“Down, down, down.  Would the fall never come to an end?”
-Lewis Carrol – Through the Looking Glass

The morning was going swimmingly.  Just a perfect illusion of normalcy.  A tepid cup of mocha infused coffee was in one hand.  His other flicked through an endless stream of banal reports.  Then in a blink, the whole damn ship lost its mind.  The readyroom viewport to Michael’s left had been showing the stars streaking by no problem as they plummeted along their course to Starbase 72 at warp six.  Until they weren’t.  At some point the stars had suddenly twisted into a tunnel of some sick, glowing haze bathed in amber and orange.  The subsequent jolt that rattled the hull and deck plating felt like the Fresno had run into the bloody soul of the galaxy its self.  The ship’s klaxons erupted with the violent howl of a red alert.

“Hull breach on deck eight.”  The ship’s computer piped up to state this fact in its usual cold and clinical manner, as though this were merely another mundane Tuesday occurrence.  The room went dark and was instantly bathed in the seething red glow of the emergency LEDs that ran along the middle of the walls.

“What the fuck!”

It was as much a declaration as it was a question.  Everything had hit the fan, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with the wreckage of it all.  Michael slammed the rest of his lukewarm mug down like it was a shot of bad whiskey.  The universe would not deny him that, at least.  Even if half its remaining contents had already sloshed to splatter his desk.  He surged from his seat with all the violence of a launched photon torpedo – adrenaline spiking, curses sputtering on his lips to form faster than thought.  The momentum of this sudden and furious departure from his desk caused his chair to collide into the wall behind him as he lurched towards the doors at the opposite end of the room that would lead to the bridge.

“Report, now!”

Michael’s voice cracked like a whip to contrast with the doors’ polite whoosh.  As he stormed past their threshold, they hissed shut behind him in a soft lullaby played that was barely heard over the klaxons and chaos of the bridge.

“Another piece of debris, bearing two-ninety-one!  Clinch and pray, lads!”  This was Vorak, the Tellarite’s inexplicable Caldos Colony Scottish brogue barking the warning like a pub bouncer during a bar fight.  All business.  No preamble.

“Brace for impact!  Helm, I want us going evasive!  Right goddamn now!” These words were from his XO.  The Andorian voice of Thalissa Zheen was controlled, exact, and in total contrast to all of the chaos unfolding around them.  A large, jagged chunk of wreckage was growing larger on the viewport.  Lieutenant J.G. Lenara Rix fought at her console to heave the bulk of their California-class vessel out of its path.  This orange, swirling vortex that they found themselves in seemed to tilt as if the whole universe were having a seizure while the Fresno pitched to starboard.

It wasn’t enough.  A second jolt slammed into the hull, but this time the shields were up and they gritted their teeth and took the brunt of it.  Try as she might to miss it, the Fresno had hit the debris head-on, no time for elegance.  The damn thing split in two and flung past either side of the ship, cleaved apart by sheer velocity, brute physics, and quite possibly spite.  An overhead panel above Michael detonated like popcorn laced with deuterium.  It showered him with hot sparks and insulation.  The deck rose to punch him in the ass like it had a personal vendetta.  One second he’d been standing just outside of the door to his readyroom.  The next he was sprawled on the floor like he’d just been mugged by the laws of physics.

“Shields at fifteen percent!” Vorak roared.  “Another slab like that an’ another deck’s gonna be open to the stars!”

“Then whatever scrap of shit shows its face next gets erased, understand?” Michael growled as he picked himself up off of the deck and straightened out his tunic.  He didn’t bother wiping off the sooty stains it had incurred with this fresh bit of chaos.  “Target it and turn it into space glitter!  If we take another hit, someone’s getting spaced!”

“Aye!” The Tellarite tactical officer muttered his assent.  As the Fresno recovered from a tilted list after this latest impact, a ring of phased energy formed to surge around the top of the saucer section and lance out at the next piece of debris in a drawn out, steady line of fire.  It cut through the brittle hulk, snapping it like a dried twig under a bootheel.  The Fresno flew through the remaining shrapnel.  The miniscule bits flared blue, harmless but hungry as they collided with and rebounded off what little dignity remained of the shields.

Eager to stow himself in before the next thing decided to come along and knock him on his ass again, Michael stormed over to the pair of center seats.  With his own still currently occupied by his XO, he dropped into hers with all the grace of a man who’d just been booted out of a moving vehicle into the middle of the street.  Commander Zheen was already half rising out of instinct, but he waved her off.  Right now, he could care less about furniture protocol.  His rump simply needed sanctuary, and it would have it!  Rather superstitiously, he hoped it would protect his backside from further metaphorical poundings as well as the literal ones.

