propel themselves through the air. The small buzzfish (as Commander Vale had dubbed them) had swarmed in a bait ball that was half in and half out of the water, a writhing, glittering mass that functioned as a single entity, flowing and morphing with desperate speed like a Changeling under a phaser barrage.
Once, Eviku would have found that a thing of simple beauty, but now there was more ambivalence to the sight. The beleaguered buzzfish reminded him of Starfleet, mounting desperate action to fight off the Borg but having to sacrifice so many in hopes that some percentage of the whole could survive. He took comfort in the fact that the buzzfish shoal lived on after the feeding frenzy…but at what cost! He could not help but be reminded of Germu and how much he missed her. How he had never had the chance to say good-bye. Aili’s close call yesterday had left him shaken, afraid of having to bear another loss.
Now that the drama had subsided, he was content to try to put those thoughts aside. He and the others sat atop the Holiday ’s roof—which had been adapted to function as a deck of sorts—having a leisurely picnic lunch while watching the distant fireworks of a lightning storm on theperiphery of the superhurricane. It was nice to be able to relax on such an agreeable planet. Not only was Droplet nice and wet, and warmer than most of Arken II, but it had a good strong magnetic field as well. Normally he had to wear his anlec’ven , an inverted-U headdress made of black magnetic material, to prevent the disorientation Arkenites experienced when removed from the powerful field they’d evolved in. Down here, he could go without the headdress, something he could normally do only in his quarters with their built-in field generator. He felt a certain affinity for the animal forms of this world, which also had evolved with an innate magnetic perception, according to the scans and examinations of numerous sampled species. It was a valuable aid to navigation on a world without landmarks.
It was also agreeable to share a recreational moment with his crewmates again. He’d spent too much time in those quarters in the past few months, alone with his private grief. He took some comfort in the distraction of an enjoyably banal conversation with Commanders Vale and Pazlar about last week’s parrises squares finals, a recording of which had come in the last data burst from Starfleet.
But Vale trailed off in the middle of excoriating his opinion on the Izarian team’s defensive strategy, staring off toward a nearby thunderhead, one of the storms on the outer edge of Spot. “What is it?” he asked, turning to follow her gaze. But he saw nothing; human eyesight was considerably better than his.
“I’m not sure.” She deliberately moved her eyes back and forth, up and down. “Not just a floater in my eye. Anybody have a pair of binoculars?” she called down the hatch in a casual yet authoritative tone. She reached down, andseconds later binoculars magically appeared in her hand. She stood and searched the sky with them. “There it is. Hey, it is a floater, just not in my eye. An inflated, translucent sack, like a jellyfish, but with some more substantial components hanging from the bottom. Reminds me of an old-style weather balloon.”
“May I see, Commander?” Eviku requested.
Vale handed him the binoculars. “Better look fast before it drifts inside that thundercloud. There.” She tried to point it out to him; with his limited vision, it took a few moments to focus on it even with help from the binoculars’ readouts.
“I see, it’s—aah!” He winced as a bolt of lightning went off right in his line of sight.
“What?”
Eviku blinked, temporarily blinded. “That…scope needs better filters. I may need to see the doctor.” The thunder arrived in the middle of his sentence. “It appears the creature’s at the mercy of the wind. Getting sucked right into a low-pressure region.” He was starting to see
Jimmy Fallon, Gloria Fallon