The ship hummed and shook around her, and she grinned every time an alarm shrieked. It seemed her little "surprises" had worked.

Thankfully, no angry Romulans popped up to deal with the saboteur, and no one grabbed her and held a disrupter to her throat. Still, she was so on edge that she nearly shot Kirk when he bumped into her.

"Hey, Velma. You've managed to piss off quite a few Romulans."

"Please. Don't call me Velma. This isn't the time- we have a captain to rescue."

"True. Let's do it." They shot their way into Pike's holding cell. He was tied up on a rotating gurney. The guy didn't look too good, but Erica could still see a steely stubbornness in his eyes.

"What are you doing here?"

Kirk grinned as he moved to untie Pike. "Following orders." A Romulan tried to sneak up on them, but to Erica's surprise, Pike grabbed her phaser, deftly flipped the setting to kill, and shot the Romulan. Even now, after having been tortured, starved, and God knows what else, like every good Starfleet captain, Christopher Pike was still a badass.

Kirk flipped open his communicator. "Enterprise, now!"

The golden-ringed embrace of a transporter took the trio, and they ended up on a transporter pad. Spock was standing beside them, and Scotty was at the controls with an ecstatic expression on his face.

Before Erica could blink, he had Erica enveloped in a bear hug. He whispered in her ear. "I knew you could do it, Erica lass. I knew you could do it."

Erica turned her face up to his. "Nice timing, Scotty."

He grinned proudly. "I've never beamed four people from two targets onto one pad before!"

Dr. McCoy took Pike and rushed him to sickbay. Kirk and Spock hurried out. Scotty turned towards the door, yelling after them. "That was pretty good!"

Erica smiled, shaking her head. "We were all pretty good, Scotty. But we're not done being brilliant yet. You might want to get to Engineering. I've got to get to the bridge." She hugged him lightly before running out.

By taking a few shortcuts through the Jefferies tubes, Erica managed to arrive on the bridge at the same time as Kirk and Spock.

Chekov turned to the group as they entered. "Captain, the enemy ship is losing power. Their shields are down, and I'm reading fluctuations in the containment field around their power core."

Erica giggled. It seemed like her little surprises had worked after all.

Kirk nodded. "Hail them now." His tone had that unique tenor of authority unique to a captain.

Chekov nodded. "Aye."

Nero's scowling face appeared on screen, and Kirk began to speak. "This is Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Your ship is compromised. You're too close to the singularity to survive without assistance, which we are willing to provide."

Spock leaned close and whispered to Kirk. "Captain, what are you doing?"

Kirk leaned in. "Showing them compassion may be the only way to earn peace with Romulus. It's logic, Spock. I thought you'd like that."

Spock frowned, then shook his head. "No, not really. Not this time."

Nero began to talk, interrupting the two. "I would rather suffer the end of Romulus a thousand times. I would rather die in agony than accept assistance from you."

Kirk nodded. "You've got it." He cut the circuit and turned to Chekov. "Arm phasers. Fire everything we've got."

"Yes, sir."

They fired, over and over again. The red phaser bolts lanced into the dying black behemoth in front of them. Reddish-orange explosions flared to life wherever the beams hit. It must have been pandemonium on that ship, Erica thought. Breaking apart in the grip of the singularity, trying to stabilize the singularity core, all the while feeling your seemingly invulnerable ship break apart around you. She almost felt sorry for her engineers, trying to do the impossible.

The Narada just… crumpled. There were no other words to describe it, really. It reminded Erica of watching water get sucked down a drain. The delicate-looking black tentacles curved into an ever-shrinking spiral, dotted with small explosions that flared to life for an instant before dying. Finally, the immense gravitational stress just overwhelmed the enemy vessel. Her warp core detonation simply consumed her.

Erica thought she noticed a satisfied smile on Spock's face.

Kirk turned to Sulu, grinning. "Sulu, let's go home."

Sulu nodded and turned to his station. "Yes, sir." He pushed down the gleaming silver lever that would under normal circumstances accelerate them to warp velocity. The ship shook like a bead in a paint mixer, and Erica held on for dear life as she frantically ran diagnostics, trying to shunt weapons power to the structural integrity field. It wasn't as if they needed weapons power.

Kirk had to yell over the noise. "Why aren't we at warp?"

Sulu shook his head perplexedly, fingers dancing across the controls. "We are, sir!" Whatever he was doing wasn't working.

Erica blanched as she realized the implications of the data showing up on her sensors- the ship's inertia was much higher than it should be, and it was increasing at a practically exponential rate. "Captain- we're caught in the gravity well! It's literally pulling her apart!"

Kirk was in full-on command mode now. Briskly, he opened a channel to Engineering. "Kirk to Engineering- Velma says we're caught in the gravity well. Get us out of here, Scotty!"

Scotty's frantic voice filtered onto the bridge. "You bet your arse, Captain!" A short pause. "Erica's right! And don't call her Velma!"

"Not the time, Scotty! Go to maximum warp. Push it!"

"I'm givin' it all she's got, Captain!" Erica checked the readouts, eyes widening. Scotty had cut out every single conceivable safety interlock that wouldn't definitely result in them getting killed.

Kirk shook his head. "All she's got isn't good enough. What else you got?"

Frantically, Erica pressed her fingers to her temples, trying to shut out the ominous sound of the roof of the bridge buckling under the gravitational stress. Words and equations ran through her head, and her lips moved silently. This was how she did her best thinking, isolated in her own mental darkroom.

Her eyes snapped open as she came to a solution. "Scotty- what magnitude of kinetic energy release would a flat-out warp core detonation cause?"

Kirk looked at her in confusion, but Scotty got what Erica was alluding to. "A pretty big one. But detonatin' th' core on th' ship would kill us just as dead as that singularity!" He paused for a bit. "Okay, if we eject the core and detonate, the blast could be enough tae push us away. I cannae promise anything though!"

Erica's fingers flew as she ran the numbers in her head. "Captain, he's right. It'd leave us limping home, but it might work."

Kirk needed no further confirmation. "Do it! Do it! Do it!"

A few minutes later, alarms blared on Erica's console as the warp core left the ship. She smoothly handed power requirements over to secondary generators, compensating for any loss of energy.

The proximity detonation alert lit up angrily next to her eye, signaling the warp core's detonation.

Then, the ship groaned under the stress as she shot away from the singularity like a cork out of a champagne bottle. Erica's eyes widened as a fresh alert popped up on her console: INERTIAL DAMPER OVERLOAD IMMINENT.

Erica braced herself against her console and opened her mouth, but it was too late. The rush of g-force pressed everyone into their seats as they accelerated madly. Erica knew that if it weren't for the dampers, they'd be paste on the wall.

Eventually, the ship's delta vee leveled out, and the singularity receded into the black. The gravitational forces on the ship lessened, and the ship coasted to a relative stop.

Tired, relieved grins lit the faces of everyone on the bridge. They'd done it. Against all odds, they'd overcome a behemoth of a ship over three times their size. They'd managed to save Earth and probably the Federation, too. Most of the ship was crewed by people barely out of the Academy. Armed with only their training and the tradition of Starfleet, they'd done the seemingly impossible.

There would be a time for mourning later. There would be a time to rebuild. But now, they could stand down.

Captain Kirk was the first to speak. "Well done, ladies and gentlemen. Well done indeed. Mr. Spock, stand down red alert."

A firestorm of claps and cheers filled the bridge, but Erica could only sit down, grinning like an idiot.