Epis­ode Num­ber: 3×08

Writ­ten by: Jon Crew

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 28^th July 2024

Guest Stars:

• Lieu­ten­ant Donak: Ambi­tious mem­ber of Ravenna’s crew
• Jak D’Jak: Sov­er­eign Vice­roy of the K’si Host Car­ri­er Light of Heaven

We are win­ning our battle against the K’si, but are tak­ing dam­age. It remains to be seen which way the Romu­lans will jump.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 9971.4, supplemental

Plot: The battle above Oreis­on con­tin­ues as the Romu­lans take an act­ive role.

The ‘A’ Plot: Lyo­n­esse rocks under mul­tiple impacts as the pecu­li­ar black beams of the K’si weapons sweep across her nacelles, send­ing dam­age con­trol teams scram­bling to shore up fail­ing cir­cuits. While Valik real­loc­ates power to rebuild their reserves, Par­ish returns fire, scor­ing a pre­cise hit on the K’si weapon sys­tems, dis­abling them.

Its weapons out of action, the Light of Heav­en begins to move towards Lyo­n­esse, evid­ently build­ing up speed for a ram­ming attack. James responds instantly, rush­ing over to the tac­tic­al con­sole to grab the attack­er with a tract­or beam. While Lyo­n­esse could nev­er hope to stop such a large ship, this effect­ively puts a bar­ri­er between them, the smal­ler ves­sel being pushed back out of the debris field as the oth­er advances.

As the K’si make repeated attempts to break free of the tract­or beam, Jin detects com­mu­nic­a­tions between them and the Romu­lan ves­sel. This raises the worry that they are work­ing togeth­er, espe­cially once the Che­vareth activ­ates its mal­func­tion­ing cloak­ing device.

James moves to the engin­eer­ing con­sole on the bridge, work­ing to restore Lyo­n­esse’s shields, but this places an immense strain on the already over­loaded EPS con­duits. Sci­ence Spe­cial­ist Andrews sends out a dis­tress call from Sci­ence Lab 4, report­ing that the dark mat­ter sample has broken out of its con­tain­ment field. One labor­at­ory assist­ant has already van­ished into the cloud, and every­one else is evac­u­at­ing deck 4. Then they hear a hor­ri­fied scream that cuts off suddenly.

Jin calls for secur­ity backup and rushes down to the labor­at­or­ies, where he is joined by Astan with an armed team. They enter the deck 4 main cor­ridor to find the labor­at­ory per­son­nel in a pan­ic, try­ing to get into a weapons lock­er. By this point, sev­er­al of them have been engulfed by the expand­ing cloud, which seems to show a sense of pur­pose, as tendrils reach out to engulf objects. While Jin con­siders that there may be an intel­li­gence present, Astan is not able to read any emo­tions from the cloud.

Appeal­ing to their Star­fleet train­ing and desire to know the unknown, Jin ral­lies the sci­ence per­son­nel to acquire mul­tiple detailed scans of the mater­i­al mak­ing up the cloud, before they retreat. With this data, they are still unclear as to what it actu­ally is, but they can dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from the oth­er mat­ter aboard the ship.

By this point, the Romu­lan crew appears to have resolved its own prob­lems one way or anoth­er. The Che­vareth’s con­tin­ued tech­nic­al prob­lems make it easy to track as it swings around the K’si ves­sel and begins what appears to be an attack run at the Lyo­n­esse.

Valik moves quickly to drop the shields, and use the new data to extract the dark mat­ter from the sci­ence labs and beam it off the ship. Then Par­ish raises the shields before fir­ing anoth­er phaser vol­ley at the K’si ship, which dis­rupts its remain­ing sys­tems and leaves it drift­ing, no longer a threat. The phaser beams clip the new cloud of dark mat­ter, how­ever, set­ting off a series of chain reac­tions, includ­ing omin­ous black “light­ning” flashes.

Jin reports from deck 4 that the sci­ence labs are clear, but the cloud has left a mess of broken fur­niture and badly dam­aged equip­ment, along with four bodies.

As they pre­pare to defend them­selves, the Romu­lan war­bird comes to a stop next along­side the dis­abled K’si ves­sel instead. Jin, return­ing to the bridge, con­tacts them and is answered by the young woman who seems to have taken con­trol, who intro­duces her­self as Com­mand­er Donak (although Par­ish notes she’s wear­ing the insignia of a lieu­ten­ant). Jin asks her to stand down, but she responds that they are claim­ing the host car­ri­er as sal­vage for the Romu­lan Star Empire. While Jin tries to argue that inter­stel­lar sal­vage law does­n’t apply to ves­sels with liv­ing crew aboard, Donak is unwill­ing to dis­cuss the mat­ter, as she requires sup­plies and mater­i­als for repairs.

This trig­gers a debate among the bridge officers: should they inter­vene or leave the two adversar­ies to it? Jin receives a con­cealed sig­nal from Thameth, Raven­na’s cen­tur­i­on, ask­ing for help, and Mas­uda ulti­mately decides to inter­vene, but not by get­ting into a fight for the Light of Heav­en. Instead, they will take advant­age of the Romu­lan shields being inact­ive to beam over and free Com­mand­er Ravenna, who seemed much more amen­able to negotiation.

The Arc: With J’dak’s ship dis­abled, the focus moves to the Romu­lans and their ship­board troubles.

Obser­va­tions: The dark mat­ter cloud in the sci­ence labs seems to have a malevol­ent intent, but Jin and Astan are unable to identi­fy any defin­it­ive signs of intelligence.

Dia­logue: Lt Par­ish, on hear­ing about Jin’s defi­ciency in engin­eer­ing skills: “Bloody boffins!”