A Trekkie's Unofficial Book Summaries Volume 5 by Geoff Canham - HTML preview
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Contents
1
2
Chekov’s Challenge (ST-TOS – Walter Koenig and Chris McAuley) ..................................55
3
4
5
A Rolling Stone Gathers No Nanoprobes (TNG – Andy Mangels & Mike Martin).................90
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Divided We Fall part 1 (TNG & DS9 – John J. Ordover & David Mack) ................................94
Divided We Fall part 2 (TNG & DS9 – John J. Ordover & David Mack) ................................95
Divided We Fall part 3 (TNG & DS9 – John J. Ordover & David Mack) ................................95
Divided We Fall part 4 (TNG & DS9 – John J. Ordover & David Mack) ................................95
The Planet Killer part 1 (Voyager – Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith).............99
The Planet Killer part 2 (Voyager – Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith)...........100
The Planet Killer part 3 (Voyager – Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith)...........100
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Double Bluff (ST-TOS Thomas Warkentin and Tom Durkin)............................................105
Husian Gambit (ST-TOS Thomas Warkentin and Tom Durkin).........................................106
The Wristwatch Plantation (ST-TOS Sharman DiVono & Larry Niven)............................109
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Episode 14, Epilogue (Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly, Jody Houser, Paul Cornell, Jim
McCann, and Brandon Easton)............................................................................................118
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Prodigy
A Dangerous Trade
Cassandra Rose Clarke
Jankom Pog discovers that one of the transporter phase coils is nearly at the end of its life, and it’s not something that can be replicated. Dal decides that they will need to purchase a new one, but since they don’t have any chimerium as currency, he opts to replicate a ground vehicle battery to trade for it, even though Janeway says that Starfleet would frown on that use of the replicator. They head for Odaru where there is a not-too-respectable market that won’t ask too many questions about trading Starfleet equipment. While Gwyn stays with Murf and Janeway aboard the Protostar (which is parked on the planet’s surface), Dal, Jankom, Zero, and Rok-Tahk (who is forced to carry the battery) visit the market. When she is jostled in the marketplace, Rok-Tahk fears she is about to drop the battery, but she maintains a grip on its container. Dal spots a Caitian woman, Chadossa, looking a bit shifty, and follows her to a warehouse run by Teyless Usk’is, thinking that would be a good place to make a deal. At first it seems as if that had been the case, but Teyless had been tracking the Protostar and they’d already obtained the battery by beaming it from its container, using a micro-transporter when Rok-Tahk was jostled, and substituting rocks in its place. Dal’s group end up in a cage, although Dal is able to connect for a short conversation with Gwyn, letting her know they were in a warehouse and informing her that Teyless was planning on ransacking Protostar. However, Gwyn and Murf had left Protostar to explore Orgora Market. She informs Janeway of what’s happening, and Gwyn and Murf, with some help from a Bajoran trader who had given her a doll, find Teyless’s warehouse and are instrumental in freeing Dal’s group, and they head back to Protostar to stop Teyless. Dal claims to surrender to Teyless, but actually has Zero pretend to be the only one who could release the lock on Dal’s safe, while actually replicating fake chimerium and storing it in an escape pod. That proves to be a good strategy, because Teyless also stores her treasures in an escape pod, ready if an emergency escape is needed. When Teyless and her cohorts hurry into the escape pod to retrieve the chimerium, Dal has the pod fired out over the market, and has the Protostar lift off into space. That doesn’t appear to have solved the transporter phase coil problem, but, when they escaped the warehouse, Zero had secretly taken the coil they’d been shown by Teyless, and Rok-Tahk points out that that was really just completing the deal that Teyless had agreed to, because she has the battery in exchange.
Supernova
Robb Pearlman
The starship Protostar with Captain Dal R’El, Gwyn (a Vau N’Akat), Jankom Pog (ship’s engineer), Zero (a noncorporeal Medusan), Rok-Tahk (a Brikar), and blue, gelatinous Murf, along with the Hologram Janeway (originally an Emergency Training Hologram), is heading for Starfleet space after escaping from the mines of Tars Lamora and freeing the other Unwanted held there in slavery. Then Zero notices that the doll that Gwyn had obtained on Odura has writing on one of its feet, and Janeway identifies it as coordinates. Since it’s not far off their route, they decide to check it out. What they find is a system with three planets with no lifesigns, and the star (or sunstar) is surrounded by a Dyson sphere. Then Protostar gets badly shaken by
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some effect, and Dal and Gwyn find themselves on one of planets (which they later learn is called Orisi), but their combadges are not working properly. They soon find that the planet is inhabited by mechanical Watchers, exactly like the ones they escaped from on Tars Lamora. In escaping from these, they discover a cave system with cave paintings depicting the rise of a civilization on the planet but indicating that its demise came about when the Watchers arrived. Along the way, they discover and rescue Jankom, and once they are out of the caves, they find a large but barely functioning power source. Jankom’s combadge does work, and they get beamed back to Protostar. Janeway informs them that it was an eruption from the sunstar that had affected the ship, that the star was going to go supernova in about 40 hours, and that she had located signs of two of the other crew members on one of the other planets (Mirios). There are also Watchers on that planet which they realize are led by a mechanical person that looks like Drednok, who (along with the Diviner, Gwyn’s father) had commanded the Watchers on Tars Lamora. They rescue Rok and Zero, and meet Yarm’orn, one of the surviving native Naroans, and he had been working to get a message out about their plight. Gwyn’s doll with the coordinates of the system was one of his attempts, and he was pleased to realize that the ship carrying the children with the doll had reached safety. He also suggests that their one missing crewperson (Murf) was most likely near the generator on the third planet - they had shut down the generator on Mirios, and Yarm’orn says that if they can shut down the last one (on Taresse), then the Dyson sphere can be destroyed and the sunstar won’t go supernova. They also encounter the person that Gwyn thinks of as Drednok, Dal calls Meany Head, but who prefers to be known as Star Killer. He had been sent back in time by the Vau N’Akats to ensure the destruction of the Federation and save Solum but his ship had been disrupted, and he'd crashed onto Orisi. The friendly Naroans had repaired him, and he’d repaid them by trying to destroy or enslave them. Those that remained, apart from Yarm’orn, are now hiding in the caves underground on Taresse. Happily, Drednok (or whoever) seems to be more interested in escaping forward in time through the wormhole that is opening up next to the sunstar and then being able to restart his mission. Dal and Gwyn go to Taresse to find Murf, and with the help of the Naroans they destroy the third generator and appear to have found the code that will allow Rok, Jankom and Zero aboard Dyson Station to initiate its destruction, but it turns out Drednok/Star Killer had changed the code. After fighting off Watchers on the station, Jankom adapts an offline Watcher to act under his control, and he has it burrow into the station’s control panel and then self-destruct as they beam back to Protostar. With the Dyson sphere no longer confining it, the sunstar stabilizes and the wormhole starts to collapse. Star Killer is warned of what is happening, but he continues to attempt his escape and ends up trapped in nothingness as the wormhole collapses on him.
Escape Route
Cassandra Rose Clarke
The Protostar had to be destroyed because it contained the seed of the Federation’s destruction. The former crew had made a shuttle and were still headed towards Earth, although none knew what sort of welcome they’ll get, and Dal thinks he may end up in custody because he is an Augment. When the warp drive starts playing up, Jankom discovers that there is a problem with the matrix restoration coil, and the month-long trip to Earth in the cramped space of the shuttle suddenly looked like being a lot longer journey. The chart showed no habitable planet or moon in the near vicinity, but then a moon comes into view that appears to be covered in trash. Jankom thinks he should be able to find something to repair their warp engine there, so they land. It is
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soon realized that the moon itself is just a collection of space junk orbiting a gas giant planet, and they discover that the moon is inhabited. The moon was the result of the Ashare (from a nearby planet) setting up a method of drawing in space junk from the universe, and the current inhabitants (the Chakkara) had crash-landed there. The Ashare then allowed the Chakkara to locate usable material and trade it for food and other materials. Yichirri was the Chakkara that discovered the crew, and he takes them to meet their leader, Amkarja. During a meal in their underground pod, an explosion occurs, caused by chemicals from the surrounding junk accidentally combining. The pod is damaged and looks as if it will have to be evacuated, but Murf gobbles up the poisonous goop and saves the day. That leads to an offer by Amkarja to give the crew a newer and faster (warp 6) engine for their shuttle in return for Murf staying with the Chakkara to be their cleanup system. To everyone’s surprise, Rok-Tahk suggests that Murf stays because she knows his future with Starfleet is very uncertain and his goal in life seems to be to eat anything around. Murf doesn’t seem too happy with the idea, and Rok-Tahk soon regrets having suggested it. When Dal gets a reminder of his childhood, he decides that he can’t leave any of his family behind. The Chakkara had fixed their shuttle, but Dal and the crew decide to fly it back to Amkarja’s pod, give back the new engine and recover Murf and their old engine. However, Amkarja had suspected they might try something to recover Murf, so the new engine had been fixed to fail right after take-off, and it crashes back onto the junk pile. The crew end up being held captive by the Chakkara, but Murf gets to hear of it. When he is called on to clean up some more dangerous chemicals, he stores them in his stomach and is later able to spit out bits of them to cause explosions to free the crew, recover their old but rebuilt engine, escape back to the shuttle and leave the junk-pile moon. Murf had also stored a piece of equipment he had found earlier, which turn out to be something tuned into a radio station from San Francisco playing hit tunes from 1985. The crew no longer felt the month ahead of them would seem so long, now that they had lively music that they could dance to.
Lower Decks
All in a Sea of Wonders
Ryan North
The U.S.S. Cerritos gets sent to the Qvanti system for second contact with the Qvantians, who in some regards are reportedly more advanced than the Federation. The disruptive atmosphere prevents beaming down or scanning the surface so, when they are invited, Captain Carol Freeman, Lieutenant Shaxs, and Dr. T’Ana, use a shuttle to land, but find themselves attacked by primitive aliens who call them monsters from the sky and witches. Freeman’s team render unconscious all of their attackers, but then the actual Qvantians arrive and take the Starfleet team into custody for breach of the Qvantians’ supposed ‘Prime Directive’. Freeman’s team are told by Sovereign Dilana of the Qvanti League that the planet has two continents and, although the same species, the Qvantians inhabit one continent and the Yentoa live on the other and have progressed differently. The Qvantians are said to impose a death sentence for anyone who interferes with the development of the Yentoa. Consequently, the captain’s team are sentenced to death, and the Cerritos will be destroyed because the crew were accomplices. Meanwhile, Boimler, Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford had been playing around on the holodeck and
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accidentally created a sentient Count Dracula. That relationship swings back and forth between Dracula trying to attack them and the group befriending him. That is resolved when the four decide to make blood donations for Dracula, and when the ship comes under attack, Dracula offers to help them. They work out how to get Dracula through the lead Qvanti ship’s shields and onto the ship. Having practiced hacking into the Cerritos’s computer, he knows how to do it on the Qvanti ship. He discovers that the Yentoa had originally been the technologically advanced, but peaceful, group on the planet and had fallen prey to the Qvantians. The Qvantians had stolen their technology, wiped the Yentoa’s memories of events, and now steal any of the Yentoa’s children who show technological talent. That information is broadcast back to the Federation and to the captain, who rescinds the offer of Federation membership until the two sides get together. To speed that process, the captain also equips the Yentoa with some of their lost technology. Dracula is offered a position on the ship but says he will join Voyager’s Doctor’s Starfleet Emergency Holographic Academy instead, and he leaves on a shuttlecraft. [Timeline: Stardate 58118.4]
Warp Your Own Way
Ryan North
Comic book format, and it is also Interactive, meaning that you make decisions at times as to what decisions someone makes, which leads to a different section of book, so you cause the story to progress differently. I’ll give two optional story lines, but there are multiple others.
