Epis­ode Num­ber: 8×04

Writ­ten by: Jon Crew, based on a story by Dayton Ward

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 17^th Octo­ber 2026

Guest Stars:

• Lieu­ten­ant T’rhyn: Time trav­el­ler from the 23^rd cen­tury, now serving as a Pro­ject Dia­mond Hedge advisor.
• Com­mand­er Haleth: Com­mand­ing officer of the Romu­lan war­bird Mogai.
• Com­mand­er Nat­alie Sig­mund: Sec­tion 31 agent.

We’ve found the Iconi­an Locus, and I’m lead­ing a small away team to secure the loc­a­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, Com­mand­er Sig­mund beat us to it and for once she isn’t work­ing alone. Will report again once we’ve dealt with the goon squad.

Away Team Report: Stard­ate 52596.4

Plot: Azon­an’s away team faces Sig­mun­d’s defences as it makes its way towards the Iconi­an Locus.

The ‘A’ Plot: As the boom and flash of the gren­ades fade, Azon­an orders his team to take cov­er. He rolls across the pas­sage to a nearby rock and fires his phaser rifle into the dark­ness at ran­dom to force the ambush­ers to stay under cov­er. He also broad­casts a mes­sage in an attempt to get them to stand down, but there is no response.

Raynor stud­ies the head-up-dis­play in his hel­met, not­ing four lifesigns loc­ated along the walls ahead. Their pos­i­tions are impre­cise due to sensor inter­fer­ence, but he takes a shot at one any­way: it is unclear if he hit them. More phaser shots come out of the dark­ness, and they return fire.

Con­ners mean­while is attempt­ing to revive T’rhyn, knocked out by the explo­sions, but finds that their envir­on­ment suits make treat­ment dif­fi­cult. Selvek runs up and throws a torch into the dark­ness, which briefly illu­min­ates the scene ahead before one of the attack­ers des­troys it with an aimed shot.

Now that they have a bet­ter idea of the oppos­i­tion’s loc­a­tions, Raynor and Azon­an are able to take more accur­ate shots, although their effect­ive­ness is still unclear. Reas­on­ing that the light is help­ing, Selvek picks up two more torches and charges into the dark­ness. He finds one of the attack­ers uncon­scious and anoth­er try­ing to fix a dam­aged rifle, while two more are crouch­ing behind rocks fur­ther back. He dodges a shot from one of them, while Azon­an and Con­ners close to fin­ish them off.

Examin­ing the black, heav­ily-armoured envir­on­ment suits, Raynor spots low vis­ib­il­ity patches for one of the Omega Teams, Star­fleet Secur­ity’s spe­cial oper­a­tions bat­talion. Azon­an is able to estab­lish a com­mu­nic­a­tions link back to Lex­ing­ton to give them an update. He also arranges for the pris­on­ers to be trans­por­ted back to the ship, using the pat­tern enhan­cers brought by Raynor. He hands the three undam­aged phaser rifles to Con­ners, Selvek and the now-recovered T’rhyn before they pro­gress on into the tunnel.

Once the pris­on­ers are brought aboard Lex­ing­ton, Kon­in vis­its the brig in an attempt to inter­rog­ate the chief petty officer in charge of the squad. Unfor­tu­nately, the chief is con­vinced that he is doing the best thing for the Fed­er­a­tion, and Kon­in’s threats of appro­pri­ate leg­al pen­al­ties have little effect. The pris­on­er offers little more than his name, rank and seri­al num­ber. Kon­in con­siders a tele­path­ic inter­rog­a­tion, but decides that would cause more trouble than it’s worth at this point.

About half an hour later, back in the tun­nels, the away team finds its way barred by a glow­ing force field. Tri­cord­er scans show a high-powered secur­ity field, sim­il­ar to those used for intern­al secur­ity on a star­ship, and designed to pre­vent access. Azon­an creeps closer to the trans­lu­cent field to get a look at the space bey­ond, see­ing that the cor­ridor turns left, widen­ing into a lar­ger cave. Across one end of the cham­ber is a smooth ver­tic­al wall that does not seem to match the cooled lava form­ing the cave walls – in fact, it resembles the mater­i­al com­pris­ing the Locus at Dys­athus II. The wall has been breached, appar­ently by means of an explos­ive charge. Four more sol­diers are vis­ible, along with sev­er­al equip­ment cases, one of which appears to con­tain the device power­ing the force field.

Reas­on­ing that he can use the same tech­nique to break through the force field as he used before, Azon­an retreats to a covered pos­i­tion and begins dis­as­sembling a spare phaser to get the neces­sary parts. His device is soon ready, and he instructs the oth­ers to attack when it fails. He turns the device on and after a few minutes, the field col­lapses with a bright flash, dazzling the sol­diers, and the team charges into the chamber.

