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By Root 811 0

was big and needed more air, so he had passed out… what? Twenty minutes ago? An hour? She had no way to tell. The Falnari, however, had died hours before-internal injuries, probably from jagged bone shredding his lungs. When he’d tried to breathe, a thick plume of black blood boiled from his mouth and he drowned that way. Janeway couldn’t do anything about it. No medkit, and seeing as how she’d only known the Falnari for about twelve hours, there was a good chance she wouldn’t understand what the readings meant even if she had a medical tricorder. Although she discovered something about the Falnari, a blocky, muscular species that inhabited pressurized domes deep underwater and had the look of squat, bow-legged pugilists. They decayed into a gray-green, viscous sludge-very quickly.

Everyone else was gone: the Falnari captain and scant crew of the submersible in flooded forward compartments. At fifty meters and change, the submersible was a mid-sized Falnari vessel built for touring and very little else-certainly not for teetering on the edge of an abyss. All things considered and in a cockeyed way, she and Chakotay had been lucky-or cursed, depending on how you looked at it. There was emergency battery power (not much), and they’d found the controls to the trim tanks in this auxiliary command center aft of the boat’s sail and rudder, bleeding what little air remained. The command center was small, roughly nine meters long by six by five. Two hundred and seventy cubic meters of air, give or take, didn’t last a whole hell of a long time. So they didn’t talk, or move much. Even so, the air went awfully, awfully fast.

Meanwhile, her mortal enemy was there: contained by a jury-rigged forcefield because the damn sub leaked like a sieve. The water was a roiling wall that sparkled with quick, sudden flashes of eerie yellow-green light like millions of angry eyes peering at her from the dark. She stared at that black, weirdly malevolent water and into those eyes. Sensed them waiting, watching. Hungry.

“God,” she gasped, forcing out the word. “God, how I hate you.”

When she came to, it was so dark Crewman Marla Gilmore’s first thought was she’d gone blind. Her second was that she was back on the Equinox. Then she felt metal against her left cheek and realized that she’d crumpled against a bulkhead aft. And then she remembered: They’d been two hundred kilometers down, right dead center in that photodynamic column, and she’d just initiated her sensor sweep when everything went to hell….

Navigation went offline, and then we couldn’t change course; spun down further, lost maneuvering thrusters and crashed into that sea mound and Paris…

“Lieutenant Paris?” she said. Her voice was shaky and small, and made the darkness worse than it already was. “Tom?”

Her ears strained for a reply. Nothing. Dear God, if Paris was dead… Heart stuttering, she pushed to a sit and nearly passed out when a lightning bolt of white pain seared the space behind her eyes. Hot bile pushed at the back of her throat, and she doubled over, fighting not to be sick. Finally, she let out a slow breath, put ginger fingers to her scalp. Her fall of corn-tassel-fine hair was sticky with clotted blood. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she probed the wound. Not too bad, and she wasn’t bleeding much anymore. That was good.

She eased up again, more gradually this time. Given the tilt, she figured the Flyer’s deck was canted thirty degrees from true. That might be all right; dead sure a far sight better than a head-on. She’d been sitting behind Paris, but the impact had thrown her to the transporter bay aft.

She braced her back against a bulkhead, recalling the layout of the Flyer in her mind. Secondary science monitor to her left; twin consoles in the ship’s midsection, and a narrow ramp sloping down to the pilot’s seat. More light would’ve been nice. But even if the water on this planet hadn’t been so damned weird, they were too far down for the system’s sun to penetrate. The water outside the hull was very, very black and about as cold as water could be and