Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (9 page)

“Are they attacking?”
Keru called from the shoreline. Aili could see him coming forward, drawing his phaser as his eyes scanned the area around them.

“Why would they give a distress call, then?” Lavena responded.

“We don’t know that’s what it is,” said Pazlar.

“Maybe it’s a warning.” Lavena ducked down and surveyed the area. Her wide eyes were more sensitive in this darkness than anyone else’s would be—except probably Torvig’s—but she saw no sign of predators. The only thing in their immediate vicinity other than the floater island was a chunk of dead floater polyps, about eight meters across, that drifted nearby a few meters down. Young floater colonies had been observed at various depths—apparently they only surfaced once they reached a certain size—but she could tell this one was dead because it was irregular in shape and didn’t spin like the live juveniles did.

Just to make sure, she swam around it to see if there was something hiding behind it. Nothing was there, so she returned to the surface, hovering just above it as she called to Pazlar, “No sign of anything.”

“Still, we should get out of the water just to be—”

Too late. Something wrapped around Aili’s leg, stinging her. She cried out and tried to pull off the stringlike tendril. But more of them wrapped tightly around her, stinging her, pulling her, and she was yanked beneath the waves as Melora cried her name. She twisted around to see what awaited her.

Hundreds of writhing tendrils had shot up from the holes in the clump of dead floater coral. Dozens of them now gripped her, burning her exposed flesh, although her minimal clothing provided some protection. She struggled to free herself, straining toward Melora—only to feel her heart tighten in horror as she saw that the fragile Elaysian was being pulled down by the tendrils even faster than she was, having no strength to resist.

A phaser beam cut through the water, blinding Aili, and she felt a tremor transmitted through the tendrils. When her vision cleared, she saw Keru pulling a limp Melora to the surface, alongside a trail of large bubbles rising from the coral clump. It was sinking, and pulling her down with it. The stings of hundreds of tendrils were making her numb, unable to fight. She could only strain to stay conscious as the darkness grew more profound. She felt the pressure beginning to rise, and realized that there would be no end to it, not for another ninety kilometers. Even if she survived the stings, she was being dragged down to depths where there would be no life, no dissolved oxygen for her gills
to extract. At least she would be gone before the pressure crushed her into pulp…

But then there was light. And movement. Something darting across her fuzzy vision, multiple somethings. She felt the tendrils snapping, giving way. Something caught hold of her, pulling her free, supporting her. She forced her eyes to focus. Before her was a pair of large, disk-shaped eyes, reflecting the glow from the bioluminescent piscoids around them. A sharp, elongated beak, four strong tentacles, a streamlined chordate body with four tail flukes.

It was a squale. And another one held her in its grasp.

Her rush of adrenaline countered the numbness from the tendrils’ stings. Forcing herself to focus, she sensed herself rising, the pressure diminishing. The oxygen-rich water rushing across her gill crests helped revive her. Regaining her presence of mind, she struck her combadge to activate its translator function. “Can you…understand…?”

But the squales convulsed as if badly startled. The one holding her released her and retreated, swimming backward; luckily her own buoyancy supported her now that she was free of the tendrils. “Wait!” she called weakly. They stopped and watched her warily from a few meters away, but there was no indication that it was in response to her plea.

“Keru to Lavena! Come in!”

“Here…” She tried to say more, but the venom was taking hold, making her laryngeal muscles sluggish, along with her thoughts.

“Hold on, we’re almost there!”

She heard the aquashuttle in the distance, saw the squales retreating at top speed. “No, wait…”

Aili tried to reach for them, but she had no more energy. She thought she saw the light from the shuttle, but just then darkness overtook her….

She awakened to see Captain Riker looking down at her. “Welcome back, Aili.”

Her wide eyes took in the surroundings without her needing to turn her head; her peripheral vision was greater than most humanoids’. She was in sickbay, but not in her hydration suit; she floated in a bathtub-sized tank that had taken the place of a normal sickbay bed. This was one of the upgrades Doctor Ree had insisted on before
Titan
’s relaunch: using replicator and transporter technology, several of the surgical and recovery beds in sickbay could now be dematerialized and reconstructed in specialized forms to accommodate crew members with unusual physiological needs. It was something she wished she’d had last year, after she’d been injured in an attack by rogue Fethetrit.

