Work Text:
The viewscreen of the bridge showed the space station looming over the planet. It had been built centuries prior by an unknown species. Now it was threatening the planet down below, a fragile ecosystem just developing on the rocky surface. A mapping mission had encountered the station and the planet and plotted out that the space station would crash to the surface within the year, potentially doing irreparable harm to the planet. Enterprise was tasked with powering up the station enough to pilot it to an orbit that would prevent it from crashing down.
Erica was excited at the prospect of piloting something different. As the transporter faded and the solid floor of the station resolved beneath her boots, she glanced towards the rest of the team. La’an for security assessment, Uhura for any translation opportunities, Sam for potential insights into whatever species lived here prior, and Spock for finding a way to power up the station.
The station was quiet, but there was a faint sound echoing through the space. Spock had his tricorder to assess the space. The lights were off, the station still, and yet the faint hum of a life support system somehow maintaining itself through the years echoed through the silent corridors. “Air is safe to breathe, oxygen levels within normal parameters, no foreign matter detected.”
The sound of his voice echoed back to them in the space as if the station were speaking back. The layout was unfamiliar, the tech ancient. La’an finally broke the silence again, “We split into our two teams to assess the available tech. Spock and Sam and Uhura, Erica, and me. I want status updates every 5 minutes. If communications cut off we return to this point.”
The space seemed to be meticulously labeled, just in a language they couldn’t identify. But doors that lead to access hatches, medical facilities, dining spaces, quarters were all labeled in one way or another. Uhura had her tricorder out in an attempt to decipher a pattern to aid in translation.
“The structure of the station remains intact,” La’an observed. “No visible damage.”
“Just abandoned?” Erica wondered. “There’s no sign of an urgent retreat or bodies left behind.”
In fact the station seemed almost unlived in. No patterns or wear on the floor. Worn paint. Just quiet and empty. Uhura paused at a junction, assessing the signs. “I think this is pointing to an interior control room. Possibly it could involve station controls.”
Erica was the first to step through into the room. At first the gravity just seemed weird, possibly the gravity plating was only semifunctional, when the floor gave way under her right foot. She stumbled down, dropping her helmet. It didn’t fall with a clatter on the metal floor, rather slowly sank down as the floor yielded under it. Erica pushed her hand back to stop La’an and Uhura as the floor softened beneath her other foot, before reforming around it like wet sand. “Whoa!” She tried to push back to retreat to the corridor when the station responded. A ripple seemed to move through the whole space.
“Did you feel…” Sam began urgently on the comms.
La’an reached forward to grab Erica’s hand, as she watched the surface of the room rise up, clinging to Erica’s ankle, then her calf and further. Whatever it was clearly alive. “Get back!” Erica shouted.
“There’s something alive,” Uhura began over the comms.
“Enterprise emergency evac, Erica Ortegas.” La’an requested. Only static responded.
“Sam?” Uhura tried the local comms again to nothing.
“No, no. Don’t you dare!” Erica yelled at the station itself as she tried to wrench herself free. The surface only tightened in response, responding to her struggle like a living thing reflectively responding to pain.
“Uhura, get to the rendezvous and find Spock and Sam. Erica, I’m here,” La’an spoke, stepping cautiously away from the opening of the room.
Erica felt the surface grow up to her knees. Panic flared through her, a rush of adrenaline. Her heart racing, lungs struggling to catch her breath. But years of training kicked in just as fast. Experience pushing down fear to remain calm and focused. She closed her eyes and focused on slowing her breathing.
“La’an,” she said softly. “I need you to stay calm.” She opened her eyes back to look at her.
La’an nodded, her tricorder out as she assessed the material. “The structure growing around you, it is no different than the station.”
“So, the station is trying to smother me. That is just perfect.” The material slowly grew up her waist and caught her arms. “Well, not panicking isn’t really helping. Any ideas?”
“I could try the phaser?” La’an suggested. She was out of options, trying her comms again and getting only static in response.
