STAR TREK - TOS - 66 - From the Depths

STAR TREK

FROM THE DEPTHS

BY

VICTOR MILAN

POCKET BOOKS Now York London

Toronto Sydney bkyo Singapore

The sale of this book without Its cover Is

unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a

cover, you should be aware that It was reported to the

publisher as "unsold and destroyed." Neither the

author nor the publisher has received payment for the

sale of this "stripped book."

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

places and incidents are either products of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events or

locales or persons, living or dead, is

entirely coincidental.

An Original Publication of POCKET

BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon and

Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas,

New York, NY 10020

Copyright C 1993 by Paramount Pictures.

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of

a Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a

division of Simon and Schuster Inc., under

exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form

whatsoever. Fbbbr information address Pocket

Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New

York, NY 10020

ISBN 0-671-86911-6

First Pocket Books printing August 1993

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

POCKET and colophon are registered

trademarks of Simon and Schuster Inc.

Printed in the U.s.a.

For Joan-Marie

Prologue

Blinking iNT-O molten silver sunlight,

Aileea dinAthos emerged from the ranch house to find

her father sitting on the afterdeck, clad only in

khaki shorts. A cup of black chai steamed in his

hand. A white eyeshade shielded his face from the

glare of tiny Eris, burning a hole in the

blue-white sky to the east, not far above the ocean that

was their world. She stood on tiptoe, stretched arms

high above her head, hand locked on wrist, back

arching. She wore just a white thong swimsuit

bottom and a sidearm belt. Eris light fell on

her bare brown skin like a rain of needles. The sky

was clear but for a bloated gray worm of smoke

sprawled across the southern horizon and a bank of

slate-colored clouds to the northeast. That would

probably not last past noon, but like any true

Vare she was prepared to enjoy the moment to the fullest.

She came up behind her father then, making no

more noise than she customarily did, which was none,

despite the light fall of volcanic ash that dusted

the deck. Before she reached the edge of his peripheral

vision, he said, "You're up late. A body comes

by slovenly habits in the city." She laughed

and sat down on the arm of his chair. A mild sea

was washing over the white flotation cylinders that

supported the deck. The float rocked gently.

A soft breeze ruffled her shag-cut hair.

"If that's the worst habit I've picked up in the

city," she said, "we're all luckier than I

thought we were." Aagard dinAthos saluted his

daughter with his mug, which was white porcelain and

chipped at the brim. Much as it exasperated her,

he refused to throw it away. It had history, he

claimed. "It's never too late to come home.

Ranch life is hard, but-it's honest and clean."

"My work's honest, too," she said. She stood up

quickly and instantly regretted her comsharpness of tone.

Her father just grinned at her through his short grizzled

beard and nodded. She sighed. She knew her father

both loved and respected her. And she had been a

full adult for years, since her fourth birthday,

self-owning and self-reliant. She was seven and a

quarter now, but he had never let go of testing her.

It was A major reason she could never come home

to stay. When Mom was alive, it was different.

Aagard and Aileea dinAthos were made of the same

stuff. Sanabar comgentle, resilient, and utterly

unlike her husband or her daughter-had

been the safety rod that prevented them achieving

critical mass. One of the sudden ,terrible storms

that wracked the planet had washed

her from their lives, leaving a void that could not be

filled. There were many reasons they called the world

Discord. Aileea wandered near the rail, shaded her

eyes to gaze away to the smoke bank in the south.

Nearer to hand a pair of Hinds floated above a

raft, each on six red win , seeking the

life-forms crawling in and on gs the matted seaweed.

"New volcano?" she asked. "We never wandered out

this way when I was a kid." "Just sticking her head

above water," her father said, nodding. "That's why I'm

keeping the float ever so slightly under power, so that

we can steer clear of the plume. May even have to lay

on more thrust, bear a hair north"-he brushed at

the gray grit film that had accreted on the arm of his

chair- "so we don't have to go around wearing

respirators."

She nodded. "Maybe FlIscoot down that way

and have a look at our new arrival."