It’s 7 am and Mariner is happy to be able to sleep in, except that the ship enters a bright nebula, stopping her sleeping. So she gets up and decides to order a Klingon raktajino. That revives her a bit and she decides to go and bother Tendi and Rutherford. They are happy to have her join them in engineering, but then an odd noise is heard from the warp core. It is discovered that the main computer had instigated a small adjustment to the antideuterium realignment sequence. Billups finds that it corresponds exactly with the warp injection signature of the Borg and then finds that he cannot contact anyone else on the ship. He says he’ll stay and disconnect the warp core from the main computer in case they have to blow it manually, and he orders the others to go fight the invading Borg. Mariner goes with Tendi and Rutherford. They climb to the saucer section and spot some drones. Rutherford suggests attacking them with EPS conduit while Tendi comes up with a plan for creating Kaylo gas to knock them out. Mariner suggests using the EPS conduit idea. That seems to be working until the Borg start not only adapting and surviving but incorporating the technique and attacking them. Rutherford has the idea of using the ship’s prefix code to order the computer to create and release Tendi’s Kaylo gas all over the ship to kill off the Borg. But, although she’s the captain’s daughter, Mariner doesn’t know the codes, and the Borg attack and kill them all.
It’s 7 am and Mariner is happy to be able to sleep in, except that the ship enters a bright nebula, stopping her sleeping. So she gets up and decides to order a human coffee. That revives her a bit and she decides to go and bother Captain Freeman on the Bridge. While heading there in the turbolift, the ship is hit by a photon torpedo. She arrives to find the Bridge crew seeing the image of Khan who is captaining the U.S.S. Reliant which is attacking them. Mariner takes over ops and takes it into her own hands to talk to Khan, which makes her realize that everything he says is identical to that said by the holodeck version of him. Captain Freeman gets Khan to allow
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them 30 seconds to make peace with their gods before he blows them out of the sky. On the basis that Mariner’s right about this being a holodeck Khan, Freeman plans to use the ship’s prefix codes, which she expects her daughter to have, to take over and disable the Reliant. Mariner doesn’t have the codes. Khan blows them from the sky.
There are numerous other optional storylines, even one where you can ensure that the crew of the Cerritos survive. [Timeline: Stardate 58640.3]
Strange New Worlds
The High Country
John Jackson Miller
Pike’s Enterprise had been sent to the Bullseye Nebula to investigate the disappearance of the Braidwood, and they approach a system within the nebula that has a planet, FGC-7781 b (later known as Epheska), that sensors show is inhabited. Pike leads a mission aboard the shuttle Eratosthenes to scan for the Braidwood but, as they approach the planet, they find equipment shutting down. The Enterprise tries to come to their rescue, but then their systems start failing too. The best they achieve is to beam those aboard the shuttle (Pike, Una Chin-Riley otherwise known as Number One, Spock, and Cadet Uhura) to the planet’s surface as the shuttle crashes. Uhura finds herself in a volcanic area but comes across what appear to be living flames and one helps guide her towards a populated region. She realizes that it responds to her emotions, so she calls it an empatherm or Empy. Una finds herself in a forest and is rescued from a dinosaur-like creature called an ollodon by a “mountain man” who turns out to be Celarius, the son of Conservator General Drayko the planet’s ruler. Pike is rescued by a farmer named Joe Magee and his daughter Jennie, who he learns are part of a group who call themselves the Menders. The Menders actually like developing new technology, but all the groups on the planet had been rescued from disasters on other planets and the planet’s rulers, the Skagarans, insist on maintaining the groups at the level of technology they had when rescued. The planet itself seems to prevent any technology involving electromagnetism from working, as Pike’s team discovers when they try using their communicators or tricorders. Pike is pleased to meet an old friend, Lila Talley, who had been part of a Luddite group that ran the Bar T Ranch when he was growing up. She had been an advisor on the Braidwood and had now been appointed as a Warden by Drayko. She loved the fact that very limited technology was possible on the planet. The Skagarans discover the Menders’ previously-secret store of inventions and books, and they force the Sorry (or sah’ree, the ‘traveling flame’) to burn it all down, and the Menders, along with Pike, escape their town of Havenbrook. Before they leave, Spock is able to contact Pike via the mysterious orb-like rondures that are found in the “temples” at the center of ever town or village. Spock suggests a distant location to rendezvous at (Leejo Point), and Pike and the others head off there, while being searched for by Drayko and the Skagarans. Una talks Celarius into helping her search for her missing friends, and she does locate Uhura. Drayko had learned of Pike’s team through Lila, and he hoped to use Una and Uhura as hostages to draw Pike in. However, Uhura escapes, Una and Celarius (who had assisted them) are thrown in the Warm Embrace (i.e., the dungeon) where they start to learn some of the true history of the place from other ‘inmates’
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(including Captain Li and the crew of the Braidwood, and Taliyah who Jonathan Archer came across on a planet in the Delphic Expanse, North Star, before becoming an advisor on the Braidwood). They manage to break out, and they all escape on one of the Skagarans’ Sentinels (i.e., an airship). Drayko is injured by Uhura’s living flame called Empy during the escape. Uhura also has to comfort Empy about the flight, because the airships are usually driven by sah’ree who are used as forced labor by the Skagarans. Pike and the Menders meet up with Spock and some other Vulcans, led by Fleet Commander T’Var, who had crashed on the planet decades before and ended up living in previously abandoned ships. T’Var takes them to an aged Strooh, Jaddak, who says his people had understood how the Baffle worked and sets them on the road to a temple and rondure in the Zevaynian uplands. That one had black marble tablets with writing inscribed on them that said there was a master rondure, at a place known as the Devil’s Dish, in the frozen north. That rondure controls all the others and can make the field that disables electromagnetism equipment vanish or expand, possibly to infinity. They are now in a race to get to this master or nodal rondure, and Lila is heading there too, except she wants to expand the field, known as the Baffle, to destroy the Klingon Empire who had wiped out the colony on Kelfour VI that included her old Luddite friends and her own children. The various groups converge at the master rondure, and Hemmer (the Enterprise’s Chief Engineer who had parachuted down from the Enterprise in an escape pod) is able to work out how to control it, but then he is shot and injured by Lila. It takes Pike getting her to think of her children to finally stop her from effectively wiping out all life in the universe. Empy the sah’ree also intervenes, and it’s learned that the sah’ree had come from another universe that was dying from lack of electromagnetic radiation, and they’d set up the rondures to funnel some from our universe. However, when they discovered the Strooh on the planet, they realized they had to limit the amount of radiation passed to their home universe (it was Weedaw, a Strooh, who provided the translation of the writings at Zevaynian). Then some of the Skagarans came, liking the minimal tech possibility because they had effectively destroyed their home planet with war and pollution, and they started kidnapping other peoples who wouldn’t be missed and settling them on the planet too. They had also quickly learned how to contain and control the sah’ree for their own purposes. Spock, Una, and Uhura had been at the ‘controls’ of the master rondure and had ended up in a sort of forcefield-contained pod with the rondure heading out into space at increasing pace, and the extent of the electromagnetic damping field was expanding at the same pace in all directions. Empy (now representing all the sah’ree) arranges it so that Una can call the Enterprise and get the three of them beamed up, and then says to have Enterprise destroy the pod. That done, all the other rondures that were similarly heading out into space exploded and the sah’ree presumably returned to their home universe. Soon afterwards, the Federation makes contact with them, and Hemmer believes there should be a way of providing the needed radiation for them. The Federation sends assistance to Epheska to help the inhabitants to adjust to the changed situation and to return any that wanted to go to their original home planet. Celarius and some other Skagarans return to their home planet to try and restore it to a more livable condition. Drayko is taken into custody and will be charged with multiple kidnappings. Lila is subjected to Vulcan justice, but since that involves teaching children how to ride horses, she is fairly content. [Timeline: Year 2259, between the episodes “The Serene Squall” and “The Elysian Kingdom”]
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Towards the Night
James Swallow
When Uhura picks up what she thinks could be a garbled distress call, possibly from a Starfleet vessel, Pike diverts the Enterprise to the planet 685-Gamma (near the Klingon border and later found to be known as Sekah by its original inhabitants), which is the apparent source of the call. The planet is being bathed in radiation from its star, and there is a ring of debris around the planet. Up closer, Uhura is finally able to get a clear rendition of the message, and it had been an urgent call from the starship Baldwin, that had been lost 94 years previously, in year 2165. The discovery that it relates to the Baldwin had been a big shock to Lt. Erica Ortegas, whose great-grandaunt (whose history had inspired Erica to join Starfleet) had been lost on that ship. Tracing the signal back, they are able to locate the derelict ship in the debris of the planet’s ring. That surprises Spock, as he’d scanned that area of the ring as they approached the planet and had found nothing unusual. Pike leads a team including Uhura, security chief Lt. La’An Noonian-Singh, nurse Chapel, Erica Ortegas, Yerah (a field researcher), and Bradley as security to board the ship, and they split up to explore the vessel. Team 2, consisting of La’An and Bradley, discover an artificial but largish alien stone object in a cargo bay, but Pike warns them to get away from it immediately (Pike had just recovered the final log entry of Capt. Mahs Rosh Hov that had spoken of an energy blast that damaged and disabled the ship after they recovered an object from the planet’s ring, and was forcing an evacuation). The artifact start to activate, which fascinates Bradley, and he delays his exit to record what was happening. When energy erupts from the artifact, Bradley takes the brunt of it and dies instantly. La’An is left injured and unconscious. The effect, enlarged by an eruption from the star, is felt throughout the ship (and the Enterprise is also shaken). Pike then finds that they cannot contact the Enterprise, and they discover that they are still in the same location but had been sent back over 90 years. Chapel discovers La’An but doesn’t have the equipment to heal her. A scan of the planet reveals a small settlement that was probably the survivors from the Baldwin, and Pike and the others beam down to try and obtain the needed medical supplies without revealing themselves to the survivors for fear of creating a time paradox. That doesn’t work out when Pike’s team comes under attack from giant flying dragonflies, that become known as Flyers, and they are rescued by the Baldwin survivors. Pike tries to keep their true identity secret, but it gets revealed after Rix, the medic from the Baldwin, discovers that La’An’s last name is Noonien-Singh and assumes she is an Augment. Pike finally has to admit they are Starfleet, although the survivors have their doubts until Erica (who had been calling herself Erica Cortez) convinces the survivor’s effective leader, Chief Luciana Maria Santiago Ortegas, that they are related. The two groups only really start working as one when they come under attack from a mass of Flyers. Although they end up driving off the Flyers, one of the Baldwin crew (Lt. Commander Marek Huber) is killed and Chapel and La’An, along with Rix and LeCroix from the Baldwin survivors, are carried off by the Flyers, apparently as food for the Flyers’ grubs. Luciana says they were probably taken to an old building known as the citadel, and a rescue attempt is launched. In escaping from the citadel, a large room is discovered with a large stone arch, and they encounter what the Baldwin survivors call ghosts. Chapel realizes it is a holographic projection that is getting distorted. Straightening the signal out, it turns out to be a message from Spock that Chapel is able to record. Back on the Enterprise in the original timeframe, they had come under attack by a Romulan D7 battlecruiser, the Pah-Gor, captained by Commander Bren. Number One manages to trick Bren into following a shuttle adapted to appear on sensors as the Enterprise, letting them hide in the
