Epis­ode Num­ber: 4×09

Writ­ten by: ELH

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 16^th Novem­ber 2025

Guest Stars:

• Com­mand­er Ravenna: Com­mand­ing officer of the Romu­lan war­bird Che­vareth.
• SHE: (aka HER) the mys­ter­i­ous entity present in the system.
• A Romu­lan sci­ence officer.

I have land­ing parties on the two moons of the weird­est plan­et I have ever seen. It appears that both moons are inhab­ited, although the life­forms are unusu­al, and Lt Jin appears to be in his ele­ment study­ing the plan­et itself.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 9997.6

Plot: Fur­ther mys­ter­ies are revealed as con­tact is made with the sur­viv­ors of the Che­vareth.

The ‘A’ Plot: Jin’s fas­cin­a­tion with the unusu­al plan­et and its satel­lite sys­tem is increas­ing in intens­ity. He begins to reas­sign more and more of the sci­ence depart­ment per­son­nel to help col­lect and ana­lyse data.

He does get a lot of push­back from those teams that work in oth­er fields, in some cases because they don’t have any appro­pri­ate know­ledge and in oth­ers because they find merely look­ing at the plan­et dis­turb­ing. The head of the xeno-bio­logy depart­ment dis­ap­pears into her office with a large bottle of Saur­i­an brandy, and Jin is forced to sum­mon a secur­ity team to get her out. The xeno-bot­any team stages a mass sit-in, refus­ing the orders because “it’s too creepy”, but Jin “reas­ons” with them in a force­ful fash­ion; this works but one crew mem­ber suf­fers a pan­ic attack and rushes to the head before being sent for a med­ic­al check-up.

On Unglo, the land­ing party has made con­tact with the Romu­lan com­mand­ing officer, Ravenna, who explains that many of the crew­mem­bers that sur­vived the wreck are miss­ing. They have been drawn off into the forest by what appeared to be friends, fam­ily or col­leagues. Would the Lyo­n­esse crew be able to help in get­ting them back? Vale sug­gests that they could use Lyo­n­esse’s sensors. Unfor­tu­nately, this request does encounter res­ist­ance from Jin, who tells them they have oth­er pri­or­it­ies and ends the call. Vale defers to Hop­era, who is only able to reach the ensign cur­rently hand­ling com­mu­nic­a­tions, as Jin is “too busy”. Hop­era dir­ectly orders the ensign to retask the sensors as reques­ted by the doctor.

While they wait, James exam­ines the hull of the wrecked Che­vareth, dis­cov­er­ing that the pan­els were cleanly cut, as if by a laser – if a laser could be power­ful enough to cut durani­um. Ravenna relates her recol­lec­tion of what happened: the ship was hit by a power­ful beam from the plan­et as it approached, and bisec­ted before any­one could react. Many of the crew died in the attack, which James con­firms when he spots half a body on one floor. Ravenna has no idea what happened to the oth­er half of the ship after the attack.

The sensors on Lyo­n­esse pick up about forty Romu­lan life signs scattered through the sur­round­ing forest. Search teams, with both Star­fleet and Romu­lan mem­bers, fan out into the under­growth to make con­tact and bring them back. James and Vale find one shel­ter­ing in between the huge roots of one tree and quiz him about what happened. He describes how he saw his broth­er and fol­lowed him into the trees.

On Tang­gal mean­while, Kheled and Valik, along with their new secur­ity team, approach the wreck of the for­ward half of the Che­vareth. Valik notes the same evid­ence as James, quickly con­clud­ing the use of a power­ful cut­ting beam, then points out that the inner doors appear to be sealed, indic­at­ing that there may be breath­able atmo­sphere inside. Kheled clam­bers up onto the low­est deck and bangs on a wall, quickly get­ting a sim­il­ar response from inside. There are def­in­itely survivors.

Adjust­ing a com­mu­nic­at­or to Romu­lan fre­quen­cies, they make con­tact, speak­ing to Com­mand­er Ravenna. They are invited to enter the ship, and dir­ec­ted to an air­lock under the port wing. They find that the air­lock con­trols have been dam­aged by the cor­ros­ive atmo­sphere, but Valik is able to work around this to get the hatch open. Once they are inside, Ravenna explains what happened when they arrived in the sys­tem. Unknown to the land­ing party, her story is identic­al to that related by the Ravenna on Unglo. She has about thirty sur­viv­ors with her, as many of the oth­ers were lost in the ini­tial attack or the ensu­ing crash.

She men­tions that they had been exper­i­en­cing an increas­ing amount of psych­ic inter­fer­ence before they arrived in the sys­tem, with a num­ber of crew los­ing the abil­ity to work effect­ively. They had come to the con­clu­sion that a power­ful entity inhab­it­ing the red plan­et was the source, and were con­sid­er­ing des­troy­ing the sys­tem, using a tri­lith­i­um device stored in their armoury. Valik con­sults with Cap­tain Mas­uda, who decides they should take this with them when they evac­u­ate the sur­viv­ors. As they begin organ­ising the evac­u­ation, more of the loc­als attack the ship, killing one of the secur­ity team and for­cing them to rush.

