Epis­ode Num­ber: 7×09

Writ­ten by: Piers Beckley

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 16^th May 2026

Guest Stars:

• Lieu­ten­ant Lam­nel: Deputy com­mand­er of Akaru Star­base Har­mony.
• Ensigns Bry­aa and Tikar: Star­base Har­mony officers.
• Cap­tain Ros­keth: Com­mand­er of the Vin­Shari vessel.

After refuel­ling at the Musang sys­tem, Lex­ing­ton is finally mov­ing into regions of space that even the Akaru know very little about. The won­ders and dangers ahead of us are as yet unknown.

There is one thing that we do know about the travels ahead. The Akaru star­base host­ing our recent refuel­ling stop has inter­cep­ted sub­space trans­mis­sions from a Vin­Shari ves­sel and is con­cerned about a pos­sible attack. They’ve asked us to track the Vin­Shari down and assess the poten­tial threat.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 52278.3

Plot: Lex­ing­ton’s attempt to cap­ture and board a Vin­Shari raid­er is thwarted by a tech­nic­al issue.

The ‘A’ Plot: Lex­ing­ton departs the Akaru Star­base Har­mony, head­ing into a region that has only been lightly explored. Wary of trouble, the long range sensor array is work­ing over­time, look­ing for any­thing unusual.

About twenty light years out, they pick up energy read­ings remin­is­cent of a ha’kiv. The Akaru have warned them that a Vin­Shari ship is repor­ted to be in the sec­tor, and asked them to report any sight­ings. The com­modore decides that this is also an ideal oppor­tun­ity to gain intel­li­gence on Vin­Shari activ­ity this far out, and orders Quinn to get them into the sys­tem unseen.

The ship drops out of warp behind the sys­tem’s sole gas giant, and imme­di­ately switches to “silent run­ning”, shut­ting down her most power-hungry sys­tems to avoid detec­tion. The Vin­Shari ves­sel is orbit­ing the inner­most plan­et, but appears to be smal­ler than those usu­ally encountered. Quinn sus­pects it is of the older Mael­strom-class, as used by the Ar-Ka-Se rebels. He uses thrusters to move the ship slowly towards the centre of the system.

Even­tu­ally they make it to the oth­er side of the inner plan­et from the orbit­ing raid­er, which does not appear to have spot­ted them. Selvek launches a probe to the sun­ward side of the plan­et, to act as a dis­trac­tion, a remote sensor and as a com­mu­nic­a­tion relay. Kon­in requests a chan­nel opened to the Vin­Shari ves­sel, and demands their sur­render. The com­mand­er of the Vin­Shari ship intro­duces him­self as Ros­keth, and asks under what author­ity they make their demand. Kon­in replies “Star­fleet”, to which the Vin­Shari arm their weapons.

Kon­in real­ises they are not going to be able to bluff or trick their way aboard, and orders the attack. The Lex­ing­ton powers up, rein­forces shields and moves into fir­ing pos­i­tion behind the Vin­Shari ship. A vol­ley of phaser fire bat­ters the Vin­Shari shields, before they are able to return fire with their long range guns.

Raynor sets up to fire again, but sud­denly, the power flick­ers across the ship, with shields, phasers and warp drive all fail­ing. The chief engin­eer, A’Mathi, is unable to explain what is going on. Kon­in is con­cerned that the Vin­Shari may have some kind of power dampen­ing device, so Azon­an heads to engin­eer­ing to apply his own expert­ise to the problem.

With phasers remain­ing stub­bornly inact­ive, Raynor switches to fir­ing a photon tor­pedo salvo instead, bat­ter­ing the oth­er ship to with­in an inch of destruc­tion. The Vin­Shari fire their own tor­pedo salvo, pum­mel­ling Lex­ing­ton’s hull, then flee, jump­ing to warp.

Azon­an finds A’Mathi study­ing the dilith­i­um crys­tal array. He explains that, while the anni­hil­a­tion is pro­ceed­ing as nor­mal, no power is being gen­er­ated by the sys­tem. Azon­an thinks dif­fer­ently: the reac­tion is irreg­u­lar, and the crys­tals are fail­ing to reg­u­late it, pre­vent­ing the form­a­tion of a sub­space bubble. Fur­ther invest­ig­a­tion shows that the prob­lem is in the cent­ral M/ARA, and they will need to dis­as­semble the appar­at­us in order to dia­gnose and fix it.

He informs Kon­in that this can­not be done without the facil­it­ies avail­able at a sta­tion dock, and that the nearest is the Akaru Star­base Har­mony, twenty light years away. He does, how­ever, have some good news: he believes he should be able to extract enough power from vari­ous sys­tems around the ship to get the ship up to warp 3 for long enough to get back to Har­mony. He warns that the sys­tem would fail if they tried it a second time. Quinn sug­gests the Ouse and Trave could also sup­ply power, des­pite the fact that both are still under repair. Azon­an agrees that this could get them to warp 5, and Kon­in approves the project.