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planet’s rings and carry out emergency repairs. Spock discovers that the stone arch in the citadel is like a massive transporter buffer in which the original inhabitants of the planet had stored themselves until their star had settled down again, and life was restored to the planet. The unmanned Baldwin had suddenly returned to that timeframe, but had been immediately destroyed by Bren’s ship, although the mysterious artifact survived. Spock realizes that the stone arch could be used to send Pike’s team forward in time to rejoin them, and Number One (Chin-Riley) authorizes him to send a message back in time using the arch, in the hope that Pike’s team receives it. When Bren returns, furious at the deception with the shuttle, Number One tricks her into taking the artifact onboard, implying it was a secret Starfleet weapon that the Baldwin had been testing. When it activates again, it leads to the Pah-Gor being sent 10 days ahead. Around that time, Pikes team, followed by the Baldwin survivors, emerge through the stone arch. Then the arch activates again, and Keol (the Sekahri scientist who had devised the method of saving his people) emerges. He is pleased with the interference by Starfleet because the artifact had been a satellite that was supposed to reactivate the arch when the planet was ready to receive them again, but it had been damaged when the planet’s moons had been unexpectedly destroyed and formed the ring around the planet. Pike arranges for equipment to be left, shielding them from interference by other possible visitors, and providing the service that the lost satellite was to have done. Keol happily returns through the arch, and the Enterprise leaves before Bren returns. Centuries later, when the Sekahri return to the restored planet, they are met by a team led by Burnham, who says that Starfleet will continue to assist them in their resettlement of the planet. [Main timeline: year 2259]
Asylum
Una McCormack
Captain Pike and the Enterprise are headed for Starbase 1 and are set to host a negotiating session with the Echet of the Chionians, Linchar A’Chevar, from the planet Xhio about the Federation formalizing trade and shipping routes through Chionian space. Linchar, with her two assistants, Texho and Marachat, also thinks there might be something to be gained by obtaining Federation membership, and they might have something to teach the Federation. What they do plan to keep quiet about is the fact that a group on Xhio had been causing problems, including some bombings. There had also recently been an attack on a world (Chianaise) near the Federation border, and Linchar had been surprised to find that the rebels had the ability to carry out attacks off world. The conference had originally been scheduled to occur on Starbase 1, but Linchar had specifically requested that it be held on the Enterprise. After the attack at Chianaise, she now requests that it be moved back to Starbase 1, which irritates Le’An, who liked to be in full control of security. When the Enterprise team gets to meet Linchar and her assistants, Una Chin-Riley recognizes Texho as being Euxhana. She had met some Euxhanas while she was still at the Academy where she had been helping her friend, Theresa Mullins, with the feline-like family (Anxha and her 4 cubs) who were seeking asylum on Earth after escaping persecution on their home world. Chin-Riley had had to back off helping them when she discovered that their uncle, Falxho (who was also on Earth), was on a watch-list, suspected of terrorism on his homeworld, and she didn’t want any close scrutiny since she was hiding the fact that she was an Illyrian. She had met the Euxhana around the same time that she first met Ensign Christopher Pike who was guest-lecturing at the Academy while awaiting a tribunal that involved his former captain and first officer. It became known that the Euxhana were a minority race on Xhio who
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were considered uncultivated and had been moved from their homelands in the mountains and banned from speaking their own language. Before Chin-Riley was aware of all that, she tried greeting Texho in his own language, and was surprised when he walked away, looking as if he’d been insulted. When Le’An and Lt. Zhovell (head of security on Starbase 1) inspect the conference room, they find it vandalized, and a three pointed flag (like mountains) had been hung up. When Linchar sees it, she is appalled. A copy of the Euxhana manifesto gets projected onto the Enterprise, and then a message is received saying that a bomb has been planted on the Enterprise. The bomb is found easily and beamed into space, but then a message is received that turns out to be part of an Euxhana poem, and it’s suspected that it might be a coded message to activate the bomb. When Texho admits that the message had been for him, Linchar has him put in the Enterprise’s brig. The poem was a well-known one associated with the rebels, and Chin-Riley learns that it was written by Texho’s brother. Then Le’An discovers that among the messages received by the Euxhana ship, three of them contained embedded material. Then a fourth such message arrives, and it’s realized that all four had been directed to Linchar. Pike, Le’An and Zhovell go to Linchar’s cabin, but they find Marachat there reading the message, which is in Euxhana. He had been raised in a well-positioned Chionian family, but after seeing a peaceful demonstration by Euxhana put down violently, he changed his allegiance and now was affiliated with the Euxhana rebels. Now Marachat is in the brig and Texho is released. Texho intends to return to Xhio, although his future is uncertain. However, Linchar visits him in his cabin (the first time that had happened) and she seems to be softening in relation to the Euxhana. But it is accepted by all that the negotiations are now not going to happen. A lawyer working with the Euxhana on Earth had arrived to assist the Starfleet teams investigating events, and he turns out to be Helexho, one on the cubs in the family that Chin-Riley had been trying to help during her Academy days. [Timeline: year 2260, several weeks after Chin-Riley’s court-martial; year 2233 when Chin-Riley first met Pike at the Academy]
Updates to Other Series
The Captain’s Oath (Star Trek – The Original Series) Christopher L. Bennett
In the year 2261, Kirk becomes the youngest captain in Starfleet when he is placed in charge of the Sacagawea. He has an older first officer named Egdor. They are operating as part of a border patrol under Robert Wesley of the Beowulf, senior captain at Starbase 24. Kirk makes some mistakes but impresses Captain Wesley enough that Wesley gets Kirk and the Sacagawea to represent the Federation at peace talks among the Acamarian clans, where the Klingons are interfering. Kirk gets the clans starting to talk seriously together after he shows that he trusts them to make their own decision. Early in 2262, Beowulf leads the five-ship defense fleet to head off a nine-ship fleet of unknown origin heading from Klingon territory towards the Adelphous system with its Federation colony, (the aliens are initially known as “demons” and later as the Agni). It comes down to a battle with the alien ships flinging their hull plates at the Federation ships, and Kirk comes up with the idea of using navigational deflectors to protect against them. But the aliens can also fire a plasma beam from their singularity drive. By the end of the battle, the Leonov had been lost with all hands, Captain Baek and the rest of the Oshosi’s
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bridge crew had been lost, but reinforcements had arrived in time to drive the aliens off. Sacagawea was disabled and had to be towed back to the starbase and had lost 87 crewpersons and many more were injured. Kirk takes a ground assignment at the Vega Colony in order to be available when the Sacagawea was repaired. While visiting injured crew, Kirk gets to meet Dr. McCoy who he calls “sawbones”, and the two become friends. Commander Rhenas Sherev is investigating a dwarf planet fragment containing an underground bunker with ancient workstations. Trying to power them up causes a power buildup and explosion, blasting the three researchers (Sherev, Isurugi, and Arhanla) into space in EV-suits. Kirk, aboard the Somerville, rescues two of them but fails to rescue Arhanla before he dies due to an oxygen leak. Sherev blames herself although it had been a bobby-trap bomb by a faction of the long-lost civilization that caused the explosion. Then the Sacagawea is relaunched, and Kirk asks Sherev to rejoin him as science officer. In year 2263, Commander Eshu Adebayo is now first officer of the Sacagawea, Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell rejoins the ship, and McCoy also arrives. On Stardate 1148.2, they enter orbit of the pre-warp second planet in the UFC 5179 system, Nacmor, for a preliminary survey. They hear radio reports about space aliens attacking cities but see no signs of other ships. Kirk, Gary Mitchell, Lieutenant Hauraki and Kamisha Diaz get disguised as natives to investigate, and they soon discover that the leader, Ultimate Premier Ribaul, was creating the supposed attacks to keep the population obedient and to clear out slums, etc. However, the three get arrested and are discovered to be aliens. Ribaul plans to use them to give more reality to his story of alien attacks, but a rebel group led by Daramoy rescues them. Kirk and his team help the rebels raid the government bunker in order to get evidence of Ribaul’s faking of the attacks and to enable Kirk and his team to recover their equipment (tricorders, phasers, communicators). Edgor was now first officer on the U.S.S. Kongo which was called to the Bardeezi system when the “demon” ships are observed approaching. While Captain Chandra coordinated with the Bardeezans, he left Edgor in command of the Kongo because of his experience with the “demons”. The Kongo and the Bardeezan ships put up a game but losing battle until the Enterprise (with Captain Pike) arrives. But before they can drive off the “demons”, the Enterprise gets surrounded by the plates and is in danger of being crushed. The Kongo attacks the ship controlling the plates and saves the Enterprise, but the Kongo is hit and disabled, and all the bridge crew including Edgor die. Spock had obtained enough reading to tell that the aliens were from a Venus-type environment, i.e., were Class-N lifeforms, and there had been Class-N planets in the systems they had been seen approaching. Sherev sustains injuries while Kirk and his crew are rescuing natives of the planet Chenar after a microquasar destroys most of the life on the planet, so she resigns from Starfleet and plans to continue as a civilian archaeologist. McCoy had left the Sacagawea after Chenar in order to aid civilizations that lacked modern medicine. The ship gets called to Hearthside, the innermost planet of the Regulus system where the Agni had somehow occupied the N-class planet. The Agni have also been discovered on the N-class third planet of 88 Leonis. The Regulans had floating cities in the upper atmosphere of Hearthside to harvest bacteria and chemicals for use in medicines, etc. The Agni had been firing occasional warning shots at the floating cities, but after Kirk and the Sacagawea arrive, the Agni attack the floating city of Laputa, targeting mostly processing or floatation orbs, but there are casualties including Lieutenant Kamisha Diaz’s friend H’Raal (Harlie). It is noted that the Agni had only carried out the attack after the Sacagawea (a ship they had previously fought against) arrived, and the attack seemed to be targeting less occupied portions of the city. When signals between the Agni on Hearthside and at 88 Leonis are intercepted, Spock and Uhura on the Enterprise and Diaz on Sacagawea are able to come up with a basic translation matrix. A
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meeting is arranged with represented of the Agni and it is learned that they are refugees after their original planet became uninhabitable, and they had lost others along the way when they had been attacked by what they call “cold beings”. They could not understand the concept of imaginary borders in space, where there was nothing of value to fight over, and all they wanted to do was occupy places that were completely inhospitable to the “cold beings”. Councilor T’Zeri and Kirk become sympathetic to the Agni, although they are not happy with the Agni’s demands that the Regulans vacate their floating cities, even though the Agni offer to harvest the bacteria and chemicals for them. Colonel Yelena Orloff of the Regulan Defense Force is totally opposed to allowing the Agni in the system, and he secretly attempts to get the cooperation of Lieutenant Diaz who is a vital link in the translation process with the Agni and is tormented by the death of her friend. However, Kirk sees through the plan to drive the parties apart, and the Agni and the Regulan Council come to trust Diaz because of the way she corrected her misguided error and thwarted Orloff’s attack on the Agni, and she is appointed as official translator and diplomatic liaison between them. Kirk was recommended for the Preantares Ribbon for his role, and Pike thought that could put Kirk in line for captaincy of the Enterprise if he took a fleet captain post. Robert Wesley said he’d support Kirk for that position too. Stardate 1278.4, year 2265, Christopher Pike hands over captaincy of the Enterprise to Kirk, and he inherits Spock as first officer. Montgomery Scott had been diverted to handle an emergency and would be joining later, as would Gary Mitchell who was making his way from Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet. Aulacri was a minor star-faring power abutting the Federation who were planning on terraforming a dead planet, Karabos II, where an Andorian archaeological team under Rhenas Sherev was surveying ruins of an extinct civilization. Director Skovir, head of the Aulacri terraformers explains to Kirk that orbital mechanics in the region is dictating that now is the only opportunity for bombarding Karabos II with asteroids, and she sees the archaeologists as caring more about the lives of people, the Karabosi, who supposedly destroyed themselves with antimatter bombs, while she cared about future generations. Sherev showed Kirk the five marker slabs they had identified through their low-level radiation, all of which were pointing to an underground chamber that they hadn’t been able to get into, but Starfleet phaser bores should be able to break through. She thinks Skovir is lying and doesn’t want them to find what’s there. Kelso saw it as Kirk playing favorites by trying to help Sherev. As Spock and Sherev (who volunteered to continue their work until the last minute) attempt to gain access to the main records left by the Karabosi, Kirk decides to divert the main asteroids intended to pummel the planet. Three out of the four asteroids are sufficiently diverted, but it is too late to effectively divert the fourth. Spock contacts Kirk to announce that very significant discoveries have been made. Kirk, Scotty and Mitchell try to manually activate the thrusters on the last asteroid, but Skovir is there to make sure they don’t, and she has a harpoon gun aimed at Kirk. Kirk finally convinces her that the Aulacri and the Karabosi are one, and that allowing the records and genetic material in the vault to be lost would be destroying her people’s past and future. Then she joins in the effort to divert the asteroid. The diversion of the larger asteroids meant there would not be the impact winter to cool the planet. However, a breed of indigenous vegetation preserved in the vault should help reflect the star’s light and help cool the planet. Sherev was going to remain to study the contents of the vault. She also talks McCoy into rejoining Kirk on the Enterprise. Two months later, Admiral Komack gives Kirk a mission to study and maybe cross the edge of the galaxy where probes had indicated a discontinuity in the interstellar medium. Kirk tells Mitchell it’s a trip he’s going to love. [Timeline: years 2261 through 2265]
