by David Mack
FROM SPACE, the vast expanse of ocean had looked tranquil. Now, as Christine Vale and Delta Team plummeted toward it, and the coastlines of continents vanished beyond the edge of an increasingly close and level horizon, she saw white-crested storm waves rolling across an angry sea.
“Delta Team,” she said into her helmet mic. “Close it up and stand by to open and drop on my marks.”
She monitored her squad’s relative positions. The timing of this jump would leave little room for error, and she couldn’t guarantee their safety unless they all maintained precisely the same altitude and rate of descent. This was going to be what the old-timers used to call a HALO jump—high altitude, low opening. They would wait until they had dropped low enough to evade the Tezwan’s defense scanners, open their chutes only long enough to slow their fall to just less than the maximum impact that their suits’ structural integrity fields could absorb, then release their breakaway harnesses and drop into the ocean at more than two hundred kilometers per hour.
All in a day’s work, Vale mused. If you’re insane.
She noticed that Fillion was lagging nearly a full second behind the rest of the team. “Fillion, tighten up.”
“If I get any tighter, I’ll implode,” Fillion said.
“If you don’t catch up, you’ll be dead.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” came his flip reply. “Commencing emergency butt-clench.”
“Spare us the details,” Vale said. She was beginning to wonder whether bringing Fillion on this mission would prove to be a mistake. He was smart, cool under fire, and was one of the few security officers on the Enterprise who was qualified to make this kind of high-risk deep-sea dive from orbit. But his infallible talent for making a smart remark in response to any order—a key reason he washed out of Starfleet Special Ops and ended up on the Enterprise—was grating on her nerves. She feared that if the Tezwans didn’t kill him, she might have to.
Seeing that Fillion was back in position, she checked the holographic heads-up display on her helmet faceplate. “Get ready,” she said. “Roll in five…four…three…two…one…roll!” Pulling her body into an almost fetal curl, she tucked her knees toward her chest. She quickly confirmed that the rest of her team had finished the maneuver. “Open chutes in four…three…two…one…GO!”
Her team’s parachutes raced upward in unison, amorphous silver blurs reaching toward the ashen sky. As they unfurled, her own canopy expanded. A jolt of deceleration trauma shot through her back and shoulders.
The churning ocean took on more distinct and increasingly ominous details as she continued to fall. As her rate of descent slowed to just under one hundred kilometers per hour, she activated her suit’s improvised structural-integrity field.
“Fields on, stand by to drop,” she said. The altimeter dropped to eighty meters, then seventy. She started her countdown. “In three…two…one…drop!” She and her team unclasped their breakaway harnesses and plummeted, feet-first, into the lead-colored water. It was almost like striking a solid surface. The impact jammed her knees and pelvic joints upward with a dull, grinding pain. Spasms shot up either side of her spine. She choked back a grunt of agony and reminded herself that if not for Tezwa’s lighter-than-Earth gravity, she’d probably be dead right now.
The pain abated. Clarity returned, and she magnified her helmet display. Fillion and Sakrysta were clumsily fishing their diving fins from their chest packs, while Spitale had already equipped her gear and was swimming toward her with easy, languid kicks. Vale retrieved her fins from her own pack and carefully slipped the flexible attachments over her boots. By the time she secured her fins in place, Spitale had moved to a flanking position on her right, while Fillion and Sakrysta swam quickly to regroup with them. Diffuse gray daylight from above danced in wave-distorted ripples across the divers.
The warbled voice of the ocean seemed to come from every direction. It was a low, constant roar punctuated by long, keening notes and tiny bubbles of noise that popped from the deep, then were swallowed by the endless depths. An enormous school of metallic-hued fish passed with a low whoosh beneath Vale and her team. The fish seemed to sparkle in the refracted flicker from the surface, cast in sharp contrast against the impenetrable darkness that yawned beneath them.
