritime organisms.

Kalico had spent the previous night in briefings with Michaela Hailwood’s people, refining her understanding of their goals and research designs. From her own experience she was able to help them narrow their focus. Even to the point of discarding entire Corporate mandates for research.

“Don’t bother with that gender study,” she’d told Michaela. “Life on Donovan doesn’t work the way any of the initial reports hypothesized. See Raya Turnienko’s research on TriNA. As far as we’ve observed, all reproduction on Donovan takes three donors, and there are no sexes. No dimorphism. Nothing close to an analog of a male or female. All three donors exchange TriNA. In the reproductive tracts, the molecules split into separate deoxyribonucleic strands that recombine with strands from each of the other two parental TriNA molecules. Each of the parents gestate one or more young after the exchange.”

She had added, “Don’t expect reef ecology to have any Terrestrial equivalent. Given that the plants on land move, any mapping of aquatic vegetation will probably be a snapshot. And while we’re not positive about this, you’re going to be a lot better off if you begin your study assuming that the plants are intelligent. Hell, for all we know, everything is.”

“You’re joking,” Casey Stoner had cried.