Epis­ode Num­ber: 1×10

Writ­ten by: Marco Rafalá

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 27^th Feb­ru­ary 2021

Guest Stars:

• Crew­man Samuel Ewendi: engineer
• Lieu­ten­ant John Kear­ney: Armory Officer, SS Atlantis NX-05

We inter­cep­ted an old-style auto­mated dis­tress call from a old Star­fleet ves­sel. Could the des­cend­ants of sur­viv­ors from an ancient ship­wreck still be alive some­where out there, marooned on a strange plan­et? I won­der. The sci­ence officer has traced the sig­nal to its source: an M‑class plan­et. The star sys­tem is uncata­loged and unique in my exper­i­ence as it orbits an unstable worm­hole. In two days we will arrive and begin our investigation.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate 9842.5

Plot: Receiv­ing an ancient Earth Star­fleet dis­tress sig­nal from a crashed shuttle­pod, Lyo­n­esse res­cues a crazed sur­viv­or, while sensors detect a ves­sel stran­ded in the event hori­zon of the nearby wormhole.

The ‘A’ Plot: Lyo­n­esse arrives in the BC-04 sys­tem as she fol­lows her way through the wind­ing pas­sages of with­in the neb­ula, and dis­cov­ers an unstable wormhole.

While Capt Mas­uda is on the plan­et, the mouth of the worm­hole grows vis­ibly and its grav­it­a­tion­al pull begins to destabil­ise Lyo­n­esse’s orbit, put­ting a strain on the ves­sel’s power reserves. Once Mas­uda returns, they plan to break orbit, but then astro­met­rics spe­cial­ists observing the worm­hole with Lyo­n­esse’s sensors pick up an anom­aly. There seems to be a ves­sel stran­ded at the edge of the event hori­zon. The data is uncer­tain, but it looks like it might be a Star­fleet vessel.

Reg­u­la­tions say that if there are people aboard, Lyo­n­esse should attempt to res­cue them, so Mas­uda con­fers with her crew. Ens Locke pro­poses a fast flyby of the the event hori­zon, attempt­ing to beam any lifesigns off the stran­ded ves­sel as they pass, before sling­shot­ting out of the sys­tem, and they decide to try this.

Unfor­tu­nately, the plan is almost imme­di­ately abor­ted as they nearly col­lide with a cloaked object on leav­ing orbit. Locke real­ises that giv­en that the shuttle­pod dates from the Earth-Romu­lan War era, this could be a cloaked Romu­lan space mine, and that, accord­ing to their stra­tegic pro­tocol, more would be scattered across the sys­tem, impossible to detect except at very close range.

Mean­while, Lt Valik reports that power reserves are drain­ing fast…

The ‘B’ Plot: Com­mu­nic­a­tions picks up an auto­mated dis­tress sig­nal from the sur­face of the one class‑M world in the sys­tem (BC-04^d). Ana­lys­is shows that the mes­sage is of human ori­gin, but pred­ates the Fed­er­a­tion, being asso­ci­ated with the old United Earth Star­fleet. Scans of the sur­face identi­fy a field of debris of appar­ently Romu­lan ori­gin, with a crash­landed shuttle­pod nearby. There is no indi­gen­ous sen­tient life, but there is one human lifesign.

Capt Mas­uda takes a land­ing party to the sur­face to invest­ig­ate. They dis­cov­er the wreck­age is covered with a tox­ic blue fungus, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to move around, but are able to recov­er the logs of the shuttle­pod, which is indeed a 22^nd cen­tury design. Dr Vale picks up human lifesigns nearby. The sur­viv­or is aggress­ive and they are forced to stun him after a brief attempt to communicate.

Beam­ing back to the ship, the sur­viv­or is con­fined to sick­bay while Dr Vale tries to cure the psy­cho­trop­ic effects of the fungus. Lt Valik’s team decodes the logs telling the sad fate of the shuttle­pod’s crew and hint­ing at the events that led to its landing.

Obser­va­tions: Time dila­tion effects around the worm­hole are extreme. Kear­ney has been on the plan­et’s sur­face for six years, but Atlantis was lost over 130 years ago.

Ref­er­ences: Lt John Kear­ney is the Armory Officer of the SS Atlantis NX-05, a Columbia-class ves­sel from the 2250s. Atlantis was built as an NX, sim­il­ar to the ori­gin­al Enter­prise, but refit­ted to Columbia-class with a sec­ond­ary hull and warp 7 engine dur­ing the Earth-Romu­lan War. She was repor­ted miss­ing, with all hands, shortly before the Battle of Cheron.

Ques­tions: Does the worm­hole cross time as well as space? Or has its time dila­tion effects merely stretched out the recent past for the crew of Atlantis?