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Don’t just stand there , her mind screamed at her. Move!

And before she realized what she was doing, Elizabeth Lense leapt straight from the figurative frying pan into the proverbial fire.

Though the bulkhead’s surface had turned transparent with the consistency of a membrane or thin gauze, she noted no strange sensation of passing through any such barrier as she leapt through the destabilized hull section and into open space. The first thing she saw as she emerged from the ship was Pattie, her body limp as she drifted slowly away from the Defiant .

“Pattie, can you hear me?” she called out even as she activated her suit’s maneuvering thrusters, pulsing the small jets of compressed gas. It took a moment to orient her body so that she was moving in the correct direction as she called on skills that she hadn’t given a second thought to since her days at the Academy.

The Nasat did not respond to her latest call, and Lense concluded that she must have been knocked unconscious. How serious was the injury? Did she have a concussion? Could she be treated here, or would she require transport back to the da Vinci ?

All of these questions and many others flooded Lense’s mind as she closed the gap. After another moment, she was able to reach out and grab an errant leg, her gloved hand closing around the fabric of Pattie’s environment suit.

“Gotcha,” she whispered, sure that Pattie was unconscious when the Nasat did not react to having her leg grabbed. “Don’t worry, we’ll get back to the ship and . . .” The sentence faded away incomplete as she reoriented her body to face the Defiant .

Elizabeth Lense had never been outside a starship before. The closest she had come was an observation port at SpaceDock orbiting Earth, looking through plexisteel windows at vessels berthed in various parking slips. While those ships looked big from that perspective, the derelict before her now was positively huge.

“What the hell am I doing out here?” she asked aloud as she pulsed her thrusters again, pushing her and Pattie closer to the ship. Lense stretched a hand out as several more seconds of maneuvering brought the vessel’s hull within reach.

Then it and the rest of her body made contact with the tritanium surface, discovering that the hull was as solid as a starship’s skin was supposed to be.

Of course , her mind taunted, reminding her that even in the 24th Century, Murphy’s Law still applied: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

They should make that the S.C.E. motto, Lense decided as she set her feet and activated the magnetic seals on her boots. Once secured to the hull, she surveyed the area of the ship in her range of vision. She had returned to the Defiant near the midpoint of the secondary hull, yet there were no signs of airlocks or other entries into the ship that she could see. Where were they located? Other than the shuttlebay doors at the rear of the ship, she had no idea. She hadn’t consulted the Defiant ’s technical schematics prior to beaming over.

Adjusting her hold on Pattie, she turned the Nasat in order to look into her helmet and saw that she was still unconscious. An area the size of a fist appeared to be swelling over her left eye, and Lense saw that the bruise was already beginning to turn a dark blue.

“Pattie, can you hear me? I need you to wake up.” A moment’s scan with her tricorder confirmed her suspicion: Pattie did indeed have a concussion. She would need medical treatment, and soon, something Lense would not be able to provide so long as they were stuck outside the ship.

“Damn it,” she whispered, turning her head to face the front of the ship when her attention was caught by something else. It was the rift, the barrier marking the entrance to interspace. Unlike the black void surrounding the Defiant, the rift itself was a spectacular clashing of colors, colliding and mixing to form a frenzied chaos.

And it was shrinking. The rift was closing back up! While Lense stood by, a powerless spectator, the tear that had brought together two spatial planes was slowly healing itself. They and