Epis­ode Num­ber: 4×13

Writ­ten by: Joe Rixman

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 3^rd May 2026

Our land­ing party has arrived on BC-21e, and found the remains of an extinct civil­isa­tion, which the evid­ence shows was des­cen­ded from the extinct Xindi-Avi­ans. The team is work­ing to estab­lish what happened to them, and the con­nec­tion with the mys­ter­i­ous arth­ro­pod exo­skel­et­ons often found with their remains.

First Officer­’s Log: Supplemental

Plot: The land­ing party explores the remains of the Xindi-Avi­an city.

The ‘A’ Plot: Their first job is to make sure the land­ing zone is safe. The land­ing plat­form is miss­ing its out­er half, which lies in rubble at the foot of the struc­ture three hun­dred metres below, but the remainder seems stable. Their efforts to enter the build­ing through the main door from the plat­form, how­ever, is thwarted when the con­trols do not work – appar­ently due to a lack of power.

Jin is able to force the door open about a half-metre and scramble through, find­ing a large room with numer­ous perches for large avi­ans. There is a cent­ral “desk” at the centre of the room, ringed by what look like com­puter mon­it­ors, and ver­tic­al access shafts to floors above and below. Press­ing but­tons and flick­ing switches achieves noth­ing, due to the lack of power.

Out­side, Valik and James check a struc­ture on the edge of the plat­form that appears to be an elec­tric­al trans­former. It seems to be intact, and inten­ded to pro­cess elec­tri­city gen­er­ated by wind tur­bines on the cliffs over­look­ing the city. Valik notes that it is set to its min­im­um out­put, but attempts to open the pan­el to change this are blocked by what appears to be a strap placed across it.

The strap seems to be made of organ­ic mater­i­al, strong and slightly stretchy, and is dis­tinctly out of place. On the oth­er side of the trans­former is a carved tone block, of a dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent style to the archi­tec­ture here. A tri­cord­er scan shows that this block is hol­low, and it appears to con­tain a power­ful chem­ic­al bomb, about the same size as would be needed to break the perch. It is unclear why it has not det­on­ated, or if it is booby-trapped, but it is pre­vent­ing access to the trans­former controls.

They decide they need to get it off the trans­former, and after some del­ic­ate cut­ting, this is achieved. The device does not seem to be too soph­ist­ic­ated but, con­cerned about its poten­tial power and the risk it may go off, James loads it on to the shuttle and takes off into space, jet­tis­on­ing the bomb towards the sun.

This enables Valik to restore the power levels to the build­ing, allow­ing easy access to the cham­ber. The com­puter sys­tems are now power­ing up, but most of the data­base appears to have been encryp­ted by some kind of vir­us. It takes some time to decrypt the files, but they are able to recov­er voice log files, in Xindi-Avi­an, giv­ing the full story of the civil­isa­tion’s fall.

They learn that a small group of Xindi-Avi­ans fled the destruc­tion of the Xindi home­world, and landed on this appar­ently unin­hab­ited world to start anew. They did not know about the sen­tient arth­ro­pods on the south­ern con­tin­ent, dis­cov­er­ing them only once they were estab­lished. They decided to help the more prim­it­ive soci­ety, and offered them train­ing and tech­no­logy. The nat­ives advanced quickly, but then developed a new aggress­ive atti­tude that the Xindi traced to a nov­el virus.

While the Xindi tried to find a cure, sev­er­al nat­ive cul­tures launched gen­o­cid­al wars against both the “invaders” and oth­ers of their own spe­cies. Xindi attempts to treat the vir­us made things worse, and the nat­ives even­tu­ally bur­rowed under the chan­nel sep­ar­at­ing the two con­tin­ents, giv­ing them access to the Xindi cit­ies. Against the back­drop of a swarm of vol­can­ic erup­tions, nat­ive forces began des­troy­ing Xindi towers, while the Xindi them­selves began to fall vic­tim to the vir­us, which usu­ally proved fatal.

