“We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.”

Gene Roddenberry, (1994)

 

The Poisoned Sea seemed to stretch on for eternity.

Even the vast Girdlecity, that had remained on the horizon to their stern, a constant broken bracelet stretching as far as the eye could encompass, had long disappeared from view leaving on the turbulent roil of the caustic grey – green seas with their filthy, foamy wave – caps for company.

After the serried devastation of the city of the dead, the bleak endless desolation of the northern oceans brought little cheer.

For Lieutenant Commander Lane Hanley, the chance to set sail on an ocean voyage was usually a cathartic pleasure that the Starfleet officer enjoyed as a pleasant diversion during shore – leave. Whether manning the helm of a Sunjammer in orbit or hauling aboard the bowline of a surface ship, she loved to sail.

When the remains of the away team and their single Romulan Republic survivor from the lost RRN Selquar had reached the ‘edge’ of the skeletal ruins of the great metropolis that had once spanned nearly the entire equator of Hectate#7b, relief to be free of the city after 4 days of perilous & difficult travel, with the ever present dangers of radiation and fatal storms, structural collapse and the prospect of encountering yet another reactivated war – drone, to see the ocean stretching on to the horizon had almost been a welcome joy.

Yet beyond the barrier of the great body of water, to the north lay their destination. The location of the command & control bunker that had once housed the military high – command of the long – dead Northern Compact forces; one of the two factions whose mindless war had signaled the end of their civilization and reduced their planet to a Hellworld.

There, presumably buried somewhere within, was a repository similar to that that Professor Venrax and the survivors had located under the Girdlecity,  that stored the personalities and memories of those warmongers via memory – engram technology.

A treasure trove of death & destruction from a bygone age that the Romulan Free State Warbird in orbit high above them, thought worth the cost of igniting a possible shooting war over with the other races that had flocked to reap the secrets of the Shackleton Expanse.

Yet to get there, Hanley and the away team had to first solve a far more immediate puzzle. How to travel from their current point on the equator of a world with a massive circumference of 278976.87 miles, covering nearly 44, 401 miles up to the arctic circle of this blighted world, without the technological advantages of transporter technology or the USS Kirk’s shuttlecraft, on a world where the last technology had ceased to function nearly 10,000 years ago?

In the end, it was a satisfyingly low – tech solution that presented itself as the solution to this problem.

Sail.

After an extensive search of the waterfront, in what appeared to have once been the remains of a marina that hosted small pleasure – craft and recreational vehicles, the team had happened on a small catamaran – type watercraft that Lane (being the only member with any actual nautical experience) determined may serve their needs, in the absence of anything more substantial.

Despite millennia of neglect, the twin – hulls were of a conventional design and manufactured from a composite material that seemed to have withstood the march of time, partly due to the conditions in which it had been stored, protected from the ruinous elements that scoured the surface of this world. Similarly, the lines and pulleys that actuated the sail sheets were made from a synthetic that had not atrophied over the course of years and seemed sound enough.

The sail itself had presented more of a problem. Whilst materially intact, here and there in places falling structural members from the decaying roof had pierced the sheeting of the crafts single – masted sail. It was Chief Harvey who had come up with the ingenious solution of sacrificing one of the two deployable emergency shelters that each Starfleet EVA suit carried – cannibalizing its contents to create two crude patches to make the sails whole again.

The remaining emergency shelter was inflated and lashed to the central part of the hull, between both pontoons. Lane hypothesized that this may provide some respite from the stinging seas (ocean – acidification had transformed the entire planet’s oceans to a caustic nightmare) and the pervading cold conditions likely to be experienced as the travelled further northwards.

Unfortunately, the rampant contamination of the planet’s atmosphere and attendant radiation meant that the surviving members of the away team would still be confined to the fragile safety of their sealed suits, which were all showing considerable signs of dangerous wear from the planetary conditions, Federation & Republic alike.

If any one suit failed, that spelled death for its occupants.

As Lane sat on the gunwale of the catamaran, grimly grasping the tiller of the fleeting craft and using her suit’s internal locator to hold the fleeting craft on its northern – heading, the suit’s onboard CPU chimed soothingly with unhelpful updates on that very tenuous state of affairs.

++Suit integrity at 38%++

Whilst Lieutenant Harvey and Venrax took respite from the stinging spray and tried as rest as best they could with the improvised shelter, Lane risked further degradation of her suit with the sure stoicism of command. It had been her determination to put a stop to the Tal Shiar’s plans to restore the glory of the former Romulan Star Empire by mining the Repository for its secret, that had set them on this desperate course, so she saw it as her responsibility to man the helm and assume a larger portion of that risk.

The added advantage of using such a nautical – analogue was that the D’deridex Warbird that kept watch above the planet would have no tell – tell energy emissions to track and locate Hanley and her small band of survivors as they voyaged ever north into the uncertain jaws of danger.

The light was fading, blurring the distinction between angry, swollen grey skies and the undulating violence of swell that they navigated and Lane keyed her suits auto-med unit to inject her with a dose of stimulant, in attempt to stay awake.

++Stimulant supply exhausted. Maybe try to sleep?++ The suit chimed unhelpfully and Lane was forced to grit her teeth and stare into the spray to reman conscious.

“Yeah, I’ll take that under advisement.” Lane grumbled sourly to herself as another wave washed over the deck, leaving a sizzling wash of bubbles that ate away at the paint on the pontoon nearest her. The weather on the contaminated ocean had thus far not been what one might call merciful but given the mammoth waterspouts that she had witnessed towering out from the deeps far to the east of their position, Lane was happy just to trim her sails and run ahead of the more truculent weather that threatened their course.

