A/N: After re-reading this I realized I should really proofread things more. Or I should just not post things at terrible hours of the night. DISCLAIMER: I own nothing except the basic plot and my OC, anything else is not mine.

Captain Jim Kirk of the USS Enterprise always felt a bit of smug pride whenever he was in Engineering. Here were some of the latest in designs for Starfleet engines and they were his. He was discussing engine maintenance with his Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, or "Scotty." They were just finishing when his communicator went off.

"Will that be all Scotty?" he asked with an inquiring look at his engineer.

"Aye Captain, I believe we're finished. I'll get started on these right away," Scotty replied, moving off a ways to confer with one of his crewmembers.

Kirk plucked his communicator off his belt and gave it a long look. The thing never gave him a moment's peace some days. Although, if it meant getting to captain the Enterprise and her crew, his own personal peace and quiet was a price he was willing to pay. He flipped it open.

"Kirk."

Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, his communications officer and language expert was on the other end. "Captain, I'm receiving a distress call from a location about 50 kilometers to our northeast." There was a pause before she added, "We can't identify what it is."

Kirk gave the communicator in his hand a puzzled look. A distress call in deep space where they were literally in the middle of freaking nowhere? The nearest planet was a good 800 kilometers away or so. He didn't know of any other Starfleet ships or other registered vessels that might be in the area.

"Are there any other vessels in the area Lieutenant?"

"None so far as I can tell sir. It appears to be just us out here."

"Alright, inform Mr. Sulu to set course for the last location of the distress call and try to make contact with the craft. I'm on my way up to the bridge."

"Yes Captain."

Kirk closed the communicator and looked for Scotty, spotting him by one of the main engine control panels.

"Scotty!" The engineer looked up.

"I'm afraid the maintenance is going to have to wait. We just got a distress call and I need you in the shuttle bay pronto."

"Aye sir." Scotty saluted him and headed off, but not before Kirk caught the muttered curses the engineer was sputtering. He just shook his head at the man and headed for the bridge.

hhh

Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy squinted in concentration at the hand sitting on the table in front of him in the sick bay. The hand belonged to the red headed young woman sitting across from him looking anywhere but where he was flushing out a gash she had given herself on a particularly sharp bolt in Engineering. To her credit though she hadn't offered to throw up on him or faint even though she was pale as a sheet and a little green around the edges. Her hand remained steady on the table.

He was applying a topical antibiotic to the wound when Jim's voice came on over the sickbay speaker system.

"Bones, you there?"

"I'm a little busy Jim," he growled at his friend. He set aside the antibiotic and picked up the sealant to close the laceration.

"When are you ever not busy Bones?"

"When I'm dead," he muttered, eliciting a small smile from his patient.

"I'm afraid this can't wait. We just intercepted a distress call and I need you to prep the sickbay and your team to receive any survivors we may pick up."

"Any idea what we're looking at?" He carefully pinched the skin closed so that it lined up evenly. He picked up the skin sealant gel and placed a thin line along the edges of the wound. He listened to Jim's information as he held it shut for a minute to let the sealant dry so that the wound wouldn't reopen.

"I'm as clueless as you are. We'll know more once we're on scene, which should be in about twenty minutes." Jim signed off.

"Excellent."

He let go of the newly sealed skin and picked up a waterproof bandage, wrapping it around the woman's hand once. "Alright, you're good to go. No using that hand for the next couple of days. Keep the area dry and clean as the sealant can wash off when exposed to enough water. Let the sealant work its magic and you should be good as new. If you have any problems come back and see me," he instructed.

"Thanks Doctor." She left to return to her station. He turned to find most of his staff going about their usual business. He rolled his eyes. Some days it seemed like a small miracle that anything ever got done around here.

"Alright people let's go. We've got a damn distress call in less than twenty minutes to prep for. Let's move it!"

hhh

She had no idea how long she'd been trapped in the small spacecraft. There were no windows and even if there had been it wouldn't have helped since she was adrift in space. There no sun cycles to help her keep track of the passing days.

She didn't know where she was in space. She didn't know what she had done to deserve the life she had been given and now this. She barely even knew who she was anymore. There were just the memories.

