Epis­ode Num­ber: 4×10

Writ­ten by: Jon Crew

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 7^th Decem­ber 2025

Guest Stars:

• Com­mand­er Ravenna: Com­mand­ing officer of the Romu­lan war­bird Che­vareth.

We’re drift­ing, dead in space. When the quasi-star har­bour­ing HER exploded, the sub­space shock­wave caught us with fright­en­ing speed, des­pite our own velo­city. Our warp field col­lapsed imme­di­ately, and we dropped to sub­light seconds later. Unfor­tu­nately, it seems our power sys­tems failed in the sud­den decel­er­a­tion, and we’re stuck on bat­ter­ies. Mr Valik and his team have their work cut out for them.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 9998.3

Plot: Lyo­n­esse’s crew struggles to recov­er from a sud­den power loss.

The ‘A’ Plot: The ship is slowly tum­bling in space, all her lights are dark.

With­in the bridge, the only sounds are groans and laboured breath­ing, the scene illu­min­ated only by the dim blue-green glow of the neb­ula com­ing through the for­ward window.

James wakes up in an awk­ward pos­i­tion: wedged upside down, with his foot caught on some­thing. His eyes adjust to the gloom and he real­ises he is head down against the for­ward rail. He must have been cata­pul­ted over the helm con­sole. He cau­tiously gets to his feet and feels his way back towards the helm.

Dr Vale is lying on her back on the floor, with a sharp pain in her left elbow. She gingerly checks it, com­ing to the con­clu­sion that it is sprained, pos­sibly broken. She crawls on her knees and one hand towards the bridge door to loc­ate emer­gency sup­plies. She is tem­por­ar­ily hindered by the manu­al over­ride on the door, but is able to con­firm that there is still air in the corridor.

Jin is lying face down on the deck. Some­thing heavy is press­ing against his shoulder, pre­vent­ing him get­ting any lever­age to extric­ate him­self, and anoth­er body lies across his lower back. He calls out for assist­ance, and gets replies from James and Vale, but they can­’t see him. He decides to try oth­er names to see who else is con­scious and soon real­ises that the uni­ver­sal trans­lat­or is dis­abled: he can­not under­stand some of the replies.

In his cell in the brig, Valik extric­ates him­self from where he has fallen at the end of the bed. He notes that the power is down, drop­ping the secur­ity force-field, and that the phys­ic­al fall­backs have failed to engage. It is pitch dark, so he ven­tures out cau­tiously. Almost imme­di­ately, he finds an uncon­scious guard, and dis­cov­ers that Saur­ik and Astan are also uncon­scious in the oth­er cell. He checks as best he can for injur­ies, then goes look­ing for a wall pan­el so that he can see about restor­ing power. His search takes him through sev­er­al locked doors into the secur­ity office, where he dis­cov­ers the prob­lem is ship wide, not just loc­al to this deck. He real­ises that both main power (the warp core) and aux­il­i­ary power (the impulse fusion gen­er­at­or) sources are down, and that reserves are low, since even life sup­port is oper­at­ing at min­im­um levels. He decides to head to the impulse engin­eer­ing deck to restore aux­il­i­ary power, as it is closest to his loc­a­tion and will require less time than restart­ing the warp core.

On the bridge, Vale has acquired a med­ic­al kit and hand­held torches from the emer­gency sup­plies in the cor­ridor, not­ing that it would really make sense to have an emer­gency lock­er actu­ally on the bridge. The torches show Jin that it is an uncon­scious Lock whose knee has trapped his shoulder, while the stunned Romu­lan com­mand­er is lying across his lower back. Vale begins triage and treat­ing the cas­u­al­ties. Her own arm is twis­ted, while many of the bridge crew are uncon­scious and may have more ser­i­ous trauma. Jin has a nasty abra­sion bleed­ing on his back, where some­thing hard has dug into his flesh, pos­sibly Raven­na’s sidearm. Mas­uda is con­scious but no-one is able to under­stand her Japan­ese, which she is find­ing frus­trat­ing. Some­how, James has sur­vived unscathed, des­pite his voy­age across the centre of the room, so he volun­teers to vis­it main engin­eer­ing to check for cas­u­al­ties and restart the warp core.

Valik arrives at impulse engin­eer­ing and begins run­ning checks on the fusion power gen­er­at­ors. Everything appears to be intact, and he con­cludes the sys­tem simply lost power to the mag­net­ic con­tain­ment field and shut down the reac­tion for safety. He goes through the neces­sary steps to restart the gen­er­at­ors, and a few minutes later, power is restored to the ship, allow­ing the main com­puter to come back online.

In warp engin­eer­ing, James arrives to find total dark­ness, even around the inter­mix sys­tem itself; it is obvi­ous the warp core has com­pletely shut down. Not being 100% con­fid­ent with such a com­plex tech­no­logy, he looks around for help, and finds sev­er­al uncon­scious engin­eers. Calls for help indic­ate that there is one con­scious, who he finds hanging on to the main­ten­ance lad­der in the ver­tic­al inter­mix shaft. James loc­ates a cable and hauls him out, find­ing that his injur­ies are min­im­al. While he does this, the lights come back on and the famil­i­ar hum of the engine room com­puters resumes. The pair of them then begin work­ing through the dia­gnost­ic sequences before determ­in­ing it is safe to re-ini­ti­ate the mat­ter­/anti-mat­ter reaction.

On the bridge, the return of light­ing and the react­iv­a­tion of the LCARS sys­tem are accom­pan­ied by the res­tor­a­tion of uni­ver­sal trans­lat­or ser­vice. Now the dam­age con­trol pro­cess can begin for real.

The ‘B’ Plot: As dam­age con­trol teams spread out across the ship, Jin receives an inter­com call from an engin­eer work­ing on the sensors. He’s found a body in the Jef­fer­ies tube provid­ing access to the sensors along the star­board edge of the saucer.

Vale and Astan imme­di­ately head to that loc­a­tion and begin invest­ig­at­ing the situ­ation. The corpse turns out to be a Romu­lan, the same sci­ence uhlan that Vale and James res­cued on Unglo. His neck is broken, but it looks like he was dragged into the tube from some­where else. Accord­ing to Vale’s tri­cord­er read­ings, he died in the last twenty minutes or so, basic­ally dur­ing the power out­age. Astan notes that this sec­tion of the sau­cer is one deck down from the quar­ters assigned to the crew from the Atlantis.

The Arc: Is there trouble brew­ing between the Romu­lan and Atlantis refugees?

Obser­va­tions: The uni­ver­sal trans­lat­or fail­ure reveals that while most of the Human crew speak Eng­lish, Mas­uda does not, speak­ing only Japan­ese and Andorian.

Ref­er­ences: The chaos caused by the fail­ure of the uni­ver­sal trans­lat­or has also been seen in the Star Trek: Dis­cov­ery epis­ode “An Obol for Char­on”. Star­fleet ves­sels rely on the tech­no­logy to enable crews from many cul­tures and worlds to work together.

Ques­tions: So who was respons­ible for the murder?