TIERNEY AND BARNES were the first ones out the door into the jungle, and the first to get shot by the sniper.

Riker wanted to help Razka pull them back to safety, but the cruel pounding in his temples was too powerful. His skull throbbed with an inner violence that sent waves of nausea roiling through him. While Riker lay on the floor and fought to breathe, Razka pulled Barnes back into the doorway and checked his vitals. The grizzled Saurian looked at Riker and shook his head “no,” just as he had done moments earlier for Tierney.

He leaned protectively over Riker. “Can you walk, sir?”

Riker’s limbs were leaden, little more than dead weights anchoring him in the doorway. He tried to shake his head, but merely succeeded in lolling it awkwardly to one side. Razka helped him sit upright. “We can’t stay here, Commander. The base crew is coming out this way. Do you understand?”

Fighting against exhaustion, against the muggy wet heat, against the siren call of surrender, Riker somehow nodded.

“We can escape underwater,” Razka said. “Can you hold your breath for thirty seconds?”

Riker could feel the words inside him, but couldn’t get his mouth to make the sounds. His jaw was slackening, and his tongue felt swollen and dry. In a huff of foul breath he slurred out, “Don’t know.”

Eerie animal calls haunted the tropical night and mingled with the reverberating, overlapping Tezwan voices growing closer from inside the base. A fever-tone of tinnitis rang in Riker’s burning-hot ears. Razka wrapped his sinewy, scaled arms around him. “Don’t worry, sir, I’ve got you. Take as deep a breath as you can, and hold it till I say to let it go.”

Relax, Riker commanded his body. Breathe. Concentrating on the simple act of pulling air into his lungs, he inflated his chest slowly, measure by measure, until it refused to accept any more. Then, as he clamped shut his jaw and devoted all his will to holding that breath hostage, Razka pulled him across the muddy ground and into the warm, murky swamp.

It was like returning to the womb to find it polluted by a creeping, squirming foulness. Pulled along through the slime-laced shallows, he was concealed with Razka beneath a blanket of thick algal scum. Riker marveled at how blithely he’d halted the tides of his breathing, as if he could simply abandon the habit anytime he wanted. As if he could make life stop and permit him to recover from its relentless indignities—the shaming of his friends, the murder of his father, Data being robbed of his emotional soul. All these blows crashed over him like waves assaulting a beach, wearing him down by degrees, eroding his will with unforgiving repetition.

“Let go.” His breath bubbled out of him as his head broke the surface. Algae and angelhair water roots clung to him like a new skin. Razka leaned close over him, covering his elongated reptilian jaw with a taloned finger. “Shh,” he cautioned. He opened his medikit and loaded the last ampoule of medicine into the hypospray. Injecting it into Riker’s throat, he whispered, “You’ll be able to breathe a bit easier in a few moments.”

Razka slinked back into the murky water, leaving Riker propped in the cradling bough of a tree that reminded the first officer of a Florida cypress. “I’m taking out the sniper,” Razka said. “Then we can hide until the Enterprise comes for us.” As he submerged, he added, “Stay here.”

Unable to lift his arms, Riker ignored the specklike insects that swarmed silently around him, hovering millimeters above the water’s surface. Though his head was still racked with pain, his thoughts cleared slightly as he once again was able to draw a normal breath and revel in its sweetness.

Choruses of flinty grackle-squawks and rasping croaks struck up a maddeningly loud musical duel, until a deep and terrible rumble announced the destruction of the Mokana Firebase and preempted the competitive duet. The blast wave faded, leaving only faint insect noise in its wake…and then the angry whine of weapons fire.

Harsh voices barked orders in the night, almost drowning out the muted swush of bodies wading through the swamp. Crisp, blinding-white shafts of light slashed through the wild undergrowth, crisscrossing one another in the darkness.

He recoiled as a hand locked onto his wrist.

“Hurry, sir,” Razka said, firmly pulling him forward and down below the level of the search beams. “Follow me.” Riker’s legs wobbled like rubber with every step. He felt at every second as if he were about to pitch forward and sink. One of the Tezwans’ search beams fleeted over Razka’s back, exposing a fresh and gruesomely charred grazing plasma wound.

Riker stumbled as a new surge of vertigo robbed him of his balance and left him feeling like water circling into a drain. He spat out the swampwater that rushed into his mouth. Razka turned back and labored to pull him back to his feet.

“Keep going, sir,” Razka urged. Riker couldn’t answer him, not even to refuse; he had nothing left.

The Saurian leaned him against another tree, unsheathed his rifle, and hunkered down in front of him. He lowered himself into the swamp, until only the crown of his head and the muzzle of his weapon remained above the water, poised to strike. Riker listened for the approach of the enemy, but felt his focus soften as a soothing darkness took hold of him at last.

Riker awoke to the hard slap of a hand across his face. Two blurry shapes towered above him, silhouetted in the night by searchlight beams. “He’s alive,” said the medic who had hit him.

Finally, Riker thought. The rescue team’s here.

His delirious perspective swish-panned in all directions. Then clarity returned for a moment, sharp and bitter. His gaze settled on the charred corpse of Razka, who floated facedown in the swamp. A cluster of Tezwan soldiers poked and prodded the slain Saurian with the barrels of their weapons.

The command officer behind the medic sounded impatient. “We need to get to the rendezvous,” he said. “Just kill him.”

Pulling open Riker’s camouflage jacket, the medic pointed at Riker’s uniform collar. “He’s a high-ranking officer.”

The commander gave an irritated sigh.

“You know what to do.”

The medic slammed his rifle stock against Riker’s head, delivering the first officer back into the arms of oblivion.