“Try it,” Erica requested, desperately. The blast shot out to no response as the material grew higher, a faint deep vibration sounding through the space, low, almost soothing Erica as it grew up around her stomach, grew up her right arm, growing over the edge of her uniform, pressing against the skin of her neck. “Oh,” she whispered. Immediately aware of the vibration of the sound as it echoed in the space around her. Her voice came back to her in warped layers, as if the room were whispering back.
“Erica, stay calm, we are getting help. Can you tell me what is happening?”
“I don’t think it is attacking, I can feel it. It is like it is learning.” She knew she should be panicking more, but somehow the warmth and stillness pressed in, comforting. She felt the material spread across her shoulders, down across her back around her ribs, holding her upright, still. And then she lost it. Her control slipped. It wasn’t the immobilization that broke her. It was the loss of timing.
She tried to take a deep breath, to slow her down, steady herself as she had learned to do. Instead her chest stalled halfway through the intake. The structure grown around her chest finished her breath for her.
Air drawn in, but too shallow, too slow, and released too quickly. The timing was wrong. It was not hers.
Erica’s eyes widened with panic. Her heart racing against her chest.
“Erica? What is it?” La’an asked, inching closer to the room.
“No.” Erica said, her voice weak, the sound coming out clipped and then echoed back around her, layered and distorted in the space. Her breathing slow and steady as her heart raced. She tried a deeper breath, forcing a longer inhale. But the material encompassing her resisted. Her ribs compressed gently, but firmly. Not crushing, but dictated. Her inhale came when the structure decided it wanted to. Her exhale, just the same.
“Erica, your pulse is racing.” La’an reported.
Erica nodded, pained. “I can…I cannot…breath…it’s…” Her words broke off with a sharp gasp. The space echoing them around her.
The structure responded to her panic, adjusting again, trying to slow her breaths more. The lack of control, her racing heart were suffocating. Footsteps came racing down the hall as Uhura returned with Spock and Sam.
Erica saw none of that. Her vision tunneled. It was worse than pain, pain she could live through. Breath through, the total lack of control…something else dictating when she breathed was excruciating. Her hands twitched uselessly against her sides. Her fingers wrapped in the material, she couldn’t even twitch them in the gloves of her suit.
“...oxygen saturation dropping…” Words that sounded like Spock’s reached through.
“...comms still…” Uhura. Erica tried to focus on their voices.
“Just need…” Erica whispered out as the space echoed back to her. She needed a breath, a moment, air. The structure didn’t give it to her.
The pressure around her chest increased a fraction. The strain of trying to breathe started to hurt sharply. The structure was trying to correct her. She felt her heart shutter. Not just racing, irregular. Missing beats.
“Erica!” The sound of a tricorder chiming. Voices overlapping.
The structure hesitated. Feeling the uncertain irregular beat of her heart in her chest. It couldn’t control that, not yet, couldn’t account for the sudden irregularity.
Erica sagged down, and control she had gone.
“Erica?”
Her legs went slack, her head lolling forward. Her heart stuttered again.
The structure scrambled to correct a system that was no longer responding. The material no longer just held her, it began to merge through her skin. Connecting to her nervous system.
Her eyes fluttered open once wide. Panicked, silent. And then still, calm. She stopped fighting all together as her body went limp.
The structure caught her instantly, holding her in place as consciousness slipped away.
“Respiration and cardiac rhythm fully overridden,” Spock reported.
The space was silent save for a steady, insistent rhythm that seemed to pulse through Erica’s unconscious body.
---
Erica awoke, but not in any way she recognized. She could no longer feel the restraint around her anymore, not because it was gone, but because any distinction between it and her was no longer apparent.
She could tell she remained surrounded within the structure. She couldn’t feel her limbs, her body at all. But there was a faint buzz, a bit like pins and needles hinted in her mind. A sense that she still existed.
She could feel her face, the faint warmth and coolness of her breath going in and out. It wasn’t quite mechanical and it wasn’t quite organic. Air flowed in her lungs at exact intervals, perfectly efficient, perfectly wrong.
