Epis­ode Num­ber: 7×11

Writ­ten by: Troy Mepyans

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 20^th June 2026

Fol­low­ing the set­back at Musang, we have com­pleted repairs and are start­ing to make some pro­gress towards the end of the Akaru Main. I’d like to avoid any fur­ther encoun­ters with the Vin­Shari: the threat of Ash’Tamalia is enough for the moment. We still have plenty of time, so we’re con­duct­ing astro­phys­ic­al sur­veys as we go.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 52304.8

Plot: Lex­ing­ton comes to the res­cue of a stricken Akaru vessel.

The ‘A’ Plot: Lex­ing­ton arrives in the Per­asi­us A4 sys­tem, intend­ing to refuel and restock at an unmanned Akaru depot. Selvek quickly picks up its coded transpon­der sig­nal on a routine scan, but he also detects a lone ship on an unusu­al course: it’s mov­ing at full impulse and will col­lide with the sys­tem primary in around twenty minutes.

After alert­ing the com­modore, he con­ducts a more detailed scan, identi­fy­ing it as an older Iry­ax-class frig­ate, as used by the Akaru. It is undam­aged, but while he is able to open a com­mu­nic­a­tion chan­nel, he gets no response. Con­cerned, he scans the ves­sel for life­forms, detect­ing a full com­ple­ment of 50 Akaru, none of which are on the ship’s bridge.

Kon­in and Azon­an decide board­ing is required to find out what is going on; the crew may be inca­pa­cit­ated in some way, or delib­er­ately locked out of their con­trol systems.

Since the ves­sel’s shields are up, trans­port­ing will be dif­fi­cult, but its act­ive impulse drive makes dock­ing a shuttle­craft even more so. Quinn notes that it should be pos­sible to syn­chron­ise the trans­port­er with the shields if they can link with the oth­er ves­sel’s com­puters. This is pos­sible on a Star­fleet ves­sel where the pre­fix code is known, but they have no such over­ride for the Akaru ship. Selvek does try, estab­lish­ing a basic con­nec­tion, but is unable to access any con­trol systems.

Azon­an decides to risk beam­ing over any­way, and takes a min­im­al team with him: Quinn and Raynor. Selvek is able to trans­port them through a peri­od­ic gap in the shield cov­er­age, and they arrive on the ves­sel’s own trans­port­er pad.

The room appears to be unstaffed, but when they ven­ture into the main cor­ridor, they find six Akaru crew­men. They appear not to be injured, but are behav­ing oddly, shuff­ling around aim­lessly. One of them spots the intruders and groans out loud, attract­ing the atten­tion of the oth­ers. They act as one, their faces exhib­it­ing rage as they charge towards the away team. Azon­an and his col­leagues react imme­di­ately, set­ting their phasers to wide angle stun and drop­ping five of them, before the XO floors the last with a right cross. Anoth­er half-dozen crew­men enter the cor­ridor and meet the same fate.

The board­ing party pro­ceeds towards the bridge, and while it is obvi­ous there are more Akaru in the side rooms, they encounter no oth­ers in the cor­ridor. The bridge doors are locked, and Azon­an is forced to hack into the emer­gency release mech­an­ism with his tri­cord­er, mut­ter­ing darkly about the lack of a manu­al release. The door soon opens to reveal that the room is empty, except for a single corpse slumped in the cap­tain’s chair. He appears to have shot him­self in the head with the dis­ruptor now lying on the floor next to him.

Quinn attempts to activ­ate the helm con­sole, but finds that the cap­tain has locked out all com­mand func­tions using a one-time pass­word. It seems he then des­troyed his own key card, so that they can­not be unlocked eas­ily. Raynor is able to access the log, play­ing the cap­tain’s final mes­sage, which opens by stat­ing they have already been infec­ted by whatever has driv­en his crew mad. It explains that the ship, its crew and the infec­tion will all be des­troyed by the sun.

Azon­an real­ises that some kind of infec­tious agent has affected the crew’s brain chem­istry, and that the three of them may already have been infec­ted. He imme­di­ately con­tacts Lex­ing­ton and explains their find­ings, ask­ing them to pre­pare a med­ic­al response team with pro­tect­ive suits. He recom­mends that they do not board until the ship has been brought under con­trol, as his team will try to divert the ship, or dis­able its engines, as a priority.

With lim­ited time, they head dir­ectly to the engine room. Again, they encounter none of the infec­ted crew on the way, but the indi­vidu­als they encountered earli­er are miss­ing, hav­ing pre­sum­ably recovered from being stunned. Arriv­ing at the three-storey engine room, they find about 25 Akaru gathered on the low­est deck. The intruders imme­di­ately step back through the door, using it to chan­nel the infec­ted Akaru into a cross­fire as they try to charge them. They drag the uncon­scious crew mem­bers into a work­shop and lock the door.

