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  #5: Interphase Book 2 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

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  #8: Invincible Book 2 by David Mack & Keith R.A. DeCandido

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  #22: War Stories Book 2 by Keith R.A. DeCandido

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  #24: Wildfire Book 2 by David Mack

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  #31: Ishtar Rising Book 2 by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels

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  #34: Collective Hindsight Book 2 by Aaron Rosenberg

  #35: The Demon Book 1 by Loren L. Coleman & Randall N. Bills

  #36: The Demon Book 2 by Loren L. Coleman & Randall N. Bills

  COMING SOON:

  #37: Ring Around the Sky by Allyn Gibson

  #38: Orphans by Kevin Killiany

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2004 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

  This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-7434-7610-7

  First Pocket Books Ebooks Edition January 2004

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  www.SimonSays.com/st

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  Acknowledgments

  The authors would like to thank the following people who contributed to making this story happen.

  Dr. Robert J. Nemiroff, our Science Officer, for his outstanding “virtual trip” to a black hole (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.html), his patience in answering our questions, and the very cool spreadsheet on gravitational effects at distance.

  Keith R.A. DeCandido for his support and tireless work. Marco Palmieri for the hand-off introduction to Keith and the Starfleet Corps of Engineers.

  Our families who put up with all the science and technobabble. We just can’t help it.

  Chapter

  1

  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.

  Footsteps!

  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 bla
ck 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.

  “Not unless you do as Es’a says.”

  Chapter

  2

  The backsplash of gravimetric waves continued to pummel the da Vinci. A tough vessel, able to weather a harsh pounding, the ship nevertheless felt the immense stress as the Demon attempted to wrench it from its position and pull it down to oblivion.

  Tev snuffled, his fingers dancing over the console. Only five minutes ago he’d faced the specter of failure. When the station’s gravitational anchor had slipped from the da Vinci’s grasp, he’d considered it the low point of his otherwise bright career. Captain Gold’s quick action, taking the ship deeper into the black hole’s embrace, had given him a second chance. Instead of grabbing at the anchor again, which just was not possible, he’d used a modified dekyon beam to “spear” the anchor into place. A tense and troubling moment.

  One he would never face again if he had any say.

  He leaned forward against the console to help balance against a particularly harsh wave that slewed the ship one way and whipped it back another. Even Tev found it difficult to believe the dekyon beam held. Then again, Tev found it difficult to believe most of what had occurred in the last short while. He’d never been in such dire straits, with ten things demanding his attention and all of them critical to success. His mouth felt like sand had been scraped across his tongue and his eyes ached as though he’d been staring at an A6-class star without polarization filters.

  “What have you got for me, Tev?” Captain Gold’s voice interrupted. Tev continued to stare at his monitors, drawing their information like a poison from a wound: analyzing, detecting, compartmentalizing, scrutinizing. However, the more he looked, the more he realized that to fix an error, he might have made a worse one.

  “Tev?” The captain’s voice rang loud, filled with all the years of command at his disposal. The Tellarite blinked once, and looked up at the captain.

  “What?”

  Gold slowly stood and walked over to within a foot of Tev, an amazing feat considering the ship slewed twice. “Tev, I need you here. Now. The ship needs you. My people on that station need you. You stopped the station falling; now I need to know how to pull us back out.”

  The physical intrusion of the captain into his space, along with his rude comments, simply didn’t scratch Tev’s exterior. Only the tone of voice and the look in Gold’s blue eyes left an indelible mark. Later he would admit (only to himself) that at that moment, Gold had had a more commanding presence than any Tellarite officer he’d ever served under.

  Tev blinked, his coal black eyes giving none of this away. “I had to reroute power from the rear shields, Captain, but by increasing the dekyon beam threefold, we seem to have ‘speared’ the anchor in place.”

  “If it’s speared in place, how can we pull it out? If you unspear it, won’t that simply allow the anchor to slip once more?”

  “That is a problem,” Tev admitted. “Though I believe I’ve found an answer.” He didn’t mention that he still believed even this answer to the problem would only make it worse in the end. The proverbial cure that is worse than the disease.

  Gold stared hard at Tev. “Out with it.”

  He’d simply waited for a command. Why had the captain’s tone changed? “I’m going to attempt to split the dekyon beam into two streams. The first will stay attached to the anchor, while I’ll attempt to spear a second beam into subspace .0025 light-seconds farther above the photon sphere than the first beam. I will then remodulate the beams, creating a synchronic sine wave that will merge the two beams. Provided the modulation is correct, the wave will merge the first beam to the second, not the other way around, and leverage the station and anchor approximately seven hundred fifty kilometers farther out of the gravity well. Obviously this will need to be repeated numerous times; I should be able to increase the distance between the two beams before merging, the higher above the event horizon I drag it, accelerating the process.”

  Only after finishing did it dawn on Tev that he’d actually used an if/then statement. For the first time since his cadet days, he’d give
n a qualified answer about whether the modulation of the dekyon streams would be successful. He realized with irritation that if Commander Gomez had been present, she would have already verified his findings. With so much splintering his concentration, such a confirmation would have been welcome, even from her.

  “Bootstrapping. Gevalt. Only you would find a way to bootstrap a station out of a black hole.”

  What did a boot—or a strap for that matter—have to do with what he’d just said? He raised his bushy eyebrows, continued. “Captain, the only real issue is one of power. I already had to redirect most of the power from the rear shields just to increase the dekyon beam enough to spear the anchor. To create two streams with sufficient intensity for our needs, I’ll need to divert most of the power from all the shields, as well as drawing from life support.”

  The captain paused and glanced toward tactical, where Piotrowski had relieved Shabalala after the latter had been taken to sickbay. The tactical officer had been thrown into a bulkhead by the wash of gravimetric waves after they (admit it, Tev, after you!) had lost the anchor. Tev knew what the captain had to be thinking. If the shields were lowered to such a level, it would leave them open to a possible attack by the Resaurian ship.

  After a review of the data, Tev no longer believed that the Resaurians had tried to disrupt the first rescue attempt. A failure on the station also fit the circumstance, and additional data pointed more strongly toward that solution. Still, the aliens had shown themselves unhappy with the da Vinci’s interference, and the fact was that dampened shielding might tempt them into a permanent solution. Gold would be laying the vessel bare for the fire and spit. Tev didn’t envy the captain at this moment.

  Not at all.

  The ship lurched and yawed as though it had struck a sandbar; only the lightning quick reflexes of the captain in snagging the edge of Tev’s console kept Gold from stumbling. The rest of the crew had strapped themselves fully into place after realizing the inertial dampers simply could not compensate for the awesome forces being unleashed by the black hole’s backsplash. Even so, Gold still found his feet almost above Tev’s head for a moment, before he dropped like a stone to the deck and stumbled to one knee.