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Enough of this! It was time to move, she decided. Lense and Blue didn’t have all day to wait for her to get her act together. With a final, cleansing breath, she reached for a handhold and began to pull herself forward once more.

“I’m moving again, Elizabeth,” she said, hoping her voice sounded more confident to the doctor than it did to her.

“Good,” Lense replied. “Sonya, just talk to me if you start to feel nervous or uneasy again.”

“Okay,” Gomez said, nodding though there was no one around to see the action. She didn’t care, her attention instead riveted on the task at hand. She closed her eyes and focused on the technical schematic Soloman had shown her, displaying the memorized route to the airlock in her mind’s eye.

Her concentration faltered, though, when she felt her hand brush across something that was most definitely not part of the Jefferies tube. It was soft, yielding to her touch, and it moved slightly at her approach.

The crewman.

Almost immediately Gomez felt her pulse begin to quicken and her breathing accelerate. Still, she kept pushing forward, gritting her teeth and clenching her eyes closed even tighter as she felt the skeleton of the dead crewmember begin to pass down the length of her environment suit. Her mind tortured her with images of bones shifting beneath the material of the crewman’s jumpsuit. Could she actually hear the sound of those bones rubbing against one another?

And then, the one thing she feared most happened.

She stopped moving.

Still gripping a handhold, Gomez tried to pull herself forward again but failed. She was stuck. Without thinking, she opened her eyes, only to see the skull of the doomed crewman plastered against the faceplate of her helmet.

The scream that tore itself from her throat echoed in the narrow width of the crawlway.

“Sonya!” Lense’s voice called out over her communicator. “What is it?”

Gomez didn’t respond. She tuned out her stranded teammate as she thrashed about, flailing her arms and kicking her legs against the sides of the tunnel in a frantic effort to free herself. One hand swiped at the skull still leering at her, forcing it away and up toward the ceiling of the tube. She felt something snap like brittle wood splintering and then she was free, pulling herself once more through the tunnel with no thought as to getting snagged on some projection or slamming headfirst into a wall or maintenance hatch.

Suddenly the cramped walls of the Jefferies tube fell away, and Gomez spilled into one of the Defiant’s corridors. She barely managed to throw her arms out ahead of her, preventing herself from careening into the passageway’s far bulkhead. As her hands touched the wall, instinct and training took over, orienting her body so that her magnetized boots could rest once again on the cold, dusty deck.

“Sonya?” Lense repeated. “Answer me. Are you all right?”

Taking a moment to gather herself, Gomez forced away the lingering images of the crewman’s body and the way the skeleton’s fragile remains had given way under her panicked assault as she fought to extricate herself from the crawlway.

“I’m . . . I’m fine, Elizabeth. Now, at least. But we’re going to have Soloman find us another way back to the bridge, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Right now,” the doctor replied, “I’d just be happy to be inside the ship.”

A small chuckle broke through Gomez’s remaining anxiety, bringing a much-needed smile to her face as she started down the corridor, examining directional signs on the bulkheads as she went. It didn’t take long to find the room containing the maintenance airlock, as well as a collection of lockers holding environment suits and assorted engineering tools. If time hadn’t been an issue, Gomez might have taken a few minutes to examine the century-old equipment and marvel at how well it had been preserved by the lack of atmosphere on the ship.

Instead, she turned her attention to the airlock itself. A moment’s work with her manual door opener succeeded in coaxing the