Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“Vanguard, this is Sagittarius! We’re attempting an emergency landing on the fourth planet. We need antimatter! Repeat, we need antimatter! Stand by for final coordinates!”

As the ship dropped below a thick layer of storm clouds, features of the landscape appeared, first hurtling closer, then blurring under the ship as zh’Firro fought to level their flight. “Impulse power fading, Captain,” she said. “We’re losing helm response.”

At the science station, Theriault clung to her chair and stared at the main viewscreen, mesmerized by the rising menace of Jinoteur’s rainswept surface.

“Theriault,” Nassir said. “How far to the coastline?”

His order was enough to snap her out of her fear trance. She turned and gazed down into the blue light of the readout under the sensor hood. “Twenty-three hundred kilometers.”

The Sagittarius dipped abruptly to starboard, and the pitch of the engines’ whine began a swift, steady decline. Terrell leaned on Nassir’s chair and advised him, “We won’t make it.”

“Ensign,” Nassir said to Theriault. “What’s the nearest body of shallow water? Quickly.”

She threw a few switches without lifting her eyes from her sensor readout. “Twenty-one kilometers, bearing two-eight-point-one-six.”

“Helm, make that your course,” Nassir said. Blue-green blurs whipped along the bottom edge of the viewscreen as the Sagittarius skimmed the top of a jungle forest’s canopy. The captain looked up at the grim-faced Terrell and smiled. “Look on the bright side. Now we can do the planetary survey.”

With a sardonic grimace, Terrell replied, “Yes, sir. That was my first thought as well.”

“Cheer up, Clark,” the captain said. “It could always be worse, right?”

Terrell chortled. “Yes, sir. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in Starfleet, it’s that nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.”

“That’s the spirit,” Nassir said.

The Sagittarius slammed through a dense swath of forest toward a flat, muddy brown streak winding through the jungle. Even through the duranium hull, Terrell heard the rapid, sharp cracks of hundreds of trees snapping from high-speed impact.

As the ship nose-dived, Terrell could only hope that the dark brown surface directly ahead of it was water.

After the sound of the explosions faded from Xiong’s helmet comm, there had been nothing on the channel except silence. Several attempts to hail the Sagittarius by increasing the power to the suit’s transceiver had proved fruitless. He checked the chronometer mounted on the left forearm of his suit. Contact with the ship had been lost for more than six minutes.

Xiong stood in the shadow of the unusual alien machinery he had discovered aboard the Tholian ship. It seemed to waver and ripple while he looked at it. The pressure and heat inside the ship made everything look like a mirage.

He glanced at the air and power gauges on his right forearm. Enough air for another ten hours, he noted. About the same reserve in battery power. Ten hours to find a way out of this. Seeds of anxiety that were nestled in his gut threatened to bloom into a fully developed panic at any moment. Stay calm, he reminded himself. Review the facts.

To the best of Xiong’s knowledge, the nearest Starfleet ship to Jinoteur was at least twelve days away, perhaps more. There were a few well-trafficked star systems close by, but most of them were under Klingon control. A Starfleet rescue seemed unlikely to arrive before his suit ran out of air and power.

Maybe the Tholians have transporter technology, he thought. If I can figure out how to work it, I could beam down to the surface. Before he could get his hopes up, his inner pessimist spoke up. What if they don’t have transporters? Even if they do, would you even recognize one if you saw it? And how are you going to run it by yourself? Dismay started turning into paralysis. He looked around the compartment and studied the various interface surfaces and noted that there were no buttons, levers, or switches that he recognized. Maybe they interface directly with their technology, the way that Shedai did on Erilon. If so, jury-rigging my way off this ship just got a hell of a lot harder.

A triple-beep tone over the comm channel indicated that an encrypted Starfleet distress signal was being received. Xiong poked at the large frequency toggle on the arm of his suit until he locked in the secure emergency channel. McLellan’s voice crackled over the comm.

“Vanguard, this is Sagittarius! We’re attempting an emergency landing on the fourth planet. We need antimatter. Repeat, we need antimatter! Stand by for final coordinates!”

Knowing the ship hadn’t been destroyed reassured Xiong slightly, but he still had his own predicament to cope with. He started walking back up the sloped passage. His next destination would be the ship’s command center. I might not understand things up there any better than the ones down here, he figured, but it’s the best place to start looking for a way out.

