Free Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea by Star Trek Page A

But soon Aili noticed something impinging on that silence, just barely at the edge of her awareness. “Wha…?” She ducked down beneath the roof of the sea, flipping upside-down, and listened for a moment. Soon she felt a tap on her ankle and looked up to see Pazlar looking down at her quizzically. She started to speak, but remembered the sound wouldn’t pass through the water-air interface well, so she surfaced. “I thought I heard something. Just a moment, please.” Pazlar nodded, and she dove back down, listening intently. Sure enough, there in the distance wasa shrill sound—no, several overlapping sounds, piercing, rising in pitch, growing in loudness. She breached the surface once more and described what she’d heard. “It’s the squales, I think! It sounds like it might be a distress call. And they’re heading this way, a whole pod.”
    Pazlar hit her combadge. “Pazlar to Gillespie . Lavena says she hears a pod of squales approaching. Anything on sensors?”
    “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 gillsto extract. At least she would be gone before the pressure crushed her into pulp…
    But then there was light. And