The fire­fight that fol­lows is brief, as the attack­ers take advant­age of the defend­ers’ blind­ness, and soon they have anoth­er quar­tet of pris­on­ers, sev­er­al boxes of demoli­tion and cav­ing gear, and con­trol of an impro­vised entrance to this world’s Locus.

In orbit, Chief Boone is at the tac­tic­al con­sole when he spots move­ment in the plan­et’s atmo­sphere, appar­ently caused by two fast-mov­ing objects. He brings it to the cap­tain’s atten­tion, but reports that he is unable to get a visu­al or sensor lock on the “bogeys”, and can loc­ate them only by the dis­place­ment of the air around them. Kon­in con­cludes that they must be cloaked, and tries to con­tact the occu­pants to warn them off. The mes­sage is ignored, so he orders Boone to fire a warn­ing shot at them.

Moments after the phaser shot illu­min­ates the atmo­sphere, Lex­ing­ton receives a mes­sage from anoth­er ves­sel, and Kon­in soon iden­ti­fies Com­mand­er Haleth of the Mogai: “Please don’t shoot at my men, Com­modore!” The Mogai itself decloaks in a threat­en­ing pos­i­tion dir­ectly above Lex­ing­ton. Kon­in warns Haleth not to inter­fere with his away team, but Haleth replies that he is basic­ally request­ing exactly the same thing.

Kon­in con­tacts the away team to warn them that com­pany is on the way, but Azon­an is con­fid­ent they will take a while to get to them, point­ing out that it’s taken them over two hours to get this far down. Then he requests that Lex­ing­ton take cus­tody of the new pris­on­ers. Kon­in is forced to risk lower­ing the shields to bring them aboard, but this passes without a reac­tion from the Romulans.

Azon­an’s team advances through the blas­ted pas­sage­way for about a hun­dred metres before com­ing out high on the wall of a cham­ber so huge that the ceil­ing, floor and far wall are all out of range of their suit lights. Their tri­cord­ers show that the cham­ber is a kilo­metre across and takes the form of an ico­sa­hed­ron, with 20 tri­an­gu­lar sides. Twelve beams of pale blue energy ter­min­ate at a large disc hanging at the centre. A small fig­ure can be seen mov­ing around on the disc, but there is no obvi­ous way to reach it.

Com­mand­er Sig­mund wel­comes them by sub­space radio and asks if they will join her. Azon­an points out that they’ve defeated her goons, but she says they’ve done their job well enough. His attempts to get her to sur­render are rebuffed; she is here to meet the Oracle, due in about 20 minutes by her cal­cu­la­tions. She is more than happy to hand Zepht over to them when it does, as she’s more inter­ested in what the tech­no­logy in the Oracle can do for the Federation.

After some dis­cus­sion, the team requests that Lex­ing­ton beam down a small anti­grav­ity plat­form, which they use to get to the disc. On arrival, they see that the plat­form itself has a ring of con­soles around a cent­ral plat­form big enough for the Oracle. Sig­mund, wear­ing a blue envir­on­ment suit, is study­ing the con­trol panels.

The Arc: The Locus is dis­covered, but what is Sig­mund actu­ally up to?

Obser­va­tions: Star­fleet Secur­ity has a num­ber of sub­di­vi­sions spe­cial­ising in vari­ous roles. The most glam­or­ous are the Alpha Teams, who are known for host­age res­cues and fugit­ive extrac­tions, as well as stand­ard spe­cial oper­a­tions behind enemy lines in war­time. The Omega Teams oper­ate in great secrecy, often in sens­it­ive situ­ations; they’re the sub­ject of many con­spir­acy theories.

The Iconi­an Locus on this world is vast. Its exact shape is unclear, but the interi­or con­sists of a huge space, shaped like a 20-sided die a thou­sand metres across. A disc-shaped plat­form a hun­dred metres in dia­met­er floats at the centre, where twelve beams of pale blue light con­verge, eman­at­ing from the ver­tices of the cham­ber. This is pre­sum­ably where the Oracle will appear.

Ref­er­ences: Com­mand­er Nat­alie Sig­mund has been a recur­ring back­ground char­ac­ter since the events at Alpha Tory­ui, and was known to have sus­pi­cious con­nec­tions (not least because her run­about, the U.S.S. Cass, pos­sesses a cloak­ing device). The fact she was work­ing for Sec­tion 31 only became clear at the begin­ning of last season.

Romu­lan assault shuttles were last seen at Dys­athus II. Tak­ing their design cues from the D’deri­dex-class, they are lar­ger than run­abouts, heav­ily-armed and pos­sess cloak­ing devices. Each is cap­able of car­ry­ing a full com­pany of sol­diers, with the trans­port­er capa­city to put them all on the ground in under a minute.

Azon­an first impro­vised his force field break­ing device dur­ing the Ori­on heist in 2372.

Ques­tions: What are the Romu­lans up to? And what does Sig­mund really want with the Oracle?