Epis­ode Num­ber: 1×01

Writ­ten by: Patrick Goodman

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 26^th March 2022

Guest Stars:

• Dr Evan­gel Stoorer: civil­ian head of the med­ic­al response team.
• Kyle Hun­s­ley: civil­ian med­ic­al orderly with a secret.
• Lolani-Taan: Ori­on merchant-captain.

The ship is on course to plan­et Dourap IV, near the Klin­gon bor­der. Velk­ath, the Tel­lar­ite colony there, has had an out­break of d’kar fever, a highly con­ta­gious vir­al infec­tion. The dis­ease is still in its early phases, and no fatal­it­ies have been repor­ted. We have been tasked by Star­base 24 to trans­port an emer­gency med­ic­al team and their sup­plies to the colony, and provide any assist­ance they might need. We are trav­el­ing at warp factor six; our ETA is approx­im­ately eight­een hours.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 5428.3

Plot: Sev­er­al months into her five-year mis­sion, Lex­ing­ton is car­ry­ing emer­gency med­ic­al sup­plies to a fron­ti­er colony when she suf­fers a cata­stroph­ic drive fail­ure. Repairs have to be com­pleted rap­idly to avoid drift­ing into Klin­gon space and con­demning the col­on­ists to an unpleas­ant fate.

The ‘A’ Plot: The star­ship is under­way to Dourap IV, car­ry­ing a med­ic­al team and sup­plies to aid with a dis­ease out­break. Lieu­ten­ant Adred at the helm, sud­denly finds him­self fight­ing to retain con­trol as a sub­space worm­hole opens in front of them. In Engin­eer­ing, Lieu­ten­ant Com­mand­er A’Mathi reacts quickly, dis­con­nect­ing the warp core to allow the ship to drop out of warp. Unfor­tu­nately, the shock of the pro­cess causes dam­age across the vessel.

Cap­tain Pryce quickly orders dam­age reports and an explan­a­tion of what happened. Lieu­ten­ant Strauss and A’Mathi, work­ing togeth­er, determ­ine that a plasma inject­or failed in the star­board pylon, caus­ing a sub­space field imbal­ance. The prob­lem is that access­ing this for repairs will involve shut­ting the core down com­pletely, leav­ing the ves­sel power­less and drift­ing towards the Klin­gon bor­der, likely to cross it in three hours. There is oth­er dam­age as well: drive con­trols are broken, power sys­tems have over­loaded across the sec­ond­ary hull, the shields and phaser coup­lings are dam­aged, and the sub­space com­mu­nic­a­tions sys­tems are down. A num­ber of crew mem­bers were also injured in the incident.

Pryce and A’Mathi organ­ise repairs: Strauss begins loc­at­ing and fix­ing the power sys­tem over­loads; Adred works on the drive con­trols; Pryce opts to take on the weapons sys­tems and A’Mathi begins shut­ting down the warp core. Dam­age con­trol and oth­er engin­eer­ing teams are alloc­ated as needed. The med­ic­al team, lead by Dr Mid­ax, set to work bandaging broken limbs and reliev­ing oth­er injuries.

The warp core will take an hour to cool down enough to repair, so A’Mathi moves on to super­vise Adred, as he’s wor­ried the helms­man will not be cap­able of this kind of repair work. He’s pleas­antly suprised by Adred’s pro­gress and moves on to realign the shield emit­ters. Pryce com­pletes the phaser repairs and begins recal­ib­rat­ing them, aware that the bridge has repor­ted that they have detec­ted Klin­gon war­ships gath­er­ing at the frontier.

Adred com­pletes work on the drive con­trols and returns to the bridge, where he begins try­ing to slow the ship’s high speed drift towards the bor­der, buy­ing more time for repairs before the Klin­gons have an excuse to attack. A’Mathi fin­ishes bring the shields back to full strength just after the Cap­tain com­pletes his phaser repairs.

