Epis­ode Num­ber: 7×13

Writ­ten by: Jon Crew

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 18^th July 2026

Guest Stars:

• Ash’Tamalia: Lead­er of the rogue Tilikaal

After weeks of uncom­fort­able travel travel through the grav­ity waves of the region, we are finally approach­ing their source, the Triplets. Long range sensors are once more fail­ing due to the sub­space dis­rup­tion here, so we will need to get closer to get use­ful data. Unfor­tu­nately, the same dis­rup­tion is also affect­ing our warp and impulse systems.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 52408.1

Plot: Lex­ing­ton vis­its the Triplets, the stel­lar drivers of most of the anom­alies with­in the Shack­leton Expanse, answers a dis­tress call and uncov­ers one of Ash’Tamali­a’s operations.

The ‘A’ Plot: As it approaches the Triplets, the ship is reg­u­larly shaken by the grav­ity waves radi­at­ing from the phe­nomen­on. The fre­quency of the waves is increas­ing with the res­ult­ing struc­tur­al stresses affect­ing many sys­tems: the struc­tur­al integ­rity sys­tem is draw­ing more power, the warp core is stut­ter­ing and long range sensors are becom­ing increas­ingly unre­li­able. Oth­er sys­tems rely­ing on sub­space tech­no­logy are also hav­ing issues, even the trans­port­er sys­tems built in to the rep­lic­at­ors. Mem­bers of the engin­eer­ing depart­ment are run ragged try­ing to keep up with the prob­lems, while mon­it­or­ing the warp core and the SIF.

They come to a halt about one light month from the sys­tem to get as much sensor data as pos­sible. From this dis­tance, the Triplets are clearly vis­ible, but now that the long range sensors have failed com­pletely, the crew is rely­ing on elec­tro­mag­net­ic radi­ation for inform­a­tion. The biggest issue is that they can­not detect the incom­ing grav­ity waves, now arriv­ing every five minutes with clock­work pre­ci­sion. They are instead rely­ing on pre­dic­tions from the astro­met­rics department.

With each suc­cess­ive wave caus­ing more fail­ures, Chief Engin­eer A’Mathi is wor­ried that the warp core will fail com­pletely if they press on, and won­ders if there is a way around the waves. Unfor­tu­nately, the waves are emit­ted above and below the stars’ orbit­al plane as well as along it, mean­ing they would have to cross just as many to get out of the affected volume. Azon­an sug­gests that they could travel between the waves, trav­el­ling along grav­it­a­tion­al “calm” behind each wave. Tak­ing a spir­al route like this will take longer, and with each wave trav­el­ling out­wards at the speed of light, will require sus­tained pre­ci­sion and con­cen­tra­tion from the helm, but would greatly reduce the amount of stress affect­ing the ship. Quinn announces that he can do this.

Ini­tially, the approach is suc­cess­ful, but around 12 au out from the sys­tem centre Quinn drifts too close to one of the wave fronts. Raynor spots the danger and warns him in time to drop out of warp, but the waves are now too closely packed to resume the course. On screen, the Triplets fill the view: 3 identic­al white stars mov­ing in a single per­fectly cir­cu­lar orbit. At the centre of the orbit is what appears to be a plan­et around 10,000 km in dia­met­er, but they are unable to get a clear image due to relativ­ist­ic distortions.

Giv­en that the wave fronts are so close togeth­er, they decide it would be simplest to rein­force the ship’s sys­tems as much as pos­sible, and per­form a short warp jump to the centre of the sys­tem. Unfor­tu­nately, the warp field col­lapses as they cross the 1 au mark, for­cing the ship back out of warp. Selvek notes that loc­al sub­space is too chaot­ic to sus­tain a sub­space bubble – there will be no warp travel bey­ond this point.

This forces them to recon­sider wheth­er it is safe to pro­ceed. The object at the sys­tem’s centre is, how­ever, def­in­itely piquing their curi­os­ity. They are still unable to make out any details through the dis­tor­tions cre­ated by the relativ­ist­ic frame drag­ging gen­er­ated by the white dwarfs. Selvek explains that this effect will get worse as they approach, but he can­not pre­dict what con­di­tions will be like inside the stars’ orbit.