After five days in the suit, despite the CPU’s best efforts to combat the bacteria growing on her skin, the smell within such intimate confines was beginning to become ‘exotic’ to say the least.

In the gloaming light, the ice that had began to form on the mast and rigging cast a weird bioluminescent light that could have been the product of irradiated seas or something even more repellant. The fluid that occupied at least 87% of the Hellworld’s planetary mass was about as far from normal seawater as you could get.

Forcing her mind into activity to ward off the fugue of fatigue, Hanley tried to make stock of what she knew and what limited resources were currently available to her. Whilst it was an activity that gave her something constructive to focus on whilst she persevered doggedly towards their destination, it did little to raise her morale.

The USS Kirk was downed. Drowned under a lake of toxic effluent, the ship had been mortally – damaged by the ambushing D’deridex Warbird. Lane was unsure if their communication to Starfleet, moments previous to that event, had successfully sent through subspace, but she had to cede to Murphy’s Law and assume that it had not and help was not on its way.

At least so concealed, her ship was probably safe from being targeted from orbit.

That Lieutenant Nil was leading the repair efforts and with the assistance of Six of Eleven, Lane knew that, if anyone had a chance of restoring the ship to a condition where they could make orbit again, if those two officers were. Though what they might be able to do, if they were ever to attain such an orbit, badly damaged with the shadowy Free States vessel laying in wait, was anyone’s guess.

~”Maybe we’ll be able to get a message out to Starfleet. ~ She thought to herself as she peered into the darkness, the suit at least was helpful enough to switch to night vision mode, giving the undulant vista a sick – green hue that did nothing to improve its appearance at all.

~”At least we’ll be able to deliver our own epitaph before the Romulans blow us to smithereens with disruptor fire.~

For the briefest moment, Lane was sorely tempted to contact the Kirk and have Ensign Gaca use the transporters to speed her and her team on their way. But leapfrogging this most testing part of their odyssey would just expose more of her people to risk and (if the prognosis that Six had delivered about the damage to the Transporter held true) if there really was only one viable (if not safe) use of the system before it failed, then Lane would prefer to retain that option should her team need an urgent extraction away from whatever peril they may encounter at the bunker.

Perhaps it was because she was so occupied or the fact that her beleaguered EVA suit had steadily been losing more and more of its core functionality as it endured the continued assault placed upon it by the persistent forces of the Hellworld, but Hanley did not notices the massive, rubbery, ichor – dripping tentacle that broke surface immediately behind the catamaran and scythed through the air (missing the temporary shelter lashed to the deck by inches) and grasped the mast with determined force.

Whilst the war that had devastated the surface and the skies of Hecate#7b, thousands of years ago, had darkened the suns with its ash clouds and the resulting nuclear winter had steadily killed off all the plant and animal life that had not become extinct through long years of pollution and environmental decay; despite the foul soup of contamination that her oceans had become, deep down in the crushing abyssal-depths, some forms of life had survived and even thrived.

Lane’s eyes widened in shock as her suit began warbling a keening alarm (rudely waking Chief Harvey as a similar klaxon sounded in his own helmet) and the deck pitched and canted roughly to starboard as more and more thick, ominous tentacles exploded from the heaving sea, lashing out to grasp the flailing seacraft in their determined grip.

=^= “CONTACT ON THE PERIMETER! STAND TO!” =^= Lane bellowed over the comm – channel as she drew her handphaser and unleashed a searing stream of focused phasic energy at the tentacle that was even now constricting around the titling mast, incredible forces beginning to squeeze and crack the composite material.

The tentacle bulged and tensed as the scorching energy began to cut into the pendulous armature and its skin began to blacken, bubble and blister

Hanley had to throw herself to port, across the listing deck as another tentacle pinioned down into the tiller where she had just sat, smashing into the deck with a concussive shudder and a terrible high-pitched wail split the night.

Another bright beam of energy lanced out from the temporary shelter, as Chief Harvey burst forth and determinedly lay down a more impressive volume of fire with his Phaser – rifle. For each shot that landed home, the air seemed to fill with more and more of the frantically beating tentacles as they quested for a target to retribute.

Lane had to grab onto flailing halyard to stop from being bodily pitched into the acidic – sea as the deck pitched again and she thought that they may capsize, which would spell the end for all of them.

There, just a few scant feet from the pontoon to port, the ebullient surf parted and ran down the face of what could only be described as a nightmare of evolution.

What emerged from the threshing ocean around their small craft was a creature with the developmental ferocity to persevere to the top of a food chain where every organism was one as persistent and brutal enough to predominate a world that had killed off lesser organisms. Given ten thousand years to develop into the ultimate apex ocean-predator, the creature that held them execrably in its hungry grasp was a madman’s amalgam of Squid and Squalus.

Abyssal gigantism had encouraged growth of monstrous proportions and exotic mutagens had merged the Architeuthis species with other aggressive Chordata – phylum predators, resulting into a creature that was the hideous and brutal juxtaposition of something not unlike the worst aspects of the shark merged with the crushing strength of a giant squid.

Lane fired again and again at the creature, as the mast splintered and came tumbling down in a confusion of rigging and stuttering sail. Lane flinched as the leg of her suit seared and smoked where the caustic seawater surged & flooded the deck beneath her.

She looked into the face of true death, as the Proto-Kraken howled its infernal song of rage.