"Best take a flyer. She's an active

baby." As if to emphasize his words a rumble,

almost subliminally low-pitched, rolled in from the south

to vibrate in their bones and teeth. Before her

the surface of the Ocean of Discord bowed upward and

then broke with a quiet, insistent rushing, not twenty

meters from the ranch house. Water cascaded from the

mottled dark blue back of a prawn. The

Waverider crest had been laser-burned a

centimeter deep and a meter wide in the beast's

carapace, which was thick as battleship plate and

nearly as hard. Like most of Discord's native

lifeforms, the giant crustaceans metabolized and

made use of the, metals superabundant in the

planet's crust.

As always, Aileea was awed watching the beast's

back, ten meters wide at its broadest, rolling

like the top of a great wheel turning, to vanish again beneath

the waters. The house rocked to the swell of its

passing. The fifty-meter-long prawn was a sea

grazer, utterly nonaggressive, relying on

size and armor sufficient to deter even the

rapacious predators of the world called Discord. A

constant tone emitted by the household sonics,

inaudible to the ears of Aileea and her father, kept the

beast from approaching dangerously close. The

breeze blew the rank salty smell of sea

life to her, and something else, at once sweet and

pungent. "That's Old Lucy, isn't

it?" she asked.

"The matriarch herself."

"She's ready to be scraped."

"True enough. But she's just done spawning.

Didn't want to gripe her."

Out on the water the wavelets danced white-bright

like broken porcelain shaken on a table. A

scooter skimmed the surface, snaking a line of

froth across the shards. A ranch hand, riding herd on

the pod of giant crustaceans or inspecting the

pod-shaped robot 66 wranglers" that contained and

guided the huge sea beasts. The figure raised

an arm and waved. 6'Who is that?" Aileea

asked, waving back. "I can't make out."

"It's Gita, of course," her father said

gruffly. "You can tell by the reckless way she

careens around."

He eyed his daughter critically. "Your

childhood playmate, and you don't recognize the

way she rides?" Aileea felt her mouth

tighten. She was all too aware of the gap that now

yawned between her and the woman who had been a virtual

sister to her. Not that

she didn't get along with Gita. It was just that

they had ... grown apart, and she felt an

aching hollowness within. "It's been a long time since

I've seen her ride, Father." "You're losing touch

with where you came from, girl." She glared at him.

He regarded her with eyes sharp and black as

obsidian. "Come home, Aileea," he said in a

quiet voice. "You know the sea as well as any

Vare-you're a very part of her. And you'll soon pick

the ranching life back up, right enough."

He showed her a sardonic grin. "And I don't

think you'd need worry about growing bored. We see

action aplenty." A grimace flickered across her

face. like a cloud transiting the sun. "I've

seen all the action I everwant to, Father. And then

some."

She paced the slow-rolling deck, hugging herself.

"The Stilters come frequently?"

"Very much so, these days."

She turned. "But you're handling them?"

It was a foolish question, she realized at once.

Evidently. Or we wouldn't be here.

"Well enough," her father said. "But it's starting

to cut close- his

A shrill beeping sounded. He reached down,

picked up a palmreader, and frowned at the screen.

Aileea felt a chill run down her

spine. "The perimeter wranglers are picking up

something on sonar." It was not a question.

Her father nodded, murmuring quick commands into the

handheld unit. Cable of lightweight

hightensile-strength alloy played out of a housing

atop the

ranch house, allowing the radar eye slung beneath the

captive polymerized aluminum balloon to ride

higher, to see farther past the horizon. , "Speak

of Leviathan," Aagard dinAthos muttered when

he saw what it showed him. "Speak of the Devil in

the Sea. . .

"Get below," Aileea said sharply. "You can

control the wrangle rs from the command center."

"I can control them from here, too, daughter," he

said, rising to his full height, which was impressive

for a man of their Gens. He spoke without heat, but

firmly.

Her eyes fell away from his. It was a

measure of the strangeness of her chosen profession that

for a moment she had been unaware of the incongruity of

casually giving orders to not just her father, but any

Vare.

