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“We’ll worry about that when the time comes. Good warning on your part, Ensign.”

“Thank you, sir,” Wong said.

Gold leaned forward in his chair and studied the alien ship on the screen, trying to make sense out of what had just happened. Only there didn’t seem to be any sense to be had. Who, or what, had brought that hulk of a ship back to life? Had his people done it accidentally?

Were his people still alive in there?

From out here, there was no way of telling and nothing he could do but wait, and try to contact them.

The problem was, waiting wasn’t something he did easily.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Ina said, “the Enterprise has responded. They will be back in just under three hours.”

Gold nodded. Three hours might as well be three days. The Enterprise had barely beat this monster once. He just hoped he didn’t have to go up against it full-on. But if he had to to save his teams in there, he would.

“Come on, people,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on in that Beast .”

None of his crew answered him. He actually hadn’t expected them to.

CHAPTER

11

The Beast was alive!

Lieutenant Commander Duffy stared around at the rest of his team. All had surprised and shocked looks on their faces.

The Beast was alive, and yet it couldn’t be.

They had just spent the last half-hour in what appeared to be the Beast ’s secondary—and only remaining—control room, getting what data they could and trying to figure out how this ship was run. They had been making some pretty decent progress, considering everything they were dealing with.

First off, the secondary control room was something far bigger than most ships’ main bridges. It had seats for twenty crew, and stations that would take them months to figure out what they were intended to run.

Everything in the room seemed plush and done to impress visitors, yet it was clearly a functioning control area. And from what they could tell, when the main control room was destroyed, everything was automatically switched to this room.

Stevens had managed to figure out how to turn on the main viewscreen so that they could see the da Vinci , but beyond that, not much else had been tested yet.

Now, suddenly, everything was coming alive.

“Who did that?” Duffy shouted, looking around at his team as board after board became active.

“Didn’t touch a thing!” Stevens said.

“Nothing here!” Bart Faulwell replied. The linguist had been trying to figure out the communications panel.

Pattie waved her two top legs in a negative gesture. “I did nothing to cause this, sir.”

“Well, someone’s doing something somewhere!” Duffy shouted. “Where’s team one?”

“Near the core, from what I can tell,” Stevens said.

Corsi nodded her head in agreement. She had been standing post near the control room door, and was now looking very worried. “I can barely make out their signatures on my scanners,” she said.

“Could they be doing this?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Bart said, “but I would doubt there’s another control room down there.”

“This ship’s shields are going up,” Pattie said, four of her eight legs waving in agitation above a control panel. “I am doing nothing, touching nothing.”

“Weapons are powering!” Stevens said.

Duffy couldn’t believe this nightmare. How was this happening? How was a dead ship suddenly coming back to life? “Stop them!”

“I don’t know how to even start them!” Stevens shouted back as he frantically searched what they had pinpointed as one of the weapons boards. He looked as if he wanted to touch something, anything, even start punching buttons at random, but Stevens was a good enough engineer to know that wouldn’t help.

“I can tell you it isn’t coming from here!” Bart said. “All these systems are being overridden somehow!”

As they all watched on the main viewer, the Beast fired on the da Vinci . For the second time in twenty-four hours, an alien cruise ship had attacked a Starfleet ship.

“ Da Vinci got her shields up in time!” Bart shouted, and everyone cheered as the shot fired from the Beast was deflected by the da Vinci ’s defenses.