Vale opened a flap of her chest pack and took out her tricorder. The device’s familiar, bright bluish glow lit her up like a spotlight as she checked their position and established a bearing to the target. She set the device to stay locked on to the submerged Tezwan firebase and relay its readings to her team’s helmet displays. A moment later, all three of her personnel waved to confirm they had received the transmission. Vale gave the signal to activate their gravity belts, which would help pull them down despite the planet’s lighter gravity and their high buoyancy in its dense, richly saline ocean.
The team swam downward, past aquatic life-forms of all types and sizes; undulating eels snaked between them while enormous tentacled mollusks and self-illuminating, semiliquid transparent blobs hovered on the periphery of their vision. Several minutes later, the scant light from the surface rapidly melted away. The team was enveloped in pure, cold darkness.
Soon after the light faded, the sounds of the sea retreated as well. In the claustrophobia-inducing shadow, Vale was acutely aware of the rush of her own breathing, which roared loud inside her helmet—the hopeful gasps of intake, the low gusts of exhalation, one after another, steady and hypnotic.
A soft, synthetic tone inside her helmet notified her that she and her team had just reached a depth of four kilometers. She hadn’t really needed the alert. With little else to focus on in the unbroken black void, her eyes had remained fixed on two readouts on her faceplate: her bearing and her depth. But even if her heads-up display hadn’t provided her with a constant meter of her downward progress, the increasing sensation of pressure would have been a more than sufficient reminder.
Nearly forty minutes after the beginning of their dive, a second chime announced the eighth kilometer of their descent. Vale activated her suit’s tachyon filter, which could render even the most lightless environment into one with at least twilight-level, monochromatic-blue illumination. In the distance below, she could now discern the first edges and outlined shapes of the undersea base. The structure slowly grew brighter and more distinct as she swam deeper. “Spitale,” Vale said. “Activate the signal jammer and drop it ahead of us.”
As the compact jamming unit sank toward the ocean floor, Vale strained to locate the exposed pressure hatch that she intended to use as the point of entry to the base. Unable to find it, she wondered if perhaps she had gotten turned around during the dive and was looking at the structure from the wrong side. A quick survey of its other key features confirmed that she was looking at it from the correct angle. Her confusion was dispelled a moment later as she realized that an unfamiliar shape was blocking the pressure hatch.
It was a submarine, docked and anchored—and obstructing the base’s only viable point of entry.
Fillion’s voice crackled softly over the secure channel. “Lieutenant? Is that thing supposed to be there?”
Vale stared grimly at the imposing submersible vessel. “No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
A brief moment, tinged with dread, passed in silence.
Sakrysta, a normally quiet Kriosian woman—whom, Vale recalled with some embarrassment, she had mistaken for a Trill when they first met—said what no one else wanted to. “So, um…what now?”
Vale continued to aim her intense stare at the submarine. “I’m thinking,” she said calmly. “I’m thinking.”
Chapter 25
Tezwa—Mount Ranakar,
1400 Hours Local Time
LA FORGE SAW THE ACCIDENT COMING, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.
The entry into the atmosphere had gone smoothly, as had the free fall. But after Piper Team had opened their parachutes and dropped below the cloud cover, they discovered that their landing zone was completely concealed by a t
hick gray blanket of fog. Though it would help conceal their midafternoon arrival from unwanted observers, it presented an unexpected hazard because their heads-up displays were suffering heavy interference from the hidden base’s energy field. Of the four of them, only La Forge—with his full-spectrum synthetic vision—was able to see the ground beneath its misty shroud.
He’d been able to coach T’Eama and security officer Braddock toward safe touchdowns, but Wathiongo, who had appeared to be on a safe line of approach, became caught in an unexpected wind shear that pushed him toward the jagged outcroppings of rock which dotted the middle of the cliff face. Before La Forge could warn him, the engineer’s parachute snagged on the rocks and came apart with a brittle rip.
T’Eama and Braddock weren’t able to see what was happening behind the thick curtain of vapor. La Forge alone witnessed, with growing distress, Wathiongo’s unprotected fall toward the ground. The man ricocheted off the cliff face and vanished into the forest canopy several dozen meters below. Distant snaps and cracks of breaking branches heralded the man’s plummet toward the ground. Then the sounds of his fall ceased.