I should be panicking, she thought. Terrified at the lack of control.
I don’t need to think about it, she thought to herself. It echoed back to her somehow from the structure as if her brain was thinking it back to her.
The structure noticed her thoughts, her worries and responded, slowing the rhythm, easing her respiration just a fraction, as if trying to soothe her.
For a moment she felt her heart starting to race, beating so much she felt like she could hear it in her ears echoing. Don’t! She told herself as the feeling dissipated. She was safe. Any other thoughts faded away.
Voices filtered in from the outside as she remembered she had ears: that she could hear. “—Erica, we don’t follow—”
“—There was a spike in her heart—”
“—Stable, too stable its—”
M’Benga. She didn’t remember him on the mission.
“She’s conscious,” Spock reported somewhere in front of her. “Neural activity increased from both of them.”
Both?
Calm. It’s okay, she told herself. No she realized, not her, not completely. She moved to lift her head and realized she was not just moving herself, the structure was working with her. A team. An unwanted team, she thought. We are one, we need each other.
She wasn’t just being controlled anymore. She was contributing.
She became aware as a faint sensation of her body returned, that when she thought about movement the structure responded. Not by letting her move, but by complying if it wanted to.
Erica thought about reaching forward and saw Spock move back just a fraction as her hand reached out. Right, she thought, I can see. The hallway in front of her was crowded with M’Benga and Spock monitoring with tricorders as Uhura watched, taking recordings on her PADD.
“I am glad you can see,” Uhura stated.
They can hear my thoughts, Erica thought to herself. Before realizing that she could hear herself back. “No, I am speaking.” She hadn’t meant to speak. The words simply left her mouth. The space around her echoed her words back.
“A resonance echo?” Spock asked.
“No, it’s feedback, a pattern on the words,” Uhura explained.
M’Benga stepped close and Erica’s head turned to face him as he raised his medical tricorder to get new readings. “Her autonomic functions are being externally regulated. Breathing, circulation, even microadjustments to her neural processing.”
“Is she being harmed?” Pike asked.
“Captain,” Erica stated without thought. When did he appear? She thought or said as the words echoed around her.
Pike gave her a sympathetic smile.
“She is not being harmed,” M’Benga hesitated before continuing. “But she’s also not…autonomous.”
The statement didn’t feel quite right to Erica, though she was not really sure why. The structure was there…she was the structure. The presence wrapped though her like a second nervous system, not replacing her, but not separate either.
There was a sensation, like pins and needles rushing over her spine. Somehow the structure was agreeing with her.
Her voice emerged again, clearer. “I’m here.” The walls didn’t echo this time. Her vision blacked out, the effort of exerting control over talking making other senses dim for a moment, like the effort was diverging power from everything else.
“Erica. Look at me.” She tried to turn her head but the structure didn’t respond.
“It is not a threat,” Erica tried to explain, she knew it. It was just seeking something. It needed somewhere. The echo was still silent. She felt her breathing quicken.
The structure hesitated and then reacted, tightening its hold on her again, keeping her stable. Just breathe. The words echoed around her again.
“Can we transport her out if we boost the signal?” Pike asked.
“No,” M’Benga stated definitively. “She is too integrated. Her bio-signature and the structure’s are overlapping. Trying to beam her out would tear them both apart.”
“Uhura?” Pike turned to her. “Any progress.”
“I am getting something, there is a pattern to the timing of the echos. I just need her to talk more.”
I’m okay, Erica thought. I can wait. The sounds echoed around her. She could almost feel the structure’s thoughts, its intentions. Layered around her. Just outside of her understanding.
She’ll figure it out, Erica thought as the words echoed around her. It was borrowing her and right now she was the only bridge they had.
A faint pulse went through the structure and Erica stopped trying to speak, trying to move. Falling into complacency. Occasionally the structure would speak through her, words becoming a garbled sentence with no meaning.
When her brain decided to respond enough to move to panic the structure reacted instantly, tightening the connection, flooding her nervous system with a corrective sensation, with more control until the thought unraveled.
