Epis­ode Num­ber: 4×08

Writ­ten by: ELH

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 14^th Septem­ber 2025

Guest Stars:

• Lieu­ten­ant (juni­or grade) Carisa Mac­al­inao: plan­et­ary phys­ics expert in the sci­ence department

After his mas­ter­ful work in (nearly) avoid­ing detec­tion at the K’si home­world, Lt James has been forced to repeat his feat to move past BC-19’s ion storms, and hope­fully bey­ond K’si patrol range. We’ve had a few days to recov­er, but sensors are show­ing anoth­er large “bubble” ahead. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be anoth­er cluster of K’si worlds!

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 9997.6

Plot: Lyo­n­esse and her crew encounter a dis­quiet­ing phenomenon.

The ‘A’ Plot: After the depar­ture of the Eye of Har­mony, Lyo­n­esse skirts the edge of the ion storm and forges on into the neb­ula tun­nel on the far side. Emer­ging after sev­er­al days, the crew dis­cov­ers anoth­er bubble over four light years across, the largest yet, although it appears to con­tain only two star systems.

As soon as they arrive, they receive a broken dis­tress call on Star­fleet fre­quen­cies. This causes a great deal of con­fu­sion as they are not aware of any oth­er Star­fleet ves­sels oper­at­ing with­in the Black Cluster, but then Jin determ­ines that the mes­sage itself is in Romu­lan, this being inad­vert­ently hid­den by the uni­ver­sal trans­lat­or. It appears to be from the Che­vareth, which has appar­ently suffered cata­stroph­ic dam­age. The coordin­ates provided in the mes­sage are loc­ated with­in the cur­rent neb­ula bubble, but scans of the area reveal noth­ing, not even the usu­al scat­ter­ing of particles and radi­ation com­mon to this region of space.

Once again, the cap­tain decides they should answer the call, so they head for its source at warp 9, aim­ing to be there with­in a day. They slow as they approach the coordin­ates and begin to scan in more detail, identi­fy­ing an ellips­oid­al region of space more than a thou­sand astro­nom­ic­al units across where there appears to be noth­ing at all. Care­ful obser­va­tions show what seems to be a dis­con­tunuity in the neb­ula wall behind it, as if they are look­ing through a glass sphere.

Sus­pect­ing some kind of unusu­al spa­tial phe­nomen­on, they launch a series of probes into the zone. The probes van­ish with a flash when they hit the bound­ary and, although they remain in con­tact, their chro­no­met­ers are out of sync by 3.61 seconds. Sub­sequent probes are pro­grammed to return, and double that error to 7.22 seconds, lead­ing Jin to the­or­ise that this is some­thing to do with passing through the bound­ary lay­er. Ulti­mately, Taurik sug­gests that the phe­nomen­on appears to be a sub­space node, a fold in space bend­ing light around its contents.

Giv­en that the probes seem fine, Mas­uda ignores her more cau­tious crew and orders the ship in.

They get a sur­prise as a hellish scene sud­denly shim­mers into view. A huge star, big­ger than any they’ve ever seen, dom­in­ates the volume, shed­ding a fierce white glow. A single red­dish gas giant, much lar­ger than most and with vis­ible rings, lies nearby, its pole ori­ented towards them. The bands of cloud in its atmo­sphere cause it to resemble a giant red­dish eye, and it reflects a ruddy glow across two large moons. Unglo is a class M world, covered in a dense rain­forest, while Tang­gal is class Y, a demon planet.

Jin, upon scan­ning the three bod­ies, imme­di­ately feels a sense of fore­bod­ing, and rap­idly becomes obssessed with find­ing out more about the giant plan­et. Taurik, mean­while, explains that the star appears to be a quasi-star, a stel­lar object powered by a sin­gu­lar­ity at its centre. He notes that these objects are con­sidered the­or­et­ic­al, as they would only have exis­ted soon after the Big Bang.

The same dis­tress call is being received from loc­a­tions on both moons, which is odd, but the sensors show con­cen­tra­tions of durani­um in both loc­a­tions, so Mas­uda decides to send two land­ing parties, one to each.

Valik, Kheled and Lt Mac­al­inao beam down to Tang­gal, arriv­ing in a des­ol­ate land­scape covered in rocky ridges divid­ing pools of boil­ing sul­phur. Soon after they arrive, they spot the wreck of a star­ship but are attacked by half-a-dozen fly­ing creatures, each resem­bling a bat-winged human torso, with what appears to be entrails dangling beneath. Mac­al­inao pan­ics, fir­ing her phaser wildly before one of the creatures knocks her out. Valik and Kheled man­age to stun the attack­ers with wide-angle blasts, and a couple of them drop into the sul­phur pools. Mac­al­inao is only bruised, but very afraid. Valik calls for her to be beamed back to the ship and requests a secur­ity party to join them.

