It began like every dream: in the middle, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. The most ordinary thing to be running through the woods, feeling like his heart was pounding out of his chest and every breath burnt in his lungs. Running through the woods like he was being chased. Or was he running towards something?

Branches whipping at his face, undergrowth tangling underfoot, he ran and ran until the trees began to thin before him. In an instant he was out of the woods, stood at the top of a cliff, a precipice, with the world burning before him. The sky roiled with fire, raining down with the tell-tale flares of torpedoes and energy weapons fired from orbit. Below him sprawled a city, his home and yet not – when had he ever named any specific place ‘home,’ much less a city? – helpless before the onslaught.

Helpless, yet not passive. Helpless, yet even from here he could see people weren’t cowering, hiding, running. Instead they turned on each other, bursting into the streets to bear down with fists and weapons, not on their attackers but themselves. As everything burnt, all they knew was hate.

Footsteps came thudding up behind him, and though he turned, tried to dart away, it was too late. Heavy hands grabbed him, pushed him, and then he was falling, falling. The ground rose up to swallow him, and though he flailed, the invisible grasp on him only tightened. Every muscle in his body coiled at the impending impact, only for it to bring not a halt, but darkness. Darkness, and chains lashing around him, choking and restraining and trapping him, and writhe as he tried, he could not escape. And somewhere beyond the darkness, everything burned.

Follow me. Find me. Free me.

Nate Beckett woke choking, clawing at his chest, at his throat. When he felt warm hands at his back, the sense of restraint sank back in, and he flailed away, got caught up in the sheets, and tumbled out of bed to hit the deck.

The impact, at least, jolted him back to reality, and for a moment he sat there, chest heaving, feeling himself, alive, free, and sore.

A moment later, a shadow moved above him, and Thawn’s tentative voice reached him. ‘…Nate?’

He grunted and pulled himself back up. ‘I’m okay. That was… I don’t know what that was.’

‘A bad dream?’ She was more cautious when she reached for him this time. This time, he didn’t pull back, her closeness helping to centre him, bring him back to the now. He wondered if she was reaching out telepathically at all, and swallowed the apprehension. Now was not the time to let his spiking adrenaline push him to paranoia.

Swallowing that down, however, forced him to stop. Think. Reflect. Then he was out of bed again, on his feet this time, and heading for the chair in Thawn’s quarters where he’d ditched his uniform. ‘No,’ he said at her confused, groggy look. ‘Not a dream.’

Thawn slid across to the end of her side of the bed. ‘Nate, it’s 0430.’

‘You’re right.’ He hopped as he pulled on his trousers. ‘We gotta bring in Airex as well.’

‘To bed?’ Her apprehension visibly grew at this hitherto unexplored vista of late-night interests.

‘To the lab!’

She stood, but reached for a dressing gown instead of her clothes. ‘Surely a breakthrough in the middle of the night can wait until morning.’

Frustrated, he rounded on her, shirt in hand. ‘I’m not sure it can.’

‘It’s that urgent -’

‘It’s not time-sensitive. I just need to know if I’m right.’ At her dubious look, he scoffed. ‘Fine. Go back to bed. I’ll see you later.’ Her expression was hidden from view as he pulled his shirt over his head, then he turned away to find his jacket, fishing around in the dark.

Then the lights lit to a low glow and his jacket became visible, fallen under the chair by the dresser. He rose and turned to see Thawn by the wall controls, her confused expression settling to one of grumpy acceptance.

‘It didn’t end well last time I let you play with an ancient Vorkasi artifact unattended,’ she said. ‘But you’re waking up Airex.’

That part turned out to be easier and less-dangerous than Beckett had feared. The science officer replied to comms almost immediately, sounding much more awake than he felt anyone had the right to be this time of night. They had not been in the lab for more than a minute, loading up their project files for the artifact, before the tall Trill all but bounded in, clutching a large, steaming mug of coffee.

‘We’ve had a middle-of-the-night breakthrough?’ Airex asked far too eagerly.

‘Maybe,’ said Beckett as he checked their scans of the artifact, less sure of himself now he was under the bright laboratory lights. The hazy dream felt murkier and murkier the more his conscious self took over body and brain. ‘I want to check something.’