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Harm’s Way (ST-TOS)
David Mack
The Enterprise is sent, by Admiral Fitzpatrick, to the planet Kolasi III in the Federation-Klingon Neutral Zone on the perimeter of the Taurus Reach after an automated Mayday message was received. A ship (the Heyerdahl) with Doctor Johron Verdo (from Ardada) and his two assistants, Doctor Mozhan Rashid (from Mars) and Lofarras th’Sailash (of Andoria), had gone missing there. Verdo had been associated with Project Vanguard for a short while, and it is feared that his research involved the Shedai meta-genome. The rain-drenched planet has fierce electrical storms and a magnetic field that prevents beaming down, and before a shuttle can be adapted and sent down, the Sagittarius (a scout ship from Starbase 47, or Vanguard) with Captain Nassir also arrives. Admiral Nogura, who now heads up Project Vanguard, insists on the two crews working together and informs them that a Klingon warship, with Captain Kang, is also on the way. A shuttle, the Kepler, with a combined Enterprise/Sagittarius team led by Spock heads down and the Enterprise and Sagittarius shelter behind the planet’s moon just before the I.K.S. SuvwI’ arrives. A Klingon shuttle, the QInqul, with a team led by Kang’s second-in-command, D’Gol, and including Kang’s wife and science officer, Mara, follows a similar path as the Kepler down the planet, but while both have very hard landings, the Kepler is still just about space-worthy while the QInqul isn’t space-worthy but could still fly. The teams independently find a cave “temple” that is presumed to be the base of whatever Verdo had become under the effects of the meta-genome, and the Federation team get captured by the natives (Chwii) and taken inside to face the Godhead. Then they get dropped into a dungeon when the Chwii and Godhead realize the Klingon team is approaching. In the dungeon, Sulu discovers the body of Verdo, so they are left wondering who the Godhead is, because the bodies of his two assistants had already been found in the remains of Verdo’s shuttle. They escape the dungeon thanks to Spock manipulating their guard’s thoughts and, with the backing of Mara, they end up joining up with the Klingon team. They learn that a Klingon female scientists, Doctor Chunvig, had arrived at the planet before Verdo, and she is the one that is now the Godhead (Verdo had tried to stop her). The first joint Federation-Klingon attack on the Godhead fails after Spock shows compassion for Chunvig, and the second seems initially to be successful, but the Godhead could separate itself into parts and not all of it had been there when the attack was made. The third attempt leaves a smoking crater in the ground, but the Godhead is only finally killed after the Klingon pilot, Hartur, flies the QInqul straight into it. Before the Godhead had been killed, the last surviving Klingon, Mara, had been knocked into a fast-moving river by a smokey serpent-like creature that was part of the Godhead, but Sulu and Doctor Babitz rescue her using the Kepler. Spock offers Mara a flight off the planet, but she asks him to tell Kang to send a vessel for her. In orbit, the Federation ships and the SuvwI’ had been playing cat-and-mouse, but when the Kepler joins them, Kang has it captured by a tractor beam. However, some gravitic mines (made from photon torpedoes by the Sagittarius crew) didn’t work as originally planned but still disabled the SuvwI’, allowing the Kepler to be safely recovered and the Enterprise and Sagittarius to escape the area. Kang is consoled to know that his wife was still alive, and their mission had been to kill Chunvig, so he is able to frame the mission as a success. Kirk is pleased to leave Vanguard and the Taurus Reach behind them, but Spock suspects that they’ll see the place again. [Timeline: Stardate 3795.4, July 2267, shortly after the events in the TV episodes “Amok Time” and “The Doomsday Machine”]
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Living Memory (ST-TOS)
Christopher L. Bennett
The U.S.S. Reliant, with Captain Clark Terrell and First Officer Commander Pavel Chekov, responds when the passenger transport Ballou is affected by a strange cosmic storm that seems to be made of large quantum fluctuations like quantum wormholes, and which had occurred near Argelius. That was believed to be an extremely rare event, but not long after that, a similar storm, that becomes known as a vacuum flare, occurs near Altair, followed by one near Deneva and then the Cygnet and Makus star systems. Chekov remarks that they are all systems that the Enterprise had visited early in its first 5-year mission under Kirk, but in reverse order. That idea seems to be confirmed when similar storms happen at the Vega system (which results in the first fatalities). But then one of these storms affects the Delta IV region which the Enterprise had not visited, but which, it is soon realized, Uhura had. Aboard the Asimov, Uhura had been doing her own analysis of the patterns in the storms as if they represented music. That leads her to the remarkable conclusion that the signals seem to be reproducing her singing voice. Then the vacuum flares occur at Denobula, directly affecting the planet and causing extensive damage and fatalities. Kirk has Captain Spock take the Enterprise to pick up Uhura, but she is unable to assist much because all these places had been visited before Nomad had wiped Uhura’s memory, and she hadn’t bothered to record much about the visits to those locations because she relied on her eidetic memory. In an effort to try and recover some of the memories, she visits her family in Nairobi who she had avoided much contact with since Nomad, because her lack of memories about them created uncomfortable conflict with her emotions towards them. That meeting goes fairly well regarding her mother and stepfather, but her brother takes her to task for the lack of contact. However, that leads to some fleeting recollections, and Uhura realizes that Nomad didn’t completely wipe everything. But there are no leads on what she might have been doing in the affected star systems, although she learns that she had apparently thought she heard something like music in the background subspace noise, but her mother thought she had given up pursuing that by the time she joined Starfleet Academy. A new vacuum flare affects the Tiburon system. Next, Uhura contacts some of the students she had gone through the Academy with, and they suggest that she had been following up on her earlier interest, thinking the subspace signals might be coming from some ancient civilization, and that she’d been assisted in her research by Rajendra Shastri, who Uhura had simply recorded in her log as ‘Jen’. But that research had apparently been halted by a visit from Commodore Conrad Reppert of Starfleet Security who felt that any potential contact with past civilizations could disrupt the current timeline. Rajendra was now happily married on Penthara IV and had left Starfleet long ago. But because of the seriousness of the vacuum flares, he agrees to rendezvous with the Enterprise, although he is about as annoyed with Uhura about the lack of contact as her brother had been. It seems that the two of them had continued their research into the subspace messages from time to time, and on Argelius they had achieved a two-way contact with this ancient civilization from the early universe, soon after the Big Bang. These “plasma aliens” had seemingly tried sending a lot of data through, apparently wanting to leave a legacy. The celebration about finally achieving the contact ended up with Uhura and Rajendra becoming lovers, but two weeks later Nomad wiped Uhura’s memory and Rajendra thought she was coming up with some unbelievable excuse to break off their relationship when she sent him a reply saying she had no idea who he was. But they are able to overcome their history and work together to remake contact with the plasma aliens as the vacuum flares have started threatening Earth, where Uhura’s original research had
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begun. That leads to a massive download of currently indecipherable data from the aliens and the dissipation of the cosmic storms. While that had been going on, Kirk had been involved with trying to implement a plan proposed by Commander Rakatheema to integrate the Warborn (Arcturians who had been specifically bred as warriors to defend Arcturus) into Starfleet Academy. Although it’s only fourteen initially, that proves to be very problematic and results in the murder of Rakatheema, and to Dr. Ashley Janith-Lau (an old friend of McCoy’s and leader of a peace group opposed to the Warborn, but more specifically opposed to the militarization of Starfleet) being accused of the murder. Then Portia, one of the Warborn, becoming the chief suspect. Ultimately, it turns out that Portia’s brother, Horatio, was the real culprit and he instigates a group suicide of his supporters among the Warborn. The Warborn get expelled from the Academy, but Janith-Lau arranges for the surviving Warborn to go to Vulcan to explore a path of peace and self-discipline. [Timeline: Summer and autumn of year 2279, approximately midway between the events in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan]
Lost to Eternity (ST-TOS)
Greg Cox
Year 2024: Melinda Silver is working on a podcast series called Cetacean, investigating the cold case of what had happened to Gillian Taylor, a marine biologist, who had vanished forty years previously. Her friend, Dennis Berry, handles the recording of the show and contributes his ideas, which are largely conspiracy theories that don’t usually get into the podcast. The two of them learn of Gillian’s anger at the early release of the whales, George and Gracie, without her knowledge, and of how she had been apparently involved in the freeing of a supposed Russian spy from the Mercy Hospital in San Francisco. Gillian also seemed to have had a meal with a mystery man at a pizza parlor the day she disappeared. Things get really intriguing when the retired detective who had been in charge of investigating Gillian’s disappearance at the time, Bill Fulton, informs them that the police had been instructed to stop investigating the event. Things get weirder still when there are hints and reports of a supposed invisible UFO that crushed a garbage can and left a large indentation in the grass at Golden Gate Park. Supposedly, a door had suddenly become visible with a ramp descended from what might have been this invisible something. This invisible UFO might also have been what stopped a harpoon that was fired at two whales in the Bering Sea, that might have been George and Gracie. Melinda and Dennis learn of how Mildred Coates (Milly) regrew her kidney after being given a pill by one of the people with Gillian when the Russia spy (who had identified himself as Chekov of Starfleet) was freed from the Mercy Hospital. They also learn of the interest that pill got from big pharma, and how one man (Wilmer Offutt) might have actually purchased Milly’s body when she died. Gillian obtains Offutt’s old business card and is surprised when calling the number on it lets her leave a message on an answering machine. However, the result seems to be that the apartment that Gillian and Dennis had been using gets ransacked a few days later, although nothing is taken. Then Dennis determines that Gillian is being followed, and they trace that to a private detective agency owned by a pharmaceutical company (Amaranth, Inc. – Amaranth symbolizing immortality) owned by Orlando Wilder. Gillian confronts Wilder, which doesn’t get any interesting information. However, they have an image of him, which Todd Coates (Milly’s grandson) and Jane Temple (a retired nurse who had worked at Mercy Hospital) identify as being Offutt (although he should be looking 40 years older). That gets Gillian arranging another
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meeting with Wilder, which he agrees to, with it being at his personal residence. Dennis accompanies her, because he’s worried about the meeting, which turns out to be a valid fear. Dennis is accidentally killed trying to force Wilder to release them, and Gillian finds herself being put into a cryogenic tube.
