Rennan Konya, the Betazoid security man, leaned out over the dark, gaping shaft, one hand wrapped around the emergency ladder, the other holding a tricorder up to his face. Faint tones whistled and lights danced on the dark screen. The readings were faint, and might not have been much more than an interference spike peeking through the station’s dampening fields. They might also be life signs. Human.

Sonya Gomez.

A rope tugged at his waist. The lifeline Vinx held. “In a moment,” Rennan said. He leaned farther out over the abyss. A tremor shook the station, and the ladder trembled.

The rope tightened and hauled him away from the drop. Rennan felt the physical move coming at his shoulder, ducked, and sidestepped right, falling back into a ready stance.

“Easy, Konya.” Lieutenant Commander Domenica Corsi frowned, dropping her hand back to her side.

Vinx stood behind her, the sturdy Iotian still holding the safety line. Off to one side Fabian Stevens conferred quietly with P8 Blue. Stevens went back to work over his own tricorder, inputting data. The Nasat returned to her study of the lift mechanisms. She rose up on her back four legs, half-crawling up the wall to study the weld-cuts that had sliced open the doors.

“S’eth would like to speak with us. I want you there.” Corsi’s gaze strayed to Rennan’s hairline. “You should get that looked at.”

Reaching up, he probed carefully at the large swelling peeking out of his dark hair. Pain answered every light touch. Dried blood flaked off beneath his fingers. “I’m fine, Commander.”

The da Vinci’s chief of security looked torn between ordering him to see Dr. Lense and physically compelling him. Her rank gave her command with Sonya Gomez missing in action. She was also quite obviously spoiling for a fight. No Betazoid training was required to detect that. He saw it in the angry flush spreading out of her blond hair, her shorter breaths, and the hard set of her blue eyes.

She also might have the juice to take him. They worked out together occasionally, aboard ship, and so far his Betazoid touch had barely been able to keep pace with her reflexes and greater strength. But this was not the time or place for a contest.

“There’s too much to do,” he said.

She exhaled sharp frustration. “All right.” Backing off, she waited while he untied the safety line and handed it to Vinx. “Keep an eye on things,” she ordered the Iotian.

Vinx set the coil of line to one side, unslung his phaser rifle. “You bet, doll. I got the drop on ’em.” He took up a position near the two engineers, making sure that any nearby Resaurians could see him.

Rennan felt Corsi tense with the familiar address, an involuntary response to the Iotian’s freewheeling attitude, but she overrode the need to correct her subordinate here and now. Instead, she gestured Rennan to follow alongside her as they left the alcove.

The station’s bridge was still in shambles. The wounded sat against one wall, tended by Elizabeth Lense and one of the snakelike Resaurians. Blood stained the doctor’s uniform, though none of it apparently her own. Resaurians slithered back and forth, bringing tools and replacement parts to damage control teams. The station trembled again, and everyone stopped, looked down, as if waiting for the end to come. When it did not they rushed back to work. Panels lay out in the middle of the floor, away from antique workstations where Resaurians burrowed back into nests of wiring and conduit to reach damaged components. These stations had not looked in prime condition before the attack, showing many dark screens and jury-rigged repairs. Now, piles of smoking circuit boards and twists of blackened fiber-optic cable littered the deck. The ozone stench of electrical fires and suppressant powder hung in the air, left an acrid taste in the back of his throat.

Or maybe that was the taste of failure.

Everything had happened so fast. The power relay station blowing up into a fireball, throwing Pattie across the bridge. That was when Gomez went down. Rennan managed to dodge two Resaurians armed with crudely made cutting lasers, trying to reach her side, but a third swung a simple bar of metal into his path.

He didn’t duck quite fast enough.

“How much of a read do you have on the Resaurians?” Corsi asked, quietly. She nodded toward where S’eth directed repairs. The Resaurian leader stood near the main viewscreen, which looked out of the black hole’s photon sphere. Stars gathered in a small, intense circle in the middle of the screen. Bands of blue-shifted light marked each Einstein Ring. The rest: nothingness.

