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 given 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.

“That’s it. Haznedl, divert all shield and life support control to Tev’s command. We will not lose that station. Piotrowski, you will keep your eyes glued to that Resaurian ship. If they even so much as turn on a landing light, I want to know about it.”

“Yes, sir,” came the instant responses.

A quick shifting of schematics on Tev’s monitors showed Ensign Susan Haznedl’s competence as the shields and life support controls were handed over.

Gold glanced at Tev and nodded. Go.

With a deep breath and another stab of annoyance that Gomez’s absence meant he could not reverify his calculations, Tev reached out and began to massage power away from the shields. At thirty percent power, he halted; any further and they might not hold up to the thrashing the gravimetric waves were handing out with relish. Verifying that the specified cargo holds contained no personnel, he locked them down and drew additional life support power.

Having reached his predetermined requirements, he fed the algorithmic calculations into the computer. The tension of the moment, his own frustration at losing control of the situation and at Gomez’s absence began to ease as the computer took his finely crafted formulae and extrapolated them as necessary. After a final deep breath, Tev tapped another interface, and a brilliant beam of ghostly energy tore through near space and punched a hole into subspace. Though no visible distortion could be seen on the main viewscreen beyond the beam’s simply ceasing to exist, the subspace monitor went haywire as overlapping energy fields showed the displacement of local subspace and the terrible forces the dekyon beam poured into the region.

Though separated by .0025 light-seconds, the interference between the two beams caused whorls in subspace that began to show that his initial assessment, regardless of his wish to deny it, had been correct. His fingers rekeyed the modulations and initiated the sequence to draw the two beams together.

As the beams began to slowly merge, his worst fears were realized. The distortions in subspace, along with the initial spearing of the anchor by the dekyon beam, were beginning to shred it. And try as he might, Tev simply had been unable to determine the anchor’s makeup, much less how he might replicate it.

“Captain,” he began, while his fingers keyed back the dekyon beams and cut off the secondary stream of energy; how much additional damage he’d just done he did not know. However, he did know with absolute certainty that if he’d continued, the anchor would’ve torn apart completely, leaving them absolutely nothing to use in stopping the fall of the station.

“What, Tev? Why’d you stop?”

For the second time in a day, failure reared its ugly head: a bitter pill that tasted vile going down. If Gomez had verified his calculations, he would’ve been able to determine the extent to which the gravity anchor’s structural integrity would be affected. Bitter tonic for hindsight.

“The anchor is shredding, Captain.” He took a deep breath, stood, and faced the captain. His to take responsibility for. “My solution is no solution at all; it has only further damaged the already weakened anchor. The twin streams are no longer a viable solution.”

“What are our options, Tev?” Tev could feel the disappointment radiating from the crew.

He tried not to gag on the words. “We should follow Commander Gomez’s original plan. Transverse the photon sphere and overlap our shields with that of the station and transport the lot of them. And it must be done quickly, before the anchor shreds away to nothingness.”