Sonya Gomez was nervous.

In general, things had been going seriously wrong every which way she turned. What she wasn’t forgetting she was losing and what she wasn’t losing was breaking. And it wasn’t just her, either. Everyone aboard the da Vinci was feeling it, all of them quivering bundles of nerves forced to juggle eggs.

She and her crew had suffered a few near-misses and project failures since starting the clearing of the Sargasso Sector. Tools and machines weren’t working right. People weren’t working right. A few crew members had taken to carrying good luck charms, although they all kept them out of her sight since she chewed out an ensign for rubbing a laminated three-leaf clover for luck. She felt bad, really, taking out her own frustrations on the unfortunate man, but they were supposed to be scientists and there was no room for voodoo in their line of work. She’d already disproved the so-called “curse of Sarindar” during her solo mission to the Nalori Republic last year, she wasn’t about to succumb to this one.

So, yes, she was nervous, because here she was aboard the da Vinci and there—some two thousand meters away—was the object of the very delicate operation Sonya was about to attempt.

During any other mission, on any other day of her career, she would have been eager and, at most, cautious. Today she was just plain nervous. She had devised a fast and, more importantly, safe way to clear a substantial area of wreckage using a found resource that was proving far more abundant than initially suspected: Black holes.

A total of thirty-one ships within sensor range were powered by some sort of singularity-based technology, all, to Pattie’s experienced eye, the handiwork of the same culture, if across an expanse of time. At some point in the past, a civilization near or adjacent to these parts developed black-hole technology similar to that used by the Romulans, and this was all that was left of them.

Each ship was equipped with from one to three chunky chambers holding its infinity-massed cargo in what appeared to be a sophisticated antigravity web. The study of how the engines managed to extract energy from this source would have to wait, but the singularities themselves, well, they were about to be pressed into service in an entirely different function.

“Engineering. Status?” Sonya said.

“Conlon here. Standing by on main tractor beam.”

“Thank you. Transporter room, are you go?”

“Coordinates locked and standing by, Commander,” said Transporter Chief Poynter.

This was a tricky maneuver under the best of conditions. They were playing with a black hole, packed in a containment device constructed by unknown beings at least seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago. So many things could go wrong.

And lately, Murphy’s Law—that everything that could go wrong would go wrong—had become the law of the land. Not that the law wasn’t part and parcel of the S.C.E.’s daily existence, but this was going to new extremes. If something went wrong with the extraction, the da Vinci and everyone on it would wind up with their mass stretched across infinity and devoured by the singularity. The only upside was that at this distance, given the limits of the tractor beam’s effectiveness as a surgical instrument, it would all be over too fast for anyone to realize it was happening.

Which, she thought with bitter amusement, is a hell of a pitiful upside.

“Fabian?” she said to the crewperson temporarily taking Piotrowski’s place at the bridge’s tactical station.

Fabian Stevens, unusually serious, took a moment to crack his knuckles and shake out his right hand. “Ready,” he said, taking hold of the joystick with which he was to direct a pencil-thin tractor beam.

“Very well, people,” she said after one last deep breath, “let’s begin. Transporter room, energize.”

“Energizing.”

The result of that order was played out on the ship’s screen, on a strangely amorphous ship that seemed to undulate even though hanging motionless in space. Its pastel-streaked milky white surface looked more like cheap plastic than anything designed to survive the rigors of space. But here it was, by their dating techniques some three quarters of a million years after it had been built. Surviving.

Somewhere near the midpoint of the misshapen derelict, the transporter reached out and grabbed the molecules of a fifteen-foot-around section of hull. Unseen, it did the same thing to a series of bulkheads and decks, opening a tunnel for the tractor beam to follow to the containment unit. Transporting a singularity, even one as small as the nick of a pin contained in a null-gravitational state, was risky business at best, even if the vagaries of physics didn’t make the amount of energy required to dismantle the singularity’s near-infinite mass into transportable particles too great for the da Vinci to provide. So they were instead transporting the derelict piece by piece out of the way of the tractor beam.

“Doing good, Laura. How much more to go?”

“Four more decks, and the containment unit should be free-floating.”

“That’s your cue, Fabian. You up for this?”

“I’m fine, Commander.” Stevens’s smile was tired. “A streak of bad luck is just a self-perpetuating cycle. The first bad thing throws you off your stride, the second rattles you, by the third you’re convinced you’re jinxed, and everything after that is just you tripping yourself up worrying that you’ll trip up. Personally, I don’t buy into it.”

“So we’re all just neurotic?” Gomez asked.

Stevens grinned. “Each in our own way.”

“Bridge, we’re through the last deck. Sensors show the containment unit is free and clear.”

“I copy that, Chief,” Gomez said. “Fabian, ready on the tractor beam.”

“Going in,” Stevens said and triggered the beam with a tap of his fingers. His eyes were fixed on a three-dimensional image of the alien ship on his screen that served as a visual guide for the path of the tractor beam.

