Текст книги "Over a Torrent Sea "

Автор книги: Christopher Bennett

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“And you’re picking that up from the whole crew,” he said with deep sympathy. “Carrying that for all of us.”

She clasped his hand. “I’m trained to cope with other people’s negative emotions. Not to let them get confused with my own. But it can be…saddening.” She reflected on some of her most troubled patients over the past few months. Lieutenant Kekil had lost most of his family when the Rigel Colonies had been attacked, but his natural pride and stoicism made it difficult for him to face his grief. Pava sh’Aqabaa from security had a triple burden to deal with: not only the loss of kinfolk in the bombardment of Andor, but post-traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt after coming back critically injured from the joint raid on the Borg reconnaisance probe—a raid that the other five members of her team had not returned from at all. And then there was Tuvok, who still struggled with depression over the loss of his son. That tragedy had undone all their work together to build new methods of emotional management to replace the Vulcan control that his years of cumulative cerebral injury and strain had left in tatters. They had needed to begin again from the ground up, and it was slow going. Even without Vulcan discipline, Tuvok’s natural stubbornness was fully intact.

“So I think I’m entitled,” she went on, “to want to stay within my own comfort zone for now. I’m enjoying the sense of being…cocooned with our baby. Being together with her, and with you, in a place of safety, surrounded by friends. Where I am right now, that’s enough for me. Visiting new worlds on the holodeck is all the adventure I need.” She gave him a lopsided grin. “After all, we’re both in for plenty of adventures after What’s-Her-Name here comes out in a few weeks.”

He studied her for a moment, and she felt his concern giving way to mischief. “So, you’re saying you’re not interested in excitement of any kind?”

Her grin reflected the mischief she felt in him, and his own soon matched it. “Well, now, I didn’t exactly say that. It isgetting awfully humid here.” She began to pull off her maternity dress. “I, for one, could use a swim.”

“You seem bittersweet,” Ra-Havreii said, stroking Melora’s cheek as they strolled down the corridor from the holodeck toward her quarters. They always made love in her quarters rather than his, since he could adjust to her gravity far more easily than the reverse. “Aren’t you happy we were able to assist our commanding couple with their love life?”

“Hey, Xin, that’s none of our business. Certainly not for public dissemination,” she hissed, glancing around at the passersby.

He chuckled. “An ironic choice of words, etymologically speaking. But I was asking about yourbusiness, my dear. Which I believe I am entitled to consider mine, wouldn’t you say?”

The corridor was empty now, so she sighed and answered. “It’s just…seeing the captain and Counselor Troi so happy together…it just reminded me that I can’t have kids as long as I remain in Starfleet. An Elaysian fetus couldn’t survive the gravity. And I couldn’t wear this antigrav suit for eight months straight.”

She realized that Xin had stopped walking two sentences back. She paused and waited for him to catch up, though he wasn’t as close as before. “Ahh, why would you be thinking about…conception, Melora? I thought that what we had was mutually understood to be…well, more than recreational, of course, but not…I mean, you know that Efrosian males don’t participate in the rearing of our biological…”

She let him squirm on the hook of her gaze for a few more moments, then relented and laughed. “Don’t worry, Xin. I’m not overwhelmed with an urge to return home to spawn. I’m just…contemplating future possibilities.”

He didn’t seem reassured. “Including the possibility that your long-term future might not include me?”

“Why should that bother you? If you Efrosian males never involve yourselves in family, I mean?” There was still amusement in her tone, but there were barbs beneath it.

“My dear, I thought we were both in agreement about the loose nature of our association. I thought you were satisfied with that.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t. Don’t overreact to this. Like I said, I’m just considering future possibilities.” She stared at him. “And if you’re so determined to keep our ‘association’ so loose, why are you acting so threatened by the idea that it might not be permanent?”

Efrosians were a highly verbal people, their mastery of speech and language exceptional among humanoids. But right now, Xin Ra-Havreii was at a complete loss for words.

CHAPTER F

OUR

DROPLET

“Ohh, this is nice.” Commander Pazlar had finally followed Lavena’s lead, stripping out of her antigrav suit and allowing the buoyancy of Droplet’s ocean to shore her up against its gravity. She’d needed Aili’s support to reach the water once she deactivated and removed the suit, and Aili knew how reluctant she was to let anyone see her as weak. The pilot was touched that her superior had trusted her enough to let her help. Perhaps it was because they were kindred spirits of a sort, both dependent on all-encasing technological aids to survive aboard Titan, always set slightly apart from the rest.