It wasn’t painful. That should have made her afraid. But she forgot she could be afraid. Forgot she could see, that she could hear, that she had a sense other than the structure, other than the station itself.
Her last internal thought that she had wanted to speak, but couldn’t find the connections to make that happen, was that realization. This wasn’t a creature or a being in the station, this was the station itself.
She could feel it, the rotation of the outer rings, the stabilization engine off line, the life support system working to support the new arrivals. She wanted to tell them. To tell someone maybe. Or maybe she was always the station, she wasn’t sure anymore.
Time became impossible to track. She didn’t even notice the pace of her breathing, her heart anymore. Time wasn’t measured in seconds any more, it was cycles. Patterns in the system.
There were beings on the station, cameras picking up their motion, their concern.
---
Uhura had brought a new device, designed to send out sounds so she could mimic the pulses of the structure. It was hard to enter the room, seeing Erica nearly engulfed having stopped responding coherently an hour before.
She played back a rhythm the structure echoed before.
Erica spoke in response, the words nonsense, but the echo having meaning. It copied the exact rhythm.
Uhura was positive now, the alien…the structure wasn’t ignoring them, they just hadn’t settled upon a meaning yet. It knew pattern. Input. It had intention.
M’Benga’s medical tricorder chirped sharply. His eyes narrowed as he read the screen.
“What?” Pike asked.
“Her biosignature…Erica is still present. Vital functions are stable. Neural activity elevated,” M’Benga stated, reviewing the readings.
“What’s wrong?” Uhura asked.
“The separation, it’s fading.” He looked up at Erica, only her face visible though the metallic structure around her. “Her bioelectric pattern is no longer distinct from the organism's energy matrix. They are synchronizing…integrating.”
“What does that mean?” Pike asked.
“If this continues,” he paused, considering her words. “There will be a point where this is no longer a clear Erica Ortegas to extract.”
Silence filled the corridor.
“How long?” Pike asked.
“Probably minutes at the current rate.”
Uhura’s hands shook as she returned to her task, loading up another pattern to try. “No,” she said fiercely. “I am sure it doesn't want to erase her. It is using her to try to translate. A bridge.”
“A bridge that’s collapsing,” M’Benga said.
“If I can complete the language model. If I can communicate the need for separation maybe…”
“Can you do it in time?” Pike asked.
Uhura didn’t answer right away. She looked at Erica, her friend, eerily peaceful in the structure and back at her translation device.
“I have to. Because if I don’t…” Her voice cracked. “I can’t lose her because she finally went quiet.” She was close, she could feel it; patterns forming in the responses to her attempts as she sent out another echoing message to the structure.
The structure responded.
“I think…it is a location, spatial coordinates. The response is different. It is telling us a place.”
She fed the same pattern back, trying to add on their current location first, trying to imply that this location could be that. The structure responded back. Their location and then the different one.
“I think it wants us to move the station to another location.”
“We don’t have time,” M’Benga said. “We need Erica first.”
Uhura had an idea. Feeding in a new pattern into her device. Trying to convey patterns becoming one and then returning to two again. Then she repeated the location it had sent.
The structure was silent. But then a ripple.
“Doctor?” Pike asked.
“The integration is reversing,” M’Benga said, astonished. “The patterns are differentiating again.”
“I promised,” Uhura began. “We need to move the station afterwards.”
“You have my word,” Pike assured her.
The material slowly reversed pulling away from Erica as she drooped forward. Gravity reclaiming her as the supports faded. Doctor M’Benga moved forward, ignoring the threat from the structure itself, but it didn’t seem interested in him. He supported Erica as she collapsed down. “Her autonomic systems, they are not functioning right. Heart rate spiking, breathing too slow.”
Erica’s chest hitched, breath suddenly coming too fast before stopping altogether for a terrifying few seconds before starting again with a ragged gasp.
“She’s not stabilizing,” Pike observed.
