Epis­ode Num­ber: 4×11

Writ­ten by: Joe Rixman

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 11^th Janu­ary 2026

Guest Stars:

• Com­mand­er Ravenna: Com­mand­ing officer of the Romu­lan war­bird Che­vareth.
• Lieu­ten­ant Scully: Med­ic­al officer with skills in forensic analysis.

Ship’s power has been restored fol­low­ing the quasi-star shock­wave impact. There are a lot of injur­ies but Com­mand­er Vale-of-Winds tells me most are minor. Of more con­cern is the dead Romu­lan found in the Jef­fer­ies tube serving the star­board lat­er­al sensor array. Com­mand­er Ravenna is demand­ing answers, and I’ve assigned Lieu­ten­ant Astan to find the culprit.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 9998.3, Supplemental

Plot: While the invest­ig­a­tion into the death of the Romu­lan uhlan begins, Lyo­n­esse receives a dis­tress call from a nearby planet.

The ‘A’ Plot: The ship gets under­way again as the dam­age from the shock­wave is cleaned up, head­ing for the nearby stars des­ig­nated BC-20 and BC-21. About an hour later, Jin announces that he is receiv­ing a repeat­ing audio-visu­al sig­nal on radio fre­quen­cies in the VHF range, unused by Star­fleet for over a cen­tury. The sig­nal is heav­ily degraded but the audio track appears to con­sist of high-pitched screeches inter­spersed with clicks in repeat­ing pat­terns. It is eman­at­ing from BC-21, about a light year away.

Con­vinced the source is sen­tient, the sci­ence officer tries to remove the inter­fer­ence, but is only able to clean up the audio chan­nel. The video chan­nel is too cor­rup­ted to pro­duce any­thing recog­nis­able. The screeches resolve into some­thing like bird­song, but it def­in­itely seems to be a lan­guage. Unfor­tu­nately, the uni­ver­sal trans­lat­or is unable to decipher it, but then Lt Par­rish speaks up: he has heard some­thing sim­il­ar before now – the cadence sounds Xindi, a group of lan­guages he is famil­i­ar with from his own time.

Par­rish joins Jin and Tim­monds to try and repro­gram the uni­ver­sal trans­lat­or to apply Xindi pat­terns to the lan­guage. They are suc­cess­ful, and become the first to hear Xindi-Avi­an words for around three cen­tur­ies. The record­ing turns out to be a dis­tress call, sent out just over a year earlier.

Cap­tain Mas­uda approves their request to respond to the call, and Lyo­n­esse alters course for BC-21.

Shortly, they arrive in stand­ard orbit around BC-21e, the sys­tem’s lone M‑class plan­et. They identi­fy two con­tin­ents, sep­ar­ated by an equat­ori­al sea, with an abund­ance of wild­life and plants. While there are signs of civil­isa­tion, in the form of cit­ies, there is no sign of cur­rent activity.

The sig­nal is being broad­cast from a rick­ety space sta­tion in low orbit, which is start­ing to lose height due to atmo­spher­ic fric­tion. The sta­tion has min­im­al power, and there are no lifesigns. While it is a prime source of inform­a­tion, the struc­ture is in immin­ent danger of break­ing up, and is too fra­gile to sta­bil­ise with tract­or beams. The officers debate wheth­er they can buy some time by using the sta­tion’s own thrusters from onboard. Hop­era decides to send a board­ing party, con­sist­ing of Jin, Par­rish and James, but requires them to main­tain con­tact and warns them that they will be beamed out if the sta­tion starts to collapse.

The trio, wear­ing envir­on­ment­al suits, mater­i­al­ise in a spa­cious cir­cu­lar cham­ber around thirty metres high. Oddly, the con­trol con­soles for the sta­tion are moun­ted high on the walls, accom­pan­ied by what look like perches. Jin muses that it appears the occu­pants could fly. There are odd columns of holes arranged in pairs, and run­ning the height of the wall. The holes are about 20 cen­ti­metres across and each column is off­set from its com­pan­ion, so that it resembles climb­ing hand­holds. Tri­cord­er scans show that power usage is min­im­al, being used only by the dis­tress beacon, while the cent­ral com­puter is deactivated.

James switches off his mag­net­ic boots, then per­forms a care­ful zero-grav­ity jump up to one of the con­soles. He briefly exam­ines it before mov­ing to anoth­er, where he finds con­trols for a nuc­le­ar fis­sion power source. After study­ing the lay­out for a moment, he pulls on a lever, caus­ing the power levels to increase, whereupon a num­ber of oth­er con­soles light up. As the trio exam­ine the avail­able con­trols, it becomes clear that restor­ing power will not help with the orbit­al issue, as the thrusters are chem­ic­al, and appar­ently empty, but James is able to activ­ate life sup­port, bring­ing arti­fi­cial grav­ity and a breath­able atmo­sphere back to the station. 

Also activ­ated is a series of video screens, appear­ing to be part of a closed-cir­cuit video sys­tem. On one, James can see what looks like a row of cryo­gen­ic pods, all bear­ing an unknown symbol.

While James remains to work out if he can replen­ish the fuel for the chem­ic­al thrusters, the oth­ers clam­ber up the wall to a hatch that appears to give access to the next deck up. To their sur­prise, they find a deck with a much lower ceil­ing, dom­in­ated by a struc­ture resem­bling a Jef­fer­ies tube, pos­sibly giv­ing access to sys­tems for main­ten­ance. It would be too small for the avi­an spe­cies that would have used the perches in the first cham­ber, and they note that the walls con­tain more of the holes like the ones they just climbed. Tri­cord­er scans show organ­ic residue in many of the holes, sim­il­ar to skin flakes. Jin sug­gests that maybe some kind of creature lived here, pos­sibly livestock.

