Epis­ode Num­ber: 5×10

Writ­ten by: Dayton Ward

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 22^nd March 2025

Guest Stars:

• Jir­al Sera: Ori­on con­tract pilot.
• E’lor­uul: Head of the “pro­spect­ing” oper­a­tion on Dys­athus II, actu­ally a rank­ing mem­ber of the Ori­on Syndicate.
• Lieu­ten­ant T’rhyn: Long-lost chief sci­ence officer of the U.S.S. Lex­ing­ton (NCC-1709).

The ride down from orbit was a little rough, but we made it. Our Ori­on friends will no doubt be upset by the sud­den turn of events though. They’ve been try­ing to reach this arte­fact using a tiny sub­mar­ine, then we show up and their plans are com­pletely ruined. It being an Iconi­an con­struct is a prob­lem: we know what the Iconi­ans were cap­able of, but why is this here in the first place, and why does it seem to be wak­ing up now?

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 51368.6

Plot: Fol­low­ing the res­cue of the Ori­on sal­vage crew, the away team encoun­ters a vis­it­or from anoth­er time.

The ‘A’ Plot: Quinn flies the Trave around the massive struc­ture, as Zepht scans its sur­face, look­ing for an access point. There are no obvi­ous doors, hatches, gates or oth­er ways in, above or below the water. The run­about’s sensors are unable to pen­et­rate the con­crete-like mater­i­al, so it will not be pos­sible to simply beam into the interior.

In order to exam­ine the sur­face close-up, they decide to land on the large flat sur­face that makes up the upper por­tion of the build­ing. As the run­about gets to with­in 10 metres of the sur­face, how­ever, it begins to be affected by a repuls­ive force, which gets stronger as the craft gets closer. Raynor puts on an envir­on­ment suit and tries to des­cend by rope from the hov­er­ing run­about, but encoun­ters a sim­il­ar effect, being repelled quite dra­mat­ic­ally at a dis­tance of about five metres.

Zepht sud­denly announces that he is pick­ing up move­ment from near water level, and is able to identi­fy a humanoid fig­ure emer­ging from the clut­ter of pylons and oth­er struc­tures at the base of the pyr­am­id. The fig­ure appears to be wear­ing an archa­ic Star­fleet envir­on­ment suit, and Zepht is pick­ing up Vul­canoid life-signs.

Kon­in ini­ti­ates con­tact, a pro­cess com­plic­ated by the fact that Star­fleet com­mu­nic­a­tion bands have changed over the last cen­tury, but even­tu­ally, he is able to speak to the officer, who intro­duces her­self as Lieu­ten­ant T’rhyn, of the star­ship Lex­ing­ton. Inspired by her envir­on­ment suit, Kon­in asks if that is the NCC-1709. She con­firms that it is, and real­ising his intent, asks for the cur­rent stard­ate. She notes that she has trav­elled more than a cen­tury into her own future.

Quinn takes the run­about down to water level to meet her, find­ing that the repul­sion effect is greatly reduced there. T’rhyn comes aboard, allow­ing them to con­verse in a more con­veni­ent fash­ion. She explains that she became trapped in a grav­ity well dur­ing an away mis­sion at the Beta Niobe super­nova rem­nant, but was able to take refuge in an ali­en struc­ture loc­ated with­in an aster­oid. That struc­ture, which she refers to as the “Oracle”, then some­how brought her to this “Locus” on Dys­athus II.

She offers to show them the Oracle, and the cap­tain agrees. The team enters the pyr­am­id­al build­ing through a formerly unseen pan­el in the extern­al wall. Inside is a cav­ernous space, con­tain­ing a single cube-shaped build­ing, which T’rhyn explains is the Oracle itself. A door on one side leads into a series of darkened cham­bers, illu­min­ated by red and blue light from what appear to be con­trol pan­els. The cent­ral cham­ber is dom­in­ated by a pentagon­al con­sole beneath a vast holo­graph­ic dis­play of a star map.

Zepht imme­di­ately com­pares the map to the map of Tilikaal sites con­tained in his tri­cord­er, not­ing a num­ber of matches, allow­ing for half-a-mil­lion years of drift. The mark­ings on this map appear to be Iconi­an glyphs, which allows him to begin identi­fy­ing loc­a­tions they have yet to visit.

The Arc: Four sea­sons later, we finally find out what happened to Lieu­ten­ant T’rhyn.

Obser­va­tions: T’rhyn iden­ti­fies the pyr­am­id as a “Locus”, as it appears to be a pro­grammed des­tin­a­tion for the “Oracle”. She believes the aster­oid was also such a locus and that there will be a num­ber of oth­ers, loc­ated across the galaxy, and pos­sibly in dif­fer­ent time peri­ods. The logic­al con­clu­sion is that the Oracle is some kind of trans­port device, and that it can tra­verse both time and space extremely rap­idly. Her trans­it from 23^rd cen­tury Beta Niobe took just over four sol­ar days of sub­ject­ive time.

Ref­er­ences: Lieu­ten­ant T’rhyn was Richter Strauss’s suc­cessor as sci­ence officer aboard the ori­gin­al Lex­ing­ton. She was lost dur­ing an away mis­sion at the Beta Niobe super­nova rem­nant in 2269.