She didn't have a lot of time to stand around being

abashed; at once she was in motion, across the

deck in a flash of long slender legs burned dark

by the relentless sun, into the cockpit of her own

scooter, moored at the stem of the float. It

retracted its fragmentproof canopy to her word of

command. Despite her state of undress she slid

into the formfitting black seat without hesitation and

slipped on the lightweight headset. She had no

need of an emergency flotation vest or a breather,

but she might have reason to miss the envir onment suit

she was accustomed to wear to work, if only for its

armor. She cast off, started the electric

impellers cycling water through tubes that ran the

length of the tiny craft. As it picked up speed she

allowed herself the luxury of a glance back at the

float where she had been bom and raised. Her father still

stood on the after- 6

deck, arms crossed over his wiry-muscled

chest, staring off at the horizon over which the intruders

would soon appear. She caught a glimpse of

giant Mansur hulking in the doorway with his

cleaver in his hand, and then she turned her eyes forward

and gave the scooter full acceleration.

Head-up holos sprang into existence between dark

jade eyes and the windscreen, feeding her

simultaneous streams of information. Still

several minutes until contact; she left the

canopy back. She would feel the wind in her face

and her hair as long as she could.

"Waveriders," she said to the communicator.

"Who's out there this morning?"

"'Sleep late enough, MET" Gita came

back. "Almost too late. Who else?"

The others sounded off crisply Krysztof,

Lev, Haidar, Jasmine. Not just employees,

they were all stockholders in the ranch. It was their

home and their property they would be defending.

She would give instructions and they would follow them,

though they were Vares and fiercely protective of their

liberties. Not simply because she was the senior

stockholder's daughter, nor even because they were all

friends and Krysztof and Haidar had, like Gita, been

her childhood playmates. Hers was not the most

respectable profession, perhaps, but her expertise

at it was unquestioned.

"We have three bogies inbound on bearing two

ninety, speed one hundred fifty klicks per

hour," she said, reading the data relayed from the

wranglers and the household sensors. "Look like

hydrofoils, sixtytonners. Cossack

class."

The Stilters were getting smarter. In the past they

had favored conventional surface craft, larger and

full

of firepower but slower. That made them potent

foes-but also inviting targets for Vare missiles and

torpedoes. Their advisers from the stars were teaching them

well, it seemed.

comKofirlar, was snarled Lev. None of them knew

it had once meant "religious infidels"; to them it

signified "intruders, interlopers." It was the name

they gave their ancient enemies' new friends.

"They'll be there," Haidar agreed, "but just a

few. The crews will be Stilters."

Holding her lower lip between her teeth, Aileea

nodded. Haidar had the knack of looking at the

brightest available side of things, but he was most

likely right.

"Moment," Krysztof said in his slow, heavy

way. "I'm getting a return from Seventeen.

Vessel in the thousand-tonne range, same bearing,

fifty kilometers farther out."

"That'll be the carrier, the mother ship," she said.

"Keeping out of our range," Lev said.

"Do you blame them?" Haidar asked with a laugh.

"There are still seventy and more of them to the six of

us," Jasmine warned.

Gita's laugh pealed in Aileea's ears.

"Unfair odds," she said. "Perhaps half of us should

stay behind."

As they spoke the six were riding an intercept

course, spread out in an arc covering three

kilometers of ocean. The scooters were tiny

craft, without armor to speak of, relying mainly on

speed for defense. But like so many of Discord's

smaller life-forms, each carried a deadly sting.

She called for the data from Wrangler 17, quickly

skimmed it, brought up the feed from the robot's

camera. "That's a tender, all right. Looks like

a Goebbels. was She used the Vare codename for the

craft. She knew the Stilter name for it,

too-Vare electronic surveillance was good, much

better than Stilter countermeasures, and after almost

forty years of constant warfare Vare and Stilter could

translate one another's language. But the Vare

names were easier on the mouth comspeaking Stilter was like

trying to tie a half hitch with your lips.