On the bridge, Selvek reports that the still act­ive probe is pick­ing up anoth­er incom­ing ves­sel, which appears to be Vin­Shari. Without power, Lex­ing­ton is vul­ner­able, so Azon­an and A’Mathi find their work is more urgent. They are able to get the jury-rigged power sup­ply in place, and the ship jumps to warp, just as a Vin­Shari Storm­break­er arrives in the sys­tem. The Vin­Shari ves­sel pur­sues them, but quickly falls behind.

Raynor reports that he is receiv­ing no response to hails to Har­mony, which is concerning.

Two days later, they arrive in the Musang sys­tem, still try­ing to get a response from the star­base. It is imme­di­ately obvi­ous that some­thing is wrong. Where the sta­tion was loc­ated is a huge cloud of dust and debris, with clear signs of an explo­sion. Des­pite their ini­tial con­cerns that this was a Vin­Shari attack, all the evid­ence is that it was the res­ult of a con­tain­ment fail­ure in the star­base’s own M/ARA.

Selvek detects signs of life in some lar­ger frag­ments, so they begin organ­ising a res­cue. They are unable to use the trans­port­ers due to the power issues, and the two run­abouts are out of ser­vice, so they are forced to use shuttlecraft.

Quinn picks what appears to be the most com­plex part of the oper­a­tion, steer­ing through some of the densest debris to reach the remains of the com­mand­er­’s office, where 3 sur­viv­ors are holed up. This turns out to be much easi­er than expec­ted, as this frag­ment of the sta­tion’s hull also includes a small hangar. Deputy sta­tion com­mand­er Lieu­ten­ant Lam­nel explains that the core began to over­load for unknown reas­ons, but Com­mand­er Cheng was reluct­ant to jet­tis­on it. Lam­nel gave the order without per­mis­sion, but it was too late, and Cheng was killed in the explosion.

Elser and Raynor take anoth­er shuttle to a sec­tion read­ing as hold­ing a dozen life signs. The atmo­sphere is being main­tained by force-fields, but the power is fail­ing. They man­age to come along­side one of the force-fields, and Raynor is able to sync the field to the shuttle door. He then has to calm the pan­icked evacu­ees so that they can get into the shuttle without incident.

The Arc: Lex­ing­ton is now out into the unex­plored hin­ter­lands of the Shack­leton Expanse.

Obser­va­tions: Ships without cloak­ing devices, but hop­ing to avoid detec­tion, will often employ “silent run­ning”, a term dat­ing from the days of sub­mar­ine war­fare on Earth. Impulse and warp drives, shields, weapons, sub­space com­mu­nic­a­tions and act­ive sensor sys­tems will all be powered down, and energy gen­er­a­tion sys­tems reduced to min­im­um out­put in order to reduce energy emis­sions. Sensors are lim­ited to pass­ive recep­tion. Star­ship move­ment is restric­ted to low sub­light speeds, and tends to be slow and tedi­ous. Some crew mem­bers find it dif­fi­cult to avoid talk­ing in whis­pers, even though there is no pos­sible way a sensor could pick up loud voices…

The Musang sys­tem is a small star sys­tem con­tain­ing a pair of red dwarf stars and a tiny col­lec­tion of minor plan­ets. Its main claim to sig­ni­fic­ance is its prox­im­ity to the neb­ula of the same name, which is primar­ily com­posed of anti­hydro­gren. The con­stant flashes as stray atoms encounter anti­mat­ter particles give the cloud the appear­ance of a thunderstorm.

Star­base Har­mony is an Akaru base and refuel­ling sta­tion, loosely mod­elled on Star­fleet examples. A large array of pipes and equip­ment extracts anti­mat­ter from the Musang neb­ula with mag­net­ic charges and fun­nels. The out­put is then routed into a stor­age facil­ity a kilo­metre across, where it can be held in mag­net­ic con­tain­ment before it is sup­plied to star­ships. A small star­base facil­ity is attached, with basic shore leave and admin­is­trat­ive facil­it­ies. The whole struc­ture is hun­dreds of kilo­metres across.

The unnamed sys­tem where the Vin­Shari ves­sel is lurk­ing con­tains a yel­low star and a trio of plan­ets, classes J, D and H.

The M/ARA is the matter/antimatter react­or assembly, the cent­ral por­tion of the warp core where mat­ter and anti­mat­ter are mixed and the main reac­tion occurs. Dilith­i­um crys­tals reg­u­late the reac­tion, pre­vent­ing a run­away explo­sion and divert­ing the res­ult­ing plasma to the warp nacelles.

Ref­er­ences: Lex­ing­ton has encountered the Vin­Shari Mael­strom-class before, in the form of the Lib­er­at­or, flag­ship of the Ar-Ka-Se. This design is smal­ler than the new­er Storm­break­er-class pre­ferred by the Vin­Shari navy, but is evid­ently still in use.

Ques­tions: What caused the explo­sion? And is it con­nec­ted to Lex­ing­ton’s own power problems?