Shelving the dis­cus­sion for the moment, the pair move on up to the next deck, which is anoth­er large cham­ber with wall con­soles, perches and “lad­ders”. This one appears to be a labor­at­ory, with mul­tiple groups of work­sta­tions at vari­ous levels, and dom­in­ated by a con­trol area with mul­tiple con­soles. The ceil­ing con­tains a large door, adorned with the same sym­bol seen on the closed cir­cuit video screens.

Climb­ing to this door, they open it to reveal a third large cham­ber. The first things they see are skel­et­ons, of which six appear to be of a winged humanoid ali­en spe­cies, sim­il­ar to the Skorr, but def­in­itely a dif­fer­ent spe­cies. Anoth­er dozen corpses are very dif­fer­ent: thirty cen­ti­metre long, seg­men­ted car­a­paces, resem­bling fat centi­pedes. Close exam­in­a­tion of the winged skel­et­ons shows that they have toothed beaks and an extra pair of sec­ond­ary nos­trils, a fea­ture com­mon to the Xindi species.

Jin turns to exam­ine the nearest cryo­gen­ic cham­ber, and finds that it is full of glass tubes. Close scans with his tri­cord­er indic­ates that they hold frozen embryos.

The ‘B’ Plot: In the ship’s make­shift morgue, the cap­tain, Astan and Com­mand­er Ravenna watch as Dr Vale and forensics expert Lieu­ten­ant Scully exam­ine the body of Sub-Uhlan Mer­ri­cus. Ravenna is strug­gling to keep her anger in check, Mer­ri­cus was a prom­ising future officer.

The med­ic­al scan­ners show no sign of for­eign sub­stances or patho­gens, but the cause of death is clear: a pre­cise clean break between the Romu­lan’s sixth and sev­enth ver­teb­rae. Care­ful study of the tis­sues shows that the break was achieved by for­cing the head back against a hard edge.

Ravenna points out that this is not some­thing a Romu­lan would do: Romu­lan mar­tial arts teach the use of a vari­ation of the Vul­can tal-shaya, achieved by a pre­ci­sion hand strike to the neck. Astan notes that it is, how­ever, a tech­nique taught to Earth spe­cial forces, usu­ally involving a care­fully-posi­tioned arm or the rim of a hel­met. United Earth sol­diers from the time of the Romu­lan War would almost cer­tainly be trained in this manoeuvre.

Mas­uda asks if he would be able to retrieve inform­a­tion from Lyo­n­esse’s per­son­nel files about who might have received such train­ing. He nods, but sug­gests that he would not have access to such inform­a­tion from the Atlantis crew, who would be the most likely suspects.

Mas­uda muses that there were Tal Shiar agents present on Che­vareth and that it is pos­sible that not all of them were iden­ti­fied. Ravenna is forced to con­cur that using a known Earth tech­nique to elim­in­ate a Romu­lan tar­get would fit their pen­chant for misdirection.

Obser­va­tions: Lyo­n­esse’s morgue is a con­ver­ted cargo hold next to the med­ic­al centre, used to store deceased crew mem­bers in stas­is until the ship finally ends its exten­ded voy­age. A spare med­bed has been set up to allow for autopsies.

There are two star sys­tems in this neb­ula void: BC-20 has no worlds of interest, but BC-21 is orbited by a “hot Jupiter”, a pair of ice worlds and a class‑M plan­et. BC-21e turns out to have two large con­tin­ents, one in the north­ern hemi­sphere and one in the south. The sur­face is 30% land and sub­ject to sig­ni­fic­ant vol­can­ic activ­ity. The north­ern con­tin­ent is mostly moun­tain­ous, while the south is dom­in­ated by a desert, but both con­tain a wide vari­ety of flora and fauna. There are appar­ently-deser­ted com­munit­ies on both con­tin­ents, closely resem­bling the clifftop cit­ies built by the Skorr: lots of high slender towers with roost­ing platforms.

The sta­tion is a stocky cyl­in­der with at least three decks and walls made of an alloy resem­bling durani­um, which tri­cord­ers are unable to pen­et­rate. The con­sole con­trols are phys­ic­al, util­ising flip switches, levers and large push buttons.

Ref­er­ences: The Xindi were five sen­tient spe­cies that evolved on the same world and formed a coali­tion to launch an unpro­voked attack on Earth in 2153, pro­vok­ing a year long con­flict. The five spe­cies were known as Xindi-Arboreals, Xindi-Prim­ates, Xindi-Insect­oids, Xindi-Rep­tili­ans and Xindi-Aquat­ics, and had pre­vi­ously erad­ic­ated a sixth, the Xindi-Avi­ans, in a civil war that des­troyed their homeworld.

The Skorr and their close rel­at­ives, the Aure­li­ans, are ref­er­enced sev­er­al times. Both spe­cies are flight-cap­able ornithoids

Tal-shaya is a Vul­can mar­tial arts move and exe­cu­tion tech­nique, achieved by a pre­cise strike to the vic­tim’s neck. It appears that the Romu­lans also use this man­oeuvre. Earth spe­cial forces were known for their effi­ciency, and the tech­nique of break­ing a neck against the edge of the wear­er­’s own hel­met goes back at least as far as the mid-twen­ti­eth century.

Ques­tions: Who built the sta­tion? Were they Xindi-Avi­ans? What were the “centi­pedes” and how were they related to the sta­tion builders?