She frowned. "The Goebbels is built to carry

four Cossacks. Stay alert, everybody-there

might be another one out there." "Should some of us hang

back and keep an eye out for him?"

Krysztof asked.

"We're too few as it is," Jasmine said.

"She's right," Aileea said. "Now be.

careful. We'll be in range of their rockets

soon."

Up ahead she saw them now, three notches of

white cut from the blue horizon, the bow waves of the

speeding hydrofoils. She brought up a magnified

display. Cossacks, all right, stubby wedge-shaped

hulls painted in jagged patterns of blue and

black and white to break up their silhouettes,

bristling with weaponry like a seaspine on a reef.

And clumped much too close together, in approved

Stilter fashion. She wondered if the Kofirlar were

trying to break them of that. She punched up a

private sideband. "Dad, did you catch that? There

may be a bogey unaccounted for."

"I'll be fine, child. I've been fighting

Stilters longer than you've been alive."

"That's Stilters, not these new friends of theirs, with

their alien technology and their energy weapons."

"Fah. They aren't superhuman."

"At least go below, please, Father? You'll be

safer below the waterline, and you can read your displays as

easily in the command center as on deck."

"I have no desire to be safe while my people

fight. Including my own flesh and blood."

She bared her teeth in a grimace of defeat.

It was an expression she'd had little use for in her

life-except for her dealings with her father.

"It's a free planet," she said wearily.

"That it is," her father said. "That's why we fight."

His image vanished.

There was a ripple of flashes as the starboard

hydrofoil launched rockets. Surges of water

foamed over Aileea's bare legs, left and right,

as she zigzagged her craft. Up here in the forties

of latitude the water was blood warm, but it felt

chill after Eris's hot caress. Its coolness

exhilarated her. The spray in her face and the moist

salty air and the nearness of danger filled her with

searing wild pleasure.

She looked across the sea, which was beginning to chop as

the wind freshened. There was Gita, canopy back,

her nebula of heavy dark hair flying free behind.

She seemed to sense her old friend looking at her and

raised a fist in joyous defiance. Aileea

grinned and waved back, but she was already forcing down the

sense of exaltation. It didn't do to get too

giddy. She wondered if Gita could control

her own exuberance in action. The rockets struck,

creating a brief flurry of geysers far astern of

Aileea's scooter. The outriders quickly called

in. She already knew the volley had fallen wide.

"Uh-oh," Haidar said from her right. "Someones

locked onto me."

"Go deep!" Aileea yelled.

Her old friend was already sealing his canopy as he

threw his craft into violent lurches Gita might

envy. He extended his dive planes and began

nosing under even before it closed. The scooter

vanished.

A second later water fountained from the roil of

water left by the submerging craft.

"Haidar!" No answer. She had come almost

abeam of the starboard "foil, swinging wide and then

curving toward the craft at full throttle. The

three bigger craft sped on toward the float. They

were after bigger game than the scooters. Aileea

raked the 'foil with her twin machine guns. They were

light weapons, too light for the work. The

hydrofoil showed no sign of damage.

Haidar's scooter burst from the sea like a

broaching volk, clearing the water in an upward

avalanche of spray. Aileea watched with

her heart in her throat, fearful that Haidar had

pushed his luck too far and was about to smear himself all

over the uneasy plane of the sea.

He struck down amid a splash like another

missile going off. Aileea saw his scooter begin

to drift counterclockwise. Then it straightened and

streaked away. A line of lesser spouts from a

Stilter automatic canon stitched across its

wake. Haidar's triumphant shout burst in

Aileea's ears.

An indicator in Aileea's head-up display

flashed, showing she had a lock-on. She quickly

triggered a missile of her own toward the nearest

'foil. An orange box surrounded it in her

display, allowing her to follow its flight. It

guided true, curving slightly to intercept the

craft.

At the last instant the hydrofoil banked hard

into its

port foil, throwing up a crescent ridge of

water. The missile blasted through the top of this bow

wave, skipped twice on the surface of the sea,

and exploded harmlessly half a kilometer beyond its

target.

"Damn!" Aileea cried, frustrated.

