The da Vinci rocked slightly, buffeted by gravimetric forces, as Mor glasch Tev stomped into the briefing room. He was aware of every pair of eyes that glanced at him in that uncertain way humans (and so many humanoid races) used to prejudge what they did not understand. They were already making assumptions that would never hold up under direct evidence. Relying on prejudice over scientific method.

Carol Abramowitz glanced back toward the door. “Glad you could make it, Tev.”

Bartholomew Faulwell, sitting next to the cultural specialist, eating from a pile of individually wrapped candies, smiled. On the other side of the long table the Nasat, P8 Blue, chittered in her way of approximating human laughter.

He did not bother to consult a chronometer. “I am four minutes early,” he stated clearly. Abramowitz flushed, and shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

Captain Gold half rose from his chair at the table’s head. “It’s a figure of speech, reserved for when someone is late, or is the last to arrive.”

Tev snuffled at the air, the Tellarite equivalent of a sigh. “I shall make a note of that, Captain.”

“Please do. No need to get your back up over a simple pleasantry.”

His back wasn’t up over anything. He had just said that he would try harder, hadn’t he? He would not even complain that Fabian Stevens had taken Tev’s seat at the left hand of Sonya Gomez. He would save instruction for later, when he could speak with Stevens alone. He grabbed the empty chair in between Faulwell and Chief of Security Corsi.

With a nod from the captain, Gomez rose and stood at the front of the room. Stevens brought up the latest scans on the black hole, including what the S.C.E. team had found inside. Tev all but felt his mind twist. It looked odd, even in a universe as varied as one that could produce cities encased in static warp bubbles and warheads to ignite gas giants into small stars. Such challenges there still were to confront!

“As near as we can tell,” Gomez began as very rough schematics flashed up on the screen. They showed a wedge-shaped construction that displaced two cubic kilometers of vacuum. “The distress call originates from this station that we located inside the black hole, which we’re currently calling the Demon—the name from the transmission.”

The screen froze, pulled down into the bottom right corner, and was replaced by magnified images of the da Vinci’s approach to the black hole. A large dark circle expanded in the center. The stars around its circumference warped away at improbable speeds, as if reflected over a concave surface.

Which, in effect, they were.

“Am I seeing double?” Faulwell asked. “There’s a diamond-pattern of stars in the upper-left quadrant, and a smaller set just like it to the Demon’s lower-right?”

Of course, as a cryptographer, Faulwell would be adept at recognizing patterns and repetitions. Tev knew about the effect, but the language specialist had beaten him to seeing it. Inexcusable. “That is an illusionary effect known as an Einstein Ring. What you see is light from the same four stars, pulled around the far side of the black hole. You will see a better example in just a moment.”

The star field slowed its expansion. “Ten thousand kilometers,” Sonya intoned. Now the da Vinci crawled forward. A moment later it stopped. “Five thousand. This is highly magnified. As large as this singularity is, about one hundred times the solar mass of Earth’s sun, its photon sphere is only nine hundred kilometers in diameter.”

Several stars looked bloated, highly magnified from being dragged around the back side of the Demon, which stared straight ahead like the dead eye of some malicious entity.

The same metaphor suggested itself to Abramowitz, who shivered. “I keep waiting for it to blink,” she said.

The sky shifted as most stars tracked to the left. “The da Vinci,” Gomez continued her narration, “orbiting the Demon.” Her voice held a touch of awe, and Tev could hardly blame her. “At this distance, we’re fighting approximately six hundred gravities to maintain station.”

Marvelous. Tev noted several tense reactions around the table, though no one could tear their eyes away from the screen. It was an odd sky, the kind most explorers never dreamed of seeing (nor wanted to). The stars continued to track left, most of them, bending outward to flow around either side of the black hole. Except in a thin ring surrounding the void where the mirror images trapped in the first Einstein Ring counterrotated in the exact opposite direction.

The vessel finally came to rest, and the sky remained stable.