“Captain,” she said. “Glad to be back.”

“You gave us quite a scare.”

She laughed weakly. “I gave
you
a scare?” She stretched her limbs, which seemed to have been healed of the burning welts left by the tendrils. “What the Deep was that thing?”

“A colony creature,” came another voice. Lieutenant Eviku came up on her other side, and she smiled at the sight of him. The Arkenite xenobiologist came from semi-aquatic stock himself, so the two of them had bonded, both as friends and occasionally on a more physical level. There had been none of the latter since the Borg invasion, however; he had become closed off, outwardly sociable but not letting anyone get closer, except presumably his counselor.
“We got a sample of the portion Mister Keru blew off…it was still clinging to Commander Pazlar when we rescued her. Each tendril and its base is a complete organism in itself, but they all work collectively. They apparently take up residence in the empty shells of dead floaters, use them as camouflage. They engulf prey that passes too close, and slowly”—he hesitated—“release acids to dissolve it. The…biomass is absorbed into the tendrils, through tiny pores.”

“What we’re more interested in,” Riker said in a gentle but authoritative tone, “is how you got away from the tendrils, Aili. It was hard to get good readings, but the sonar showed what seemed like squales…”

“They saved me,” she said. “I don’t know how…something else cut the tendrils…but they were there. They tried to warn us about the tendril trap, and they…they buoyed me up once I was free.”

“Something else?” Riker asked. “Another species?”

“Something small and fast…and there were luminescent creatures too. I’m sorry, my memories are vague. But it was like…they were working with the squales.”

Riker frowned. “We heard you trying to talk to them over your combadge.”

“I thought…maybe this proved they were intelligent. I was trying to communicate.” She lowered her head. “But they just ran away. Like Melora…Commander Pazlar said, if they were intelligent, wouldn’t they be more curious?” She strained to remember details from her rescue. “I don’t know, sir…I’m not sure I wasn’t delirious. I can’t be sure what was real down there.”

He patted her hand. “It’s all right, Aili. The important thing is that you’re still with us. You just rest now.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

Eviku lingered for a moment, and she read sympathy and sadness in his eyes. “I’m fine, Ev,” she told him, reaching to stroke his hand.

He just nodded and smiled, not resisting the touch but not returning it. “I’m glad.”

“If you want to stay and talk…”

“No…the captain’s right, you need your rest.” He nodded farewell and departed.

But she couldn’t rest. She had finally seen the squales up close,
touched
them, and still been unable to bring back any answers. They had saved her life: was it the instinct of a social animal, or the act of a sapient, ethical people?

She had to know. Somehow, she had to make contact with them again.

It took some time for Tuvok to answer the door after Ranul Keru signaled. Keru was just about to try a security override when the panels finally slid back, revealing a tired-looking Tuvok in a disheveled uniform. “Mister Keru. Is there a problem?”

“I just wanted you to know,” the Trill replied in an easygoing voice, “that you missed the start of your shift again. I had to cover your asteroid-deflection drill.”

Tuvok straightened. “My apologies, Mister Keru. I…lost track of the time. I will see that it does not happen again.”

It was a rather transparent excuse; either the computer or T’Pel could have reminded Tuvok, if he’d been in a condition to listen. But Keru let it slide. “It’s all right, Tuvok. I don’t mind the extra work. I carried both our jobs for a
while, before you joined the crew. Not that I’d want to do it full-time again, mind you. At least this way I get some time off. So I’m hoping to see you back in full swing before long. But until then, I want you to know I have your back.”

Tuvok lifted a brow, and for a moment Keru expected a dose of boilerplate Vulcan literalism in response to the idiom. But that was the sort of banter Tuvok engaged in when he was in a good mood, or so it seemed to Keru after serving with him for a year. Right now, he didn’t have it in him. “That will not be necessary, Mister Keru. Any further dereliction of duty on my part should not be tolerated. The captain—”

“The captain understands. So does Commander Vale. I made sure of it.” He forestalled another protest, saying, “Listen, Tuvok. I know what you’re thinking. It’s been five months, you should be moving on with your life by now. But that’s not how it works. I was in grieving for years after Sean died. I wasn’t able to let him go until
I
nearly died in the Reman attack last year. So if anyone can understand what you’re going through, Commander—”

He broke off, since what he saw in Tuvok’s eyes gave him a keener understanding of just what it was inside of Vulcans that was so frightening that they felt they had to keep it buried at all costs. “With all…due respect for your loss,” Tuvok said stiffly, “it is not comparable. You did not lose a child.”

