Epis­ode Num­ber: 7×14

Writ­ten by: Jon Crew

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 26^th July 2026

Guest Stars:

• Chief Boat­swain’s Mate Arag Qoht: Lex­ing­ton’s Bol­i­an head of the Deck Department.

We are approach­ing the tur­bu­lent far edge of the Wash­board. Although we’ve man­aged this trans­it before, and have a good idea what to expect, it remains a dan­ger­ous pro­spect. But we’re already begin­ning to get a glimpse of the won­ders that lie beyond.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 52475.4

Plot: Lex­ing­ton exits the Wash­board and dis­cov­ers a mys­ter­i­ous battlefield.

The ‘A’ Plot: Three weeks after the Triplets, Lex­ing­ton approaches the Divide once more. The tur­bu­lent neb­ula seems less severe than on the oth­er side, but there are still dangers. Tak­ing the time for detailed scans of the neb­ula, they are able to plot what should be a safe path through. Two days into the jour­ney, while trav­el­ling between two dense areas of anom­alies, they encounter a migrat­ing shoal of gormaganders. Star­fleet con­siders them endangered, so they are held up for sev­er­al hours as they pass. Des­pite this, they com­plete the cross­ing in only three days.

Once through the neb­ula, they have a clear­er view of the galaxy bey­ond. Pi-Latka is a bright point of light lying dir­ectly in front of them, and the astro­met­rics depart­ment reports that its spec­trum appears to show a dense plan­et­ary sys­tem orbit­ing the star. The struc­ture of the Pin­wheel is now clear­er: centred on a close bin­ary pair of orange giant stars, the orange neb­ula gases are arranged in five curved arms resem­bling a spir­al galaxy. The astro­met­rics team is also excited to see a pre­vi­ously unknown star cluster on the core­wards edge of the Expanse. It is dense, con­tain­ing sev­er­al hun­dred red and orange dwarf stars, so it gets christened the Ember Cluster. Long range sensors, finally work­ing prop­erly, report poten­tial signs of civil­isa­tion, but Selvek notes that it is unlikely that life could evolve in such a radi­ation-dense environment.

Although they have six weeks until Zeph­t’s arrival, the jour­ney will prob­ably take three weeks at cruis­ing speed. Kon­in decides that they should avoid any oth­er diver­sions and head straight to Pi-Latka in order to have time to scout the area and map out any haz­ards. They may be able to check out the sights on their way home.

A day later, while cruis­ing at warp 9, Selvek announces that the for­ward shields are record­ing a sig­ni­fic­ant increase in impacts. His ini­tial ana­lys­is shows that the com­pos­i­tion of much of this mater­i­al is con­sist­ent with debris from an arti­fi­cial con­struc­tion. Kon­in decides they should check it out; among oth­er things, it may give them some indic­a­tion of the cul­tures in this region.

Lex­ing­ton drops out of warp, and Selvek brings some of the debris aboard for detailed ana­lys­is. While it is badly degraded by the sub­space anom­alies in the region, it is iden­ti­fi­able as battle wreck­age, although it is not clear how long ago the battle might have taken place. Sensors show a debris field stretch­ing across a region two light years in dia­met­er. The pieces encountered so far are small, includ­ing met­al fasten­ings such as bolts, por­tions of sup­port beams, and what appear to be shards of curved hull plates.

There are lar­ger pieces closer to the centre of the bat­tle­field. The hull plates appear to come from spher­ic­al ves­sels around half the size of Lex­ing­ton, with a thick coat­ing of a black sub­stance on the out­er sur­face. Azon­an won­ders if this is some kind of stealth tech­no­logy, but it also seems to serve a pro­tect­ive func­tion against the sub­space tur­bu­lence of the Expanse. A num­ber of pieces are host­ing an unusu­al extremo­phile life-form, a large mag­got-like creature which appears to be scour­ing them for organ­ic mater­i­als, and can move in space by vent­ing gas from its body.