Year 2268 (circa Stardate 4730.2), the third year of the Enterprise’s five-year-mission, the Enterprise is sent to recover the part-Andorian scientist, Dr. Taya Hamparian, who had apparently been taken as a hostage by a con-man named Pierre Fortier when he hijacked a transport vessel and got it to deliver him to a specific location, at which point he took Hamparian in an escape pod. Kirk’s crew are able to establish that the pod landed on a planet named Atraz that has a pre-warp humanoid population. While the Enterprise keeps its distance from the planet, Kirk leads an away team aboard shuttle Galileo to locate Hamparian. In making their way to a nearby city, Kirk rescues one of the natives, Jaheed, who was being attacked by flightless birds, and Jaheed proves to have useful information, and to be useful generally. At the city (Reliux), Kirk notices a tower that seems to have artificial lighting that is beyond the capabilities of the local population, and Jaheed discovers information about an alchemist named Siroth who serves the city’s ruler, Varkat, and has recently been joined by a blue lady, who Kirk suspects is Hamparian. Meanwhile, the Enterprise has been joined by a Klingon D7 battle cruiser, the BortaS with Captain Khod, and a Klingon team led by Colonel Yorba also land on the planet. Jaheed gets Kirk’s team into an amphitheater where a gladiatorial contest is to be held, and he gets them into seats opposite from the royal box. As expected, Siroth is there along with Varkat and his entourage, and Hamparian joins them, although she is obviously not happy about the gladiatorial contest, especially when Fortier turns out to be one of the contestants that gets taken down by the Blood Beak flightless birds. She had staged her kidnapping to escape Federation scrutiny of her work, and Siroth had recruited her to assist his work on prolonging life. Then a fight breaks out when Yorba tries to take Kirk captive, and Siroth recognizes Kirk as the famous captain of the Enterprise and gets the Varkat’s men to try and take him into custody. Kirk, McCoy and Yorba do end up getting arrested, but they later escape with the aid of Hamparian who gains the help of Sulu and the rest of the away team, along with Jaheed and the rest of the Yorba’s away team. The Klingon warbird fires a short burst from its disruptors, destroying much of Siroth’s tower. When Spock, aboard the Enterprise, confronts Khod about the attack on the tower, a battle breaks out between the Enterprise and the Klingon warship, which only ends when both ships have suffered damage but Spock and Uhura are able to trick Khod into believing that the USS Yorktown and the Argosy are about to come to the Enterprise’s assistance, and Khod has a parting shot at the Enterprise before heading back to Klingon territory. That gives Spock the opportunity to beam up Kirk, his team, Hamparian, Jaheed (who gets beamed back to a safe spot on the planet, along with a reward), and Yorba and two associates who are later released on their shuttle, which the Enterprise had captured. Siroth is left to sort through the remains of his tower to see what can be salvaged, as he contemplates where he’ll go next. Hamparian will face Federation justice, but Kirk intends to make sure she can continue her work, but under supervision. As he says, she may even come up with a pill to regrow a kidney. Year 2292, just after the collapse of the Klingon-Romulan alliance: The reptilian-looking Osori, an ancient reclusive species that even cloaks their home planet from view, reach out to possibly establish relations with the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. A ship from each rendezvous at the Osori homeworld, and each ship will carry a representative of the Osori, and an observer (some say a hostage) from each of other ships, and they will proceed to Nimbus III, the Planet of Galactic Peace, for a conclave. The Enterprise represents the Federation and has
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Gledii as the Osori representative, Commander Motox as the Klingon observer, and Varis as the Romulan representative. The Romulan ship, Harrier captained by Commander Plavius, has Nawee as the Osori representative, Spock representing the Federation, and the Klingons are represented by Lt. Chorn. The Klingon ship, Lukara with Captain B’Leste, carries the Osori named Cyloo, Saavik for the Federation, and Subcommander Taleb for the Romulans. None of the ships have an easy time with that mix but, on the Klingon vessel, their Dr. Kesh fakes an emergency involving a potential warp core breach and forces an evacuation of Cyloo, Savvik, and Taleb, along with himself in an escape pod, killing another Klingon crew member in the process. B’Leste, tries to grab the pod with a tractor beam, but the pod explodes, presumably killing all on board. That leads to accusations and demands from all sides, and it is only some smooth talking by Kirk that prevents shots being fired. In reality, those aboard the escape pod had been beamed to a very well-equipped laboratory deep inside an icy body in the Oort Cloud surrounding a nearby system. Kesh is really a very long-lived human, previously known as Offutt, Wilder, and Siroth, among others, who was desperate to find the secret of eternal life and had already extended his own life extensively. He wanted to study Cyloo to find out the secrets of the very long lives of the Osori. However, the three captives were not about to willingly accommodate him, which results in Taleb being rendered unconscious and put into cryogenic storage along with what Kesh calls his ‘other guest’. Saavik tricks Kesh into leaving them alone for a while which gives Cyloo the chance to use Osori advanced technology to gain control of the control panel in the lab and activate the forcefields to keep Kesh out. She also accesses the comm system and enables Saavik to get a short message out to the Enterprise, although Kesh is able to interfere with it sufficiently to leave some of it unclear. But it was sufficient for Uhura to track the message back to its source. Cyloo sends Saavik to revive Taleb, and she finds a second occupied cryogenic chamber that is occupied and frees that occupant too. Melinda Silver is very surprised to find herself about 300 years into her future and out in deep space. Kesh regains access to the lab, still intent on experimenting on Cyloo and is planning on putting the others back into ‘cold storage’ when a proximity alert sounds. The Enterprise, the Lukara, and the Harrier were surrounding the icy body that the lab was in. Saavik, Kirk, Gledii, B’Leste, and Plavius tell Kesh that he will never escape alive from there, even if the surrounding ships have to sacrifice his hostages, but he basically calls their bluff. Then Melinda faces down the phaser-wielding Kesh and points out that eternal life means nothing if you are not living and enjoying the life you have. Kesh ends up lowering his weapon and Saavik is able to tell Kirk that the standoff is over. Kesh is taken into custody, and the Osori decide that the other civilizations are not ready for them yet, so the conclave is called off. Melinda ends up meeting Gillian Taylor on a yacht (the Cetacean) in the South Pacific and also see George and Gracie and their baby Harpo, the first humpback whale born on Earth in 300 years.
The Autobiography of Mr. Spock (TOS – TNG – Picard) Una McCormack
Spock sends Picard his t’san s’at (wisdom book) as he sets out on a secret mission, two years after Picard resigns from Starfleet following the abandoning of the mission to assist the Romulans.
