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.