A coali­tion of unin­fec­ted nat­ive and Xindi sci­ent­ists formed to try to cure the afflic­tion but was only able to launch a “life­boat”.

Look­ing at the tim­ing of the final events of the logs, Dr Vale real­ises that the erup­tions helped spread the vir­us to the Xindi, and sus­pects that was delib­er­ate. The tim­ing also implies that the Xindi infec­tion may have been the res­ult of genet­ic modi­fic­a­tion of the vir­us, pre­sum­ably by the natives.

Jin has the party set about extract­ing as much data as pos­sible from the databanks for future study, and begins organ­ising spe­cial­ist research teams.

Before they return to the ship, Cap­tain Mas­uda asks them to check out the remains of the nat­ive cul­tures on the south­ern con­tin­ent. This may help the his­tor­i­ans get a bal­anced view of this conflict.

They return to the shuttle, and James pilots them south, fly­ing at low-level over the north­ern coast of the south­ern con­tin­ent. They can soon see that the hills are pock­marked with caves, both nat­ur­al and arti­fi­cial. Arth­ro­pod skel­et­ons can be see out­side many of them.

Pick­ing the largest, they land and ven­ture in to invest­ig­ate. The primary tun­nel goes deep under­ground at a shal­low angle, and splits into three main pas­sages. One ends in a chasm so vast, the tri­cord­ers can­not read the bot­tom, while anoth­er dead-ends in a nest of large arach­nids that grow quite agit­ated at their approach.

The cent­ral pas­sage flat­tens out, and opens onto the floor of anoth­er large cham­ber. The floor is covered in pits, and there are sim­il­arly sized vents in the ceil­ing. Jin ven­tures into one of the pits, land­ing on a floor about three metres down. The shaft opens out into a space about the right size to serve as a liv­ing space for a fam­ily of the arth­ro­pods, and actu­ally has a power sup­ply, but no source of water. The floor is covered with the remains of food.

At the rear of the main cham­ber is a tower, com­plete with mul­tiple entrances, both at ground and high­er levels. Inside is just one cham­ber, with Xindi perches on the walls and wall-moun­ted com­puter sys­tems. Lying amid a large num­ber of nat­ive exo­skel­et­ons is a single Xindi-Avi­an skel­et­on. There is no act­ive power source to activ­ate the com­puters, but James spots oil cans in one corner of the cham­ber. Valik soon loc­ates an oil-powered gen­er­at­or out­side the rear wall and starts it up. This enables them to power the com­puters and extract their logs.

It appears that this com­plex was a place where the two spe­cies met to work togeth­er. The last reports from the Xindi admin­is­trat­or indic­ate that the loc­als had become viol­ent and killed all the res­id­ent Xindi, and pre­sum­ably dated from the begin­ning of the peri­od described in the city logs. It does­n’t take long to find a row of graves con­tain­ing the skel­et­ons of Xindi-Avi­ans behind the tower.

Mean­while, research­ers piecing togeth­er the Xindi records announce that they think that the “life­boat” is actu­ally an inter­stel­lar colony ves­sel. There may be more embry­os to rescue.

Obser­va­tions: The Xindi-Avi­ans were obvi­ously not bothered by heights: the land­ing pad has no bar­ri­ers, and access­ing the door con­trols for the civic centre requires reach­ing half-a-metre bey­ond the edge of the platform.

The explos­ive device is a carved, hol­low block of stone-like mater­i­al, strapped to the trans­former by an organ­ic plastic web. Small holes drilled into the rock appear to show status lights, two of which are show­ing red. This alerts Valik that the device may be live, but stalled, or even booby-trapped.

Vale notes that the arth­ro­pods seem to have no concept of san­it­a­tion. Without easy access to water, and with the remains of food scattered around their homes, a vir­us would have spread eas­ily. She also notes that an air­borne patho­gen would have spread huge dis­tances if car­ried by vol­can­ic activity.

Ques­tions: Is it too late to loc­ate the “life­boat”? And if so, does this mean that Xindi-Avi­an civil­isa­tion can be restored?