Before this mission, Xiong had seen Tholian bodies autopsied, he had studied several theories about their social structure and technology, and he had on a few occasions interacted with live Tholians who were garbed in amber-hued silk envirosuits. Not one iota of that experience had prepared him to be trapped alone inside one of their battleships.

First time for everything, he told himself as he reached the intersection and doubled back toward the bridge. I just hope this doesn’t turn out to be my first time getting myself killed.

The Maker’s rage burned like the heart of a blue star. The ship should have been destroyed instantly! How did it survive?

Fear and recrimination pulsed through the legion of the Nameless, who recoiled and thought only of evading the Maker’s wrath. The Avenger and the Warden, denied the haven of retreat, stood together in the face of the Maker’s fury.

The Telinaruul ship had unique defenses, the Warden insisted. They came prepared to thwart us.

Absurd. Blue-spark images raced through the air, drawn with the fires of the First Conduit, directed by the Maker’s will. Our power should have vaporized that speck of metal. Instead it has trespassed on the surface, defiled our sanctum. How?

Hostile speculations buzzed through the shared mind-line of the Colloquium, but there was no sound but the distant crash of thunder and the soft slashing of rain outside the Colloquium.

The front rank of the Serrataal parted for the Wanderer, who approached the Maker, wrapped in hues of submission and fealty. I sensed resistance in our mind-line, the Wanderer said. When the moment came to work our will upon the Telinaruul, one among us opposed the will of the others. We have been betrayed.

The Maker reviewed the mind-line, relived the attack on the ship, this time opening her senses to the subtleties in the ebb and flow of power through the First Conduit. It was as the Wanderer had said. A defiant will had undermined the others, had diluted and diffused their power, enabling the ship to survive.

When she turned to confront the Apostate, he did not flinch or avert his focus. He stood proudly even as she accused him.

You interceded for the Telinaruul, declared the Maker.

I did. There was no shame in him for what he had done.

A series of violent images communicated the Maker’s wishes to the Avenger, whose corporeal avatar dissociated, freeing her essence to speed its overland journey to the downed ship.

To the Apostate the Maker explained, You have only delayed the inevitable and prolonged the Telinaruul’s suffering. Never have we permitted their kind upon the First World. Their presence will not be tolerated now. She summoned the others to join in her rebuke of the Apostate and marshaled their combined strength as if it were her own. One-third of the Serrataal refused her entreaty; they seemed poised to oppose her until the Apostate signaled his surrender to her judgment, which she pronounced without delay. I banish you from our Colloquium. Return only when you are ready to don the colors of a penitent.

As the Apostate’s physical form dissolved into separating tendrils of dark vapor, his reply resonated ominously throughout the Colloquium: That day will never come.

10

Captain Nassir turned his chair aft as he heard the door to the bridge open. Ankle-deep dirty water surged between Master Chief Ilucci’s feet and across the deck onto the bridge. “We’ve got a hull breach topside,” Ilucci said as he stepped inside, water dripping from his sodden coverall.

“Amply demonstrated, Master Chief,” Nassir said. “Are your people all right?”

Ilucci answered as he surveyed the damage to the bridge’s overloaded consoles. “Torvin’s hurt. He’ll live, but Doc Babitz says he’ll be down for a few hours.”

The captain nodded. An injured crewman wasn’t good news, but he was relieved that Torvin’s injuries appeared to be the extent of serious casualties from the attack and the crash. “Keep me posted, Master Chief. And get that breach sealed.”

“Will do, Skipper.” Ilucci pulled an access panel off the starboard bulkhead and poked his head inside the gap.

Nassir got up from his chair and sloshed across the shallow flood to McLellan. “Bridy Mac, bring Sorak’s team and Medic Tan Bao to the cargo bay. We’ll meet you there.” McLellan gave a curt nod and made a quick exit. The captain looked to the rest of the bridge crew. “Everyone else, with me.”

He led them off the bridge to the port ladder, then down to the cargo bay. Only a few trickles of water had yet found their way to the ship’s lowest deck. As soon as the rest of the bridge team had finished descending the ladder, Nassir began issuing directions. “Clark, Sayna, break out the lures Xiong brought aboard. Theriault, help me unpack the signal dampeners.”

They opened the crates and had their contents ready to go by the time McLellan and the field scouts clambered down into the cargo bay. Sorak, as usual, skipped any preamble and cut to business. “Captain, a large energy reading is moving toward us, from the north. It will reach us in less than ten minutes.”

