Epis­ode Num­ber: 5×11

Writ­ten by: Erin MacDonald

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 5^th April 2025

Guest Stars:

• Com­mand­er Muafo: Com­mand­ing officer of the Akaru flotilla.

Recently-estab­lished sub­space com­mu­nic­a­tions with Setu, the home­world of the Akaru, have sud­denly ceased. It appears to be due to a pulsar deep­er with­in the Expanse, giv­ing off inter­fer­ing radi­ation. Giv­en our dip­lo­mat­ic exper­i­ence with the Akaru, we have been sent to restore the connection.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 51445.6

Plot: The crew uncov­ers a Vin­Shari plot to raid the Akaru home­world under cov­er of an inter­stel­lar disaster.

The ‘A’ Plot: Con­tact has been lost with a sub­space com­mu­nic­a­tions relay sta­tion near Setu, home­world of the Akaru. The unmanned sta­tion helps enable real-time com­mu­nic­a­tion with the isol­ated cul­ture, and the Lex­ing­ton is sent to invest­ig­ate as the crew has exper­i­ence of work­ing with them.

As they get closer, Zepht ana­lyses the last sig­nals received from the relay. He iden­ti­fies a dis­tinct­ive squawk, occur­ring as the sig­nal ends, as char­ac­ter­ist­ic of the sub­space ele­ment of a pulsar emis­sion. This kind of event could rap­idly over­load even shiel­ded sub­space radio equip­ment, but the nature of pulsars means that it could­n’t be a ran­dom occur­rence. The Corps of Engin­eers would nev­er have placed the relay in the path of a pulsar beam, so some­thing must have caused the pulsar itself to shift its axis of rota­tion. Which is impossible, except pos­sibly with Tilikaal-level technology.

Approach­ing the sta­tion loc­a­tion, the sensors pick up half-a-dozen ships posi­tioned on its far side, and they do not respond to hails. Inter­pret­ing the cap­tain’s orders a little cre­at­ively, Quinn drops out of warp to one side of the sta­tion, skew­ing to a hard stop and sur­pris­ing the oth­er ships, which turn out to be a squad­ron of Akaru frig­ates. Their weapons are act­ive, and Raynor reports a com­mu­nic­a­tion from the squad­ron’s com­mand­er, Muafo, warn­ing them not to make any sud­den moves. Requests for explan­a­tions are ignored, and sensor scans of the sur­round­ing region show noth­ing out of the ordinary.

Detailed scans of the relay sta­tion itself show it is dark, its fusion core run­ning at sus­tain­ment levels, but with no power being used else­where. There are no life signs and no indic­a­tions of extern­al damage.

Tak­ing a toolkit, Azon­an beams across to invest­ig­ate. He finds the sta­tion is pleas­antly (for an Andori­an) cold, but that it retains a breath­able atmo­sphere. There is no power avail­able to the con­soles, and tra­cing the EPS sys­tem shows that a con­duit is blocked. He clam­bers down an access tube to the fusion plant, burn­ing his hand as he cuts off the power so he can make repairs. Return­ing to the dam­aged con­duit, he finds that it has been crushed by some kind of mech­an­ic­al device.

Out­side the sta­tion, the Akaru ves­sels begin to man­oeuvre, appar­ently repos­i­tion­ing them­selves to bet­ter watch for trouble from the anom­aly-rid­den regions to either side of the spacelane. The com­mand ves­sel moves cau­tiously past the sta­tion, put­ting it on a path towards the Lex­ing­ton. Kon­in asks his crew to be alert, and Raynor to pre­pare for a pos­sible tight-beam com­mu­nic­a­tion. It appears the Akaru com­mand­er has the same idea: as his ship gets closer, it shines a com­mu­nic­a­tions laser at the Lex­ing­ton.

Once a chan­nel is estab­lished, he explains that Setu has recently come under attack, a power­ful sub­space energy beam sud­denly sweep­ing across the sys­tem, wip­ing out com­mu­nic­a­tions and dis­abling their data net­work. The sub­space com­mu­nic­a­tions link with Star­fleet went down shortly after­wards, con­vin­cing many of the Akaru’Bak that this was a pre­curs­or to inva­sion, pos­sibly by the VIn­Shari. Some of them were wor­ried that the Vin­Shari were in league with Star­fleet. Kon­in explains about the sus­pec­ted pulsar re-align­ment, and that it may be related to Tilikaal activ­ity, rather than a Vin­Shari weapon.