Soon they encounter the shattered remains of entire ves­sels. These would have been smooth black met­al globes around 200m in dia­met­er, but each was sliced into mul­tiple pieces by some­thing resem­bling a high-powered laser. The intern­al struc­ture of these ships is now exposed, con­sist­ing of nes­ted spher­ic­al decks, sur­round­ing a cent­ral void 20m wide. The pur­pose of this cham­ber is revealed when they find an intact met­al ball about 15m across, drift­ing by itself. It is gen­er­at­ing a lot of energy, although this is merely radi­at­ing off into space at present. There are none of the radi­ation read­ings asso­ci­ated with either nuc­le­ar fusion or anti­mat­ter anni­hil­a­tion, so Quinn sug­gests it may be sim­il­ar to the quantum sin­gu­lar­ity power sys­tems used by Romu­lan warbirds.

Azon­an wants to exam­ine this arte­fact more closely, so Raynor attempts to tract­or it. His ini­tial attempts are thwarted by the extreme grav­it­a­tion­al gradi­ent sur­round­ing the sin­gu­lar­ity with­in, but he is soon able to bring it to a safe dis­tance from the ship. Unfor­tu­nately, Lex­ing­ton’s sensors are almost use­less even at this dis­tance, so they con­sider send­ing an away team for a closer look. Although they can com­pensate for the grav­ity gradi­ent, there is too much shrapnel in the area for an envir­on­ment suit to provide enough pro­tec­tion, so they opt to tow it out of the bat­tle­field to a safer area.

They are sur­prised to see the hulk of an Ori­on pleas­ure barge, sim­il­ar to the Con­tent­ment, drift into view. This has also been sliced up by the same weapons as were used on the sphere ships. They deploy a board­ing party to look for inform­a­tion, espe­cially if it can indic­ate when it was des­troyed, but everything of use has been stripped out of the vessel.

As they move out of the far side of the debris field, they find a rather unusu­al sight. A huge cross-shaped struc­ture is drift­ing away from the bat­tle­field at a con­sid­er­able sub­light velo­city. It is 6 km across, its arms assembled of twis­ted met­al of a dark hue. There is no indic­a­tion of its ori­gin, but its pos­i­tion next to the bat­tle­field can­not be a coin­cid­ence. It is unclear wheth­er it is the vic­tor of the battle or anoth­er vic­tim. Sensors show some signs of life and energy use at its centre, but none in the arms.

The ‘B’ Plot: Chief Qoht meets with Azon­an in the XO’s office, and explains that his crew is hav­ing dif­fi­culty keep­ing up with the main­ten­ance tasks caused by the con­di­tions they’ve been encoun­ter­ing. These include fix­ing sprung plates, tight­en­ing loose fix­ings, sta­bil­ising loose cargo, and so on. He wants to know if he can get help from Engin­eer­ing with the repairs, and Secur­ity for reor­gan­ising the cargo. Azon­an explains that the engin­eer­ing per­son­nel in par­tic­u­lar are very busy, but he would ask A’Mathi and Raynor if they can spare any­one. Qoht departs, pleased to know that he is being listened to.

Later, fol­low­ing the dis­cov­ery of the cru­ci­form struc­ture, Qoht con­tacts Raynor on the bridge. He reports that two of his crew failed to report for duty at the begin­ning of their shift about an hour earli­er. One of them was Crew­man Belades Qoht, his own daugh­ter, along with Boat­swain’s Mate Wil­li­am Briggs. Raynor informs Azon­an, and imme­di­ately begins ques­tion­ing Qoht regard­ing the miss­ing crew­men’s move­ments the day before. It seems the pair were in the habit of play­ing ten­nis in recre­ation room 3 after their even­ing meal, but have not been seen since then.

Raynor sends a quar­tet of two-mem­ber secur­ity teams out to check their known haunts, and mon­it­ors their pro­gress from the bridge. After twenty minutes of fruit­less search­ing, one team fails to report in, which trig­gers a full secur­ity alert. Raynor and Azon­an lead two lar­ger parties to search all the holds and rooms in the sec­tion in ques­tion, the dis­used por­tion of deck 9 just out­board of rec room 3.