“I expected as much,” Nassir said. “Here’s the situation. Without main power, the ship can’t defend itself. Whatever’s coming at us, we need to lure it away from here, with these decoys Xiong developed. We’ll split into pairs and head in different directions.” He pointed as he named each person. “Sorak with me. McLellan with Tan Bao. Theriault and Niwara. Razka, go with zh’Firro.”

Nodding at the devices sitting in the open crates, Nassir continued, “One person from each pair take a decoy, the other take a signal dampener. Get as far from the ship as fast as you can; draw the thing’s attention. If it gets too close, activate the decoy’s propulsion circuit and let it go. Then use the dampener to hide yourselves. Clear?” The landing party nodded.

The captain turned to Terrell. “Clark, you’ll have the conn. Stay with Dr. Babitz and the engineers. Once we’re ashore, have Ilucci seal the top deck and scuttle the ship. You should have enough battery power to run a dampening field for about a half-hour. If we’re lucky, the thing’ll be gone by then.”

Terrell made a rueful frown. “And if it’s not?”

Nassir slapped Terrell’s shoulder. “You’ll think of something,” he said. “You’re clever that way.” He picked up a fist-sized decoy device. It weighed roughly one kilogram. He had no idea what might be in it to make it so heavy. “All right, everyone,” he said, motioning with the device toward the ladder. “Time’s a factor. Grab a pack, and get moving.”

As the head of the ship’s security team, Lieutenant Sorak was the first to climb up the ladder and out the ship’s wide topside hatch. He was greeted by warm, humid air, a storm-blackened sky flickering with far-off electrical activity, and gray curtains of rain that swept across the ship’s half-submerged hull and churned up white froth on the surface of the river.

Sorak moved a few paces from the hatchway, lifted his tricorder, and crouched. He scanned the perimeter while the rest of the landing party climbed quickly out of the ship into the squall. Nassir was the first one to follow him out. The captain joined Sorak and dropped to one knee at his side.

“Any movement?” Nassir asked.

Sorak continued to watch his tricorder readout. “Not yet, sir. The storm is generating intense interference, on several wavelengths. It might not be an entirely natural phenomenon.”

“Keep an eye on it,” Nassir said. He turned to the rest of the group. “Sorak and I will head north. The rest of you, pick a direction and go. Move out.” He pivoted back toward the river and said to Sorak, “Stow your gear; we’re going.”

Nassir eased himself over the curved edge of the hull into the brown water that surrounded the ship. Sorak turned off his tricorder, secured it inside his watertight backpack along with the dormant signal dampener, and followed the captain into the river.

It was warm, slow-moving, and thick with mud. Swimming while wearing boots and a backpack was awkward. The boots made it difficult for Sorak to propel himself efficiently, and the backpack was pure drag. He and the captain had the greatest distance to swim; fortunately, the ship had landed in a narrow bend of the river.

Sorak used a variation of the crawl stroke that kept his head above water, so that he could keep the captain in sight. The current was strong enough to pull them both slightly eastward of their intended landing point. After a minute of hard swimming, both men scrambled onto the muddy riverbank.

The Vulcan scout helped the captain to his feet. Nassir nodded his thanks and opened his own watertight pack to retrieve his communicator. He flipped open its gold grille and sent a hailing signal. “Nassir to all landing party personnel, check in.”

Staring back across the river, all that Sorak could see was silver veils of rain. He retrieved his phaser from his pack.

The others responded quickly. McLellan and Tan Bao checked in first, followed by Theriault and Niwara, then Razka and zh’Firro. “Good luck, everyone,” Nassir said. “And God-speed. Sagittarius, did you copy all that?”

“Affirmative, sir,” Terrell replied, his normally rich voice sounding hollowed out by the communicator’s speaker.

“Take her down, Clark,” the captain ordered. “And stay there till I give the word.”

“Aye, sir,” Terrell said. “Be careful out there. Sagittarius out.” The channel clicked and went quiet. Out in the river, the water boiled and churned as the ship’s maneuvering thrusters fired and nudged it toward the center of the river, into deeper water. Dirty foam surrounded the ship, which vanished into the muck. Seconds later the foam dispersed, and the water once again became still and uniformly beige.

Sorak watched the captain hesitate on the riverbank and stare at the river with a melancholy expression. “Captain,” Sorak said with polite insistence. “We have to go.”

“Yes, we do,” Nassir said. He turned his back on the river and jogged, then sprinted, into the dense, dark jungle.