Memories upon memories upon memories jostled and brawled for a moment of her attention. It was impossible to focus on any single one. As soon as she did, it slipped away to join the others swirling around and around in her head.

A majority of the memories weren't even hers. She wasn't even capable of making her own memories anymore. There were so many others crowding her mind there wasn't any room left for them. She was starting to lose her grip on reality, being pushed towards her breaking point. It happened to everyone eventually.

She was on her side curled in a ball on the floor of the only compartment on the craft. Her knees were tucked tightly to her chest and her narrow fingers were tangled in her dark brunette hair, covering her ears. Her eyes were squeezed shut, trying to shut out the memories, but you can't escape something that's in your head.

Her right ankle was chained to the wall and the shackle bit painfully into her skin from where she had struggled against it at first. She tried to focus on that pain now. It served as her anchor to the current world to keep her from going completely insane. There was no food or water on board. She was aware of one thing through the haze in her mind. This was not a prison or form of punishment. Her people had abandoned her. This was her coffin, but she wasn't ready to die yet.

hhh

Leonard looked at the stranded vessel though the wide view window that spanned the width of the bridge. The ship was slightly smaller than the average escape pod and was almost perfectly spherical in shape. The outside was the color of burnished copper and covered in an intricate maze of grooves. There were no windows that he could see.

"It appears to be simply drifting," Kirk muttered from the captain's chair. "I can't see any outward signs of an engine or other kind of propulsion system."

"Maybe that's why they sent out the distress signal?" Leonard suggested.

Jim shrugged and pressed a button on the arm of his chair. "Scotty, is the retrieval party ready to depart?"

Before leaving the space port at Earth, the Enterprise had been equipped with a specially designed 2-man Rescue & Recovery shuttle for collecting such things as artifacts, escape pods, and the like while they were on their journey. They had made the decision to use the shuttle in this case after earlier examination of the mysterious craft had revealed that there was no easily accessible door or hatch to dock with one of their other rescue shuttles. Since the craft was small enough, they decided to bring the whole thing on board.

"Aye sir they are. Shall I send them on their merry way?"

"If you will please Scotty."

There was a brief pause before Scotty came back on. "Shuttle departing now Captain."

"Thanks Scotty."

Leonard watched as a few minutes later the R&R shuttle floated into view and headed to retrieve the stranded craft.

Kirk stood and stretched. "Let's go down to the shuttle bay Bones and see what we're dealing with. Uhura, Spock, you guys come to. Your skills may come in handy. Mr. Sulu you have the con." Ensign Hikaru Sulu nodded. "Aye Captain."

Leonard followed the others into the lift with a feeling that things were about to change. He couldn't tell if it was for better or worse. He decided that with his luck it would probably be for the worse. He really hated space some days.

Half an hour later he watched through one of the shuttle bay's plate-glass windows as the rescue shuttle maneuvered the stranded ship into place. Once both vessels had been secured in place, the mammoth bay doors at the opposite end were closed and the strange craft settled onto the floor as gravity reasserted itself.

"Fascinating, I've never seen a ship quite like it," Spock said as everyone converged on the craft. Already, crewmembers were putting chocks in place against the sides to stabilize it and keep it from rolling like it was trying to do.

"Not even from something you may have learned on Vulcan?" Uhura asked him.

He shook his head, "Not even from my time there."

"What about you Scotty?" Kirk asked the engineer as the man joined them. "Have you seen anything like it?"

"Can't say that I have Captain. I saw some concept sketches for something similar in engineering school, but nothing ever came of it that I'm aware of." He ran a portable scanner over the copper-colored exterior as he walked around it.

"I'm not detecting any kind of propulsion system on it and there's what looks to be a very basic life support system on it, designed to last only a few days at most depending on who's using it."

Leonard had been half-listening to the conversation. He didn't really care much about the outside of the ship; he was more interested in who—or what—might be inside. Now he took over the conversation.

"Then we need to get this thing open right now and help whoever, or whatever, may be inside." He turned to Scotty. "How do we open this thing?"

Scotty shrugged. "I haven't the foggiest. Let's find out shall we?" He set aside his monitoring equipment and together they examined every inch of the exterior for a clue as to how to get in.

