Epis­ode Num­ber: 5×13

Writ­ten by: Dayton Ward

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 3^rd May 2025

Guest Stars:

• Jir­al Sera: Ori­on con­tract pilot.
• E’loruul: Head of the “pro­spect­ing” oper­a­tion on Dys­athus II, actu­ally a rank­ing mem­ber of the Ori­on Syndicate.
• Lieu­ten­ant T’rhyn: Long-lost chief sci­ence officer of the U.S.S. Lex­ing­ton (NCC-1709).

Call­ing the dis­cov­ery of this new Iconi­an arti­fact on Dys­athus II a game-changer is a huge under­state­ment. And here we are, try­ing to fig­ure out what to do with it, or even if we can do any­thing with it.

Or, if we should do any­thing with it.

The Ori­on “sal­vage col­lect­ors” are a prob­lem. They’re angry we’re here in the first place, but the dis­cov­ery of the Oracle has changed the game. E’lor­uul is smart enough to know this is import­ant to the Fed­er­a­tion, the Klin­gons, and a lot of oth­er people. Ori­ons aren’t eas­ily deterred when there’s poten­tial profit involved.

And it’s only a mat­ter of time until the Romu­lans real­ise what is hap­pen­ing right under their noses.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 51464.7

Plot: The away team tries to under­stand the pur­pose of the Oracle, as Ori­on and Romu­lan forces close in.

The ‘A’ Plot: The away team con­tin­ues to invest­ig­ate the ali­en struc­ture T’rhyn calls the “Oracle”, and dis­cus­sion soon moves to the time and space travel mech­an­ism. T’rhyn points out that the jumps appear to be ran­dom, in des­tin­a­tion, arrival date and ini­ti­ation time; it could jump to any point in space and time without warn­ing. The cap­tain dir­ects the team to try and find a way to pre­vent this hap­pen­ing for a while.

Azon­an, Zepht and Quinn con­tin­ue to decode more of the con­soles and their data, loc­at­ing what appears to be a his­tor­ic­al record, detail­ing the rela­tion­ship between the Iconi­ans and the Tilikaal.

Raynor takes the search for a con­trol mech­an­ism out­side the Oracle itself, first examin­ing its sur­face, before mov­ing on to study the inner walls of the pyr­am­id­al Locus. As he gets closer to the entrance, he begins to pick up a call from the secur­ity officer on the Trave: appar­ently Com­mand­er Zohir has been try­ing to reach the cap­tain for sev­er­al minutes, but the pyr­am­id walls have been block­ing the sig­nals. He relays the call to Kon­in, who is informed that Nar­en­dra Sta­tion has detec­ted the move­ment of a large Romu­lan fleet towards Dys­athus. They are likely to arrive with­in three hours, and Nar­en­dra can­not send any oth­er ship to assist.

Kon­in real­ises the away team needs to work fast, both to learn what they can and to ensure the Romu­lans do not gain con­trol of the Oracle. After some dis­cus­sion, they decide that they should try to take con­trol of the trans­port mech­an­ism, send­ing the device to a time and place of their choos­ing. Zepht and T’rhyn exam­ine the Oracle’s star map in more detail, and select a star sys­tem bey­ond the cur­rent lim­it of Star­fleet’s explor­a­tion of the Shack­leton Expanse. They will aim for sev­er­al months into the future, giv­ing Pro­ject Dia­mond Hedge a chance to reach that far before it arrives.

T’rhyn points out a major prob­lem at this stage: the Oracle needs a lot of power to trans­it. It looks like this should be the job of the Locus, but the pyr­am­id cur­rently seems to have no capa­city to do this. Quinn sug­gests that they should con­nect the Oracle to the run­about, using its power reserve, which should be suf­fi­cient. A plan is put togeth­er, with Azon­an and Kon­in build­ing the power inter­face, while Raynor goes into the Oracle’s crawl­ways to find the con­trol mech­an­ism, with T’rhyn provid­ing guid­ance from out­side. Zepht con­tin­ues to work with the data they extrac­ted from the con­trol sys­tem to refine the nav­ig­a­tion set­tings, and Quinn brings the Trave closer to the entrance to the pyramid.