Raynor’s team works its way through a num­ber of unfin­ished crew cab­ins. In one room, an ensign spots some­thing mov­ing behind the bed, and calls for Raynor’s atten­tion. From his descrip­tion, it’s a Car­das­si­an vole, much to Azon­an’s annoy­ance. They try to corner it, but it escapes into the cur­rently unpowered EPS con­duit, and there is no way to wall it in.

Azon­an, mean­while is lead­ing his team in search­ing the cargo holds in that area. Round­ing a stack of crates, he finds a cargo scan­ner on the deck. Qoht is adam­ant that none of his team would leave this lying around, so they exam­ine the area in more detail. There are scuff marks on the floor that indic­ate there was a struggle, but there is only one set of human-sized foot prints. One of the secur­ity team finds a scrap of hair with blood on it on a crate, while anoth­er finds small paw prints, which would be the right size for a vole. Could a vole be respons­ible for the the miss­ing crew?

Anoth­er team mem­ber announces that the far door of the hold has been opened recently. Mut­ter­ing that it should be locked out, since it opens into an area with no life sup­port, Azon­an checks the records on the lock, find­ing that it was over­rid­den recently. At this point, the door opens again, and the secur­ity crew­man is yanked through it by a shad­owy fig­ure with pale skin and a num­ber of mech­an­ic­al implants.

Azon­an real­ises that they’re deal­ing with a Borg incursion.

The Arc: Lex­ing­ton is now only 3 weeks away from Pi-Latka.

Obser­va­tions: The deck depart­ment is the under­ap­pre­ci­ated third part of the oper­a­tions divi­sion. It’s respons­ible for cargo oper­a­tions, cater­ing, san­it­a­tion, and the gen­er­al main­ten­ance of those parts of the ship’s infra­struc­ture that do not mer­it the atten­tions of engin­eers. Chief Boat­swain’s Mate Arag Qoht runs the depart­ment on Lex­ing­ton. While it is unusu­al for two mem­bers of a fam­ily to serve on the same ship, his daugh­ter, Belades, is also in the department.

Recre­ation room 3 is one of a num­ber of crew recre­ation areas aboard he ship. Loc­ated inboard of the star­board extremity of the primary hull, it is primar­ily used for com­pet­it­ive sports such as ten­nis, indoor foot­ball and racquetball.

The major­ity of the wrecked ships are of an unusu­al design. They appear to have been spher­ic­al, with smooth black hulls, and no pro­jec­tions. 200m across, their decks are laid out in con­cent­ric spheres, with arti­fi­cial grav­ity aligned towards the centre of the ship. At the centre, a sphere con­tain­ing a quantum sin­gu­lar­ity sup­plies power and pre­sum­ably grav­ity. Weapons (primar­ily dis­ruptors) and oth­er sys­tems are hid­den behind flush-fit­ting panels.

Lex­ing­ton suffered sig­ni­fic­ant dam­age to the star­board edge of her primary hull dur­ing the Battle of Valo III, and required sig­ni­fic­ant recon­struc­tion efforts. Since then, fur­nish­ing the rebuilt sec­tions has been a low pri­or­ity, and the dis­used spaces resemble half-con­struc­ted offices. Many rooms are excluded from life sup­port as they are not in use.

Dia­logue: Azon­an real­ises what he is deal­ing with: “When the hell did they get on board?”

Ref­er­ences: Gormaganders are endangered spe­cies of cos­mo­zo­an resem­bling a cross between a ter­restri­al squid and a small whale. Reach­ing the size of a shuttle­craft, they feed off alpha particles in the sol­ar winds. They were first seen in the Star Trek: Dis­cov­ery epis­ode “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”.

Car­das­si­an voles are six-legged creatures often found on ships across the Alpha Quad­rant and regarded as pests.

The Con­tent­ment was vis­ited by Lex­ing­ton sev­er­al months earli­er, as depic­ted in “Con­tent­ment”.

Ques­tions: Who were the com­batants in the battle? What was the Ori­on ship doing there? And how and when did the Borg get aboard Lex­ing­ton?