Epis­ode Num­ber: 4×12

Writ­ten by: Joe Rixman

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 15^th March 2026

Our response to a dis­tress call from the BC-21 sys­tem has led us to a pro­found, if not troub­ling, mys­tery. A peace­ful Class‑M world, two major con­tin­ents, what appears to have been two dis­tinct spe­cies of sen­tient life. The first appears to be refugees from what was con­sidered the pre­vi­ously extinct spe­cies of avi­an Xindi. The oth­er looks like a spe­cies of intel­li­gent centi­pedes, which we believe are indi­gen­ous. We’ve also loc­ated a derel­ict space sta­tion, three dozen corpses, and the source of a dis­tress call via radio wave sent out over a year ago. Ship’s sensors indic­ate numer­ous cit­ies in the north­ern hemi­sphere, believed to be of Xindi design, attached to arma­tures drilled into moun­tains. A num­ber have appar­ently been…detached viol­ently and sent fall­ing to the ground below. We’ve detec­ted no sen­tient life what­so­ever on BC-21e. A mass extinc­tion event, maybe? At this point, we don’t have enough inform­a­tion, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to find out what happened here.

First Officer­’s Log: Stard­ate, 9998.5

Plot: With the sta­tion in danger of break­ing up, the board­ing party under­takes a com­plex res­cue operation.

The ‘A’ Plot: On the sta­tion, Jin stud­ies the cryo­tubes lin­ing the room. There are twenty of them, each con­tain­ing dozens of vials, and he estim­ates there are hun­dreds of embry­os in each vial. He is unable to tell what spe­cies the embry­os rep­res­ent, so he con­tacts Dr Vale, pulling her out of the Romu­lan autopsy, to dis­cuss the pos­sib­il­ity of trans­port­ing them back to the ship, where the more accur­ate med­ic­al sensors can be used.

There is some oppos­i­tion to the idea: Par­rish points out that remov­ing the embry­os from the ship might be con­sidered “steal­ing” and cause a dip­lo­mat­ic incid­ent. Jin coun­ters that this is in ser­vice to a human­it­ari­an act, as the embry­os will be des­troyed when the sta­tion breaks up in the atmo­sphere, and they might be able to save an entire spe­cies. Ulti­mately, Hop­era approves the pro­ject, provided they can arrange enough power for the cryo­tubes, and ensure pro­tec­tion meas­ures are in place to pre­vent bio­lo­gic­al con­tam­in­a­tion – they’re con­cerned there may be a patho­gen on the sta­tion that caused the deaths of its crew.

Two decks below them, James is examin­ing the struc­ture’s sta­tion-keep­ing sys­tem, learn­ing that it is com­prised of three chem­ic­al thrusters, and that they are almost entirely out of fuel. He believes that refuel­ling would be trivi­al, but he would need to get out­side to find out what pro­pel­lant is required. As the sta­tion is skip­ping through the upper lim­its of the plan­et’s atmo­sphere, ven­tur­ing out in an envir­on­ment suit would be dan­ger­ous, so he feels it would be safer to use a shuttle.

He con­fers with the oth­ers, and it is agreed that he will beam out with one of the cryo­tubes. He trans­ports back to Lyo­n­esse, then beams the cryo­tube dir­ectly into a sealed sec­tion of the bios­ciences lab, pre­pared by Vale. This area is pro­tec­ted by enhanced bio­haz­ard seals, and is con­nec­ted up to the power grid to sus­tain the cryo­n­ics sys­tems. By the time this is fin­ished, the sta­tion reaches peri­ap­sis, the low­est part of its orbit, although it sus­tains little damage.

James takes Nim­ue, the scout shuttle, out to scan the sta­tion’s fuel tanks. While skim­ming the out­er atmo­sphere of the plan­et, the shuttle is buf­feted by the increas­ingly dense gasses, and he has to per­form risky man­oeuvres to avoid hit­ting the sta­tion. He dis­cov­ers that two of the engines are still func­tion­al, but the third is badly dam­aged by repeated atmo­spher­ic buf­feting. While the fuel residue detec­ted by the sensors is an unfa­mil­i­ar com­pound, it can be eas­ily replicated.

On Lyo­n­esse, Vale care­fully scans the embry­os in the cryo­tube. It turns out that all are of the same spe­cies, and about half of them are viable, totalling around 3000. Ana­lys­is shows that they are arth­ro­pod lar­vae. Want­ing to con­firm that they are the same spe­cies as the exo­skelet­al remains found on the sta­tion, she asks Jin to send one over. She car­ries out an autopsy on the corpse, con­firm­ing that they are same spe­cies, and also that this spe­cies has a large brain capa­city, com­par­able to that of a sim­il­arly-sized Earth car­ni­vore. It is pos­sible that they may be sentient.