As the vari­ous tasks reach their con­clu­sions, sensors on the run­about alert them to move­ment on the snow out­side the Locus. Large num­bers of Ori­ons and Naus­icaans are approach­ing, heav­ily armed. Quinn imme­di­ately raises the shields, con­fid­ent that these will pro­tect them from any assault.

E’lor­uul hails them, demand­ing access to her “sal­vage”. Kon­in tries to buy time by enga­ging her in a leg­al­ist­ic debate over what con­sti­tutes “sal­vage”, but then the Trave is rocked by an explo­sion. They’ve just been hit by a photon gren­ade, and more arrive from sev­er­al dir­ec­tions as the Ori­ons move for­ward. Kon­in real­ises they won’t have long before the gren­ades take down the shields, so he activ­ates the tac­tic­al con­sole and returns fire with the Trave’s phasers, tak­ing out one mortar.

The ground forces begin fir­ing dis­ruptor rifles, their beams splash­ing harm­lessly off the shields, but the real danger lies in the fall­ing gren­ades. Even­tu­ally how­ever, Kon­in takes out the remain­ing mor­tars and they breathe a sigh of relief as Azon­an and Raynor fin­ish their tasks.

E’lor­uul raises the stakes, as two heavy shuttles approach, their weapons act­ive, while the ground forces con­tin­ue to fire. Azon­an begins to rig a con­trol sys­tem for the Oracle, but while he works out how to con­trol its des­tin­a­tion point and time, he is unable to com­plete a means to delay its activ­a­tion – someone will need to stay behind. He orders the oth­ers out, intend­ing to be the one to stay, but Zepht argues the point, explain­ing that he knows more about both the Tilikaal’s tech­no­logy and their lan­guage, while Azon­an is more import­ant to the ship. The engin­eer moves to force him out, but T’rhyn nerve pinches him, car­ry­ing him out to the run­about while Zepht remains to activ­ate the jump.

As she leaves the Locus, a swirl­ing pat­tern appears around the Oracle, which twists and van­ishes into thin air.

Kon­in, decid­ing that he wants E’lor­uul in cus­tody for her earli­er crimes, sets the trans­port­er to cap­ture and dis­arm her on his com­mand. The first of the incom­ing shuttle­craft com­pletes its attack run, miss­ing the Trave, and every­one except Zepht is able to board. As they lift off, Kon­in lowers the shields, risk­ing incom­ing fire to grab the Ori­on lead­er. The second shuttle nearly hits them, but Raynor is able to use a decoy probe to deflect the dis­ruptor fire, and they escape to orbit.

Return­ing to Lex­ing­ton, they are able to leave ahead of the Romu­lan fleet’s arrival, with E’lor­uul safely in the brig. Kon­in real­ises that Zepht nev­er returned to the run­about, and calls T’rhyn and Azon­an to his ready room to dis­uss this. He’s not happy, but accepts their explanation.

The Arc: It seems the Iconi­ans were try­ing to help the Tilikaal avoid their fate, but were pre­ven­ted by the fall of their own civilisation.

Obser­va­tions: The Oracle’s his­tory files tell the story of the Iconi­ans’ inter­ac­tions with the Tilikaal. Appar­ently, the Iconi­ans real­ised their rivals’ research into oth­er uni­verses would have a det­ri­ment­al effect on their civil­isa­tion, and present a threat to the rest of the galaxy. They developed a way of con­nect­ing to the Tilikaal net­work, enabling their isol­a­tion in anoth­er uni­verse until such time as the Iconi­ans could neut­ral­ise the poten­tial threat of their struc­tures. Unfor­tu­nately, they were nev­er able to com­plete their pro­ject, with their own civil­isa­tion van­ish­ing first.

Dia­logue: T’rhyn explains her actions: “He was cor­rect, he was the only logic­al choice to stay with the Oracle.”

Ques­tions: Did Zepht and the Oracle make it?