The table was silent for a moment, everyone lost in their own thoughts. There was a space station down inside that hell. What would they see? What kind of technology permitted them to survive? Tev’s hands itched to find out.

“This space station?” Dr. Lense asked. She sat at the other end of the table, and had remained very silent up to now. She often had just as much trouble following the engineer’s explanations as Faulwell, or Gold. “By ‘inside,’ you mean falling into?”

Gomez shook her head. “No. It is definitely anchored within the photon sphere, at approximately one-point-three Schwarzschild radii.” Lense frowned and Sonya explained further. “A Schwarzschild radius is equal to the radius of the black hole’s event horizon—the point where gravity goes to infinity. The photon sphere is where light can no longer escape, at one-point-five radii.” She smiled grimly. “That is the point where, if you look along the plane of the Einstein Ring, light would be perfectly bent around the black hole and you could see the back of your own head.”

The concept weighed heavily over the room for a few seconds. Faulwell skated a candy across the table to Lense. He pushed another over in front of the Tellarite. “So if this station is within the photon sphere, how can we see it?” he asked.

Tev ignored the candy and stifled the urge to lecture. It was not his discovery. Even though the process had been fairly rudimentary. Gomez nodded to Stevens, who took up the narrative from his seat.

“Probes. We threw one in orbit around the Demon, and then sent it and another into its mouth. Our subspace connection deteriorated rapidly, but by forming a kind of relay system from Probe One to Probe Two and back to the da Vinci, we managed to get those basic images. They also helped us pinpoint the gravitational anchor.”

Tev could not take it anymore. His large hand trapped the candy Faulwell had slid in front of him just to have something on which to concentrate. A twist of cellophane dumped out a greenish rock of square candy. “An anchor had to exist,” he said, looking at the strange emerald in the palm of his hand, “or the station would have fallen into the event horizon decades ago. Even accounting for time dilation.”

Gomez nodded. “Right,” she said, stealing back the floor. “Of course, there was another large sign, when we finally noticed. The gravimetric waves. You would expect them to radiate out in a fairly uniform manner. But they don’t.” She tapped the console in front of her, and the display shifted into a bluish tint. The black hole roiled with energy. Now it looked more like a mouth, chewing.

“This is the Hawking radiation evaporating off the Demon. It shows a large disturbance centered here”—she pointed it out with a wave of her hand—“where there is a discontinuity in the tidal forces. The station is somehow anchored to space far outside of the photon sphere, which has kept it safe. It has also created a mostly stable channel for approaching the station where the gravitational pull is far less than it should be.”

“How much less?” Lense asked.

Gomez’s voice was very small. “Somewhere around the order of one point five million gravities, as you approach the photon sphere.”

“And the gravimetric waves?” Gold asked, bringing them back on topic.

“Backsplash,” Tev said. Gomez glared at him, and he popped the candy into his mouth.

“Backsplash is actually a good way to look at it,” she allowed. “Take an ocean tide, rolling waves near an atoll. One of those waves starts to shallow, and crest, and then strikes a large rocky protuberance.”

Apple flavor washed the inside of Tev’s mouth as the candy began to slowly dissolve. Tart. Almost sour. “Momentum has a lot of force to it when interrupted,” he said, adding to Sonya’s explanation. Why not? He had tumbled to the source of the gravimetric waves before her, after all. His mouth puckered as the taste built up, and he swallowed, catching the candy between his teeth to hold on to it. Remarkable.

“Apple Rancher,” Faulwell said, leaning aside to whisper the candy’s name. He skated one to P8 Blue, who declined. Abramowitz grabbed it instead—the cultural specialist went through them like, well, like candy.

Captain Gold leaned back into his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him as he looked at some point on the wall over Tev’s head. “So we are proceeding on the assumption that this was a deliberate attempt to place some kind of outpost—a research station perhaps—inside a black hole. But now something has gone wrong?”

