Lieutenant Commander Domenica Corsi stepped through the hatch into a place where artificial gravity worked and, therefore, the effects of the station’s unbound careening through space were immediately evident in the beam of her headlamp. She had entered a kind of staging area, where prison staff would have suited up to make excursions into the weightless, airless space of the open shuttlebay. But everything was, to put it delicately, everywhere. Equipment, EVA suits, even instrument consoles had been uprooted by the g-forces of the station’s motion, and were still flying across the large room with every new lurch the platform took.

And that included herself, now that she was inside the station’s gravitational field. The station took a sudden tumble and she was thrown head over heels. No longer weightless, she slammed into the bulkhead with enough force to knock the wind out of her. Someone piled into her from behind, and she saw that the rest of the team was also bouncing around the chamber.

This is no good, she thought. She had scanned for any threats from other beings before even going through the hatch, and found the chamber uninhabited. But the motion of the platform could wipe out her whole team, just as surely as it must have killed the prison crew and inmates.

The room took another turn, and Corsi started to fall. She reactivated her magnetic boots, which she’d foolishly shut off upon stepping into the station’s gravity field. She was on the floor, she realized, even though she was looking down at the ceiling. Some of the away team had fallen down there, and everyone looked a little dazed. P8 Blue had rolled into a ball, using her chitinous armor to shield herself. The others, though, were being battered. Corsi knew that the greatest danger here came not from the team being bounced around the station but from all the loose debris smashing into them. Even big pieces of furniture—tables and chairs and shelving units—that had been bolted down before had broken loose under the tremendous strain.

“Boots on, everyone. We have to get to ops!” she shouted over the comlink. “We have to bring the gyrostabilizers back on-line before this stuff kills us.”

“Either that or cut the artificial gravity,” Kieran Duffy replied. “That would at least minimize the impact of everything being tossed around.”

“I’d rather restore stabilizers if we have that option,” Gomez put in brusquely.

“Me, too,” Duffy said. “I’m only saying, if we can’t, we have a backup plan.”

“Corsi, you remember the layout, right?” Gomez asked. “We’re not that far from the operations center.”

“I remember,” Corsi replied. She at least had the advantage that she was standing on the floor—though upside-down, with the blood rushing to her head. This couldn’t last too long, or she might have to drop to the ceiling and then work her way back up to the hatchway.

The station’s next tumble, though, solved the problem for her. Suddenly she swung sideways. Now “down” was precisely the wall she wanted, the one with the hatchway in it. Instinctively putting her arms out to brace herself for the impact, she stepped down the vertical surface toward the hatch. “Let’s go, people!” she called. “This is the way out!”

Corsi opened the hatch while the others followed suit from whichever surface they happened to be on. Everybody was able to grab a rail or a rung, and they started moving toward the hatchway. The difficulty came when the station continued its roll, and suddenly she was climbing up into the hatchway instead of simply sideways or down through it. Beyond the hatch, an empty corridor waited. She knew it led to the station’s operations room and a command center, what would pass for a bridge on the antique space station. Either one would help, though operations was their preferred destination; from there it would be easiest to appraise the damage and assess how to proceed.

Corsi could see two hatchways ahead—above, just this moment, though she knew that would change—and she was sure that operations had been the one to the right. But for a moment she was not so sure which way was right. She wasn’t moving along the floor of the corridor, she was sure—the floor was currently to her left side. Which meant, she deduced, that the hatch she wanted was the one that would be in front of her when she climbed up the corridor to it.

She really hated this whole deal.

Another few minutes and two shifts in perspective later, she managed to get the hatch into operations open. Something had fallen into it, she guessed, jamming it, and she’d had to use a P-38 to get the door open. When she finally did so, she was not at all surprised to see that the big space was full of massive pieces of equipment rolling and falling and bouncing like leaves in a strong wind. Didn’t these people secure anything? she wondered. She scanned the room with her tricorder, finding no signs of life.

“Commander Gomez.”

“What is it, Corsi?” Gomez asked.

“Please join me at this hatchway.”

Gomez muttered her assent, and a moment later had slid down the corridor to squat at Corsi’s side by the open hatch. “I see,” she said.

“There are no lifesigns in there. No security risk that I can determine—except for the incredibly obvious one.”

“The equipment is pretty much smashed to smithereens.” Corsi could hear Gomez sigh through the comlink. “Getting any of that repaired and functioning will be a challenge—especially since it’ll mean dodging the big chunks.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you think the command center will be in any better shape?”

“We can check, but considering what we’ve seen so far, I don’t see any reason to think that it will be.”

“If it’s not significantly better, it does us no good. We can access the operations computers from there, but if they’re utterly destroyed, we still need to get in here at some point.”

“Your call, Commander,” Corsi said.

They both watched a twisted, scorched chunk of metal that had once been part of an instrument panel flip past them, smashing into a wall beneath them.

Gomez shrugged and drew a phaser from a pocket of her environmental suit. Corsi understood what she was up to and did the same. They targeted the big pieces of wreckage, and within a few minutes had vaporized them. There would still be some danger from smaller bits of flying debris, but the danger was minimized.

“That worked,” Corsi said.

“Thought it would.”

“Are we going in or what, Sonnie?” Duffy asked from behind her.

“As soon as Commander Corsi clears us, we are,” Gomez replied.

“It’s all yours,” Corsi said.

“There you go, Mr. Duffy. Happy?”

“As a clam, Commander Gomez,” Duffy said.

Gomez started into the operations center, but Corsi grabbed her arm, stopping her. “One more thing,” she said.

Gomez looked at her through their helmet windows. “What is it?”

“Do you realize what we haven’t seen?”

“Anything right side up?”

“A living being. Or a dead one, for that matter. Nobody. There should have been someone on duty in ops, trying to restore equilibrium. I would have thought there’d be crew members in the corridor, or in the staging area by the shuttlebay. Someone, somewhere.”

Gomez’s brown eyes widened. “You’re right,” she said. “We haven’t seen a soul.”

“I’m going to look around some more,” Corsi said. “Hawkins, you stay here with Gomez, Duffy, Blue, and Soloman. Frnats, Drew, you and Stevens come with me and Lense. We’ll go into command, maybe the infirmary, and see what we can find.” Even as she made the decision, she questioned her own motivation for doing so. Why did she want to keep Stevens close to her?

“Makes sense to me,” Gomez said, giving her approval.

“Stay in touch,” Corsi said, gripping a wall rung as the station tipped again. “And the sooner you can get the floor to stay under our feet, the better I’ll like it.”

“Empty.” Fabian’s voice over the comlink was almost weary. This was the third place they’d looked for life—the command center, the infirmary, and now the prison staff’s mess hall had all been deserted. Progress from point to point was slow because of the incessant lurching of the platform, and Corsi felt like her stomach would never settle again. At least none of them had been sick yet, though, and Fabian’s fears of encountering vast amounts of vomit had not been borne out—since there was no one around to get sick.

Still, she didn’t like it. This was a busy, populated prison station, she thought. So where is everybody?

The ceiling she was walking on started to slip out from underneath her feet, and she latched onto a railing just in time.

And what’s taking the engineers so long to restore the damn stabilizers?