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

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,