On Unglo, all the stray Romu­lans have been recovered, and Vale is keen to get them off-plan­et and back to the ship. Unfor­tu­nately, Lyo­n­esse is still orbit­ing Tang­gal, but Ravenna turns to her with beatif­ic smile and tells her that “all is well” and they can “remain calm”. James imme­di­ately pays atten­tion: he’s been hear­ing that phrase a lot, and he’s sus­pi­cious. He dis­cretely asks Vale if she can arrange to scan the Romu­lan for some kind of extern­al influ­ence. The doc­tor con­vinces the com­mand­er that a bio-scan is required ahead of their evac­u­ation, as there may be things the trans­port­er biofil­ter will miss. Ravenna agrees, and Vale soon dis­cov­ers she is not Romu­lan. When con­fron­ted, she turns into a horse-headed humanoid, and tells them: “You can­not stop HER arrival. We offer you to HER so that SHE may prosper!”, then bolts at high speed into the forest.

Vale imme­di­ately starts scan­ning the oth­er sur­viv­ors, dis­cov­er­ing that only a dozen of them are actu­ally Romu­lan, with the rest being the same kind of shape­shifter as their “com­mand­er”. Rather than alert any­one, Hop­era quietly passes this inform­a­tion back to the ship and instructs them to beam up only the real Romu­lans. Vale recruits the uhlan they res­cued earli­er to help sep­ar­ate them into groups of six to beam up, ensur­ing that the real Romu­lans are in the first groups, and leav­ing the rest.

Back on the bridge, Mas­uda con­fers with her seni­or officers, along with the newly-arrived Com­mand­er Ravenna. Jin explains his find­ings: that the entity is the plan­et, and that it is immensely power­ful, feed­ing on power drawn from the quasi-star. It also appears to be sen­tient, and pos­sibly hos­tile. The Romu­lan officer asserts that the entity must be des­troyed before it becomes a threat to the rest of the galaxy, a pos­i­tion sup­por­ted by James. Mas­uda is much more inter­ested in try­ing to reach a peace­ful solu­tion, a pos­i­tion with which both Vale and Jin agree.

As they talk, mock­ing laughter echoes through the ship, and the sensors team announces that the plan­et’s eye­like polar vor­tex appears to be phys­ic­ally realign­ing to face them. James’s hands move almost without think­ing, and Lyo­n­esse neatly dodges a bright energy beam emit­ted by the vor­tex. The cap­tain orders the ship behind Unglo as they con­tin­ue to debate their next move. While the entity is clearly power­ful and hos­tile, that does not mean they can­not reas­on with it.

Valik announces that “SHE” is able to see and hear everything he does, and that he should be con­fined away from the bridge at once. Mas­uda imme­di­ately orders that he be taken to the brig, along with Ensign Saur­ik. Lt Astan is already in a cell, hav­ing incar­cer­ated him­self as the only empath aboard.

Mas­uda arrives a few minutes later to try to reas­on with HER through Valik, but quickly learns that the entity has no interest in peace­ful coex­ist­ence. Rather, SHE wants to play with her new toys. When the cap­tain emphas­ises her refus­al to com­ply, SHE tells them they have no choice. The bridge reports that Unglo is start­ing to break up under the impact of HER energy beam.

As the moon starts to col­lapse, James quickly ini­ti­ates a warp jump to reappear behind Tang­gal, but the cut­ting beam soon begins to sweep towards them. They real­ise that simply retreat­ing is not a prac­tic­al option: SHE will con­tin­ue to grow in power, then threaten the K’si, before mov­ing on to the oth­er inhab­it­ants of the Black Neb­ula. And SHE may not stop there.

Swayed by the argu­ments of Ravenna and the oth­ers, Mas­uda is forced to con­clude that they will have to des­troy HER, and reluct­antly orders the Romu­lan tri­lithum device to be deployed. Fir­ing it at the quasi-star, the ship flees the sub­space node at max­im­um speed. Behind them, the fold enclos­ing the sys­tem flashes brightly and dis­ap­pears, a huge shock­wave catch­ing up with them nearly a light year away. The warp field sud­denly col­lapses under the impact, and while they wait for Valik to restart the warp core, they dis­cuss their the­or­ies as to what they were really deal­ing with.

The Arc: Com­mand­er Ravenna and the sur­viv­ors of her crew are now refugees aboard Lyo­n­esse. Apart from the strain on their resources, cer­tain refugees from the Atlantis crew are likely to have issues with this.

Obser­va­tions: The life­forms on Unglo are humanoid, with very thin limbs and heads resem­bling those of horses. They are shape­shifters, and seem to enjoy imper­son­at­ing people known by their vic­tims, which implies a level of tele­pathy. Those on Tang­gal look like human tor­sos, with the lower halves severed at the waist, and what appear to be drip­ping entrails hanging beneath. They fly by means of bat wings attached to their shoulders, and their lower halves, if any, are nowhere to be seen. Weirdly, both beings resemble beings from Filipino folk­lore, the tikbal­ang and the man­anang­gál, which implies a con­nec­tion to Lt(jg) Mac­al­inao, or at least her psyche.

Ref­er­ences: The Che­vareth was car­ry­ing an exper­i­ment­al weapon of mass destruc­tion designed to dis­rupt stars. It employs tri­lith­i­um, a rare and unstable com­pound cap­able of halt­ing nuc­le­ar fusion pro­cesses. Intro­duced into a star’s core, it can cause a drop in its intern­al pres­sure, caus­ing the star itself to col­lapse, and trig­ger­ing a super­nova event.

It seems to work spec­tac­u­larly on the quasi-star at the centre of the sub­space node, but there must be some­thing else going on, as Saur­ik had explained that quasi-stars do not rely on fusion pres­sure to sup­port their surfaces.

Ques­tions: What was SHE? And was SHE really that big a threat?