Epis­ode Num­ber: 7×10

Writ­ten by: Piers Beckley

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 6^th June 2026

Guest Stars:

• Lieu­ten­ant Lam­nel: Deputy com­mand­er of Akaru Star­base Har­mony.
• Cap­tain Ros­keth: Com­mand­er of the Vin­Shari vessel.
• Speak­er: Spokesbe­ing for the anti­mat­ter “Cloudlings”.

Our res­cue efforts at Star­base Har­mony con­tin­ue. While our primary motive is to help the vic­tims of the dis­aster, I am very aware that this is the only place we can find the equip­ment we need to fix Lex­ing­ton’s warp core.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 52285.1, supplemental

Plot: The crew dis­cov­ers a new life form.

The ‘A’ Plot: The third shuttle­craft, car­ry­ing Com­modore Kon­in, Lieu­ten­ant Selvek and Nurse Ser­valan, takes a round­about route through the wreck­age towards one of the lar­ger pieces of the former sta­tion. From out­side, this appears to be a large office space. A cor­ridor extend­ing from the office entrance con­tains a dock­ing port, but is there is a large breach open to space 5 metres beyond.

Kon­in brings the shuttle in to the dock­ing port any­way, and the team dons envir­on­ment suits before open­ing the hatch. After cyc­ling the air­lock, Selvek ven­tures out into the air­less cor­ridor and sets up a force field to seal off the open the end of the cor­ridor. This enables them to pres­sur­ise the sec­tion behind it.

Selvek bangs on the door, and after a moment, gets a response from inside. He is soon able to con­nect the loc­al part of the sta­tion’s intern­al com­mu­nic­a­tions sys­tem to the Star­fleet sys­tems. Kon­in organ­ises an evac­u­ation, but is warned that one of the sur­viv­ors is badly injured and can­not be moved. Nurse Ser­valan goes in to check on the cas­u­alty, and finds that one of the Akaru doc­tors has been impaled by a sup­port beam. She comes to the con­clu­sion that the injured woman needs urgent sup­port from Lex­ing­ton’s med­ic­al centre, but with the trans­port­ers out of action, mov­ing the injured woman with the beam in place would likely res­ult in her death. Remov­ing the beam would enable her to be moved, but she would prob­ably die from blood loss before they could get her to the ship. Ser­valan decides that the best option is to cut the beam short to min­im­ise the poten­tial dam­age. This is suc­cess­ful and they are able to get the evacu­ees back to the ship without issue.

Their return coin­cides with the arrival of the pur­su­ing Vin­Shari Storm­break­er. Cap­tain Ros­keth imme­di­ately demands the sur­render of Lex­ing­ton and her crew for their act of pir­acy against his ship. Kon­in replies that the Vin­Shari have been attack­ing Star­fleet and Akaru ves­sels for years, to which Ros­keth replies that these ships had invaded Vin­Shari space. Not­ing that the Vin­Shari seem cau­tious about enter­ing the debris field, Kon­in warns that he would fight aggress­ively to defend his crew, and that many would die on both sides. This appears to con­vince Ros­keth to withdraw.

Azon­an reports that the engin­eer­ing team needs some spe­cial­ised equip­ment, primar­ily an “anti­pro­ton ana­lys­is mat­rix” (AAM), from the sta­tion to dia­gnose their warp core prob­lem. He believes that this device may still be intact in the vicin­ity of the sta­tion’s power core. Kon­in imme­di­ately dis­patches Quinn, Raynor and Selvek in a shuttle to hunt for it. The Akaru engin­eer Lieu­ten­ant Lam­nel accom­pan­ies them as he is famil­i­ar with that por­tion of the station.

The trip taxes Quin­n’s skills as he nego­ti­ates some of the densest regions of wreck­age and frozen bod­ies. They arrive at the remains of the main power room, which is a huge cham­ber, with a large ver­tic­al breach expos­ing sev­er­al decks. Raynor, Selvek and Lam­nel don envir­on­ment suits to enter the main stor­age deck at the top of the sta­tion frag­ment, look­ing for the AAM. Although they search the stor­age racks, they find only a vacant slot where Lam­nel says it would have been stowed; he believes that the power plant crew may have been using it before the explosion.