Sorak followed him. As he neared the tree line, the sky above turned black as night, and a crack of thunder shook the ground. Then he was under the cover of the rain forest, heading north at a full run with the captain.

Completing the Kolinahr, the Vulcan ritual of shedding all emotion to achieve an intellect of pure logic, had taught Sorak that fear was a paralyzing emotion, an impediment to rational action. Being immune to fear, however, did not mean becoming oblivious of peril. Shadows in the forest had begun to pursue himself and the captain.

He poised his finger over the trigger of his phaser and quickened his pace, determined to place himself between the captain and whatever danger they now were running toward.

“Wait up!” shouted zh’Firro. Razka halted and turned back to let the Andorian zhen catch up to him. She was quicker on her feet than most humanoids he had met, but she had been unable to keep pace with the Saurian field scout in an environment so similar to that of his native world.

He breathed in the jungle. It was rich with the odor of decaying vegetation and the sickly sweet fragrance of exotic flora. Rainwater drizzled in steady streams through the multilayered forest canopy, and the ground was slippery with several centimeters of mud. His broad and leathery webbed feet were bare and felt more comfortable in the rough, root-covered terrain than on the smooth metal decks of the ship.

Cannonades of thunder concussed the air and swayed the tropical forest. In the rocking movements of the trees, Razka caught hints of movement. A nebulous presence was stalking them. He blinked his inner eyelid into place and surveyed the forestscape with his thermal vision.

He smelled the change in the air before he saw it. Darkness cold and foul was spreading like a slow poison through the jungle. Something terrible was descending from above, and it was coming down all around them.

Zh’Firro stumbled to a halt beside him and looked up, following his line of vision. “What is it?” she asked.

“A trap, Lieutenant,” he said. “It’s called a trap.”

Rain hissed through the forest of azure, piercing wind-whipped boughs in drizzles and mists. High overhead, tree limbs snapped in the gale. On the muddy jungle floor, coltish legs carried McLellan through narrow slivers between lichen-draped trees. Tan Bao was right behind her, his own stride unflagging. McLellan figured it hadn’t been coincidence that the captain had teamed her up with the medic, who was the only runner on the ship likely to be able to keep pace with an experienced marathoner such as herself.

She opened up her lead and hurtled down an uneven slope. The sky above was ink-black and stuttering with bright blue lightning. Racing through a rainstorm felt like a lark, like a child’s foolish tempting of fate.

Directly ahead an electric bolt lanced down and blasted a tree to smoking cinders. A thunderclap threw McLellan backward. She collided with Tan Bao, and they fell in a heap on the muddy slope. Overhead the strike had torn a burning cavity in the forest canopy. Dark sheets of rain hammered down.

Then another blast of lightning struck, closer this time. Its crash was like a spike driven into her eardrums, its heat like a furnace blast in her face. An indigo afterimage on her retinas left her blind for a few seconds.

Before her vision had cleared, Tan Bao pulled her to her feet. Her thunderstruck ears could barely hear him shout, “Run!” He kept his grip on her jumpsuit sleeve and yanked her forward. Sprinting blind into a violet darkness, she lunged headlong through clusters of vines. Her feet slid and slipped in the mud. Shapes came back a few at a time, in visual hiccups, strobes of movement. At first she thought it was an artifact of the flash that made her see shadows following them.

Fiery bolts slammed through the jungle, setting it ablaze, while the maelstrom tattered the treetops and rained heavy debris onto the ground. Panic left McLellan short of breath, gasping. She swallowed a mouthful of air, and the compression in her ears cleared with a painful pop. All she could hear was the apocalyptic percussion of constant thunder.

Then a chilling, primal noise wailed from the sky. It was part roar, part droning howl—the hunting cry of a leviathan.

From every direction, the predatory shadows closed in, gaining speed with every meter of ground McLellan and Tan Bao covered. Then a blast of fire rent a new gash in the jungle ahead of her, and she realized that the leviathan and the shadows were one and the same.

Icy wind slashed through the humid jungle air, gusting into Vanessa Theriault’s face. A tentacle of shimmering liquid snaked out of the trees ahead of her and rushed in her direction. She froze for the space of a breath, mesmerized as the dark fluid sparkled with motes of power. Then Niwara tackled her to the ground as the appendage struck like a viper.

It blurred past them and split the trunk of an ancient jungle tree. In the millisecond before impact, the tentacle’s tip had sharpened to a swordlike point and transformed into a razor-edged blade of gleaming obsidian.