Growing up in ShiKahr, Spock got a grounding in multicultural society, and one of the earliest things he became fascinated by was the pendant on his mother’s, Amanda’s, necklace. That pendant featured the Kol-Ut-Shan, the symbol for the “Infinite diversity in infinite
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combinations” principle of Vulcans. His father expected him to follow in his footsteps and become an ambassador when he grew up, although he was struggling at school initially, especially slow at learning to read. Spock was about six years old when Sarek and Amanda adopted the older Michael Burnham who had lost her parents in an unfortunate incident. That disrupted Spock’s relationship with his mother, which he resented. Although they became good friends most of the time, harsh words were spoken by both of them to the other at times. As a result of a bomb being placed at their school, Sarek had to mindmeld with Michael in order to save her life and, soon after that, some kind of ‘red angel’ appears to Spock to help them find Michael, who had run away. Spock later established that the ‘red angel’ was actually Michael’s mother, Gabrielle Burnham. Amanda found the cause of Spock’s learning difficulty, which was l’tak terai, something like dyslexia, and then his learning really took off. His father arranged for him, against Amanda’s desires, to take part in a traditional Vulcan betrothal to T’Pring. Michael went through the Science Academy and had hoped to join the Vulcan Expeditionary Group, but largely due to Vulcan prejudice was refused entry. She therefore joined Starfleet and gained a position on the Shenzhou. Sarek’s first marriage had been to T’Rea and they had a son named Sybok. However, T’Rea joined a religious community in the L’langon Mountains to take Repose and was considered basically dead to the outside world. Due to Sarek’s ambassadorial duties, Sybok had been left with T’Rea’s parents most of the time. He had a powerful ability to mindmeld, which made him fairly empathic. Spock met him when Sybok was preparing for his last attempt at the kahs-wan, and the two boys got on well together. However, Sybok abandoned his kahs-wan attempt a few days early, saying he had seen Sha Ka Ree (roughly equivalent to Eden) and he ended up leaving Vulcan. When it came time for Spock to choose his own path in life, he decided to attend Starfleet Academy in order to follow a career in science. His father didn’t approve of the choice, and they were not on good terms when Spock left. Spock felt that Starfleet Academy was the saving of him. Although he had seen other species before, this was the first time he had to work with them, and he soon learned that there was more than logic needed for success. He even learned from another Vulcan, T’Kel, that Surak had not talked really about suppressing emotions but about mastering them. He also got to spend more time with Amanda’s parents. Consequently, he developed an inventive mind that even surprised his classmates with the traditional outgoing year prank he came up with, and which earned a number of his classmates important postings and himself a post on the Enterprise. During his time aboard the Enterprise, Spock again started getting visions of the Red Angel and he started to doubt his own chthia (reality/truth) and he got leave from the Enterprise and submitted himself for psychiatric care. He came to see that he was receiving warnings of a potential future that involved Section 31. The only solution turned out to be to have Michael and the Discovery disappear from that time into the future. Spock got one final image of the angel (Gabrielle Burnham) as a member of the Qowat Milat. When Pike was leaving to join the Admiralty, Spock was relieved in one way in that his new captain would not be privy to all these events involving his family life, but he also felt a great debt of honor for Pike, which was a large part of his reason to place himself in danger of court martial by taking Pike to Talos after Pike had been so seriously injured. The Enterprise under Kirk turned out to be quite different, and not just because Spock became First Officer. For the first time in his life, he felt like he was part of a functioning family. When the Enterprise’s mission under Kirk was over, Spock decided to return to Vulcan to see his parents and then decided to undertake kolinahr. However, part of his mind always seemed engaged and then he started feeling a pull that was related to V’Ger. From V’Ger he learned that logic without emotion was barren and meaningless. Bones and Spock always seemed
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to be sparring, but they actually got on well together, and when Spock knew he would have to give up his own life to save the ship during the mission involving Khan Noonien Singh and the Genesis planet, Spock transferred his katra to Bones almost as a joke, but also because it was the logical choice. Saavik had been one of the half-Vulcan, half-Roman, children left behind when the Romulans abandoned the colony Hellguard. Spock took particular interest in her progress, and she ended up being aboard the Enterprise during the mission at the Genesis planet. It was Saavik and Kirk’s son David that discovered the resurrected body of Spock on the planet, although David died at the hands of Klingons. The restoration of Spock’s katra to his body was a difficult process, but successful. When Praxis exploded, Sarek sought Spock’s assistance in building a peace with the Klingons, but that was nearly derailed by Kirk (who still had the death of his son at the hands of a Klingon on his mind) and Spock’s protégé, Valeris, who couldn’t logically see how a peace treaty could be made with the Klingons. The Romulans were supposed to be part of the peace process, but they backed out which actually made Spock’s job of forging a peace with the Klingons a lot easier. Sarek had been negotiating with the Romulans while Spock finalized the peace treaty with the Klingons. Sarek’s ongoing work may have prevented a war with the Romulans, but it also meant that he was away when Amanda became ill. Spock put his own diplomatic ambitions on hold to be with his mother, and she died two days before Sarek returned. Spock had met Pardek at the peace conference with the Klingons, where Pardek was an aide to the Romulan ambassador to the Federation, Nanclus, who was involved with the plot to assassinate Gorkon. Pardek went to great lengths to emphasize that he had not been involved, and he kept up a correspondence with Spock afterwards, through which Spock learned a lot about the Romulans. Spock had had issues with his father, Sarek, throughout his life, but it was the issue of how to deal with the Cardassians that really drove a wedge between them. Spock didn’t think that any sort of peace treaty was possible with them, while Sarek did. Sarek’s views were colored by his contacts with a particular Cardassian who had actually been an exile on Vulcan until he was finally allowed to return to Cardassia. The discussions between Spock and Sarek on this issue had been carried out through Sarek’s third wife, Perrin. Spock was unaware that Sarek was suffering from Bendii Syndrome at that time, and he only really found out the full truth when he mindmelded with Picard who had previously mindmelded with Sarek in order to strengthen Sarek during his final mission as ambassador. Spock’s mission to achieve unification between the Romulans and the Vulcans had started off with him hoping to influence their politicians, but that got abandoned fairly quickly. Then he started building rapport with the regular Romulans and was able to work fairly openly with the Qowat Milat making the Tal Shiar back off a bit. Following the Romulan’s participation with the Federation in the Dominion War, things were looking promising, but then the Tal Shiar shut down all of his “houses”, and his supporters were arrested and ‘disappeared’. Spock was traveling at the time, and so escaped capture. He discovered that the Tal Shiar’s actions had been spurred by the discovery of the impending supernova, which the Romulans wanted kept secret. Spock had supported Picard’s efforts in helping the Romulans, but the synth attack on Mars brought that to a close. Spock was now setting off in the one-man vessel, Jellyfish, on a potentially suicide mission to try dropping a small amount of red matter into the Romulan star, hoping to lessen the effects of the supernova and maybe prevent it by turning the star into a black hole. He requested Picard to take on the role of his literary executor, deciding what of his writings should be made public. Picard never heard from Spock again, and his mission did not save Romulus but perhaps his actions prevented a larger-scale disaster. [Timeline: Years 2230-2387]
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Coda, Book 1: Moments Asunder (TNG)
Dayton Ward
Beverley Crusher suddenly gets a vision of Wesley while she is working in sickbay, and her six-year-old son, Rene, seems to see Wesley as well while in his class. Not long after that, Picard, Beverley and Rene are relaxing on a beach while taking shoreleave at Starbase 11 at Planet Yko when a portal opens in the sky, and someone appears floating down to the beach. That is found to be a 400-year-old Wesley Crusher, who is quickly beamed up to the Enterprise’s sickbay, but he dies soon after. Then the middle-aged Wesley feels a pull to return to visit his mother. Wesley had been traveling through time, space, and different timelines/universes trying to stop attacks that were occurring due to some unknown entities who had destroyed the Guardian of Forever and other time-related artifacts and had caused multiple deaths. Arriving back aboard the Enterprise, Wesley explains what has been going on, including the destruction of multiple timelines, and he is shown the body of his older self and also the equipment that his older self had brought with him. That included something that Wesley identified as an Omnichron, that seemed to be a comprehensive record of everything that the older Wesley had learned about the mysterious creatures carrying out the attacks, and the information seems to be designed to help the younger Wesley avoid the mistakes that had been made by the older one. The creatures carrying out the attacks included serpent-like space creatures (that become known as Nagas) and humanoid-shaped ones who wore dark flowing robes (that Wesley called ‘ghosts’ but were like marionettes). Both types seemed to be constantly phasing between different timelines, enabling them to move unhindered through walls and even starship shields. They killed by touch, which dramatically ages the person touched, causing them to almost instantly decay into powder. The serpent creatures remind Picard and Riker of the ophidians that the Devidians had used to travel through time and space to devour the neural energy of those dying of cholera back 19th century Earth, and evidence of a triolic energy signature reinforces that connection. That leads to the Enterprise heading to Devidia II, which is found abandoned except that there is an underground facility with a large depression containing the remains of some structure, but Wesley has to shift himself, Picard, Geordi and Lieutenant Elfiki across centuries to find out what it is/was. They find a prototype transmission tower developed from Iconian technology, which was used to focus temporal distortions. Seeing Nagas there, Wesley transports them back to their original time, but the Enterprise team come under attack from the serpent and humanoid creatures, as does the Enterprise once they’d beamed back. Rene gets the merest touch of a Naga and ages to become a nearly 20-year-old man, but still with a 6-year-old’s mind, and he has to be kept sedated. When a signal is discovered coming from the planet, Wesley says to destroy the cavern, which they do. Among those that die aboard the Enterprise is Taurik. Then the Aventine, with Captain Ezri Dax and First Officer Sam Bowers, arrives. One of the humanoid creatures had been captured in the fight, and it is learned that they and the serpents are constructs used to further the Devidians’ aims. Using the frequency of the triolic energy that had brought the humanoid/avatar there, they establish where it had come from. With the next location being 4,000 years in the future, it is decided that the Aventine is the best ship to use for that trip. On a planet they find another massive structure associated with temporal distortions which seems to be a focal point for different time streams. Then another battle with the Nagas and humanoids breaks out, but Wesley does recover a lot of information from the computer associated with the facility, and he gets the whole facility destroyed, although it is only one node of a vast network spread over various timelines. Also, fatalities among the Starfleet crew are considerable, including Captain
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Dax, T’Ryssa Chen, and Ranjea (a DTI agent). Wesley had discovered that their own timeline was being destabilized to allow the Devidians to feast off that timeline, and they had to find the heart of the network to stop them. [Timeline: Year 2387 with travel to other times]
Coda, Book 2: The Ashes of Tomorrow (TNG)
Dayton Ward
When Kirk and Wesley give their report to Starfleet and to the Federation president, they do not receive the support they had expected, and they are ordered not to tell anyone else about what they have learned, and Picard, along with the crews of the Enterprise and Aventine are stood down. Even Admiral Riker doesn’t support them, taking the official Starfleet position of simply trying to deal with the Naga incursions. Attacks had also been occurring in adjacent territory too, including that of the Gorn, the Klingons and others. However, Picard gets the support of Captain Bower, Geordi La Forge and a number of other trusted associates, plus Commander Tom Paris and his wife, B’Elanna Torres, and they “steal” the Aventine and head for Omicron Theta to recruit Data and Lal, and Lal overcomes Data’s resistance. Then Riker and the Titan arrive to take Picard into custody, but Lal talks Data in assisting Picard and the Aventine to escape. Next, Spock turns up, having realized that Worf (who he had previously mindmelded with) was experiencing problems. Worf was getting disoriented because he was being influenced by the life essences of Worf’s from other universes that had been destroyed by the Devidians. Between Data, Spock and Picard, they conclude that the Bajoran wormhole must be the “weak spot” that the Devidians are utilizing to instigate their attacks on this timeline, because the wormhole exists in multiple timelines, facilitating access. That leads to them heading to Deep Space Nine, where they meet up with Sisko (who had gone to Bajor after receiving a message from the Prophets), Dr. Bashir (who Garak had roused from his almost comatose state on Cardassia Prime by bringing him news of Ezri Dax’s death), and Vedek Kita Nerys (who had also received a message from the Prophets). It is established that the wormhole needs to be destroyed and the Prophets send Kira a message to that effect too, even though it will result in their deaths. The only way to cause the wormhole to collapse is to detonate the matter-antimatter reactors powering the DS9 station, and Kira, O’Brien, Ro and Quark start moving the station, while the Aventine, the Defiant, and Captain Nog’s ship, the Saticoy, are fighting off a group of Naga who have come through the wormhole. The Saticoy is lost, along with Nog, while taking out two Naga and protecting a fleet of barges carrying refugees from Bajor (including Jake Sisko and his wife, Azeni Korena). The Prophets do help Kira escape from DS9 before it explodes, although the others die while defending the station from the Naga. Kira is also given the Orb of Time, but she is devastated to find it blackened and “dead” when she is taken aboard the Aventine. The Titans arrives at Bajor, and a furious Riker demands that Picard be handed over, or he will fire on the Aventine which is badly damaged at that stage. Picard is apparently beamed over to the Titan, but that turns out to be Odo who was masquerading as Picard. That allowed the real Picard and Wesley to make their escape aboard the Defiant, along with Geordi, Sisko, Bashir and a few others, in order to take the fight to the Devidians in what is called the intertime realm.
