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Finally she spoke, almost reverently. “It’s a space station, orbiting a black hole.”

“Not just orbiting, Captain,” Seven chimed in.

“No,” Janeway continued, examining the readings more closely, “you’re right. It’s powered by the singularity. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Captain,” B’Elanna said quietly, “it’s a little soon to say definitively, but even from this distance, the power signatures appear to be similar to those we saw when we encountered the alien relay stations that had been coopted by the Hirogen.”

Janeway turned abruptly. “Have we detected any Hirogen vessels?”

“No, Captain,” she answered, “but with the interference, we might not detect them until we were right on top of them.”

Janeway considered for a moment before resolving, “I’m confident that the understanding we reached with the Hirogen after our last encounter will hold for the time being. And even if they have somehow discovered this, I don’t see how or why they would want to make use of it. The relay stations allowed them to stalk prey over much wider areas of space while maintaining communications. Unless this station is filled with beings the Hirogen would find challenging to hunt, I doubt we’ll get any trouble from them,” Janeway said as she turned back to the display. Finally she asked, “Can we date this technology?”

Seven quickly ran the data through a dozen different algorithms before replying, “The station is at least eighty thousand years old.”

Janeway shook her head, awed. “So we have another mystery to add to those we’ve already encountered in the Monorhan system. It’s possible that whatever ancient civilization managed to safely harness the energy of microscopic singularities and build the communications arrays we discovered several months ago didn’t stop there.”

“You’re saying the next step was stabilizing a singularity large enough to power a space station?” B’Elanna asked, clearly ready to rethink her earlier supposition in light of this intriguing hypothesis.

“The relay stations were at least a hundred thousand years old. And the similarity in the power signatures is more than the complex mechanics of harnessing the energy of a singularity. I don’t think it’s a huge leap to suggest that both the arrays and this station were built by similar, if not, the same hands. The size of it, though,” Janeway continued, her eyes glued to the viewscreen image, “It’s so much larger than any space station the Federation would ever consider building. It’s more like…”

“A city,” Seven finished.

All three women stared silently at the image of the massive circular construct that orbited slowly around a singularity large enough, by all rights, to have sucked it into oblivion ages ago. Though none of them posed the question aloud, Janeway knew that both Seven and B’Elanna were as curious as she to know exactly what kind of stabilization field would be necessary to keep a piece of engineering that size intact around the densest and one of the most powerful gravitational forces known to the universe.

Finally Janeway broke the silence with a simple order. “I want continuous scans running on every sensor array we have until we reach this. Reroute internal sensors if you have to. We need to know everything we possibly can about it before we get there.”

“I wonder if anybody’s home, and how they’ll feel about our stopping by?” B’Elanna mused aloud.

“We’re about to find out,” Janeway sighed, resigned. “Because Tuvok’s headed right for it.”

Chapter 2

Lieutenant Tom Paris, Voyager’s senior conn officer, had been ordered by Commander Chakotay to get some rest. He’d pulled more than his fair share of extra duty shifts since they had arrived in Monorhan space, and under normal circumstances would have been grateful for the brief respite. He knew that, even at impulse, Voyager would overtake Tuvok’s shuttle in a few hours, and he would certainly be called to the bridge when their mission became, as his gut told him it would, more than a simple shuttle recovery. But right now only B’Elanna’s firm warm presence nestled against him and