La Forge guided himself toward a clearing in the trees, on his left. His feet skimmed the leafy branches that reached up, like supplicative arms, from the forest canopy. A sudden gust of wind at his back caused him to miss the clearing by a few meters. He instinctively pulled his limbs inward as he crashed through the upper foliage layer and rammed a path through the heavier boughs below. The furious series of impacts jabbed him with sharp tips of broken edges and pummeled him with one blunt impact after another. He felt the welts and bruises multiplying beneath his protective gear.
His descent slowed with one hard jolt, then another, before he was yanked to a halt and left dangling, four meters above the ground, in the barren lower limbs of a tight cluster of trees.
Placing his trust in the laws of physics and the accuracy of Vale’s premission report, he unlocked the breakaway clasp and dropped free of his snared parachute. In Tezwa’s lighter gravity, he fell just a bit slower than he was used to, and he landed with a slightly less jarring impact than his muscle memory expected. It was almost like the sensation of falling in a dream, when one knows it’s a dream and there’s really no danger. Of course, it depends on how far you fall, he reminded himself, and he thought of poor Wathiongo. He keyed his secure com. “La Forge to Wathiongo, please respond.”
No answer came. He activated the transmitter again. “La Forge to Piper Team. Sound off.”
“T’Eama, acknowledging.”
“Braddock here.”
“Lock on to Wathiongo and regroup,” La Forge said. Following the signal from Wathiongo’s suit transponder, which registered as holographically generated bearing-and-elevation coordinates on the lower right-hand corner of La Forge’s faceplate, the chief engineer powered up his suit’s camouflage system and selected the gray-brown highland pattern. The forest floor was thick with scrub brush, thorny brambles, and dead vegetation. It all contributed to what La Forge considered to be an uncomfortably loud rustle that haunted his every step.
He pushed ahead toward Wathiongo. After a few minutes he saw Braddock and T’Eama converging from separate directions. Both of them seemed to be having difficulty finding their way through the fog. “T’Eama, Braddock,” La Forge said. “I can see you both. Can you see each other?”
“Negative,” T’Eama said.
“Not a thing,” Braddock said.
“Braddock, you should be able to see Wathiongo soon.”
“Still not…hang on, sir,” Braddock said. The burly security officer pushed his way into a tall cluster of bushes, then crouched out of sight. “Found him, sir. He’s alive.”
La Forge quickened his pace and joined Braddock at the same time T’Eama reached him. Moving into the bushes, they kneeled on either side of their fallen comrade. The signal jammer he had carried now lay on the ground a meter away from him. Braddock had removed Wathiongo’s helmet and was affixing a cortical stimulator to the fallen man’s temples.
La Forge removed his own helmet. “Report,” he said.
Braddock took off his own headgear. “More broken bones than I can count,” he said, setting down his helmet. “Serious internal injuries, skull fractures, concussion. I gave him ten cc’s of telorathal to slow the bleeding and keep him stable.” Good thing Vale requires her people to take first-aid training, La Forge realized. Braddock turned on the cortical stimulator. It hummed with quiet, regular pulses. “This should keep his brain functioning.” He picked up his tricorder from the ground next to Wathiongo and scanned him. “We might be able to keep him alive like this for a few hours, but if we don’t get him to a sickbay by then, he’s dead.”
“I presume he is not stable enough to be moved,” T’Eama said as she doffed her helmet. Her hair, cropped in a short bob, was less rigidly styled than that of some Vulcans.
“Definitely not,” Braddock said.
“Commander,” she said. “May I suggest we camouflage Ensign Wathiongo’s location and attempt to carry on without him?”
“We don’t have much choice,” La Forge said. “Braddock, do you know much about demolitions?”
“More than a little,” Braddock said with an ironic nod.
“All right,” La Forge said. “Fix him up, best you can. T’Eama, set up the signal jammer. When you’re both done, salvage his critical gear. Then we’ll move out.”
