The world flashed bright with transporter light, then went black. They’d beamed from the transporter room on the Tempest in EV suits, the hum of the ship, each other’s movements, the chirruping of systems background noise even when nobody had spoken. Now, as they materialised into the darkness of the Mercury’s decks, her hull blown, hard vacuum around them, Renard heard nothing but the hum of her comms, her own breathing in the helmet, and the thud running through the suit as the mag-seals of her boots clamped to the deck.

‘Forward saucer section,’ Valois confirmed, voice crackling through comms even though he stood beside her. ‘We’re two sections from the bridge.’

Their helmet lamps punched cones of light down the corridor, twisted walls of metal, but soon disappeared into darkness.

‘She died well,’ came Jodrak’s crackling voice, approving as he studied dangling cables and broken struts. Beside him, Ash’rogh said nothing.

‘What counts as “well?”’ Renard challenged.

‘She has been gutted. Rent asunder,’ Jodrak said as if this was obvious. ‘Fought until the end.’

Valois advanced down the corridor, consulting the display on the tricorder systems built into his wrist panel. ‘Bridge is this way. Let’s go.’

He took point with Jodrak, and Renard found herself beside Ash’rogh behind them. Lights caught signage, door-frames, melted control panels. A pressure door was broken halfway open beside a sheared-off handrail. In the gloom, it had looked much like any other Starfleet ship Renard had done search and rescue aboard, but under their lamps, she could see the distinct design cues of the 22nd century. This wasn’t just a dead ship. This was an ancient battle site.

She still kept to her trained SAR protocols. Check footing before each step. Sweep for loose plates under dust.

‘Contact ahead,’ said Valois as they swept a corner. ‘Main corridor to the bridge. It’s blocked.’

As her lamp swept up, she saw it: the corridor ending in a wall of debris where the ship had folded in on itself. Deck and ceiling came together in a jagged mess, structural beams sundered. But occasionally, a thin blue spark snapped in the darkness, leaping from a torn edge to nothing.

‘There’s still power,’ Ash’rogh said. ‘Dangerous.’

‘Useful,’ said Jodrak. ‘If we wish to access bridge systems without beaming over our own power supply.’ He consulted his own scanner, the Klingon EV suits much bulkier and sturdier than Starfleet’s, his movements cumbersome. ‘Power runs down this junction. But not to the bridge proper.’

Valois was also reading his scans, with more detailed schematics of the ship layout. ‘There’s an EPS control node two junctions off the main. If we can access limited power, we can maybe boost bridge systems.’

Under Valois’s headlamp, Jodrak’s eyes gleamed. ‘I can do that. If you show me where.’

‘Then we will clear the way,’ Ash’rogh butted in. Renard suspected he wanted to make himself useful, but it was a task which needed doing.

Valois glanced at her, then back to the Klingons. ‘Aye,’ he said after a beat. ‘Channel two for intra-teams. Check in every three minutes. Try to not bring the corridor down.’

‘I know how to handle unstable ship sections,’ she said blandly.

‘Good!’ boomed Jodrak. ‘If it falls, roar loudly so we can hear you.’

‘On the correct channel,’ Ash’rogh said wryly. He did not move as Jodrak clapped him on the shoulder, and the sergeant and Valois headed down the junction towards their control node. The darkness ate their headlamps almost immediately.

Renard and Ash’rogh turned back to the heap, and she let her torch crawl the contours of shattered metal. Peeled deck plating, a fallen beam, a pressure door that had compressed a section, and faint blue snaps of static confirming at least residual charge.

‘There is no sophisticated way through this.’ He advanced first, and set his gloved hands on a bent girder the size of a man and leaned into it. Metal groaned, the girder shifted an inch or two – then a blue knife arced across his gloves with a crack. He jerked back with a sound of more surprise than pain.

Renard scowled. ‘22nd-century polarised plating. Essential for ship-to-ship combat. Far more dangerous in the wreckage afterwards than deflector. If you’d waited…’

‘You said nothing.’ His voice bore the edge of frustration that spoke of faint embarrassment.

‘I did not know I needed to inform you of basic safety protocols on an unstable ship.’

‘Then we wait while you scold me, and then the wreckage.’

‘We’re not waiting.’ She raised her wrist, studying her display. ‘We’re doing it right.’ A holographic overlay scrolled across her HUD, identifying and outlining separate sections of wreckage, and with the press of a button, she transmitted the feed to him. ‘Those are load-bearing,’ she said, tagging sections. ‘Those are not. Move the wrong one, and this all comes down. Those are live. Pull before I bleed them, and we fry.’

His eyes flickered as he studied the feed in his helmet. ‘Then guide me.’