Raynor announces that he is pick­ing up an ana­logue radio sig­nal. It is very dis­tor­ted, but he’s able to clean the sig­nal up enough to make out words in Eng­lish, in what appears to be a North Amer­ic­an accent. It appears to be a dis­tress sig­nal, but claims to be from the U.S.S. Enter­prise, which is appar­ently marooned without power. The fre­quency, how­ever, has­n’t been in reg­u­lar use since the 21^st cen­tury, and the new star­ship Enter­prise is cur­rently con­duct­ing patrols in the rim­ward part of the Fed­er­a­tion, so should not be any­where near this location.

Regard­less of this, Kon­in rules that Star­fleet dir­ect­ives dic­tate that they need to respond to dis­tress calls.

As there are jets of intense radi­ation fun­nelled “ver­tic­ally” from the core of the sys­tem, Quinn pushes Lex­ing­ton dir­ectly between two of the stars at full impulse, on a course plot­ted by astro­met­rics. This close, the shields are reg­u­larly flick­er­ing as they ward off the durani­um and tritani­um dust filling this region of space. It’s a rough ride, but Quinn gets them intact to the equi­lib­ri­um point at the centre.

They heave to about 1000 km from the mys­ter­i­ous sphere. From this dis­tance it is obvi­ously arti­fi­cial, per­fectly spher­ic­al and fea­ture­less, and com­posed of a duranium/tritanium alloy sim­il­ar to the dust, which causes Azon­an to spec­u­late that either the sphere is an accre­tion of the dust, or the dust is the product of the sphere’s erosion. Without full sensors, they can­not determ­ine if the object is hol­low, but it does have its own grav­it­a­tion field of around 1.2g. Selvek notes that he is detect­ing power emis­sions from 12 loc­a­tions arranged in a ring around the sphere, about 100km below its sur­face. There is no sign of the ship in dis­tress ini­tially, but then an unex­pec­ted object emerges from behind the sphere – it appears to be a Ha’kiv.

Azon­an sug­gests the creature may be stuck in the grav­it­a­tion­al equi­lib­ri­um, unable to sus­tain the sub­space bubble it would need to escape. They won­der if it sent the dis­tress call; Ha’kiv are intel­li­gent and it may even know what the sig­nal was. They dis­cuss how they could get it out of the sys­tem: it is same size as the ship so would be dif­fi­cult to tow by tract­or, while push­ing it with the ship would place immense strain on the SIF and may be inter­preted as an attack. A’Mathi sug­gests using the tract­or beam to hold the Ha’kiv against the hull, so they can carry it out phys­ic­ally, assum­ing it does not resist.

Kon­in reaches out tele­path­ic­ally to the Ha’Kiv and suc­ceeds in estab­lish­ing a basic level of con­tact. In the pro­cess, he also iden­ti­fies a dozen more pres­ences inside the sphere. Some­thing about them is famil­i­ar, and he real­ises they are Tilikaal, then with a start that one of them is actu­ally Ash’Tamalia. He begins to feel trapped and unable to escape, but real­ising this is com­ing from the Ha’Kiv, he attempts to calm it by telling it they are there to help.

He returns his atten­tion to the bridge and tells the oth­ers about the Tilikaal and Ash’Tamalia. This sparks some dis­cus­sion about what the Tilikaal are actu­ally up to. Is this a Tilikaal struc­ture? And if so, what does it do? There are sug­ges­tions it might be a pris­on, pos­sibly hous­ing Ash’Tamali­a’s ori­gin­al body, or some kind of gate­way. And, most import­antly, should they get involved?

While the debate pro­gresses, Selvek announces that he is regis­ter­ing a rap­id power increase in one of the 12 power nodes in the sphere, which he is now call­ing the “Engine”; whatever Ash’Tamalia is up to, it is hav­ing some effect on the Engine itself.

Kon­in tries to con­tact Ash’Tamalia tele­path­ic­ally, ask­ing what she is up to. The Tilikaal is not pleased by their pres­ence, warn­ing them to leave and not to inter­fere with her work. Kon­in tries to tell her they can­not allow her to endanger the galaxy, but she cuts him short, say­ing that it’s her galaxy, they have no say in what she does with it. She cuts off the con­tact, leav­ing Kon­in lost for words.

Selvek announces that anoth­er node is reach­ing full power out­put, and Kon­in asks his officers for options to des­troy the nodes. Azon­an points out that it very much depends how much of the duranium/tritanium mater­i­al they have to pen­et­rate. Drilling a hun­dred kilo­metres would take hours by phaser, and while photon tor­pedoes would have sig­ni­fic­ant destruct­ive cap­ab­il­ity, they would gen­er­ate huge amounts of high-energy radi­ation that the fal­ter­ing shields would have to deal with.