On the relay sta­tion, Azon­an has replaced the con­duit, and taken the dam­aged sec­tion up to the con­trol room. He exam­ines the dam­age in detail while wait­ing for the sys­tems to come back online, find­ing traces of an unusu­al met­al alloy. He scans the room with his tri­cord­er and finds more traces of the met­al near the air­lock door. A closer look shows that the air­lock itself is open to space, the out­er door hav­ing been ripped out of its hous­ing. Strain­ing to see through the porthole, he sees a deep gouge in the floor, which may have been made by a Vin­Shari harpoon.

Then he hears a noise from the corner of the room, and real­ises that the shad­ows there are dark­er than they should be. His tri­cord­er does­n’t show any­thing out of the ordin­ary, but then a fig­ure emerges from behind a con­sole, a Vin­Shari enfor­cer. Azon­an, unarmed, des­per­ately calls for assist­ance, but the com­badge is being jammed. The enfor­cer approaches, but then dis­ap­pears as a Vin­Shari woman emerges from thin air to one side and attacks him. He swings his tool­box at her, then takes a more defens­ive pos­ture as she attacks again. On the Lex­ing­ton, Raynor and Zepht have man­aged to con­nect to the sta­tion’s intern­al video mon­it­ors, and they are able to beam the engin­eer out before he is injured.

Kon­in, Azon­an and Raynor arm them­selves with phaser rifles and return to the sta­tion, but des­pite intens­ive scan­ning are unable to loc­ate the Vin­Shari. Azon­an notes that she appears to be a Mida­jah-Ka, with holo­graph­ic pro­jec­tion equip­ment, and won­ders if the phaser sweep pro­to­cols developed for loc­at­ing Changelings would work. The cap­tain agrees, and they begin to search the sta­tion crawlspaces again. Then they notice that a dis­play on the cent­ral con­sole is count­ing down: the fusion core is over­load­ing. It is far too late to stop it, so they beam out.

Back on the Lex­ing­ton, they see a small Vin­Shari skiff approach the sta­tion before jump­ing to warp moments before the sta­tion explodes. The saboteur has escaped. Deploy­ing a sub­space buoy to restore basic com­mu­nic­a­tions between Setu and Nar­en­dra Sta­tion, Lex­ing­ton heads to Setu to help with the recov­ery from the pulsar interference.

A day or so later, the newly-repaired long range sensors pickup Vin­Shari ships enter­ing the out­er reaches of Akaru-claimed space. The invad­ing ships soon turn around and head home, pos­sibly because the sensors are now work­ing again. It def­in­itely looks like a raid was planned, but des­pite Akaru fears, it was prob­ably opportunistic.

The Arc: The Vin­Shari are expand­ing the range of their depra­d­a­tions, and the Akaru are scared of the possibilities.

Obser­va­tions: Pulsars are high-dens­ity stel­lar objects that pro­ject tight beams of energy from their mag­net­ic poles. They rotate extremely fast, and the beams sweep across a fixed circle of space over a short reg­u­lar peri­od of time. The energy beams them­selves are power­ful, but are also accom­pan­ied by high energy sub­space field dis­tor­tion “beams” that travel much faster than the speed of light and can over­load com­mu­nic­a­tions and oth­er sys­tems rely­ing on sub­space field dynamics.

The high angu­lar momentum of a pulsar, arising from their dens­ity and rota­tion­al speed, means that it is vir­tu­ally impossible for the ori­ent­a­tion of the beam to change nat­ur­ally. Zepht pos­its that there may be Tilikaal tech­no­logy able to do this.

Ref­er­ences: The sub­space relay sta­tion is unmanned, but oth­er­wise resembles Relay Sta­tion 47, as seen in the Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion epis­ode “Aquiel”. It has no per­son­nel accom­mod­a­tions or shut­tle­bay, with the hab­it­able por­tions con­sist­ing of a cent­ral con­trol room, dock­ing facil­it­ies and a num­ber of crawlways.

The Akaru flo­tilla com­manded by Muafo is made up of 6 Iry­ax-class frig­ates, a type first seen in “Joy’s Soul Lies in the Doing”.

Ques­tions: What caused the pulsar to shift? Are the Vin­Shari plan­ning to invade Setu, or was this just an oppor­tun­ist­ic raid?