T’Eama and Braddock set to work. La Forge looked up at the forbidding cliff they were about to scale. It was a nearly two-hundred-meter vertical ascent up a jagged face composed of what his old climbing instructor had called “jingle rock.” The name was derived from the pseudo-musical sound it made when it collapsed under your feet and struck up a percussive melody while falling on anyone unlucky enough to be down below.
La Forge recalled making a joke about this mission an hour ago, during the briefing. But now Wathiongo was down and dying, and one look up made it clear that scaling this treacherous cliff would be no laughing matter.
Chapter 26
Tezwa—Linoka Forest,
1810 Hours Local Time
ENSIGN FIONA MCEWAN made a pinpoint-perfect landing. The nimble young redhead hit the ground and stepped clear as she released her parachute canopy. The fluttering swirl of fabric sank to the ground like settling dust.
Looking around, she saw the Linoka Forest was not what she had expected. It was dry and dead, bereft of foliage, little more than a wasteland. Barren tree trunks, acid-bleached to the color of bone, jutted from the charcoal-colored ground. The sunset blazed bloodred behind inky streaks of smoke and was almost indistinguishable from the sinister glow of fire that lined the horizon beneath it. Flakes of ash wafted through the air like snowflakes, borne aloft on hot gusts of wind generated by the inferno that raged only a few short kilometers away.
Collateral damage from the Klingon counterattack, McEwan realized. I’d hate to see the populated areas right now.
She made a quick head count of the rest of Echo Team. Lieutenant Taurik, the leader, had already hidden his parachute and was rounding up the engineers, Mobe and Rao. McEwan rolled up her parachute, tucked it between two large rocks, then rejoined the rest of the group. She noticed that she was the only one who had activated her suit’s olive-drab camouflage. Probably because there’s no forest, she chided herself.
Taurik checked his tricorder, then turned and pointed with an extended arm. “The target is that way, sixteen-point-four kilometers,” he said. “Move out, double-quick time.” Taurik jogged away, and the rest of the team followed close behind him.
McEwan suspected she knew the answer to her next question, but hoped she was wrong. “Sir,” she said, her voice quaking with each running step, “should we be running into the fire?”
“Our suits are designed to protect us from the thermal effects of atmospheric reentry, Ensign,” Taurik said. “They should protect us for ninety-one minutes. The flames will conceal our approach to the entrance of the
firebase.”
Less than one kilometer ahead, the wildfire danced with malevolent glee. It was a red-orange giant, reaching from the ground to high above the swiftly igniting dead forest, each second multiplying its appetite and its fury.
And we’re running straight into it. Like just about every other sentient being in the quadrant, McEwan had heard that Vulcans were renowned for their sound, logical judgment. As she followed Taurik into the heart of the inferno, she could only hope that he wasn’t an exception to the rule.
Chapter 27
Tezwa—Kolidos Desert,
0615 Hours Local Time
PEART PEEKED HIS HEAD UP over the crest of the sand dune. He squinted into the rising sun. Silhouetted in the fiery golden dawn, four armed hovercraft—each carrying a dozen Tezwan soldiers—glided toward him. Dropping back behind the dune, he looked at the other members of Sierra Team.
“Four more,” he said. “Less than a kilometer away.”
“Damn,” Scholz said. “What’re they all doing out here?”
Peart shrugged. “Maneuvers? Training exercises? Who knows.” He felt the others waiting for his next order. The Tezwans were closing in on his position from four directions. Sierra Team’s adaptive desert camouflage might have helped them evade detection had their arrival not been so visible. But neither the time nor the location of the strike had been flexible; it was simply Sierra Team’s misfortune to have been assigned a daylight landing in a location that was swarming with Tezwan soldiers.
“Dig in,” Peart said. “T’Sona, bury Morello. I’ll cover Scholz.” The strike team split into pairs and began digging frantically with their hands, burrowing through the loose sand with furious scooping motions.
The thrumming engines of the Tezwan hovercraft grew louder. Scholz hunkered down into his hastily dug trench, and Peart pushed the excavated sand back in on top of the tall engineer. Scholz’s long, rudder-nosed face projected incredulity as he watched Peart. “And this will accomplish what?” he asked.