James flies Vale and Hop­era to Unglo in the shuttle­craft Mor­gana, put­ting down near the wreck of a star­ship. It appears to be one half of Che­vareth, sheared diag­on­ally in half. As they make their way through the jungle, they begin to hear voices call­ing for help. Before long, they real­ise that these are some kind of ruse, try­ing to attract their atten­tion. Ignor­ing the calls, they press on to the wreck, where they are greeted by heavy dis­ruptor fire.

Someone calls for the shoot­ing to stop, and then Com­mand­er Ravenna appears, shout­ing to her crew mem­bers that they are friends, not the creatures that kid­napped their col­leagues. She approaches the land­ing party and explains that Che­vareth was attacked without warn­ing, for­cing it to crash. Since then, many mem­bers of her crew have been lured into the jungle by famil­i­ar voices and lost. She asks for help find­ing them, and Vale sug­gests that they could use Lyo­n­esse’s advanced sensor suites to loc­ate them.

The ‘B’ Plot: Dr Vale is con­sul­ted by Lieu­ten­ant (juni­or grade) Carisa Mac­al­inao, one of the sci­ence team. Unlike many of the crew, she has not been affected by the con­di­tions in the neb­ula, but she has recently had her sleep dis­turbed by night­mares of being chased. Many of them end with her wak­ing up sud­denly with the sen­sa­tion of some­thing sit­ting on her chest, try­ing to suck her life­force out.

Vale listens, then sug­gests that it might be a ten­sion that has been build­ing sub­sconsciously in the back­ground. Giv­en the sleep issues, she wants to put the officer on light duties and have her spend spend the night under obser­va­tion in sickbay.

She notices that Mac­al­inao keeps glan­cing at the corner of the room and asks why. Mac­al­inao explains that she has had the sen­sa­tion of being watched, and Vale remarks that seems quite com­mon among the crew at present.

Con­vinced that she seems to be hold­ing some­thing back, Vale pushes for more inform­a­tion, and Mac­al­inao says that she is embar­rassed because the mon­sters in her dreams are from folk tales she was told dur­ing her child­hood. She grew up steeped in her fam­ily’s tra­di­tion­al Filipino cul­ture, and was often told tales of the hor­rible mon­sters said to haunt the wil­der­ness. Once she became inter­ested in sci­ence, she put those tales aside and embraced a more skep­tic­al view of the world. Vale explains that this imagery is simply provid­ing a shape to her night­mares, and is noth­ing to be wor­ried about in itself.

Over the next day, Vale keeps her under obser­va­tion, but her scans and oth­er tests show noth­ing amiss, oth­er than a heightened level of anxiety.

The Arc: The Che­vareth returns, but is obvi­ously in a bad way.

Obser­va­tions: Carisa Mac­al­inao grew up in a tra­di­tion­al fam­ily in the Phil­ip­pines, and her child­hood was heav­ily steeped in the cul­ture and folk­lore of the region. There were many mon­sters that would prey on people who strayed too far into the forest, and these are appear­ing in her nightmares.

Sub­space nodes are (usu­ally nat­ur­al) bubbles in the struc­ture of sub­space, and can be large enough to encom­pass large regions of space. Light is bent around the bubble, effect­ively hid­ing the con­tents from the out­side. These phe­nom­ena are rare, but not unknown, with the Bar­rens and the Delta Tri­angle being not­able examples in Fed­er­a­tion space.

A quasi-star is a stel­lar object that is being slowly con­sumed by a small black hole in its core. As its interi­or mater­i­al col­lapses into the sin­gu­lar­ity, it emits radi­ation that sup­ports the object’s sur­face, and powers its intense lumin­es­cence. It it the­or­ised that such bod­ies exis­ted in the the early eras of the uni­verse, but as they would col­lapse into stel­lar mass black holes with­in a few mil­lion years, none should have sur­vived to the present day.

The quasi-star’s sole gas giant is orbited by two plan­et-sized moons, Unglo and Tang­gal. While Unglo is an M‑class world, covered by a huge forest, Tang­gal is Y‑class, a “demon plan­et” with high tem­per­at­ures and a hos­tile atmosphere.

Dia­logue: The dis­tress call from Che­vareth: “… the … war­bird Che­vareth, …est­ing assist­ance… Unpro­voked attack… … … stran­ded on … plan­et at Fed.. galac… inates 95.12W 80.91N. Please …”

Mes­sage seen on Jin’s con­sole: “She is watch­ing us. She can see everything. We bathe in her light. Not light, but blood.”

Ref­er­ences: Che­vareth is a Romu­lan war­bird on an unknown mis­sion, cap­tained by Com­mand­er Ravenna, and also stran­ded with­in the Black Cluster. Des­pite their respect­ive gov­ern­ments’ dif­fer­ences, Lyo­n­esse and Ravenna have pre­vi­ously cooper­ated against the K’si.

Ques­tions: Where did the names of the moons come from?