One thing the Stilters were good at was dodging. And,

unlike their bigger ships, the hulls of their new

hydrofoils were largely nonmetallic

composites, giving Vare targeting radars little

to bite on. So far she had had to give few

instructions-and now her comrades were doing something she

wouldn't dream of asking them to do. They had begun

darting back and forth in front of the 'foils,

dangerously close to the dazzle-painted hulls.

The 'foils were not notoriously stable beasts. Though

they dwarfed the scooters, a collision with one at

speed would tumble a 'foil if not tear it to pieces.

The bigger craft were slowing down and beginning to swerve

themselves to avoid their tormentors. Aileea turned

her scooter and raced to join their dangerous game.

Stilter gunners blazed enthusiastically away

at the scooters. Their targets were small, fast, and

agile, and the Stilters were outstandingly bad shots. As

they lost way, though, the 'foils" hulls settled

back into the water. It slowed them down, but it also

rendered them less vulnerable to impact. The vessel

she had shot at was headed away in a wide arc

west, possibly running, possibly circling to come

in again. For the moment it was out of the fight. Aileea

overtook what had been the central craft,

turned to cross its bow. Ahead of her she saw

Gita , actually steering toward the "foil, guns

firing. The hydrofoil lunged forward at full

power, trying to catch the outrider before its foils bit

and lifted it

out of the water again. Aileea shouted wordlessly as she

watched the big craft run her friend down. She

hurled herself at the 'foil, which was continuing

to accelerate, hoping to surprise the outrider@. and

break past them to the ranch float. Aileea streaked

down the vessel's flank, raking it fore to aft with a

shuddering burst of her guns, fighting to hold the

scooter steady against the recoil, The water seemed

to boil around her as the 'foil gunners opened up on

her with everything they had.

Then she was past, circling the hydrofoil's

stem, cursing that she was now too close for her

remaining missile to arm itself. She prepared for

another run along the central 'foil's other

side. It would expose her to the point-blank fire

of two enemy craft. She didn't care.

As she lined up for her pass something flashed through the

corner of her peripheral vision. The hydrofoil's

stem exploded into two pulses of yelloworange

flame.

Victory cries rang from'her

communicator. She at heered to port and let her

scooter lose way as the hydrofoil began

to settle by the stern. Long-legged figures darted the

canting deck in panic, tumbled, thrashing, in the

water. Later she would see to rescuing

survivors-if a later happened. Half a

kilometer astern of the burning 'foil, dead between the

spreading legs of its wake, a single scooter

bobbed. "Gita?" Aileea said.

"I dove under the seaslug,"eaher old friend's

voice came back. "I guess I fooled him.

Fooled you, too, didn't IT" Aileea opened

her mouth, but her words clogged her

throat. "Some vacation, huh, Aili?" Gita

said with a laugh like a silver bell.

Lev uttered a harsh cry of triumph as the

third hydrofoil turned right about and fled. The

vessel Aileea had launched at, meanwhile, was

making good progress toward the horizon. "Good

job, people," Aileea said.

"Daughter," Aagard dinAthos's voice said,

"well done-was "It was Gita, Father."

"But I'm afraid it isn't over yet-was

The image of another hydrofoil

appeared in her display, transmitted from the float.

Beside it was a map, showing a blinking red dot

rapidly closing upon the steady white glow that

represented the ranch house.

"Father!" Aileea exclaimed, blasting power to her

impellers. "Why didn't you warn me?"

"You all were busy. I didn't want to distract

you." As he spoke he worked controls outside her

field of vision. At his back she saw

blue-white sky. He still stood on deck.

"Besides, I have the situation under control."

She felt her lips peel back from her teeth.

The other riders were lining up in a V formation,

trailing to port and starboard of her. They rode

flat out, bouncing off the wavetops like skipped

stones. It was a race to see who would reach the ranch

house first, scooters or lone "foil.

Aileea's eyes flicked desperately from

windscreen to display. Seven hundred meters,

STAR TREK - TOS - 66 - From the Depths

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