“It’s not a competition, Tuvok,” Keru said, his tone as placating as possible. “Every loss is different.” He sighed. “But it’s still loss, my friend. That’s a universal.”

Tuvok was silent for a time. Finally, he said, “How were you able to do it?”

Keru blinked. “Do what?”

“Let him go.”

It was a while before he could decide what to say. “I just…let it happen. Eventually. I think…at first, when you lose someone, you don’t want to stop thinking about your last memories of them, no matter how much it hurts, because it’s all you have left of them. But there comes a time when you try to relive those moments and it starts to slip away. And you don’t want it to, you try to cling to it. But I think…” He swallowed, clearing his throat. “I think your mind knows when it’s ready to start healing. So when you try to dwell on those memories, it resists, because it needs to start moving on. If you fight that…if you keep on clinging to it…you end up getting stuck, not moving on with your life the way your loved one would want you to. But once you realize your mind is trying to let go, to move on…once you let it…it just sort of happens. Not quickly; the sadness doesn’t go away anytime soon. But…it doesn’t
trap
you anymore. You miss him…but you live your life, and start to feel normal again.”

Tuvok took it in and thought about it for some time. Keru stood patiently, the gift of a security guard. “An interesting insight,” Tuvok finally said. “I do not know, however, if it is applicable to me. I do not believe I have yet reached that state of readiness—if I ever will.”

“I think it takes longer for people like us.” A brow went up, inquiring. “People who never got to say good-bye. Who never got to prepare for the end, to say the things that went unsaid…there’s so much more we don’t want to let go of.”

A heavy sigh. “It is illogical to cling to such regrets.” He said it not with chastisement, but with irony.

Keru narrowed his eyes. “I’m not so sure. If the mind needs time to work through them, to come to terms with them, I’d say it’s illogical to force it along—just as illogical as refusing to let go when you’re ready.”

“A surprisingly…intellect-based view of grief, Mister Keru.”

“I guess it comes from my time tending the symbiont pools on Trill. Mind and memories…that’s all they are.” His gaze went unfocused. “And it’s hard to imagine how much loss they’ve known.”

Tuvok nodded. “It is a universal.”

Keru smiled. “But so is life, my friend. So is life.”

DROPLET, STARDATE 58525.3

E
viku nd’Ashelef sat atop the aquashuttle
Holiday
, having a picnic with his crewmates while watching the fish fly by.

Many of Droplet’s chordates could pop out of the water, extend their long, cartilage-stiffened fins, and glide for great distances. Many had fins that could actually flap for propulsion. Eviku had catalogued a number of them today while the
Holiday
cruised a few dozen klicks behind Hurricane Spot (as the perpetual superhurricane had been nicknamed), studying the storm and its effects on the ocean in its wake. The surface cooling caused by the dense cloud cover and heavy rain caused a vertical displacement of the thermocline, promoting blooms of phytoplankton that in turn promoted a feeding frenzy. Some flying piscoids had taken to the air to avoid predators in the water, while others, predatory themselves, had come in from farther afield to pursue them or to dive after piscoids in the water. Earlier today, the crew had observed a fascinating event in which
a large school of piscoids had been caught in a pincer between two predatory species: below, cuttlefish-like creatures with tentacles keratin-stiffened into multiple scissorlike blades, and above, a flock of long-tentacled piscoids with dragonfly wings. Eviku had observed this pattern before on other worlds, but this had a twist. The piscoids in the targeted school could themselves take to the air for brief moments, using their fins purely for passive lift and flapping their wide tails at blurring speed to propel themselves through the air. The small buzzfish (as Commander Vale had dubbed them) had swarmed in a bait ball that was half in and half out of the water, a writhing, glittering mass that functioned as a single entity, flowing and morphing with desperate speed like a Changeling under a phaser barrage.