When Jin hears the news, he asks if they are genet­ic­ally-engin­eered, and what they died of. Vale is able to con­firm that they evolved nat­ur­ally, and that they died of a vir­us. The good news is that the vir­us appears to be inert, and is not threat. The struc­ture of the vir­us is com­pletely unfa­mil­i­ar to her, and she will need a live sample to syn­thes­ise a vac­cine or oth­er treatment.

As it will take time to recov­er the remain­ing cryo­tubes, Jin asks James to go ahead with his plan to refuel the sta­tion-keep­ing sys­tems. The pilot returns to the ship and activ­ates a work­bee, using it to take the syn­thes­ised fuel to the tanks. From exper­i­ence, he knows that the best point at which to increase the sta­tion’s orbit­al speed is at apoap­sis, so rather than wait for anoth­er hour, he risks anoth­er trip through the fringes of the atmo­sphere now. The refuel­ling oper­a­tion is a suc­cess and the sub­sequent speed boost raises the sta­tion by around 20 km, which will keep it in orbit for a few more years.

Over the next few orbits, all the cryo­tubes are brought aboard Lyo­n­esse, and the ded­ic­ated labor­at­ory begins to run out of room. Scans show that about three quar­ters of the viable embry­os are arth­ro­pods, but the rest have large com­pon­ents of Xindi DNA, and are pre­sum­ably Xindi-Avians.

Valik’s engin­eer­ing teams are work­ing on extract­ing what they can from the sta­tion’s fail­ing com­puter sys­tems, but it’s increas­ingly obvi­ous that the best way to get more inform­a­tion about what happened to the pop­u­la­tion is to vis­it the plan­et itself.

Jin, Vale, Valik and James form a land­ing party to take a shuttle down to the biggest set­tle­ment on the North­ern con­tin­ent. It is obvi­ously a city con­struc­ted by fly­ers, with build­ings moun­ted on a forest of cyl­indric­al rock spires. The shuttle puts down on a broad plat­form in front of one of the smal­ler build­ings on the edge of the city.

Wear­ing envir­on­ment suits, to pro­tect from the unknown patho­gen, the mem­bers of the land­ing party step out onto the plat­form and are imme­di­ately buf­feted by strong winds. Jin is knocked off his feet, although his mag­net­ic boots pre­vent him being blown off the plat­form which, like the spires, con­tains mag­nes­ite. The team finds it easi­est to crawl to the nearest building.

The door slides aside eas­ily, giv­ing them access to what appears to be a fam­ily home. A large cent­ral room seems to include cook­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tions devices, while side cham­bers resemble bed­rooms. There are no bod­ies, and no sign of power.

Real­ising that muni­cip­al build­ings, hope­fully con­tain­ing some kind of records sys­tem, will be close to the centre of the com­munity, the party returns to the shuttle. James flies through the build­ings to the civic centre, bat­tling the winds the whole way. Jin draws on his own under­stand­ing of pred­at­or soci­et­ies to identi­fy a likely can­did­ate, and James brings them in for a land­ing on a badly-dam­aged platform.

As they emerge from the shuttle, they see that the dam­age has been caused by some kind of explos­ive. This was not the res­ult of erosion, but delib­er­ate action.

Obser­va­tions: The ali­en space sta­tion’s orbit is ellipt­ic­al, dip­ping in and out of the atmo­sphere. At the low­est part of its orbit (peri­ap­sis), it slows a little more due to atmo­spher­ic fric­tion, and poten­tially takes dam­age. This in turn, reduces the alti­tude of its next orbit, both peri­ap­sis and apoapsis.

Like many Star­fleet ves­sels, Lyo­n­esse car­ries a small com­ple­ment of work­bees, small one-crew craft designed for extra-vehicu­lar main­ten­ance tasks.

The Xindi-Avi­an city con­sists of build­ings moun­ted on thin spires of rock con­tain­ing large amounts of mag­nes­ite, which pre­vents trans­port­er use. Res­id­en­tial build­ings around the edges seem to con­tain mul­tiple apart­ments, while lar­ger muni­cip­al build­ings are loc­ated closer to the centre. Broad plat­forms, referred to as “perches” by the land­ing party, provide land­ing areas, and slid­ing doors give access to the interi­ors. Many of the sup­port spires are broken, with their build­ings lying on the ground beneath.

Ref­er­ences: The scout shuttle Nim­ue has been seen before. It’s a small two-per­son craft, with power­ful sensors and stealth characteristics.

Ques­tions: What happened to the pop­u­la­tions of the plan­et and the sta­tion? Were these really Xindi-Avians?