She was still comparing her results to Tan Bao’s original scan of McLellan’s injury when the technician looked up from the analyzer and swiveled his chair to face her. “It’s a living crystal matrix,” he said with amazement. “A mineral composite with anabolic properties.” He added more ominously, “Just like what the Vanguard team found in that thing they brought back from Erilon, except…alive.”
“That’s not all, Tan,” Babitz said. “It’s spreading. Two hours ago, this substance penetrated two millimeters up her thigh. Now it’s twenty-two millimeters along. If it continues at this rate, it’ll start hitting vital organs in less than thirty-six hours. And in forty-eight…she’ll be dead.”
Theriault had lost any sense of how long she had been in the water. It had carried her through multiple sets of rapids, across clusters of half-submerged boulders, over sudden plunges into rock-bottomed shallows. Her entire body was covered with scrapes and bruises.
Her fall from the cliff had seemed to happen in slow motion. Succumbing to gravity’s pull, her senses had sharpened, and she had seen all the vines between her and the river. Her hands had grasped in vain at every one within reach, and they all had snapped under the force of her plummeting body.
Striking the water had been a stunning blow. Disoriented from the impact and the irresistible pull of the current, Theriault had spent several seconds fighting her way to the surface. Her first instinct had been to swim for one bank or the other, but the rocky walls of the winding ravine had offered her no handholds, no means of pulling herself from the water.
Little by little, the clifftops had drawn closer, the ravine had narrowed, and the water had gained speed. Now it emerged from the rocky gorge into a lush rain forest of azure. The river was wider here, and though Theriault now could see flat riverbanks on either side of her, she was too weak to fight across the current to reach them. It took all her flagging strength to keep her head above the surface, to gasp for breath without swallowing the silt-rich water.
The jungle was eerily quiet. There was no sound except her own labored breath and the splashing of her exhausted limbs. Have to conserve my energy, she reminded herself. Rest before I hit more rapids. She took a deep breath, then closed her eyes and rolled facedown into the river. Relaxing her arms first and then her legs, she let her limbs dangle beneath her as she floated limp in the current, letting it take her without a fight. After struggling for so long, she relished being able to rest her weary body, even if just for a minute.
When she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she rolled gently onto her back and exhaled, drew another long breath, then returned to her “dead man’s float” pose, drifting downstream like a corpse. Every time she held her breath she counted the seconds carefully to sixty. Then she counted the minutes each time she rolled over for a breath. Fifteen minutes passed quickly, then thirty minutes. She used the time to plan her next move. Once I reach shore, I should follow the river back, she decided, recalling her survival training. The captain will send someone to look for me, and that’s where they’ll start.
As her strength recovered, she took the opportunity to make an inventory of her equipment. The strap of her tricorder had broken shortly after her first run-in with submerged rocks in the rapids. Her fingers found only an empty loop of fabric where her communicator should have been. Only her small hand phaser was still securely in place. Figures, she thought. My least favorite piece of equipment is the only one I’ve got left.
Rolling onto her back at the thirty-five-minute mark, she started to wonder if she might be recovered enough to make an attempt for land. Then she heard the soft wash of white noise getting louder ahead of her. Twisting herself to face forward, she saw light low on the horizon and realized that the landscape was beginning another steep decline. She was drifting toward another run of rapids, and there would be no time to reach land.
The water around Theriault became turbulent, and where the river narrowed it churned itself white with violence and swallowed her whole. Adrenaline coursed through her body as she kicked and flailed against the water, unable to find air, unable to see, hearing nothing but the roar of water crashing over rocks and against itself.
Then she ricocheted off one enormous rock, caromed off another, scraped roughly along the bottom, and broke free for a fleeting moment. She had just long enough to pull one desperate breath of air and realize that the river was racing down a steep gradient and disappearing into a broad, cavelike opening in the side of a hill.
Panic fueled her frantic attempts to defy the current and strike out for the riverbank, which was dozens of meters out of reach. A dip of the riverbed dunked her underwater, and her head struck a rock as she was towed past. Dazed and blinking painful colors from her vision, she suddenly found herself in the dark. The river had gone underground and taken her with it.
No more points of reference, no more parallax along the riverbank to gauge her motion. Pure blackness engulfed her, frigid, merciless, and endless. Inside the subterranean channel the roar of the water echoed back upon itself, a deafening wash of noise so mighty that she no longer heard her own frightened splutters and gasps.
She kicked downward, hoping to hit a shallow patch or a sandbar, anything that might let her stop her inexorable forward motion, but the river hurtled through the stygian depths, its embrace deep and cold. Keeping track of time was a lost cause now. There was only fear and darkness. Then, as she bobbed upward for air, her head collided with the rocky roof of the cavern. Reaching up, she felt it close above her, slick with slime. The river’s passage through the underdark was running out of breathing room.
There was no way to hang on to anything. Every surface she grasped was coated in the same slippery mess, and the roof grew closer by the minute. Theriault kicked as hard as she could to keep her mouth and nose above the water, but the tunnel dipped and curved without warning in the blackness, and she had to cough out one mouthful of water after another. With the space above her narrowing to a sliver, she sucked in one full chest of air, then submerged and let the current carry her away.
Watery silence, no air to breathe. Just the rapid beating of her own heart growing slower as her lungs filled with carbon dioxide. Holding in the expiring breath was too much effort. She let it go slowly, a few bubbles at a time, reluctant to exhale because she knew that her body would reflexively try to inhale immediately afterward…and she knew that would not be possible.
One bubble at a time, one breath escaping, then another, like a prison break from her lungs. Letting go of her last breath was a relief, a surrender, an admission that it was time for the end to begin. A final push, and her chest was empty.
She resisted. Tried to will herself not to breathe in. Squeezed her eyes and prayed that she could just fade away without having to feel the water invading her lungs.
Her chest expanded, and she choked down on the reflex, fought it. It was too strong. Defying her will, her body breathed in. The water flooded her sinus, gagged her, assaulted her. A spasm sealed her airway, and water poured down her throat into her stomach. Terror overcame her training, and she kicked and twisted wildly, desperate to discover some hidden pocket of air, irrationally hoping to find one more fresh breath with her hands.
Involuntarily gulping water, she lost all sensation of her body. Darkness melted into vivid colors, bursts of turquoise and crimson, emerald and chartreuse. A siren’s song called to her.
Then she was free, released into open air.
She was falling, shot out of the stone tunnel by a jet of water and plummeting beside an ivory cascade of spray, toward a cerulean pool fifty meters below. Unable to scream or even breathe through her spasm-sealed airway, she marshaled her wits long enough to tumble into a feet-first position, pinch her nose shut, and cover her mouth before she made impact.