Now the two women, Selkie and Elaysian, floated together in their undergarments a few meters offshore from the floater island that housed their base camp. Pazlar had ordered the rest of the team to stay in the camp or on the far side of the island for the duration of her swim, although Commander Keru had insisted on standing by within shouting distance in case some large sea creature found them appetizing. Pazlar had acceded, perhaps in part because Keru would notfind two scantily clad women appetizing.

For a while, they just floated there, gazing up at Droplet’s night sky. The persistent cloud bands that obscured much of the view during the day tended to dissipate somewhat at night, so they could see a wide swath of stars as well as two of the planet’s four captured asteroidal moons, while colorful auroras wafted and flickered to the south. Aili had always loved staring up at the stars in her youth. But unlike then, she now had the comfort of knowing she would be back out among them in a week or two. Still, she had greatly missed the sensation of being in the sea, and this sea was far more comfortable than her own, for there was no family, no peer group to look on her with disapproval for failing to live up to her culture’s expectations.

“So what progress are you making with the squales?” Pazlar finally asked. Her tone made it sound more like casual conversation than a command to deliver a report.

Aili responded in the same spirit. “Well, they’ve been getting closer, and letting me get a little closer to them. I think they’re acclimating a bit. But they still retreat every time I switch on my tricorder.”

“Incredible hearing.”

“Not for a sea creature.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Without my tricorder active, they’ve let me get close enough to see them relatively clearly. They have four large tentacles at the front, but they can fold them back along the body and flatten them out for speed. The mouth is beaked, and has two large eyes behind and above it. They have some vents that I’ve seen them expelling bubbles from; I think they can function like a cetacean blowhole but also as a kind of jet thruster for maneuvering.”

“But not for propulsion?”

“No, they’re too massive for that. They have strong tails with four flukes. They can oscillate them in either direction, using one set of flukes or the other for thrust. I think it lets them switch from one set of muscles to the other, giving them more endurance.”

“I don’t suppose they’ve let you observe much of their behavior.”

“Not visually, but I can hear them talking to each other.”

“Talking? Don’t jump to conclusions, Aili.”

The use of her given name instead of her rank softened the chastisement. Still, she knew better than to respond in kind. “That’s the feeling I get, Commander. They’re constantly exchanging elaborate vocal signals through the…the deep sound channel, like my people do back home, or like the humpback whales on Earth.” She’d almost called the deep sound channel by its Selkie name, the ri’Hoyalina, before remembering to use its Standard name. The channel was a region of the ocean, about eight hundred meters deep here, where temperature, pressure, and salinity conspired to produce the lowest speed of sound. Since any wave passing between two media was refracted toward the one where its speed was lower, the DSC tended to confine sound waves inside it as solitons, much as light was trapped within the opti-cable inside Titan’s consoles and computers. Since the waves propagated in only two dimensions instead of three, it took their energy longer to disperse, so sounds emitted in the DSC could travel thousands of kilometers if loud enough. “We’ve recorded hundreds of distinct sounds being used.”

“Sounds the translator hasn’t been able to find any definite meaning in.”

“That could just be because they’re so alien. The translator couldn’t handle star-jelly communication either. And we know they’rehighly intelligent.”

Pazlar nodded at the reminder of their encounter last year with the vast, jellyfish-like spacegoing organisms. “True, but we can’t jump to conclusions. For one thing, if the squales were intelligent, wouldn’t they be more curious about us? Their avoidance suggests an instinctive fear reaction, one that isn’t being overcome by intellect.”

“Maybe.” Aili sighed. “And they won’t let Chamish get close enough to get an empathic reading.”

“That wouldn’t really prove anything, though. If he couldn’t commune with them, it could be because they’re intelligent.” For some reason, Kazarite psi abilities only worked with subsapient animals; higher cognition interfered with them in some way Aili couldn’t understand. “Or it could be because of some other factor, like the way Betazoids can’t read Ferengi brains.”

“Too bad our most powerful empath is too pregnant to come down and get a read on them.”