The nacelle pylon is now cool enough to replace the plasma inject­or, but A’Mathi dis­cov­ers that this was not a simple fail­ure: it was caused by a cross-con­nec­ted cable – and there’s no way that happened acci­dent­ally. As the hunt for a saboteur begins, A’Mathi com­pletes repairs and, with the Klin­gons in sight, care­fully begins to restart the warp core. Although this pro­cess should take in excess of half an hour, he uses his extens­ive know­ledge of the ship to bypass sev­er­al safety pro­to­cols and restart it in twenty minutes.

Although the Klin­gons begin to cross the bor­der in pur­suit, Adred is able to put the ship into warp and they escape the vicin­ity in plenty of time.

A’Mathi requests a private audi­ence with Pryce, where he apo­lo­gises for the abrupt drop­ping out of warp. His cap­tain remarks that he saved the ship, so no apo­logy needed – but next time give him some warning!

The ‘B’ Plot: Secur­ity Chief Nossaag and his team attempt to find the source of the sab­ot­age, inter­rog­at­ing the civil­ian med­ic­al response team first as they are new to the ship and the most obvi­ous sus­pects. In talk­ing to Dr Stoorer, it quickly becomes clear that one of their num­ber, an orderly named Kyle Hun­s­ley, is a last minute replace­ment in the team – and that he has gone miss­ing from his quar­ters. Nossaag begins a man­hunt to loc­ate him, even­tu­ally track­ing him down in the cargo holds. A brief fire­fight later, he’s in custody.

It turns out that Hun­s­ley, in des­per­ate need of money, was paid by Ori­ons to delay the ship’s arrival at Dourap IV. He’s a med­ic, not an engin­eer, and his attempt to cause a minor delay nearly des­troyed the ship.

They arrive at Dourap IV in fairly good time, and long range sensors detect an Ori­on ves­sel in orbit around the plan­et. Pryce con­tacts the plan­et­ary author­it­ies to let them know of their arrival, and the admin­is­trat­or informs them they have arrived just in time: they were about to pay the Ori­ons far too much for the medi­cine they des­per­ately need. Pryce reminds them that the Fed­er­a­tion is provid­ing it free of charge, then con­tacts the Ori­on ship.

He is answered by Lolani-Taan, mer­chant-cap­tain of the Zhair­assha. While express­ing annoy­ance at the Lex­ing­ton’s arrival and the res­ult­ing col­lapse of her deal with the col­on­ists, she com­ments that she has a right to make a liv­ing, before the Zhair­assha leaves at high warp.

The ‘C’ Plots: Pryce awakens from a night­mare reliv­ing the M‑5 incid­ent. Though shaken, he puts it to one side as he pre­pares for his day.

A flash­back shows the first gath­er­ing of the seni­or officers aboard the refit­ted Lex­ing­ton orbit­ing near Earth Space­dock. Pryce does his best to cre­ate a con­vivi­al atmo­sphere, but A’Mathi, always aware of his duties, is more inter­ested in get­ting Com­mand­er Shiva to sign off on his sched­ules. Strauss is nearly late fol­low­ing delays on the shuttles.

The Arc: Lolani-Taan of the Ori­ons makes her first appear­ance. There is cer­tainly more to her than meets the eye.

Obser­va­tions: A’Mathi seems more impressed by actions than qual­i­fic­a­tions. Once he sees Strauss in action, he is happy to let him get on with his work.

Pryce was Com­modore Wes­ley’s exec­ut­ive officer dur­ing the M‑5 war­games. He was first to dis­cov­er the after­math of the hit to Main Engin­eer­ing and still suf­fers night­mares on occasion.

Ref­er­ences: Lex­ing­ton, com­manded by Com­modore Bob Wes­ley, was one of the four ships that opposed the USS Enter­prise NCC-1701 dur­ing the M‑5 Incid­ent. She took heavy dam­age to Main Engin­eer­ing from a full-strength phaser blast and suffered 50 casualties.

Lex­ing­ton under­went a par­tial refit dur­ing repairs. Sev­er­al parts of the ves­sel are more advanced than on Kirk’s Enter­prise, includ­ing Main Engin­eer­ing and Sickbay.

Ques­tions: Is there more to the Ori­on pres­ence than just an attempt to sell over­priced medicine?