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!”