Raynor leads the away team down into the main gen­er­at­or cham­ber, which is arranged much like a Star­fleet ves­sel’s main engin­eer­ing com­plex. The entire room is full of shred­ded sup­ports and equip­ment, cre­at­ing a maze of sharp met­al that proves dif­fi­cult to nav­ig­ate. It’s not long before Raynor’s suit leg is breached. While he is patch­ing the leak, Lam­nel and Selvek become trapped, and he is forced to assist them in get­ting free.

They arrive at the sta­tion’s inter­mix cham­ber, dis­cov­er­ing that the matter/antimatter reac­tion assembly has been com­pletely oblit­er­ated by an intern­al explo­sion. While Selvek gath­ers read­ings from the scattered mon­it­or­ing devices, Lam­nel and Raynor loc­ate the AAM, which is intact and still retains the data it recor­ded before the explosion.

Back on Lex­ing­ton, Azon­an and A’Mathi take deliv­ery of the AAM and begin to modi­fy it to inter­face with the warp core. While this is going on, Kon­in begins arran­ging defences against the Vin­Shari in case they return in force, dir­ect­ing shuttle crews to repos­i­tion pieces of wreck­age to lim­it the clear paths through the debris field.

Before long, A’Mathi con­tacts the bridge to let the com­modore know that they’ve found some­thing sig­ni­fic­ant. It’s dif­fi­cult to explain, so Selvek and Kon­in vis­it main engin­eer­ing to learn more. The AAM has been attached to the lower inter­mix cham­ber of the core, and its screen is show­ing a view of the con­di­tions with­in. The anti­mat­ter it con­tains appears to con­sist of dis­crete clouds of gas mov­ing at ran­dom, and A’Mathi explains that this vari­ation in dens­ity the cause of the reac­tion effi­ciency loss. Azon­an adds that the gas should be an even dens­ity through­out, and that basic gas phys­ics should enforce this. If these vari­ations are allowed to con­tin­ue it will lead to a severe imbal­ance in the mat­ter and anti­mat­ter in the reac­tion cham­ber, and trig­ger an explo­sion. This would explain the fate of the starbase.

A’Mathi says that he has dis­covered some­thing inter­est­ing: the clouds’ move­ments are not as ran­dom as they seem. He has them con­tained with­in a mag­net­ic bubble, and goes on to demon­strate what hap­pens when he cre­ates a hole in the bubble. One of the clouds moves towards and through it, then more clouds fol­low it one-by-one. He points out that if this was the res­ult of a simple pres­sure dif­fer­en­tial, they would all move at once, form­ing into a single stream like a vor­tex, but this is more like a herd of anim­als going through a gate.

Selvek real­ises this implies that the clouds are a form of life, respond­ing to stim­uli in their envir­on­ment. Self-organ­ising gaseous life has been encountered on sev­er­al occa­sions (the Cal-Mir­rans being one obvi­ous example), but no-one has seen a liv­ing being made of anti­mat­ter. In this light, it seems that one cloud checked the open­ing, then called the oth­ers over to use it. A’Mathi points out that if this is the case, then they may be respons­ible for the deaths of sen­tient beings: they would be des­troyed by the matter/antimatter anni­hil­a­tion that powers the warp core.

Kon­in has the engin­eers return the anti­mat­ter and the clouds to the stor­age bottles in the lower sec­ond­ary hull, then asks Azon­an to take him to see the stor­age area. This involves a des­cent into the low­est decks of the ship, where the life sup­port only comes on when needed.

Kon­in approaches one of the bottles and attempts to detect some kind of sen­tient thought with­in it. He has more suc­cess that he expects, dis­cov­er­ing a num­ber of dis­crete sen­tient sources, all appar­ently liv­ing calmly with­in the con­tain­er. He cau­tiously tries to con­tact one of them tele­path­ic­ally, and is able to speak to one indi­vidu­al, which chooses to des­ig­nate itself “Speak­er”. After some ini­tial con­fu­sion as they try to under­stand each oth­er­’s thought pro­cesses, he man­ages to explain that he has dis­covered that he and his crew have acci­dent­ally imprisoned the cloud creatures. Speak­er appears to accept this without anger, imply­ing that acci­dents hap­pen and that there is little any­one could have done about it.