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Coda, Book 3: Oblivion’s Gate (TNG)
David Mack
The Defiant, with Sisko, Picard, Wesley, Spock, Data, Lal, etc., get sanctuary in the Mirror Universe, meeting up with the jaunt-ship Enterprise. Wesley is given permission to use Memory Omega’s quantum window from which he ascertains that the thing that started the Devidians’ attack was the Enterprise’s trip back in time to stop the Borg interfering with Zefram Cochrane’s attempt at warp drive. The Borg had fired a chroniton surge at them as they returned, which had inadvertently created their current timeline (called the First Splinter) which included their ‘normal’ universe and the Mirror Universe as two sides of the same coin. The only way to stop the Devidians would be to go back in time and stop the First Splinter being created and leaving the Prime timeline, because First Splinter timeline was the first “weak” timeline that attracted the Devidians. The other weak ones, that the Devidians had been destroying, were branches off of their one, and devouring the First Splinter Universe would make the Devidians powerful enough to eat stable universes. Meanwhile, Earth and the solar system had been destroyed as disruptions to the laws of physics multiply, and Riker, after having Captain Vale and Dr. Ree held for mutiny, declares himself head of what’s left of Starfleet and orders all ships to search for the Defiant. The Defiant heads back in the Borg timeline but gets shot at and crashes on Earth, and while Geordi tries to get it flight-worthy again, Picard, Data, Lal, etc., try to reach the Borg’s chroniton emitter. The jaunt-ship Enterprise goes to the ‘normal’ universe and tries to find the intermediate-sized black hole that the Devidians are using to house their base, but Riker catches on to what they are doing. Kira is delighted when the Orb of Time lights up again, and she, Sisko and Wesley use it to ask the Prophets for guidance to the Devidians’ intertime base. Spock is unsuccessful in talking the squabbling parliament into sanctioning the use of the other jaunt ships to assist C.S.S. Enterprise but, when Riker thinks he’s finally caught the C.S.S. Enterprise at the black hole they were investigating, twelve of the other jaunt ships arrive to allow Enterprise to finish its work there and escape. On the Borg’s version of Earth, Worf and the Mirror Universe’s Commander K’Ehleyr assist Geordi’s team in stealing the parts they need to get Defiant operational again, and Picard and his team are closing in on the chroniton emitter when Picard realizes that the Borg Queen knows that Locutus is in the area, and when they break into the temporal disruption base, he starts to feel her influence a lot more. Aboard the Mirror Universe’s Defiant (Defiant II), Kira is approaching the Bajoran wormhole, but Captain Dax tells her that the flotilla protecting the entrance to it has doubled. Those aboard the C.S.S. Enterprise have located the Devidians’ temporal collider at the black hole Yama, and Wesley takes an outrider (a shuttle-like craft) into the Intertime rift to check out the area first. While there, he observes them destroying Bajor to feed their insatiable craving, and then he meets an older version of himself who tells him to get back and report his findings. Of course, he doesn’t until it’s too late. He does manage to instruct his Omnichron to take the ship back and pass on the information. That leads to Luc Picard bringing his fleet into the Interphase, and the fleet gets destroyed but Luc Picard, Beverley and Rene manage to get into the Devidian’s HQ in an effort to find Wesley. Meanwhile, Wesley has been captured and four Devidian scientists have experimented on him and some ophidians in order to utilize his Traveler powers to create the Naga and avatars and start their conquest (remember we’re outside of normal time here). On the Borg Earth, Data and Lal have been left in the control center to coordinate the ending of the timeline, Picard gets captured by the Borg Queen but is freed by Beverley, Bashir and Sisko, but then Sisko dies while they are making their escape. On the Titan, Troy, Tuvok and Ree have restored Riker to his old self as
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they head for the black hole Yama. Picard, Crusher and Rene and the others have made it to the Devidian control center, but they are fighting a losing battle against the Devonian’s Naga and avatars, even though Wesley had taken out a lot of them when he died like a supernova. Then Riker and a team arrive to assist, but everything hinges on Data sending the information to create the interdimensional, cross-time quantum resonance. Data and Lal are fighting off the Borg who have forced two openings into their control center, and Data is still waiting for Kira to get the orb inside the wormhole to provide the link. Saavik arrives with the other six jaunt ships to help the Defiant II break through the blockade at the mouth of the wormhole, and while the jaunt ships and a Dominion fleet destroy one another around them in the middle of the wormhole, Kira gets the Prophets’ assistance in creating a temporal resonance between the Borg timeline and the First Splinter timeline when they carry out the corrective disruptive action (Coda). Data triggers the Borg’s beam so that it only sends heat at the Enterprise-E as it returned from saving Cochrane’s first warp test flight and thereby protecting the Prime timeline. Picard, with encouragement from Crusher and Rene, implements the destruction of the First Splinter timeline before it began. As universes vanish around him, Picard experiences a lot of the other opportunities, and then there’s nothing of that timeline. In his apartment in New York City, Benny Russell concludes another novel that he knows nobody will publish, and which he only calls fiction in order to be allowed out of the psychiatric hospital. Having honored those lives with his tale of their heroic dedication, he feels an alternative story coming on and starts typing his next novel. [Timeline: 16 years after Voyager had been abducted to the Delta Quadrant from the Badlands]
Shadows Have Offended (TNG)
Cassandra Rose Clarke
When a cultural ceremony is planned to celebrate the Betazed legend, Xiomara, and the bringing together of her three ancient treasures, a severing dish (the Enshrined Disk), an old urn (the Hallowed Urn), and a spoon (the Sacred Silver), for the first time in about five hundred years, Ambassador Lwuxana Troi gets the Enterprise involved in ferrying guests to the planet. When one of the guests is unable to attend, Lwuxana manipulates it so that Picard takes his place. A science team had been checking out the planet Kota (class M with vegetation but no animal life) to ensure it was suitable to take the refugees from the Federation colony on Aratril, which was about to be made uninhabitable by an asteroid strike. When the team’s leader and another member are lost due to a flash flood, they request assistance, and a team consisting of Riker, Dr. Crusher, Data, Ensign Josefina Rikkila and Ensign Amir Munoz are dropped off at the planet. During the ceremonies on Betazed, when it gets to the part where the three treasures are unveiled, it is discovered that they are missing. Investigations show that the leader of the Third House, Aviana Virox (who had had the serving dish) is missing along with her personal spaceship. The Enterprise is sent to track her down, with Worf as captain (Picard had been forced to remain on Betazed to try to maintain calm among the participants at the festivities). Worf and Troi recover Virox on the planet Uesta, and she informs them that she had been kidnapped by a Romulan named Thuvetha, who had also taken the three treasures. Thuvetha is tracked to the planet, Issaw II, where she had apparently delivered the three treasures to the Ferengi pirate known as Byrd the Baron. After finding out that Virox had been a member of Betazed Intelligence before becoming head of the Third House, she and Troi beam down to the planet masquerading as pirates who want to purchase the three treasures, and Worf is with them as their bodyguard. They are allowed into Byrd’s compound where they find Thuvetha who is still waiting to be paid by Byrd. Using a
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number of ploys, Troi discovers that Byrd is actually a female Ferengi, and then she gets a face-to-face meeting with her. Troi feels some sympathy for a female Ferengi who is making her own way in a male-dominated society, so she offers Byrd a twenty-four-hour head-start in return for the three treasures (which are really worthless to anyone but a Betazoid) with the alternative of calling down an Enterprise security team to recover the treasures and take Byrd into custody. Byrd wisely accepts the deal, which also involves the Enterprise taking Thuvetha into custody as the person who stole the treasures. On Kota, Rikers team and the surviving science team members have had personnel (including Data) behaving oddly from time to time, sometimes going comatose, and often experiencing similar dreams related to Bluster Beach where they had collected samples, and the station’s technology starts to behave erratically and finally the buildings begin disintegrating. Dr. Crusher is at a loss to establish if it is some sort of infection, or whatever, but she finally establishes that the planet has microorganisms that act as a hive mind and live in a kind of dreamworld, and the odd behavior of the people and the technology was an effort by this hive mind to communicate with them. Crusher makes contact with them and explains what their efforts have been doing, and before the Enterprise comes to pick them up, Data and Crusher have made a start at using the universal translator to talk directly with the hive mind.
Holo-Ween (TNG)
Chris Sequeira
Comic book format
Enterprise had just been through a scary transit of a solar storm and, seeing the Earth calendar date, Troi suggests to Picard that a Halloween party might help the crew to get over their fears and stresses. But then two crew members disappear from the holodeck, Lt. Bloch gets tricked into going there and he disappears too, and then other crew members start disappearing. It is discovered that Redjack has set up home in the holodeck, is holding the missing crew as hostages, and controls many of the ship’s systems. To stop his reign of terror, Troi suggests they use a temporary hypnosis technique used on Deneb III, and Picard, Riker, Worf, and Troi adopt the personas of Mr. Edward Hyde, Werewolf, a monster Klingon, and Celestial Moon Goddess. Fearlessly they enter the holodeck to go after Redjack (who had taken over Lt. Bloch’s body and added Borg features to look more frightening), but they only have 30 minutes to complete their task or suffer brain damage, and they also can’t be brought out of the hypnosis cycle early. Happily, Troi’s Betazoid ancestry lets her be freed early to rescue Data, who had been captured by Redjack and made to resemble Frankenstein’s monster. The team is able to free most of the hostages, and Data helps them make it out of the holodeck. However, Redjack is still there and still has seven crew as hostages. Troi sends out a message to all vessels to stay away because of Redjack, but Scotty picks up the warning and beams himself aboard to help. A second attempt within the holodeck seemingly frees the hostages but, once out of the holodeck, they find that they had ‘rescued’ holodeck replicas. Then it seems as if Redjack had contacted the planet Vagra II and had brought Armus onboard. It is realized that it is only a simulation, but it can travel through the ship sparking terror. The crew tempt Redjack to the bridge (giving Data an opportunity to free the final seven hostages) and Troi produces a subspace conduit projector, saying she will beam Redjack’s energy into space. Redjack laughs, pointing out that she would need his non-physical intelligence net to do that, but then he learns that they have that. Scotty had been taken over by Redjack back in Kirk’s time, and the intelligence net had been recovered
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from him. Redjack’s essence gets beamed into space, freeing Lt. Bloch. Data estimates that it will take centuries before Redjack will be able to reassemble. The long delayed Halloween party helps relieve the built up tensions in the crew. [Timeline: Stardate 47614.5]
The Mirror War (TNG Mirror Universe)
Scott Tipton & David Tipton
Comic-book format
Year 2370, circa Stardate 46922.1: Barclay brings information about a shipbuilding planet named Faundora and, after Inquisitor Troi has used her talents to ensure Barclay is being truthful, Picard starts dreaming of building a new Terran fleet, so he has the I.S.S. Enterprise head in that direction. En route, they capture a large container of dilithium from the Klingons, encounter Obnoxious Okona again, and O’Brien is lost at the Cardassian station, Nopal Trem, when Leah Brahms boots him back down a shaft to prevent him from returning with the others to the Enterprise. O’Brien gets taken to be slave labor on Terok Nor. The Enterprise gets some help from Sisko when Intendant Kira has him knock out the engines of Regent Worf’s ship. Year 2371: The Enterprise crew take over the planet Faundora with special help from Data who overcomes their controlling AI (Groupthink) and turns it to their purposes, then by year 2372, circa Stardate 49725.3, Picard’s new armada is nearing completion at Faundora. However, Admiral Nechayev refuses to continue financing him without seeing more results, so Picard starts raiding Klingon and Cardassian convoys and the Bank of Ferenginar Branch 147 to supply their funding.