“Her body’s forgotten how,” M’Benga said grimly. “It’s been externally regulated for too long.” He tapped on her cheek, trying to get a response. She remained silent. “We need transport now,” M’Benga ordered.
The interference from the station faded away allowing the transporter beam enveloped them and take them to sickbay.
“She’ll be okay,” Uhura said, trying to force a confidence that she didn’t feel as they appeared in sickbay. “It knows. It wouldn’t have released her otherwise.”
“I am sure you are right,” Pike said as they watched the med team hurry Erica over to a bed.
---
The lights of sickbay were dimmed, intentionally softened. Alarms quiet. The whole space was currently designed to be calm and low stimulation. Erica lay back, reclined on the biobed, blanket pulled up to her waist, PADD resting on her lap.
She wasn’t reading it, having given up hours ago. She couldn’t focus.
Her chest rose and fell…then paused. Too long.
The display above her shifted subtly, nothing audible, no alarms, but the heart irregularity flagged as her rhythm shuttered before finding its way back to a shaky normal. Even with the alarms off, she was acutely aware of the issue.
But that itself was a plus. She no longer felt like a space station and no one but herself was controlling her breathing. It was a step up from both being on the space station and when she first came to in sickbay.
M’Benga didn’t look alarmed.
“That felt…longer than usual,” Erica observed. Focusing on steady breaths and calm.
“It was,” he said calmly. “But your body corrected and it has been some time since the last time.”
Uhura stepped over to the bed from behind. Trying to not be worried about how intently M’Benga was watching Erica’s vitals. She knew the visiting instructions: ‘Project calm, stay calm.’ “Am I interrupting?” she asked softly.
“No,” Erica said, trying for lightness. “Perfect timing. I was just rediscovering the joys of breathing. Apparently breathing is a skill I forgot I learned.”
Uhura began to smile and then caught the faint irregularity on the display and let the smile fade into something more watchful as she moved closer.
“Not a skill,” M’Benga corrected. “An autonomic function with a voluntary component.”
Erica glanced at him. “That feels like semantics.”
“It matters,” he said gently. “Skills you relearn. Autonomic systems recover.”
As if on cue Erica’s heart rate spiked again, fast, uneven, then dropped too low.
Uhura’s breath caught. But the biobed remained silent, visually indicators only gently displaying the issue.
“Okay…that was not great,” Erica said faintly as her vision narrowed for a second.
“Here, a mild neural stimulant,” he said, injecting her with another dose from a hypo on the side of the bed. “It just keeps your body deciding it does want to recover those systems.”
“That’s been happening?” Uhura asked quietly as she felt her own heart race in response.
“Less often now,” M’Benga said. “And with better recovery each time.”
“See? Progress,” Erica said with a small shrug. “Now tell me all about the station.” She glanced at M’Benga. “But leave out any really exciting parts for later.”
“We returned it…well we returned the whole station. Sam and xenobiology as having a field day understanding the whole thing. But somehow the thing is the station or became the station. The destination was a moon on another planet in the same system. Anyway, it is done.”
“Please tell me you are leaving out half of that tale.” Uhura only responded with a smile. “Did you know I was the station for a bit?…” Erica stopped as she felt her heart race somehow too aware of every feeling in her chest. “That was all me, Doc. Exciting stories for later. I can share about being a station and you can tell me the thrilling tale of Uhura talking in echos to an unknown lifeform later.”
“How long do you need to stay?” Uhura asked.
“Long enough that I’m confident her body remembers it’s in charge,” M’Benga explained.
Erica sifted slightly, trying to sit up more. Her breath remained stable despite the movement. “Hey, all normal.”
“Yeah, it was,” M’Benga reported.
Erica handed Uhura her PADD. “Would you mind just reading out loud a bit?”
Uhura looked down at the choice of text as she began to read, “‘The Starfleet Shuttle - An Abridged History.’ Light reading I take it.”
“Calm reading,” Erica said as she leaned back and rested her eyes.
“In the mid 22nd century the shuttlepod was the primary form of transportation to and from planets…”