“We have a sonar reading,”came Torvig’s voice. “Too much interference for other sensors to clarify, but there are multiple four-meter bodies heading in your direction, emitting sounds consistent with squale calls. ETA two minutes at this speed.”
“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 youa 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.”