‘If this was a dream…’ muttered Thawn, clearly only able to go so far in being supportive on what might be a fool’s errand.

‘I’ve had some of my best inspiration strike from dreams,’ said Airex, sipping coffee and rocking on his heels. ‘Follow your gut, Lieutenant.’

‘There it is,’ Beckett murmured as the scan record flashed up. ‘We’ve been working on the principle that this is part of a system of data storage, right? Specifically, a Vorkasi library or database. Likely telepathically accessible, as that seems to be the Vorkasi’s jam.’

‘That’s our theory.’

‘Okay, so we seem to think that these components here are some sort of resonance emitters that operate on psychic energy. Interfacing with telepathic minds?’ Beckett brought up the holographic projection of the scans, including a projection of the artifact itself – still locked in storage – and gestured at a small row of devices.

‘Theoretically. They share some similarity with some of the principles on the subspace trumpet we designed in the Delta Quadrant,’ said Airex, patient and audibly letting Beckett work through his suspicion.

‘I think it’s even more similar than that. I do think that this is a system which allows people to psychically access some form of storage device. But I don’t think it’s a library. I think the telepathic elements go both ways.’

Airex cocked his head. ‘Not minds accessing data. Minds accessing… a mind? Minds?’

Thawn’s brow furrowed. ‘A telepathic library?’

‘No.’ Beckett’s throat tightened as he straightened up. ‘A telepathic prison. The Vorkasi trapped something telepathic and powerful – or at least its mind.’

In the silence that followed, Airex advanced on the projector. He didn’t say anything for a while, sipping his coffee and reading. At length he said, ‘That’s a little bit of a leap based off these readings.’

But Thawn was looking at Beckett, guarded. ‘You didn’t have a dream. You think that whatever was trapped is trapped and communicated with you?’

Airex turned to him. ‘Explain.’

The more Beckett was awake, the less he wanted to do that. He planted his hands on the console, feeling the cool metal calm and ground him. ‘Don’t call me crazy. I know what it feels like when a telepathic being is directly trying to affect my mind.’ He glanced at Thawn. ‘I felt it aboard the Devore ship.’ It had to be something powerful, he thought. He couldn’t tell when Thawn simply read his thoughts. But in the Delta Quadrant, she’d been working alongside the subspace trumpet, the subspace echoes of the murdered Brenari. This was something more, something communicating directly.

Haltingly, he explained the vision. Airex’s frown remained intact as he listened, but Thawn shuffled half a step closer to him, as if their superior officer would notice and judge if she dared do more, dared express any further efforts of comforting him.

Eventually, he finished, ‘The Vorkasi are bad news, right? Trying to conquer worlds. I don’t know if what I saw was a memory or a warning, but I felt the despair and suffering they were inflicting on this place. Then I felt them trap me. They were powerful telepaths who’d mastered telepathic technology; is it that outrageous that if they came up against a powerful telepathic entity, they might try to stop it?’

Airex drummed his fingers on the side of his coffee mug. ‘You say it spoke to you.’

‘It wants to be found. It wants to be freed.’ Beckett nodded at the projection of the component. ‘I think this is a bit of its prison. I think that’s what we’ll find if we track down wherever it came from. Something that was powerful enough to stand up to them, so they locked it away.’

‘That means,’ ventured Thawn carefully, ‘we’re dealing with a telepathic entity – that may or may not have ever existed in physical form – that’s endured for thousands of years while trapped. That sounds like a lot of hypotheticals.’

‘There are plenty of records of entities that exist outside of our common understanding of life,’ mused Airex. ‘Or even our dimension. A being of pure psychic energy? It would be fascinating and improbable, but far from impossible.’

‘Or it’s just, like, one telepathic alien guy whose brain’s been trapped in a box for a few thousand years,’ said Beckett with a shrug. ‘Either way… psychic or not, doesn’t this count as a distress call?’

The ghost of a smile at last tugged at Airex’s lips. ‘I’m not sure policy would agree it fits the definition. But, nevertheless, we’re Starfleet. Starfleet answers distress calls.’