They opt to try the phasers any­way, and Raynor begins drilling down through the sur­face. A half-hour and two more powered-up nodes later, the beam breaks through into a huge void inside the Engine, and Raynor pauses fir­ing so they can scan the interi­or. Deep inside the void, they pick up a 25 km dia­met­er object, which cor­res­ponds to one of Selvek’s power nodes. It’s made of the same mater­i­al, but Kon­in decides it’s worth try­ing to dis­rupt the Tilikaal’s work by des­troy­ing it. Raynor fires a photon tor­pedo and hits the object, but dis­ap­point­ingly it causes only lim­ited damage.

Ash’Tamalia how­ever, notices, and begins berat­ing Kon­in tele­path­ic­ally, demand­ing that they leave or she will des­troy them. The Ha’Kiv mean­while is also get­ting impa­tient, and Kon­in exper­i­ences vis­ions of a man and a dog walk­ing down a road into the sunset.

Giv­en their own tech­nic­al issues, the immense power of the Tilikaal, the need to res­cue the Ha’Kiv, and the import­ance of the great­er mis­sion, Kon­in decides dis­cre­tion is the bet­ter part of valour. Lex­ing­ton takes the Ha’Kiv aboard and retreats at full impulse from the Engine; Ash’Tamalia does not stop them.

As they reach 1 au, Selvek announces that the last of the nodes is reach­ing full power. The Ha’Kiv, now able to gen­er­ate its own sub­space field, leaves, and Azon­an and A’Mathi con­cen­trate on get­ting Lex­ing­ton’s warp drive back online.

Behind them a bright flash eman­ates from the Engine. When the glow sub­sides, the Engine has been replaced by what appears to be a small black hole, which per­sists for sev­er­al minutes before a second flash her­alds the return of the Engine and a rap­id decline in its power output.

There is no sign of the Tilikaal.

The Arc: Ash’Tamalia has been work­ing hard to get the Engine work­ing, and has used it.

Obser­va­tions: Stel­lar car­to­graphy has nick­named the area around the Triplets as the “Wash­board”, due to the reg­u­lar grav­it­a­tion­al waves spiralling out from its centre. The impact of the waves on the ship sends shock­waves through the struc­ture, and the waves them­selves dis­tort the loc­al sub­space field, caus­ing prob­lems for much of the ship’s equipment.

The Triplets them­selves are revealed as three appar­ently identic­al white dwarfs placed equidistantly around the same orbit 0.5 astro­nom­ic­al units from their com­mon centre. Each would take around 60 days to orbit the centre. There is no chance this could be nat­ur­al, as this form­a­tion would be inher­ently unstable, an example of the “Three Body Prob­lem”. At the centre of the orbit, the grav­ity of the three stars can­cels out cre­at­ing an unstable grav­it­a­tion­al equi­lib­ri­um, remin­is­cent of a Lag­range point in a two-body system.

The Tilikaal Engine rests at the centre of the entire sys­tem, a duranium/tritanium sphere 10,000 km across. Its sur­face is 2 km thick, sur­round­ing a void con­tain­ing a dozen 25 km dia­met­er objects arranged in a ring. These objects pro­cess power gen­er­ated by the orbit­ing white dwarfs, and when they have enough, cre­ate what appears to be an arti­fi­cial sin­gu­lar­ity. Its exact pur­pose is unclear, but it appears to be some kind of portal to anoth­er location.

Dia­logue: Ash’Tamalia: “I am as a god to you! You are the insects creep­ing through the walls of my temple!”

Ref­er­ences: Ha’Kiv have been seen twice before, both times as vic­tims of the Vin­Shari (“The Needs of the Few”, and “The Fallen”). This Ha’Kiv has evid­ently vis­ited Earth at some point, judging from the images it uses in communication.

Azon­an won­ders which U.S.S. Enter­prise would be send­ing a dis­tress call on radio fre­quen­cies; pos­sibly one the 20^th cen­tury air­craft carriers?

Ques­tions: What is the pur­pose of the Tilikaal Engine? Is it an arti­fi­cial worm­hole gen­er­at­or, or maybe a gate­way to the Tilikaal pris­on dimension?