Pazlar’s silence gave agreement. They stared at the stars a bit longer. “And if you’re right,” the Elaysian went on in time, “if the squales are sapient, then we’ve got a Prime Directive problem. We’d have to avoid further contact. In fact, I have to wonder if we should be erring on the side of caution—looking for ways to study them that don’t let them see or hear us.”

“Oh, that would be a shame. They’re so beautiful. The way their song resonates through me…I’d hate to have to observe them only from a distance, through a probe or something. Besides, with the sensor troubles we have down here, how could we study them remotely?”

“Well, Xin’s been talking about his mobile holoemitters. Maybe we could disguise some probes as holographic sea creatures.”

“And control them how?”

“Let them function autonomously and then return to base.”

“That’s so limited.”

“It might be all we can get.”

Aili let her head sink beneath the water for a moment, letting the immersion refresh her, then lifted it again so she could hear Pazlar’s speech clearly. “Doesn’t it frustrate you sometimes? Coming out here to meet new life forms, but having all these rules limiting how much contact we can make?”

“And how much damage would we do without those rules? Or how much damage might be done to us? Making contacts…connecting with other beings…you can’t be careless about it. Can’t let yourself get too close too fast…not until you’re sure it won’t hurt…somebody.”

Aili frowned. “Are you still talking about the Prime Directive? Or are you trying to give me some kind of relationship advice?”

“What?” Pazlar let out a brief, breathy laugh. “No, I’m sorry. Believe me, I’m the last person who’d have any meaningful insights about relationships.”

That drew a sympathetic look. “Did you and Xin have a fight? Ma’am?”

“I’m not even sure of that, really. And I don’t think I want to talk about it. Not unless you managed to glean the secret to understanding Xin Ra-Havreii during your past liaisons with him.”

“Umm, sorry. The main things I learned about him were physical and…logistical. He’s very creative, but I assume you know that.” Aili smiled. It actually wasn’t as hard for her to make love with an air-breathing partner as most people assumed; her quarters did have about sixty centimeters of air at the top, and she could function with her head—or other body parts—out of the water for a fair amount of time so long as most of her gills remained wet. Some of the maneuvering to keep her partner’s head above water could be strenuous, but the principle was straightforward. But she enjoyed playing up the sense of mystery involved, in order to make herself seem more impressive and intriguing to the rest of the crew—and to pique the curiosity of those who might like to try it for themselves. “That, and we talked a lot about language and music. We enjoyed connecting in body and mind, but the heart never came into it.”

Pazlar frowned. “I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.”

“Because you’re worried he can’t love you?”

“No…because I’m worried he can. I’m not sure how I feel about being that…unique to him.”

Aili thought it over. “I don’t know if it’s my place to offer advice…”

“Go ahead. What the hell.”

“You’re better off letting him go. Letting him get back to being the man he is. He’s a theorist—he indulges his curiosity, but he doesn’t want to move out of his ivory tower. Maybe the right woman could make him into something more…but if you’re not sure you’re happy with the idea of him loving you, then it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. There’s got to be someone better out there, if commitment is what you want. And if you’re just interested in having fun, well, sometimes it’s best to move on before things get stale and complicated.”

“Uh– huh,” Pazlar said at length. “Thanks for the input. I’ll give it the thought it deserves.”

Aili looked at her, but the Elaysian’s face gave nothing back. “Well, you asked.”

“I did.” After a moment, she smiled. “It’s okay. I appreciate the effort. It’s not your fault that I don’t have any answers yet.”

“Thank you.”

“Sure.”

They floated together in silence, gazing out at the stars. 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 was a 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 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.”

“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, touchedthem, 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 Inearly 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 trapyou 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.”

CHAPTER F

IVE

DROPLET, STARDATE 58525.3

Eviku 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 Holidaycruised 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.

Once, Eviku would have found that a thing of simple beauty, but now there was more ambivalence to the sight. The beleaguered buzzfish reminded him of Starfleet, mounting desperate action to fight off the Borg but having to sacrifice so many in hopes that some percentage of the whole could survive. He took comfort in the fact that the buzzfish shoal lived on after the feeding frenzy…but at what cost! He could not help but be reminded of Germu and how much he missed her. How he had never had the chance to say good-bye. Aili’s close call yesterday had left him shaken, afraid of having to bear another loss.