Rennan slowed, buying time to think. Explaining Betazoid training was difficult in most textbook cases. His position was more unique.

“My skill is in tapping the motor reflex area of the brain, not the thought process. I knew before that our ‘host’ was keeping something from us, and I communicated that to Commander Gomez, but he never exactly lied.”

“What does that mean, ‘never exactly lied’?”

“If S’eth believes what he is saying, even if he shades his explanation, I cannot distinguish between a fervent wish and the truth.”

“Wonderful.”

Corsi separated slightly from him, giving both of them free space in case sudden violence became necessary. Rennan wasn’t too certain that it would not. There was a great deal of hostility in the Resaurians now. And fear. He felt both in their muscle twitches and agitated pacing. The two never mixed well.

S’eth saw them approach, tucked his legs back and slithered over, meeting them halfway. Greenish black scales protected him from blunt-tipped nose to tail. His vulnerable underbody usually had a more emerald cast to it. Rennan saw that those scales had paled to a pea green. Shock, blood loss, or something else? S’eth had a shoulder wound from the earlier fighting, bandaged quite efficiently by Dr. Lense.

“Lieutenant Commander.” He bowed low, nictitating membranes rolling up to protect his coal-dark eyes. “Have you found any sign of your Commander Gomez?”

“Other than a blood trail and some impressive damage to the wall back there? No.” Corsi did not sound in any mood for diplomacy. “Maybe you should tell us what we’re up against, S’eth. Why did your people attack us?”

“Not my people!” He reared back, much like a snake preparing to strike. Rennan tensed, but S’eth simply rested back on a thick coil. “Es’a, the nest-breaker.”

The name sounded familiar. Rennan remembered hearing the Resaurian mention it before. “Maybe you should give it to us from the top,” he suggested, playing “good cop.”

S’eth hissed a long, drawn-out sigh. “For decades, our…we…thought to escape. Equipment was dismantled and reassembled. We learned. We planned. But the traditionalists were careful. Our theories always fell short of resources, and we slowly resigned ourselves to our fate. This became our world.

“Except for Es’a. He…was a young engineer, and insane. He would risk all our lives for any mad gamble to escape. His plan involves major alterations to the shield generator controls, which are all that anchor us inside the Demon. To prevent this, several decades ago we seized the bridge and many upper levels, including life support. Es’a and his followers control the lower levels—most of our hydroponics and our fusion reactors. We have a stalemate. We survive.”

“Yet you worked with us to escape,” Rennan said.

“You have outside resources. The risk seemed acceptable.”

Did it? Then why did S’eth’s muscles contract tightly as he said this? Rennan felt the Resaurian’s tension, but sensed no impending hostile action. He nodded, and Corsi asked, “Why did Es’a take Commander Gomez?”

“So that he too may control new resources. The nest-breakers will let us know his demands.” He ducked his head, in apology it seemed. “We will not bow to him. I am sorry.”

Rennan stepped on Corsi’s impending outburst. “So are we,” he said calmly, nodding his commander back and leading her away from the Resaurian leader. When she started to speak, the muscles in her jaw loosening, he simply shook his head. Not yet.

Not until they were back at the lift shaft. Vinx stepped back, letting them pass. Then he swung back on guard like some kind of brute enforcer, with a Starfleet-issue phaser rifle. Stevens and Pattie waited for them in the alcove. The sounds of repair from the main floor were slightly muted inside the alcove, and the smell of burnt wiring not so prevalent.

“What?” Corsi demanded shortly.

“He lied to us. For the first time I can be certain. Right there at the end. But I can’t say what he lied about.”

The intimidating blonde looked ready to march back in and wring answers from the Resaurian. “Is he dangerous to us?” she asked.

“Everyone is dangerous, Commander. You know that. It’s only a matter of what pressures set them off, and how they choose to act.” Rennan shook his head. “I am certain that he will not help us recover Commander Gomez. We will need to mount our own rescue attempt.”

Corsi gestured to the engineers. “What have you got?”