“I want explanations.” Michael growled, his voice carrying an edge that made it clear who was in charge on this bridge regardless of seating arrangements.  “What the hell is all of – this?”  He raised a hand to gesture at the tunnel of orange and amber madness on the other side of the viewscreen as if daring it to keep existing.  And continue to exist, it did.  “Why are we not at warp?”

“We were, sir!  Something pulled us into this!” the youthful if indignant voice of Lenara spoke up from the helm defensively.

“Subspace corridor, sir!”  From the science station at the far rear wall Lieutenant Commander Dren Lor’s voice barked through the bridge smoothly to clarify, as though he were reporting the weather and not a spatial rabbit hole into madness.  “The aperture yanked at our warp field like a magnet!”

“You’re telling me we got pulled into the Underspace?” Michael asked incredulously.  The Trill science officer might as well have just told him that the floor was made of bees.

The Adroit had slipped the noose, so to speak, when it came to taking part in the fiasco that had taken place last year.  Michael’s former posting as its XO had spared him from that particular pleasure, and he didn’t mourn his absence from it in the slightest.  The amount of ships that the Fourth Fleet had lost to the Underspace debacle was partially responsible for why he had been given command of the Fresno.  God bless institutional desperation.  But now that a name was being put to this, the Captain of the Fresno was recognizing their situation for what it was.

Rather than directly answer Micheal’s query at first, the mutton chopped Trill just emphatically gestured to the viewscreen.  No explanation.  Just pure, exhausted look for your own damn self kind of energy.

“How?” Michael finally asked.

“Right place, right time.” said the Trill simply.

“We were right on top of the first chunk!” Lenara Rix continued to stammer defensively.  “I didn’t have time to dodge!  Our shields were still down!”

That first impact.  The hull breach while he’d been innocently chugging bean juice and reading reports.  The realization hit Michael like a dead canary flung across a mine shaft to strike him upside his head.  “How many casualties on deck eight?”  But the answer to his question was interrupted.

“Targetin’ more debris!  Bearing zero-eighty-nine!” Vorak’s voice rang out once again, with the timbre of a war drum that had been fashioned from an oak scotch barrel.

Another phased energy beam lanced out to dissect another rusty hulk of flotsam.  This time, one of the cleaved shards smacked into the saucer section of the Fresno dead to rights.  He didn’t need his tactical officer to tell him that the last of their shields had just been pissed away by this latest jarring impact.  The hull of the Fresno convulsed once more like a drunkard being stunned mid-rant in the middle of the lounge.

“Warp power offline!” came the panicked cries of his helmsman.

“Bridge, do you copy?”   The voice of Chief Engineer Kiran Nivar crackled over the comms.  “Warp core was seconds from going full-on Armageddon.  Had to shut it down.”

Well that was just great.  Michael had some caustic comment holstered and ready to be drawn, but the words caught in his throat.  Suddenly – impossibly, they were out of the orange laden maelstrom of the Underspace.  He stared at the viewscreen like it was mocking him.  Cold pinpricks of stars against the backdrop of the void were suddenly back, as if they hadn’t just recently been replaced by hellfire and lunacy.  “Uh… someone want to tell me how the universe suddenly forgot to kill us?”

“It would appear that it had something to do with the manner in which our warp core was beginning to surge, right before Nivar’s team shut it down.” Dren Lor said as he tapped through the readouts of his science station.  “It interacted somehow with the Underspace and ejected us to… here.”

“And just so I’m clear,” Michael drawled, beginning to feel at his wit’s end at the day’s shit-show, “where exactly is here supposed to be?”

“The Pieris system, Captain.” Lt. J.G Lenara Rix helpfully offered, with a voice that had gained just a little more altitude in confidence than earlier.

Indeed, the recognizable form of the Pieris sun and its curious but distinct form of radiation that the Fresno had spent its first mission investigating presented its self in the distance of the viewscreen’s display.  It would seem that destiny, that smug bastard, had decided to steer them back to this patch of cursed space like a dog returning to a spot it had once pissed on.

“Sir! Subspace aperture opening at heading two-five-six!  We have a contact!” Vorak’s voice roared out once more, sounding like gravel mixed with thunder.  It shattered Michael’s detour in thought with all the grace of a disruptor blast being fired into a priest’s confessional booth.

All heads on the bridge looked on at the viewscreen expectantly, transfixed to the screen like moths to rotten fabric.  It would seem that their uninvited foray into the Underspace would not go unnoticed.  A chasm yawned open, a swirling eye of the familiar orange and amber tones that the Fresno had just escaped.  Out from the hole in space poured the form of what the crew of this Federation ship caught unawares would later learn to call a Manasa-class escort.  Polaron bursts along its hull began to coil and crackle as they charged up, setting off a hellstorm of warnings across Vorak’s console…