“Just like threading a needle,” Gomez said softly.

“Contact,” Stevens said. “Gonna start to ease it back out now.”

“Scan of the containment unit looks good,” Gomez said. “Go for the extraction.”

There was silence over the next few moments as Stevens drew the squat alloy container from the bowels of the ancient ship, up past decks that had last seen movement most of the way to a million years ago. Soon, the unit would be in open space and in position for the next phase of the operation.

“What’d I tell you?” Stevens said. “No such thing as bad luck.” The containment unit slid into view from inside the gutted derelict.

Gomez smiled and said, “I never for a second doubted you. But, just to be on the safe side….” She held up her hands, showing crossed fingers on both.

Stevens laughed. “If you want to know the truth, with my hands being occupied I had my toes crossed.”

Tapping her combadge, Gomez contacted the engineer in the cargo bay. “Ensign Lankford?”

“Yes, Commander?”

“You may launch the drone at your discretion.”

“Drone away, Commander. Through the cargo doors, locked on target and closing.”

A small drone vehicle, about the size of a duffel bag, glided onto the viewscreen, on course for rendezvous with the containment unit.

“Two thousand six hundred meters and closing.”

In just a few minutes the drone would ease up next to the containment unit and, on contact, would fire its main gas-propellant engine to push itself and the unit into the very heart of the field of wreckage.

“Two thousand three hundred.”

At a predetermined distance from the da Vinci, the drone would detonate, shattering the containment unit and, of course, unleashing the black hole.

“One thousand nine hundred.”

The singularity would begin to do what it did best, drawing everything within its event horizon toward and into its influence. Ships unmoved since forever would race toward the black hole, expanding into infinite mass before disappearing inside the thing’s insatiable maw.

“One thousand two hundred.”

It would sweep its immediate area clean and, not too long after it had sucked in everything it could reach, it would begin to feed on and collapse in on itself. Even a black hole so small as this one could exert its gravitational mastery over several hundred million square kilometers, a significant dent in this particular pile.

“Nine hundred klicks and closing.”

There were risks, of course, but under controlled conditions, with the da Vinci moved to a safe distance to observe the event, they were—If our luck holds, she thought—acceptable. And this method, in addition to being fast, also offered some fairly attractive safety features of its own, most specifically in the case of the accidental release of any unknown but potentially hazardous contents of any of the ships.

“Three hundred klicks. Sensors are locked on target. Two hundred…one hundred…”

Everything from inert organisms to uncontrolled chain reactions would get caught up in the singularity.

“Two hundred meters.”

Nothing unleashed could be more powerful than the gravitational pull of that tiny bundle of compacted matter. This would throw out not only the baby with the bathwater, but the bathtub and the whole bathroom as well.

“One hundred meters…ninety…eighty…”

If this worked, Gomez judged it would take a maximum of six strategically placed black-hole releases to open a lane wide enough for the approaching traffic through the Sargasso Sector. That would still leave several dozen lifetimes worth of intact derelict ships for future study.

“…Forty…thirty…”

At twenty-six meters, the drone’s main thruster ignited and sent it slamming into the containment unit at several thousand KPH, relative. The struck object spun off at a tangent, while the drone, its trajectory altered by the impact, went streaking toward the not too future rubble of another derelict.

“Dammit,” Gomez growled. “We’ve got a misfire. Get us out of here, Robin. Now!”

The bridge crew sprang into motion, their voices rising with the sudden whine of the da Vinci’s surging engines.

“I have the drone impacting with the derelict in four minutes,” Stevens shouted.

“We’ll be at warp in one,” Ensign Robin Rusconi said from the conn.

“The containment unit,” Gomez said heatedly as she scanned her console. “I’ve lost it in the clutter of the debris field.”

“The unit would’ve been built to survive impact,” Stevens said, but the look in his eyes was anything but confident.

“It’s three-quarters of a million years old, Fabian,” she reminded him. “Bet whoever built it didn’t expect it to be in service that long. If it gets loose before we’re out of range….”

He nodded, then pointed to his screen. “Got it! Plotting trajectory…it’s good! The unit has clear sailing for a good hour, plenty of time to retrieve it.”

“Warp one,” Ensign Rusconi announced.

As the da Vinci pulled back from the Sargasso, Gomez and Stevens tracked the errant drone. By the time the little booster glanced off the side of the looming ship, they were well out of the danger zone. A misnomer, actually, as the result of the collision was almost nonexistent. The drone’s mass was insufficient to do anything more than dent the larger ship’s hull and cause it to begin to wobble slowly in its orbit.

Stevens looked over at Gomez and frowned. “Now, is what just happened bad luck or good luck?”

“Why do I think that luck had nothing to do with it?” Sonya said.

“ ’Cause,” Stevens said, “we’re scientists, not gamblers. We wouldn’t have played this hand if the odds hadn’t been in our favor.”

“We need,” Gomez said in agreement, “to find out just who the hell’s been dealing us these crappy cards.”