Pattie shrugged. For a Nasat, the gesture involved multiple sets of legs and a lowering of her antennae. She had examined the lift doors carefully, but had very little to report. “Obviously the doors were cut away,” the structural specialist said. “Some kind of torching compound, hot enough to cut through steel but without the concussive force of shaped charges.”

Stevens agreed. “I saw it come down. Right in the middle of the attack.” He ran fingers back through his short-cropped black hair. “Welding sparks drew fast lines around the entire edge of the door.”

Rennan had seen the same. He’d been on the move, to assist Pattie. If he’d veered over in time…

“Fabian?” Corsi asked. “What about the station? Where are the repairs?”

“No one is saying much, so it’s hard to say.” That had to be hard for the engineer to admit. “The damage is extensive. There are many redundancies built in, but the way the power grid selectively blew…I don’t know. I’d almost swear it was done deliberately.”

Corsi nodded. “The timing of the assault came right on the heels of that first power rupture. It certainly is suspect.”

“Well, we have some time,” he said. “It looks like the anchor grabbed hold again. But the station’s trembling has them worried. We may be slipping farther into the black hole. Or the shields may be failing, which means that gravitational tides will rip us apart. We’ve no word from the da Vinci, and zero fail-safes if that anchor gives way.”

“We have to assume that Captain Gold has the rest of the ship bent toward rescuing us. In the meantime, I want options. How do we reestablish contact? What can we do on our own? S’eth mentioned that the lower-decks faction had a plan to use the shield generators in a plan to escape. Look into that.”

“What about the commander?” Pattie asked. Like Rennan, her concern seemed to be with the recovery of Sonya Gomez. “We could split into two teams—”

And though he knew it wrenched at Corsi’s gut, the security chief shook her head. “We have no way of knowing where she’s been taken. It’s a big station, and our tricorders are all but useless with the shields’ dampening effect. Commander Gomez would agree that our first priority is to get free of the Demon.”

“I don’t know,” Fabian said. He squirmed, obviously uncomfortable speaking against Corsi. His attraction to her was just as plain (to Rennan) as his respect for the chain of command. “Sonya would be the first one on point if it were one of us missing.”

“You mean she’d be running solo while the rest of us worked on the problem at hand. But we don’t have the resources. We can’t spare you and Pattie from the repairs. Dr. Lense won’t leave her patients. And you all need security to watch out for trouble.” Corsi stared them all down. “I don’t like it either, but that’s where we are.”

Slowly, sullenly, Stevens and the Nasat peeled away to head back to work. Which left Rennan with his superior officer. “It should be me,” he said.

Corsi blinked. It was her only physical reaction, and the lack of response itself was enough to convince Rennan that he was right. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“I felt your muscles ease when you mentioned Commander Gomez running off alone. And you are clamping down on your own fight-or-flight impulses even now. You’re going off after Gomez. Or you think you are. But it should be me.”

Corsi glanced back from the alcove, checking that Fabian had moved far enough that they would not be overheard. “No. It shouldn’t. Our responsibility is to the engineers still here, still working to get us home. Ordering out a solo security guard would be irresponsible.”

“And going it alone is not?”

“My career,” Corsi said. “My choice.”

Rennan took a step closer. He sensed that this might come down to physical action, and wanted to negate Corsi’s longer reach. “I have the best chance to find her. You know that. Tricorders aren’t reliable. Now you have a choice. Try to stop me, or not.”

He waited for her to make the first move, felt it building in the sudden flood of adrenaline in Corsi’s system, but then a slight easing as she deliberately pulled herself away from the edge. Captain Gold did not suffer fools, or a chief of security who gave in to blind aggression, it seemed. He stepped away from Corsi, giving her his back and putting a hand on the shaft’s emergency ladder.

It was a long, long way down.

“Do you even know if she’s alive?” Corsi asked. He did not need to look to know that she had not turned to watch him go.

He paused for a moment. Corsi, he knew, would prefer the truth.

“No,” he said. “But I feel it.”