“I can’t feel them! I can’t feel any of them!”The memory of the panic in Troi’s voice went through her again like an icy knife. She shoved the feeling away and considered her prospects.

  The drop to the jungle floor was not sheer. In fact, were she simply to let herself fall, she could be assured of having every bone in her body shattered and her flesh torn by the innumerable serrated brambles, vines and leaves she would hit as she fell.

  The way across the top of the canopy was far more treacherous. She might make a go of leaping and swinging from stalk to stalk, but eventually a vine would snap in her hands or her feet would slip on a mossy bough and down she would fall.

  Every scenario eventually put her on the ground, and in mostly unpleasant ways. So, after deciding which way was east and fixing it in her mind, down she went. Better to get there on her own terms.

  It was dark on the forest floor, the entire area suffused with that same gloomy twilight that seemed to permeate places like Ferenginar and Berengaria VII. It was cooler on the bottom as well. She lost her jacket fending off the attack of some large multilegged lizard and now felt its absence acutely.

  Mites and other unknown creatures flitted and skittered in the hidden reaches, and there was a sort of deep moaning sound-animal or artificial, she didn’t know-that rumbled through the area periodically. For all of that, Vale was alone.

   East, she reminded herself. There was no reason to go that way specifically. She just felt better walking-all right, trudging-through lichen and forest muck toward the light, even if the source was hidden behind the seemingly endless stretch of purple jungle.

  It didn’t make sense. Once her body got used to navigating the wild but fairly predictable contours of the jungle floor, her mind was free to drift without impeding her progress.

  Somehow, she knew, this was Orisha. There had been a range of mountains in one of the visual signals they’d managed to decipher that was identical to the one she’d seen from the canopy.

  The strange energy mass hadn’t contained a new world but had served as some kind of shunt, bridging the hundreds of millions of kilometers to the planet in an instant. But what explained such a phenomenon? Was it natural or artificial? How had it formed?

  In a way that was good news. They had made it to shore more quickly than they had anticipated, but what they found there did not match the data they’d collected.

  Orisha was, at least in part, an industrial society. She had watched the snippets of visual data Troi and Modan had culled from the bizarrely warped signal bleeds. Granted there was no real pattern to any of it; they had been watching three to five seconds snipped from moments isolated from what could have been hundreds of years of signal bleed. It was a sure bet that they’d missed a lot; certainly they had missed all the subtleties that must be present in a society this large.

  There were still things they had thought they knew for certain, and yet, now that she was here, none of them had been borne out.

  Where were the cities? She had seen something that resembled one in one of the snippets. It had been a gathering, Troi supposed a religious gathering, of a few thousand Orishans in some sort of open arena, with a night sky and something like skyscrapers clearly visible in the background. Granted the Orishan architecture-a strange admixture of familiar constructions, the same woven metal she’d seen on the watchdog vessel, and massive blue crystals carved into useful shapes-was foreign to her, but some commonalities always arose no matter how alien the species.

  So, where were the cities? Where were the roads connecting the cities? Where were the signs that the Orishans had mined, farmed, or otherwise domesticated the natural resources of their world?

  Nowhere, apparently. This was as close to a pristine ecosystem as she had ever seen, and that couldn’t be if the Orishans had developed any version of high technology.

  Invisible cities. Warp energy for something other than space travel. Space travel for something other than expansion or exploration. Weapons powerful enough to wreak havoc on alien vessels, but which had clearly been designed without an inkling that the enemy might wish to protect itself or fire back.

  It was a puzzle all right, something Vale didn’t like normally. She was a fan of solutions, but in this context the puzzle kept her mind off the eventual concerns of her belly and the very strange thing she’d seen just before she’d blacked out.

   “I can’t feel any of them!”Troi had said, meaning the emotions of Titan’s crew. They all just vanished from her perceptions, switched off like three hundred fifty lights. There was only one thing that could have caused that, as far as Vale was concerned. One thing and one thing only. In view of the large black shape she’d seen being torn to bits in the energy storm, she had a very solid suspicion that her feeling was correct.

  Something was tracking her.

  She’d been trudging for about four hours by her reckoning without sight or word of the others when she noticed her shadow.

  There wasn’t anything she could put her fingers on exactly, beyond the gradual absence of animal noise in the surrounding jungle, but years as a peace officer had taught her to trust her instincts when her hackles rose even the slightest bit. Right now they were at full attention.

  Something was watching her and moving with her, a few meters beyond the densely clustered vines and leaves. Of course there would be predators in a place like this. Of course some of them would be big enough to give her trouble, especially considering the new scents her simian-descended body had introduced to this place and the amount of noise she made as she went. She could only hope she was too alien to be recognized as prey.

   Heartbeat slow, she told herself, remembering her survival training. Pace regular, body relaxed and calm.

  In a normal jungle, even one that was exceedingly lush, there would be bamboo shoots or tree branches or even stones she might use as weapons, but this was Orisha. The vines and leaves were either too spindly or too thick or too supple to allow her to make anything more dangerous than a length of rope, and the crystal formations, while certainly durable enough to cause damage, were also too solid to break or even damage with her bare hands.

  She was just thinking about maybe trying for some higher ground at least when the thing attacked. It was so fast she barely had time to react. It whipped out at her from her left side, barely disturbing the flora. In the glimpse she caught of it as she spun out of its path she saw something long and thick like a constricting snake but with thousands of tiny legs running in two rows along its belly.

  She hit the ground hard as it passed and looked up to find it had disappeared into the thick foliage the way a shark disappears into an ocean.

  There was a tear in her undershirt but not in her flesh, thankfully.

  The thing ripped out at her again, just as she was getting to her feet, this time giving her no time to dodge.

  She managed to get her hands up as it smacked into her, catching its head between them even as it bore her to the ground.

  It was a monster, all right, its skin a shifty scaly texture that modulated its color to match the plants around it.

  Its face, if you could call it a face, was a nightmare, little more than a gaping hole filled with multiple rows of tiny fishhook teeth. Its breath stank like a hundred corpses left too long under a hot sun, sweet and musky and full of blood.

  As it lunged at her, its throat let out an ugly gurgling sound as if it, rather than she, were being constricted to death.