Epis­ode Num­ber: 4×14

Writ­ten by: The authors of the Shack­leton Expanse Cam­paign Guide

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 24^th August 2024

Guest Stars:

• Doc­tor Rose Eloun­dou: Star­fleet first con­tact specialist.
• Lilong Cap­tain of the Green Isle: Com­mand­er of the Qofuari trad­ing ves­sel Song of the Green Isle.
• Grith­al of the Rolafus: Tra­di­tion­al­ist eld­er at the Qofuari All-Ashore Meeting.
• Fal­loo “Broken Ear”: First mate on the Song of the Green Isle.

Our return vis­it to the Qofuari has gone a little off-plan. We’ve dis­covered a ruined Iconi­an city, but as a res­ult, the Lex­ing­ton may have been infec­ted by an Iconi­an weapon. Unfor­tu­nately we are unable to warn them, due to the restric­tions placed on our tech­no­logy by our hosts.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 50698.4, supplemental

Plot: With an Iconi­an soft­ware weapon on the loose, the crew races against time to clear it from the Lex­ing­ton’s con­trol sys­tems before it can cause cata­stroph­ic damage.

The ‘A’ Plot: Real­ising they need to warn Lex­ing­ton about the poten­tial con­ta­gion, the away team assesses its options. Their com­mu­nic­at­ors are stowed back on the Song of the Green Isle due to their agree­ment with Grith­al, and the Qofuari ship is too far away for them to reach in time. The only device they have cap­able of talk­ing to the ship is Zeph­t’s tri­cord­er, which now has no power. They con­sider writ­ing some kind of over­sized mes­sage on the moun­tain slopes, but even if Grith­al approves the idea, it’s unlikely that Lex­ing­ton’s sensors would pick it up in time.

They decide the best way to send a mes­sage is via the tri­cord­er, and to do this the device will need power. The con­trol ped­es­tal that infec­ted the device in the first place is com­pletely inert, hav­ing appar­ently drawn its power from the tri­cord­er itself, and the power con­duits for the machinery sur­round­ing the inact­ive gate­way device are cor­roded and useless.

This means they need to gen­er­ate power them­selves, and after going through a few options, they decide sol­ar power is prob­ably the least offens­ive to the Qofuari Tra­di­tion­al­ists, and should be easy to build.

Unfor­tu­nately, they still need to per­suade Grith­al this is a good idea. The old Qofuari is rant­ing at them from the edge of the cav­ern about how this is their own fault: they have evid­ently angered the spirt of the vol­cano, des­pite the ritu­al. Kon­in takes a deep breath and goes up to talk to him, tak­ing Zepht and Lilong as trans­lat­ors. He proves dif­fi­cult to con­vince, espe­cially since he thinks the poten­tial destruc­tion of their star­ship would be a just pen­alty for their defi­ance of the spir­its. The cap­tain per­sists, explain­ing exactly what would hap­pen to a large por­tion pf the plan­et if the warp core were to breach. Even­tu­ally Grith­al real­ises this is not a price he is will­ing to pay, and relents.

The team works with Lilong’s small land­ing party to track down the neces­sary mater­i­als. Luck­ily, the vol­can­ic ter­rain con­tains a vari­ety of rare min­er­als, which include those Azon­an requires. With­in a few hours, they are build­ing a series of large sol­ar power pan­els, which the engin­eer then wires into the tri­cord­er. Quickly pur­ging its data bank to get rid of the soft­ware weapon, he hands it over to Zepht.

The Den­ob­u­lan is able to use the device to remotely con­nect to the ship’s com­puter, then hack dir­ectly into the main view­er on the bridge, allow­ing him to attract the atten­tion of Com­mand­er Zohir. Although the soft­ware weapon is already caus­ing major prob­lems, he is able to explain the cause of the trouble, and Azon­an sup­plies the solu­tion which worked for the Enter­prise. Zohir instantly relays this to the repair teams led by Lt Selvek.

With the mes­sage delivered, the team dis­mantles its con­struc­tion in an effort to keep Grith­al and his spir­its happy, then heads back down to the ships. The walk and sub­sequent boat ride are made a little more excit­ing as the vol­cano begins its biggest erup­tion for dec­ades. Grith­al simply watches it without say­ing anything.

Back on the Song of the Green Isle, they are con­tac­ted by Lex­ing­ton, learn­ing that Selvek’s team have reset the sys­tems and purged the Iconi­an weapon. Azon­an and Zepht beam back to the ship to fol­low up on the repairs, while Kon­in accom­pan­ies Lilong back to the All-Ashore Meet­ing. The cap­tain form­ally apo­lo­gises for the chaos, then explains what he has dis­covered. Ulti­mately, he is able to set up a long-term dip­lo­mat­ic rela­tion­ship with the Qofuari, leav­ing Dr Eloun­dou as an ambassador.

Once away from the coun­cil, he quietly gives a com­mu­nic­at­or to an excited Lilong, so that he can con­tact the Lex­ing­ton if he needs to.

The ‘B’ Plot: Aboard Lex­ing­ton, Selvek and the engin­eer­ing depart­ment are bat­tling a bliz­zard of minor prob­lems, from rep­lic­at­or and tur­bo­l­ift faults to fluc­tu­at­ing labor­at­ory power sup­plies, com­puter bugs and a con­tain­ment prob­lem in the impulse drive. Aware that these prob­lems must be related, but baffled as to their ori­gins, repair teams led by Selvek, Ensign Elser and Chief Rogon are kept busy fix­ing prob­lems across the ship, while Lt Hu’Gar­im­min leads a group of pro­gram­mers in a los­ing battle to keep the com­puter sys­tem under control.

Once Zohir relays Zeph­t’s mes­sage, their activ­ity becomes more focussed. The solu­tion requires the com­plete shut­down of all the decent­ral­ised com­puter sys­tems aboard the ship, before their data cores can be purged of any traces of the Iconi­an weapon. Only then will it be safe to restart them. Each team takes on a dif­fer­ent sys­tem, and they stead­ily erad­ic­ate the con­ta­gion. Hu’Gar­im­min even finds an isol­ated instance that has hid­den itself away in a holo­deck char­ac­ter matrix.

Even­tu­ally, they are able to bring the ship back online, wel­com­ing the away team back aboard, before under­tak­ing a level 5 dia­gnost­ic to ensure everything is clear.

Obser­va­tions: A warp core breach in a rel­at­ively low orbit would have dev­ast­at­ing con­sequences for the the plan­et below. A mat­ter-anti­mat­ter explo­sion of that size would unleash high-energy gamma and x‑rays that would kill almost all life in line-of-sight on the sur­face, and irra­di­ate an area the size of a small con­tin­ent. The sub­sequent bom­bard­ment by radio­act­ive debris would also be leth­al to any life­forms that sur­vived the ini­tial blast.

The cas­cade of engin­eer­ing issues is sim­il­ar to those exper­i­enced by the Yam­ato and the Enter­prise. Unlike the former, the Enter­prise crew was able to shut down and purge the com­puters before the con­ta­gion affected the warp core con­tain­ment sys­tem. Selvek’s team is con­fron­ted with the same race for survival.