In the engine room, Azon­an and Quinn study the sys­tems and try to fig­ure out how to shut down the impulse drive and the shields. Unfor­tu­nately, it is becom­ing increas­ingly obvi­ous that Quinn has been infec­ted, and Azon­an is find­ing that he is los­ing his tem­per more eas­ily. They opt for the quick­est solu­tion, simply dis­con­nect­ing the power to the impulse drive. This works, but an energy surge briefly reverses the iner­tial dampers, throw­ing them across the room. Then to add insult to injury, the grav­ity sys­tem inverts, leav­ing them effect­ively upside down. The good news is that the surge also knocks out the shields, allow­ing easi­er transport.

Lex­ing­ton imme­di­ately grabs the ship in a tract­or beam and begins steer­ing it away from the star, while med­ic­al and secur­ity teams beam over in pro­tect­ive suits. Con­ners orders one secur­ity team straight to engin­eer­ing, where they ask the board­ing party to dis­arm and come with them. Quinn, now quite aggress­ive, refuses to give up his dirk, for­cing one of the secur­ity team to stun him.

The med­ic­al spe­cial­ists soon dis­cov­er that the infec­tion is caused by an air­borne para­site, which con­cen­trates in the humanoid brain. One of the symp­toms is that it shuts down emo­tion­al con­trol mech­an­isms, and this affects Vul­canoids very quickly.

Selvek’s review of the Akaru logs shows that the crew had been car­ry­ing out a detailed sur­vey of the sys­tem. They had landed an away team in the nar­row strip of hab­it­able ter­rain on the tide­locked moon of the gas giant. He reas­ons that the infec­tion must have ori­gin­ated there. Con­ners sur­mises that tem­per­at­ure extremes might kill the para­sites, which is quickly proven in the labor­at­ory, where a sus­tained tem­per­at­ure of ‑10° is effect­ive. Azon­an volun­teers as a guinea pig, since he has much bet­ter cold tol­er­ance, and again they are suc­cess­ful, lead­ing to the erad­ic­a­tion of the parasites.

The Akaru ves­sel soon heads back home, newly dis­in­fec­ted and with its crew cured of its afflic­tion, while Lex­ing­ton restocks before head­ing deep­er into the Expanse.

Obser­va­tions: Three weeks have passed since the events at Star­base Har­mony. The Lex­ing­ton crew has spent a week of that time realign­ing the ship’s warp core, and help­ing with the Akaru recov­ery efforts.

Per­asi­us A4 is a small sys­tem, con­sist­ing of a yel­low dwarf sun with a large Class‑I “hot Jupiter” orbit­ing close in, and a scat­ter­ing of aster­oids bey­ond. The plan­et has 2 moons in highly-inclined orbits, 1 of which appears to be tide-locked to the sun, with an nar­row hab­it­able strip along its ter­min­at­or (sim­il­ar to Cal-Mirra).

The Akaru depot has been hid­den with­in a crater on an aster­oid orbit­ing some dis­tance out from Per­asi­us A4 itself. It is unmanned, but is broad­cast­ing its loc­a­tion on a nar­row sub­space band known only to the Akaru and Lex­ing­ton’s crew. The depot itself con­sists of an unre­mark­able set of stand­ard con­tain­ers and stor­age tanks, con­tain­ing pro­tein stocks, deu­teri­um and antimatter.

The Akaru Iry­ax-class frig­ate has a very simple intern­al arrange­ment of three decks, with the bridge at the bow, the engin­eer­ing com­plex at the stern, and a wide cor­ridor con­nect­ing them on the cent­ral deck. Crew quar­ters are on the upper­most deck, stor­age holds on the low­est, with offices, labor­at­or­ies and work­shops flank­ing the main cor­ridor. Its slid­ing doors are auto­mat­ic, much like Star­fleet’s, but the emer­gency release mech­an­ism is a self-powered elec­tron­ic device requir­ing a key card to open. Akaru com­mand author­ity also relies on key cards, rather than using voice print iden­ti­fic­a­tion like Star­fleet ships.

The Akaru have adap­ted Star­fleet’s stand­ard explor­a­tion pro­tocol: advance scouts con­duct pre­lim­in­ary sur­veys to assess the nature of a new sys­tem. Usu­ally a detailed study will be car­ried out at a later date by a ded­ic­ated sci­ence ves­sel, but if the ini­tial sur­vey indic­ates some­thing of spe­cial interest, a nearby ves­sel, such as a patrol cruis­er, may be tasked to make a spe­cial investigation.

Dia­logue: The Akaru Cap­tain’s Log: “If you are hear­ing this, you are dead. I am sorry. My crew are all infec­ted, and, by now, you are too. There is no cure, but the con­ta­gion must be stopped. This ship will be des­troyed by Per­asi­us A4, and I have locked all sys­tems to ensure this fate. I recom­mend that you make your final peace with your life.”

Ref­er­ences: The para­sit­ic infec­tion has symp­toms that resemble sev­er­al forms of zom­bie out­break from hor­ror fran­chises like 28 Days Later, and Res­id­ent Evil.

Ques­tions: Lex­ing­ton will shortly arrive at the bound­ary of the Endur­ance Divide: what will they find?