The tentacle ripped free of the tree, leaving behind a crystalline residue in the wound, like a scar of black glass.

Niwara and Theriault scrambled to their feet and resumed running, trying to continue on their easterly course away from the ship. A midnight blur lunged from Theriault’s left. She ducked. Another tentacle, another bifurcated tree. Within seconds, more tentacles were invading the forest, probing, searching, taking every opportunity to attack.

Stands of trees to either side of her and Niwara were uprooted and blithely tossed skyward, enabling Theriault to see that the tendrils all originated in the storm cloud overhead. Flashes of lightning struck in tandem with more descending tendrils of jet-black liquid. This was not like the fearsome black golem that had assaulted the teams on Erilon; this was something of an entirely different order—larger, more versatile, and more powerful.

Liquefying vapors turned into stoneglass daggers and jabbed from multiple directions. Theriault sidestepped one, dodged another, somersaulted over a third. Tumbling back to her feet, she saw Niwara pivot clear of a deadly thrust. As Niwara sprinted toward Theriault, another tentacle raced up behind the Caitian woman. Pointing, Theriault cried, “Look out!”

Niwara hurled herself to the ground, and the saw-toothed blade grazed her golden mane before burying itself into the muddy ground. The Caitian rolled clear and backpedaled toward Theriault. “Keep going!” she shouted, drawing her phaser and laying down covering fire. She turned around when she reached Theriault, slapped her back, and started sprinting as fast as her broad paws could carry her. Theriault paced the longer-legged scout by virtue of sheer terror.

Shadows were tearing the jungle to pieces, and it was only a matter of time before she and Niwara ran out of room to run.

Eerie wails echoed across a coal-colored sky. Keening bellows of bloodlust, atonal and resonant, resounded off nearby hills, and there was nothing but the pandemonium of thunder and the searing fury of lightning ripping the jungle asunder.

Chaotic frequencies and shockingly strong electrical fields buffeted Celerasayna zh’Firro’s antennae. Her Andorian senses were overwhelmed by emanations from the unnatural storm cloud. Its every pulse resonated inside her mind, filled her with panic, clouded her thoughts with confusion and fear.

There was no place she could hide from its psychic onslaught. All she could do was run.

Liquid knives arced out of the darkness and tested her reflexes. She outran one strike and weaved left past another. An abrupt halt spared her from an uppercut that would have decapitated her. Razka tugged her arm and yanked her clear of a stab in the back. Two of the tentacles collided and shattered each other in a flare of indigo flames.

They emerged into a wide-open clearing of sheared-off tree stumps and charred, smoking ground. Above, the ebon cloud loomed over the jungle, a Colossus with hundreds of fluidic limbs seeking out its prey. It was like the darkest passages of the Codices come to life—a physical incarnation of Chaerazaelos, the eternal storm of torments that awaited those who dared to appear unWhole before Uzaveh the Infinite. Zh’Firro stood in the open, staring slack-jawed at what she took to be the embodiment of annihilation, and lost herself in its terrible majesty.

A scaly hand slapped her face. The stinging warmth of the hit registered and raised her ire. Then she saw Razka standing in front of her. “Snap out of it, sir! Start running!”

One moment Captain Nassir and Sorak zigzagged at a full run through the claustrophobically close jungle forest, evading lethally agile tentacles lunging out of every shadow, and the next they stumbled clear of the tree line onto a broad, open slope that overlooked a lush terrain of steep, rolling hills. In the sky a few kilometers distant Nassir saw the edge of the massive storm cloud that lurked overhead and, beyond it, clear sky.

Behind them, a dozen serpentine coils were smashing through the forest and were about to overtake them.

“End of the line,” he said to Sorak, pulling off his pack. As he reached inside for the decoy, he said to the Vulcan, “Prep the dampener.”

He was grateful that Xiong and his team on Vanguard had simplified the use of the decoy. With so little time to deploy it, the less Nassir needed to remember, the better. Rain pelted the sphere in his hands. He engaged its autopropulsion module and pointed it in the direction he wanted it to go. Then he pressed the button under his index finger.

The device leaped from his hands and shot away into the sky, quickly becoming little more than a speck sailing over and beyond the crest of the next hill, speeding away toward the horizon. “Activate the dampener,” he said. Sorak switched on his device. Nassir snapped, “Hit the deck!”