He found it first with his fingers that were finely-tuned to finding anomalies after years of medical practice. Amongst the many knots and grooves, his hands brushed over something that felt like a handle. Upon close inspection it was found to be a disk sunk into the metal with a bar that spanned about a hand width across it.

"I think I found it," he announced. He grabbed the bar and turned it clockwise. With a slight metallic groan, it turned half a revolution before it stopped.

By now everyone else had gathered around him. He leaned back and pulled the handle up. The disk rose out of the exterior, resulting in an airy hiss as the concealed door opened. The light beyond the door was just bright enough to escape being called dim, but visibility was still abysmal.

"Anyone got a flashlight?" he asked over his shoulder.

"Here you go." Scotty handed him the one that he kept on his belt.

"Thanks."

Just before he was about to climb in, Jim stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

"Hang on Bones, let me go in first. We don't know what may be in there."

"If you insist, be my guest," he told his friend, handing him the flashlight. It wouldn't help anyone if the Chief Medical Officer on board was injured or killed.

Jim took the flashlight from him and clambered inside, stooping through the low-ceilinged, short entry tunnel. A muffled curse was spat out as Jim knocked his head against the ceiling.

Leonard could see the brief flashes of light through the door as Jim looked around inside. He could also feel the curiosity radiating off of the others surrounding the ship. Even he was curious about what might be inside.

"Bones, you better get in here!" Jim called after a couple of minutes. He grabbed the edge of the door and hauled himself up, mindful of the ceiling as he stood up. Three quick strides had him in the dome-shaped main compartment of the craft. As far as he could tell, it was the only compartment.

That's not what commanded his attention though. The beam of the flashlight fell over the form of what appeared to be a young woman. She was curled up on her side in the fetal position. Her hands were clapped over her ears and her eyes were squeezed shut. The only indication that she was still alive were the violent tremors that shook her body and the shallow, rapid breaths she was taking.

"Look at her ankle." Jim's voice broke through his mental evaluation. His eyes moved across the figure on the floor until he found what had caught his friend's attention. A brief flash of anger at some unknown entity coursed through him as he realized what he was looking at. A cruel manacle with a heavy chain had been snapped tight around her right ankle. It had rubbed the skin raw and opened painful looking sores in a few places.

A thousand questions ran through his mind. Where had she come from? What was she doing on this ship? Why was she chained? She didn't appear to be dangerous. If anything, she appeared to be terrified, but of what?

He knelt next to the woman and laid a hand gently on her shoulder. She was trembling so much that the whole lower half of his arm shook. She didn't seem to feel his touch.

"Miss? Hello? Can you hear me?" he inquired. He tried shaking her to get her attention, but she was still unresponsive. He tried a few more times with the same result. He leaned back for a moment and looked her over, reassessing.

"You might want to be ready to jump in just in case," he warned Jim. Before the other man could ask why, Leonard reached down and pried her hands away from her ears and held them in his hands. As if some switch had been flipped, her eyes flew open and she probably would have tried to get away if he hadn't grabbed her. Her eyes darted around the room, looking for an escape as she struggled against his hold.

He could tell she was far from rational at the moment, still trapped in her fear. She reminded him of some of the more skittish horses they'd had on the farm in Georgia where he'd grown up. He decided to use the same approach he had used on them to try and calm her down.

"Easy, easy. No one's here to hurt you. You're safe," he told her in a calm, steady voice as he held fast to her hands.

"You're alright. You're on a Starfleet vessel. No one's going to harm you. You can relax. We're here to help you."

As he talked he could see her start to calm down a bit as his words penetrated through her veil of terror. He didn't know if she understood anything he was saying, but he kept on talking seeing that it was having some effect.

At last she quit struggling. She was still trembling though. Her eyes quit darting around and she fixed him with a pair of the darkest blue eyes he had ever seen. The corners were strangely tilted down at the edges. They were framed in thick, dark, lashes.

She spoke one word. "Safe?"

He nodded. "Yes, safe.

She sighed before suddenly collapsing. He caught her before she hit the floor.

A/N: As always I would love to know what you think. Leave me a note after this message ~Naomi