Kon­in explains that he hopes to be able to free the inad­vert­ent pris­on­ers, but would need their assist­ance. With Speak­er con­vinced, he dis­cusses his plan with Azon­an and the engin­eer­ing team – he basic­ally wants to reverse the whole anti­mat­ter “min­ing” pro­cess. This would require them to con­nect to the sur­viv­ing por­tion of the refuel­ling sta­tion and then remotely invert the mag­net­ic scoop and pumps. The cloud creatures them­selves will need to cooper­ate by stay­ing in the bottle, but mov­ing quickly when required. He will be able to com­mu­nic­ate this to them.

The only res­ist­ance comes from Lam­nel, who expresses his belief that the creatures are respons­ible for the deaths of his col­leagues, and present a clear and present danger to the Akaru. He reas­ons that the neb­ula is the only source of anti­mat­ter the Akaru can access, and without it, they will be vul­ner­able to the Vin­Shari. He tries to make this an “us or them” pro­pos­i­tion, but the com­modore is able to talk him down, remind­ing him of the Akaru belief that all sen­tience is valu­able. and that there may be a dip­lo­mat­ic way to resolve this poten­tial crisis.

The res­cue oper­a­tion takes place without a prob­lem. The refuel­ling point is badly dam­aged, but A’Mathi and his team are able to fab­ric­ate a replace­ment, and Selvek is eas­ily able to con­nect to the con­trol sys­tems to reverse the anti­mat­ter flow. The cloud creatures return to the neb­ula, and fol­low­ing their release, Speak­er nego­ti­ates a deal with Lam­nel via Kon­in, so that the Akaru can con­tin­ue to extract anti­mat­ter from the neb­ula. With suf­fi­cient warn­ing, the cloud beings will be able to evac­u­ate the extrac­tion regions.

The Arc: The res­cue mis­sion has been delayed once again, and the Vin­Shari have addi­tion­al cause to dis­like the Lex­ing­ton crew.

Obser­va­tions: The anti­pro­ton ana­lys­is mat­rix is a stand­ard piece of dia­gnost­ic equip­ment designed to allow the obser­va­tion of con­di­tions inside a reac­tion cham­ber using mul­tiple sensor devices. They tend to be very heavy, and are used rarely enough that most star­ships do not have the capa­city to carry one.

The Star­base Har­mony power room bears a strik­ing resemb­lance to Star­fleet warp engin­eer­ing cham­bers, com­plete with ver­tic­al inter­mix cham­bers and a hori­zont­al cham­ber fun­nel­ling the res­ult­ing plasma to an energy col­lec­tion system.

Lex­ing­ton’s anti­mat­ter stor­age “bottles” take the form of five large met­al tanks, each about 20 metres across, and con­tain­ing mag­net­ic field gen­er­at­ors to pre­vent the anti­mat­ter con­tact­ing the met­al. Loc­ated in the low­est decks of the sec­ond­ary hull, they are sur­roun­ded by sensor and waste man­age­ment equip­ment. The cor­ridors are vis­ited only rarely by main­ten­ance crews, so life sup­port, includ­ing light, grav­ity and atmo­sphere recyc­ling are turned off most of the time. In the event of an emer­gency, the bottles can be jet­tisoned through emer­gency hatches on the vent­ral sur­face of the hull.

The anti­mat­ter creatures evolved with­in the neb­ula and have little under­stand­ing of the uni­verse bey­ond its bound­ar­ies. They are amorph­ous and made up of the same gases in which they live. They repro­duce by mer­ging and divid­ing to pro­duce new indi­vidu­als, as they can share memor­ies and per­son­al­ity traits. Their civil­isa­tion is largely based around philo­sophy and art, and they tend to be some­what fatalistic.