He and Sorak dropped to the ground as the tentacles erupted from the trees and raced over them—and continued into the distance, chasing after the still-flying decoy. Nassir gave silent thanks to Xiong and his cadre of scientists, pulled his communicator from his belt, and flipped it open. With the press of a single switch he sent a triple beep to the rest of the landing party. That would be their cue to release their decoys and activate their signal dampeners.

He just hoped that the rest of the landing party was still alive to receive the order.

McLellan and Tan Bao flailed clumsily with their packs as they ran, their bodies able to do two things at once with speed but not with grace. She fumbled the decoy, which bobbled inside the pack with every running footfall she landed, while Tan Bao struggled to get a grip on the dampener.

As soon as her hand gripped the fist-sized device, she let her pack fall away in the mud behind her. Tan Bao did likewise as he pulled the dampener free.

Flashes of lightning to her left gave McLellan enough light to find the controls of the decoy. One touch was enough to arm its propulsion circuit. Another would send it on its way. It was only another five meters to a narrow break in the canopy cover.

An impact against the back of her knee was so swift and the cut so clean that she didn’t realize what had happened until the lower portion of her right leg fell away and she pitched forward onto her face. She fumbled the decoy, which rolled ahead of her and sank halfway into the mud.

Then the pain hit. Cold fire coursed through her leg. She looked down and saw the crystalline residue spreading over her wound, a scab of glass. The tentacle that had severed her leg reared up, momentarily a vapor as it coiled to strike.

The dampener, fully activated, rolled to a stop beside her, and the tentacle wavered, as if it had lost track of its prey. Then it steadied and fixed itself on a new target: Tan Bao. The medic dived toward the decoy, reaching for it with one hand while brandishing his phaser in the other. He slid across the muddy ground as the tentacle snapped forward. His hand closed on the decoy, and he fired his phaser at full power into the jungle canopy. The tentacle liquefied and solidified on target for his heart. He dropped his phaser, lifted the decoy, and activated its propulsion circuit.

The decoy shot up and away through the hole he’d blasted in the canopy. He flattened himself on the ground, face pressed into the mud, as the tentacle curved up away from his back and out through the smoldering channel in the foliage, hurtling after the decoy. A rumble of thunder shook the ground. Then there was only the white noise of rain.

Tan Bao pulled his face from the muck. He gasped for breath, checked to make certain there were no more tendrils stalking them, and scrambled over to McLellan. She took his arm in a fierce grip. “It hurts, Tan,” she said through gritted teeth. Tears of agony rolled from her eyes. “God help me, it hurts! Do something.”

“You have to let go of my arm,” he said. “I need to get back to my pack. I have a field kit in there.” He pried at her fingers. “I’ll be right back, Bridy, I promise.”

It took all her strength to let go of him. She covered her face with her mud-caked hands and listened to his sprinting steps squishing across the wet ground. Fighting for breath and clarity, she focused on the sound of him coming back, getting closer. Then the hiss of a hypospray brought a warm sensation to her body, and she felt weightless. She remained half-conscious while he examined her with his medical tricorder.

“The good news,” he said, “is that whatever that thing did to your leg, it stopped the bleeding.”

Anticipating the second half of his report, she asked, “What’s the bad news?”

“Whatever that stuff is…it’s alive.”

“Come on!” Niwara shouted to Theriault, who was a few paces behind her. “We’re almost there!

The jungle teemed with scores of tentacles. Adding to Niwara and Theriault’s numerous disadvantages, they had been forced to retreat uphill for the last hundred meters.

A crystalline blade cut across Niwara’s path and embedded itself in a tree. The liquid part of the tentacle disengaged from the crystal blade, leaving it behind as it recoiled for another strike. The nimble Caitian ducked under the stuck shaft of black glass and dodged right, nearly colliding with Theriault, who had caught up to her.

Ahead the darkness of the forest gave way to light and air, a clearing open enough to release the decoy. The two officers jumped through a wall of thick blue-green fronds—and nearly plunged over the edge of a cliff into a vine-choked ravine, thirty meters above a run of white-water rapids.

Niwara regained her balance first, then she reached out and steadied Theriault. They teetered for a moment on the crumbling edge of the cliff. “Activate the dampener,” Niwara said as she readied the decoy. Seconds later, the dampener powered up with a low hum, and Niwara released the decoy into the sky. The jungle canopy echoed with the snaps of breaking limbs as the tentacles shot upward in pursuit.