Sonya Gomez came back to the universe slowly. Echoes of the Big Bang rolled around inside her head. Flashes of formless light slowly took shape as her consciousness struggled against the cobwebs that entangled it. Like a ship fighting against the clutches of an inescapable gravity well.
Seizing on this thought, her mind brought her back to the Demon.
There had been a distress call, she remembered. A subspace signal degraded so badly that she and Mor glasch Tev narrowed it down to ninety-three years of broadcast travel. Impossible. Or so they thought, until Captain Gold ordered the U.S.S. da Vinci into action and brought the crew up to the edge of a nearby black hole. The Saber-class ship trembled and shook as it resisted the Demon’s gravitational pull, staring down into that black, baleful eye. And nestled deep within the gravity well, across the photon sphere and close—so close—to the event horizon, they discovered the Resaurian space station.
Sonya’s team of Starfleet engineers set immediately to work on the problem. Any ideas that the station had accidentally fallen into the clutches of such a monster were quickly disproved by discovering a gravitational anchor holding the station in place. It had been intentionally set within the black hole, for whatever reason, and now it was in trouble. The distress call originated with the station, crawling up its anchor line with stubborn resiliency. Sonya and Tev had collaborated on a method to send an away team to the station and return it with any survivors.
The plan had been half-perfect.
Tev’s half, no doubt, as the Tellarite would certainly explain smugly if she ever made it back to the da Vinci.
Sonya groaned. Whether from her prediction of another insufferable lecture by her proud subordinate or due to the painful jog of footsteps that pounded through her brain, she couldn’t be certain.
Wrenched back from the abyss of memories, Sonya opened her eyes and tried to sit up and reached for her phaser, all at once. The result was not pleasant. Pain hammered at her temples. Her arm slipped out from beneath her, tingling with numbness, and she collapsed back against the cold steel deck, striking the side of her face and shooting fireworks off behind her eyes. About the only thing she accomplished with her action was a brief glimpse of one of her captors.
Resaurian. One of the snakelike beings her team had discovered living on the station. So far she had seen Resaurians with coral red scales, others with greenish black, and even one of dull gold. This one had looked pale blue—almost an Andorian coloring—and sat-stood with typical Resaurian posture, resting back on a thick tail and using thin legs for tripod stability.
Sonya also thought it had looked a good deal smaller—only three or four feet tall—but that was hard to tell from the floor.
Cautiously this time, she opened her eyes. No one.
She lay on a cold steel floor, her face bruised and aching along her left side. The deck was filthy with a thick dust of dried skin from Resaurian shedding mixed with metal granules and filings. The sound of footsteps and the scraping brush of scales against deckplate came from behind her and above her, and every few moments the entire station trembled a deep shudder. Her tongue felt swollen. She dry-swallowed several times, tasting old blood.
Still alive, though. Always a step in the right direction.
She stared into the open bay of an old transport lift. Somehow she simply knew the lift shaft ended behind a welded set of doors on the station’s bridge. Near where she had been, her team working with the da Vinci to haul the station out of the black hole. The doors had blown inward.
Weapons fire.
Shouting.
P8 Blue had been knocked across the room and Sonya had…she’d…
Stop this, she ordered herself. What do you remember? What did you see?
Very clearly she recalled the beam-over, materializing in an open area near the station’s bridge. Her seven-member team had been surrounded by Resaurians with makeshift weapons: plasma torches and crudely made lasers.
Domenica Corsi, the da Vinci’s chief of security, must have given a signal, because Rennan Konya slipped forward to incapacitate one Resaurian before anyone else was aware of what was happening. The fight ended fast and decisively, with the Resaurian leader, S’eth, finally regaining control of his people.
A mistake, he promised, welcoming the rescuers and putting the Resaurian prisoners to work alongside Sonya’s S.C.E. team.
Political prisoners. S’eth had been quick to point out the difference.
“We were free thinkers,” he’d said. “Progressive diplomats, teachers, and engineers. The Council quaked in their nests when our eggs hatched.”
A fact which Captain Gold later confirmed through his dealings with a Resaurian vessel on the outside of the black hole. Twelve hundred, culled out of the population and anchored within the Demon eight hundred years ago, kept sterile by an additive in the food supply. The hidebound Resaurians had banished a new generation’s leadership to this limbo existence, thinking to preserve their way of life by enforcing a “traditionalist” agenda.
S’eth had shown the engineers the station’s upper levels. Rigging a way to contact the da Vinci, using a relay system of probes set out by Tev, a plan had been formed. Two plans, actually. The first, hers, had involved sliding the da Vinci along the gravitational anchor, bringing the vessel down into the Demon to bump shields with the station and transport survivors aboard. It would have taken several trips, with over a thousand lives to save, but possible. In the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, a can-do attitude was not just a help. It was required.
Tev, of course, lived and breathed that ideal. He one-upped Sonya’s plan by coming up with a way to uproot the station’s gravitational anchor from outside the black hole, and then use it like a lifeline to simply haul the station up and out.
Simple. Direct. Brilliant.
Disastrous, as it turned out.
Everything had gone wrong so very quickly, it was still a jumble in her head. Her team’s efforts to keep a stable field around the station had failed as power relay stations blew under the stressed load. The anchor slipped, caught, and then slipped again.
And then the attack came.
No other explanation. The old, welded-shut doors had burst inward—under directional charges, she guessed—and Sonya had been caught in the concussive force. After that, it all turned hazy.
She remembered the shouts. Seeing Konya swept back away from an arcing panel…and Corsi going down under an assault of weapons fire.
Hands grabbing at her shoulders and legs. Lifting her. Carrying her into the old lift.
Taking her prisoner.
“What kind of mess have we fallen into this time?” she asked aloud, her words breaking inside a parched throat.
“Very bad mess,” a soft voice hissed from behind and above.
She hadn’t expected an answer. Especially one from so close. Sonya blinked hard, banishing the last of the fog from her vision and thoughts. With a great deal of effort she rolled onto her back.
A Resaurian crouched over her, looking very tall and unhealthily thin, with mottled, red scales and dry, dead black eyes. She felt at her hip. No phaser. “But I’m still alive,” she said aloud, as if confirming that fast.
“Yesss…” The Resaurian nodded. “But not for much longer,” he said, reaching down for Sonya. She tried to fend him off, but he was quick, striking down to grab her under both elbows, hauling her to unsteady feet.