She flagged a girder and clipped a grounding clamp to a section of bulkhead before adjusting her tricorder’s emitter. ‘On my mark.’ Under her scans, there was a bloom of light as the charge leapt to the path she’d given it, grounded to a safer location. ‘Now.’

Ash’rogh hauled. The girder came up with a squeal of metal before he threw it to one side with a crash. He made a satisfied noise. ‘Fine guidance.’

‘Fine lifting.’ She paused and wondered if she sounded glib. ‘This work takes cooperation, communication, patience. We press on.’

They found a rhythm faster than she expected. She’d anticipated managing his impatience or over-confidence, but now he listened and waited like it was a combat drill. Wait for the signal. Apply force. Step back. Wait again. At points she had to join him, adding leverage rather than strength. Progress was slow, but steady.

‘Valois to Renard,’ came the XO’s voice eventually for a third check-in. ‘Jodrak is making progress. Five more minutes.’

‘Four minutes!’ insisted Jodrak.

She caught the shake of Ash’rogh’s shoulders as he chuckled to himself without activating comms, and let herself smirk in the shadows. ‘Clearing is progressing. We may be done by the time you’re back.’

Ash’rogh was watching her as she finished. ‘You keep steady even when this metal wants to kill us.’

‘It’s metal. It doesn’t want anything.’

‘This is a ship of the dead. It will claim us given a chance.’

‘Which is why we take it carefully.’

They worked in rhythm now, tagging sections safe to clear, bleeding charges, shifting beams. The wreck groaned, disturbed dust now thick in the air, hanging in their torchlight.

Until the pitch of the metallic groans of wreckage changed. Renard’s gut clenched just as a beam overhead sheared loose, bolts pinging into the dark –

Then Ash’rogh was there, arms up, and braced the falling beam with a strength she knew she didn’t have. He locked himself, and through comms she heard his grunt of effort. ‘Move!’

She ducked back, and as he wavered, she snatched up a section of conduit they’d already cleared and shoved it into the gap as a brace. Her HUD had been blaring warnings she hadn’t needed when she’d seen the moving girder, but now the tagging flashed from red to amber. ‘Release!’

He heaved, letting the beam crash onto the brace. Dust flew up anew, then the corridor stilled. ‘That would have crushed you.’ She heard the heaviness of his breathing.

Her pulse thudded in her ears, deafening compared to the hum of her suit and its systems. ‘Good timing.’

After that, it didn’t take long. A last plate came free under his hands, and the way through opened, not long before Valois and Jodrak returned to them, the four reuniting before the warped doors to the bridge.

‘We should have emergency power,’ Jodrak confirmed. ‘These systems are old and degraded, though. Only activate systems we need.’

Valois nodded at the way ahead. ‘Then let’s get those doors open ourselves.’

The Klingons stepped forward for that, cranking the manual release to then haul the panels away. With a groan of tortured metal, they parted, and the bridge of the Mercury lay open before them.

It was a ruin. Chairs had collapsed to twisted frames, console panels were shattered, the forward screen a slab of scorched metal. Dust drifted through the air at their disturbance, kaleidoscoping through the beams of their headlamps.

Valois hesitated at the threshold, and Renard paused, wondering if he’d seen a threat. Then he looked at her, and she saw his expression was reverent, not concerned.

‘We read about this in the Academy. Didn’t you? One of the earliest exploration disasters of Starfleet. All these ships, all these lives. Lost in a mystery.’

It wasn’t that Renard didn’t care. But she preferred to save such reflections for once the job was done. ‘We’ll solve that mystery, Commander,’ she said, and set foot on the bridge.

‘A battlefield is sacred.’ That was Ash’rogh, still beside her. ‘Even an enemy’s.’ She wondered what her colleague – her brother – would think about the Klingon guest showing more vocal regard for the wreck site than her, and decided to instead focus on the work she could affect.

A section of the bulkhead was cracked open. The crew had likely been dragged into the void through it, though by the shattered mess of the bridge, they might have been dead already. Renard found her eyes drawn to the captain’s chair, now nothing more than a stump of metal. Once, the commander had sat there, held there, and overseen her people fighting to their death.

She advanced to the operations console and tested the controls. Weak lights ebbed across it. ‘Emergency systems here. Sergeant, if you help me, we can see what logs we can access.’

Valois nodded and turned to the centre of the bridge. She heard the click as he swapped his comms to Starfleet frequencies. ‘Away team to Tempest. We’re at the bridge and booting up systems.’

Renard could hear the crackle of resentful excitement in Pentecost’s reply. ‘Understood, Commander. Let me know what the dead have to say.’