Abramowitz nodded. “Details on the Resaurians are sketchy. A few brief mentions in some corrupted old logs of a pre-Federation Earth ship captain named Archer, and not much else. Without more cultural details to go on, a research station seems the most logical choice. Except—”

“Except what?” Gold pounded on her hesitation right away.

“Well, the images we have of the station itself. I spoke with Pattie earlier,” she nodded to P8 Blue, “and there don’t seem to be any escape pods. Near as we can tell.”

“Or if there were any,” the structural specialist said, “they have already been used.”

The ship rocked again, and Gold waited until it passed. “Communications?” he asked. “Life signs?”

Stevens again. Tev shifted uncomfortably. “Unable to be sure. No answer to our hails, but given the nature of their distress call, I’d say no.” He leaned forward, resting against the table with hands clasped before him. “They piggybacked their anchor, using it as a kind of transmission medium, or antennae, to escape the black hole. Life signs…same answer. Our probe’s sensors couldn’t penetrate the station’s shielding, except on a very specific band.”

This was new. Tev straightened up, eager for more data. A few seats down, Gold did the same. “And that is?”

“Transporters,” Stevens said. “The shield harmonics are meant to allow transport.”

“Transporters?” Gold frowned. “Through that kind of gravimetric interference?” Gold might not always understand the engineering side of things, but he knew his ship well. Tev had to give him credit for that. “Risky.” He leaned forward, waving a finger in the air. “Didn’t Voyager fall into a singularity recently?”

The logs that had been coming in from Project Voyager—which had managed to make contact with that ship in the Delta Quadrant, where it had been all but stranded for six years—had made for fascinating reading for the entire S.C.E. team, Tev knew. They had encountered some phenomena that almost defied belief.

Stevens answered the captain’s question. “Their chief engineer rigged up a dekyon beam to reopen the ‘rift’ by which they entered. Nothing like that will work here. I think transporters are our best bet.”

Gomez nodded reluctant agreement. “I was thinking that Tev might be our answer.”

He was? Tev swallowed, the hard rock of candy forcing its way down his throat with reluctance. He coughed into a large fist, and Faulwell hit him on the back. He shrugged away from the affable linguist, able to recover better on his own. Faulwell looked wounded. “You want me to transport over?”

“I want you to rig up a transporter relay system that can get a team over there. We’ll take pattern enhancers, which should aid in recovery of any trapped crew.”

Tev blinked in surprise that Gomez was acknowledging his expertise. “A relay?”

“Through a series of probes. You wrote a paper on the miniaturizing of transporters, didn’t you? Can you rig up some kind of circuit that will pass through our patterns, without distortion?”

He snuffled. He should have thought of that. One of his specialties, in fact, and Sonya Gomez handed it to him as a favor! She certainly hadn’t wanted to share the credit, as competitive as the S.C.E. team always seemed to perform. “Yes. It can be done. Quite easily, I should think.”

“I’ll want a trio of security personnel to escort any away team,” Corsi said.

Lense nodded. “I’ll join it with medical supplies. There might be injuries over there.”

“Let’s set it up,” Gold said. “But I want it well tested before we commit any live personnel to it.” He pointed at the screen, where the Demon was frozen in timeless pause. “That is one of the most destructive forces in the known universe. We treat it with great, great respect at all times. Clear?”

Sonya answered for the team. “Yes, Captain.” She looked them over. Shrugged. “What are you waiting for? Get to work.”

Tev felt that last comment aimed right for him. It didn’t matter what he had solved yesterday, or even this morning. What mattered was what he contributed now. Commander Gomez had made that amply clear.

He stood, waiting while Gold and Gomez left first. He would have been third out of the room, by seniority, but he paused. Faulwell was gathering his wrappers. When the language specialist looked up, he found Tev standing just inside the door. They were the last two left.

“Dr. Faulwell, I was wondering?”

The slight man rubbed at his beard. “Yes, Tev?”

The Tellarite glanced back into the hall. No one. He snuffled. He needed to get back to work. He would have to try even harder. But first…

“May I have another piece of candy?”