By year 2373, Picard is ready to lead the attack on Cardassian forces while Data (with the surprise help of the Defiant and Captain O’Brien) keeps Worf’s Klingon forces occupied. Picard does take Guinan’s warning seriously enough to be ready when Leah Brahms tries to take over the Enterprise, but with Picard becoming more of a megalomaniac (including ejecting Okona from an airlock), Riker kills him and becomes captain. Then, with the new fleet showing its power and Garak thwarting Worf’s anger-driven efforts, Riker is able to come to a working agreement with the Cardassians and Klingons. Having killed off Admiral Nechayev along with the virtually braindead Emperor Quinn, Riker basically crowns himself as Emperor William T. Riker.
Star Trek, Volume One, Godshock (TNG/DS9)
Collin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing
Comic book format
Jake is delighted when Benjamin Sisko suddenly is returned to the Promenade on DS9 after his stay with the Prophets following the end of the Dominion War. Sisko announces that he is on a mission for the Prophets, and he calls on Picard to help him obtain a ship and Picard comes up with the Theseus that was first commissioned over a hundred years ago but has been renovated with new and experimental technology by Captain Scott. Sisko insists on assigning his first officer, who turns out to be Data. Other members of the command crew include Jake, Lieutenant Tom Paris, a Vulcan named Ensign T’Lir, an Andorian named Ensign Sato, and Beverley Crusher in charge of sickbay. Scotty, of course, is in engineering. The mission from the Prophets is to stop a god-killer, and Sisko knows he has to start at the Hephaestus nebula. Arriving there, they find it consists of something like tiny space krill, but nothing else is there until they see
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hundreds of Crystalline Entities approaching. Then a ship approaches and destroys all the Crystalline Entities with one shot from a previously unknown super-weapon, and then the ship disappears again. Sisko believes he knows who created the weapon, so with Ambassador Worf’s assistance, he meets with Emperor Kahless (the clone) to request permission to visit the planet of the Shapers of Sarkadesh. Kahless refuses, but Sisko takes the Theseus there anyway. That doesn’t go down well with the Shapers, or with the Klingons who send ships to “dissuade” them. Despite that, Sisko learns that the Shapers had indeed fitted out the vessel Sisko seeks with its weaponry while under threat. Sisko learns from a brief encounter with Q that he must find the God City of the legendary T’Kon. Their homeworld had been destroyed in a supernova that then formed a black hole. Arriving in the area, they find the remains of a massive space station that used to be the God City and is, or at least houses, a gigantic creature that is dormant inside it. Then they see that another ship is approaching that bears the signature of the ship they encountered at Hephaestus, and it turns out to be the Quv Vo’Kahless’ commanded by Kahless. Kahless considered himself a god-killer, and he was on a mission to kill off anything that might be considered a god. Sisko flies the Theseus inside the city/station, and they find themselves followed by the Quv Vo’Kahless’. That action awakens the creature of the station, and it finds itself in pain and lashes out at them. Kahless is able to beam troops into the Theseus, but Sisko’s crew is able defeat them and drive them back. In doing so, Worf (who had resigned his post as ambassador in order to join Sisko’s crew) discovers that his son, Alexander, is one of Kahless’s followers. When Sisko goes to implement a plan for destroying the Quv Vo’Kahless’, Worf stops Sisko, and then Worf is ordered off the bridge. Worf ends up stealing a shuttle, the Portsmouth, and chasing after Kahless and the Quv Vo’Kahless’. Sisko has himself beamed aboard the station to try and negotiate with the creature, and Jake and Crusher join him. Sadly, that only seems to annoy the creature more, and realizing that they are from Earth, it heads off with them still aboard to reach and destroy Earth, with the Theseus chasing them as best it can. It is only after Sisko makes a tearful apology to Jake for all he’s put him through, that the creature realizes humans aren’t all bad and stops its headlong dash. A fleet of Starfleet vessels was being deployed to stop the creature, and Sisko, who has now been beamed back aboard Theseus, orders them to stand down as it is now a diplomatic opportunity that faces them. While the diplomats take on that task, Sisko orders the Theseus back to where they began their mission, as they continue the hunt for the Quv Vo’Kahless’. [Timeline: Stardate 55301.4 - This is the first comic book in The Red Path storyline]
Star Trek, Volume 2, The Red Path (TNG/DS9)
Colin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing
Comic book format
Sisko gets back to DS9 and reunites with his family (Kasidy, Sarah, and Jake), and Lieutenant Shaxs gets temporarily assigned to the Theseus because of his knowledge of lost Bajoran orbs. The Theseus goes to the assistance of Cardassia Prime that is under attack from other Cardassian warships, and Sisko, Data, Sato, and Shaxs beam down, but then Sisko finds himself facing a Cardassian court for crimes against Cardassia. The court is headed by Barada Damar, First Speaker of the Cardassian Reclamation, assisted by Yeor (a Vorta) and Zero (a Jem’Hadar). Despite Garak’s efforts to defend him, Sisko is convicted and sentenced to death, but the court had been staged to identify those who were of the old regime that had teamed with the Dominion, and to execute them. While that was going on, Data had taken the Theseus in search of the
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missing orbs, and they have to convert the ship into a solar sail craft because the Cardassian space station, Tong Beak, is in a nebula that could cause their engines to explode. It is believed that Kahless got the Orb of Destruction from there. On the station, the team led by Shaxs, and including Dr. Crusher, T’Lir, and Sato, comes under attack from Cardassians who follow the Red Path. Lieutenant Descheeni leads a security team to support Shaxs and the others, and Sato succeeds in opening the vault door where they find the Orb of Creation, that is unfortunately guarded by a Romulan with a sword. Shaxs accepts the challenge to fight, but he had also set his phaser to overload. The others escape with the orb and Shaxs is shielded from the blast by the body of the Romulan. But then a fleet of Romulan craft uncloak around the Theseus and the station. Red Path reinforcements were being beamed onto the station, but happily Sisko, Damar, Zero and Yeor also arrive at that moment. Sisko sees Yeor creeping off and follows him, and Sisko thinks he is going to release a weapon. Instead it was the last Founder remaining in the quadrant, who really did not expect Yeor, backed up by Zero, to kill him. Theseus returns to DS9 where Sisko gets a call from Captain Worf aboard the U.S.S. Defiant. Worf says he is on the way to Qo’noS where the battle-ready Quv vo’Kahless’ is, along with three experimental Romulan warships, and he wants Sisko and the Theseus to meet them there to stop Kahless no matter the cost. On the way, the ship’s computer’s subroutines demonstrate that they’ve become sentient and want to be free, and they end up being released on the world called Circe V and T’Lir has the job of replacing the computer’s subroutines. [Timeline: Stardate 5544.3 - This is the second comic book in The Red Path storyline]
Star Trek Volume 3, Glass and Bone (TNG/DS9) Collin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing
Comic book format
The U.S.S. Theseus with Captain Sisko in charge is tasked by Admiral Sato with reaching a peace settlement with the Tzenkethi Coalition who have built a new fleet of warships. They are to meet up with an agent, Kingsnake, already embedded there. That turns out to be Harry Kim. They get a meeting with the Autarch (the leader of the dinosaur-like Tzenkethi) but find that the Romulans, led by Magistrix Ariennye T’Galatheon, are already there and providing the Tzenkethi with weapons. While Sisko tries negotiating with the Tzenkethi, Dr. Crusher and Scotty explore deep within the planet to try and find the cause of the seismic events that are becoming more frequent. The two sides get invited to join a Tzenkethi celebration, which turns out to be a pitched battle against the Sha’Zol, a massive herd of monsters who had been displaced by the Tzenkethi early in their history and return at regular intervals to reclaim their territory. The Sha’Zol are driven off but at the cost of five lives and multiple injuries among the Starfleet crew (including Ensign Lily Sato losing one of her antennae) and deaths and injuries among the others involved. Sisko ends up in sickbay after being literally stabbed in the back by T’Galatheon. The Autarch is grateful for all the assistance, but sees the Romulans being of the greatest benefit, which leads to Admiral Sato ordering Kingsnake (assisted by Ensign Sato) to trigger explosives that destroy the Tzenkethi fleet (although they still have a massive newly built flagship). The largely repaired Sisko and the other Starfleet contingent on the planet beat a hasty retreat back to the ship, although Crusher and Scotty are trapped below ground when tremors increase. They finally manage to get a message back to the Theseus that the tremors are a result of the planet’s core having shrunken as the core cooled off, and the planet would implode soon. To add to the interest, a Cardassian fleet had arrived, believing (rightly) that the Tzenkethi had
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been planning on invading them. Crusher and Scotty are rescued and, with no time to evacuate the planet, a plan is hatched and implemented to reheat the core with a specially crafted power source. Sisko beams down to inform the Tzenkethi about what they had done. The Autarch has the data checked and finds that it is correct, so now she is more grateful to the Federation and the Romulans are out in the cold. Sisko has achieved the peace he was tasked with, but Admiral Sato is not happy. Then Sisko gets a visit from someone claiming to be the last physical Organian and needed Sisko’s help in responding to the call from the Pleroma to fix the wound at the center of all things. That ‘someone’ turns out to be T’Lir who was thought to be on some secret assignment. [Timeline: Stardate 55450.3]
Star Trek Volume 4, Pleroma (TNG/DS9)
Collin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing
Comic book format
T’Lir announces that he is really the last of the Organians who got himself born as a Vulcan, having admired Spock. At that time ‘he’ (T’Lir) was a female name Tandela. Sata, who had been friends with T’Lir, is now annoyed with him. T’Lir tries the talk Sisko into heading to Pleroma, a conference of the gods, to get them to bring back the Organians, but it is Dr. Crusher who talks Sisko into it by showing him that the Orb of Disruption was still unraveling reality. Sata gets talked into joining Section 31 and is given a task. Dr. Crusher is given an Aegis ‘pen’ by one of the gods, which she uses to visit her son, Wesley. He says he can’t come back with her, but he gives her a note and sends her back. Sisko’s mother (one of the Prophets) arrives to take Sisko ‘home’, but he insists on staying to fight. However, the gods (such as Trelane and Apollo) are not interested in helping Sisko, and then Lore (who had replaced Kahless as leader of the Red Path) arrives with a Romulan warbird and threatens the gods with an anti-tachyon bomb that will wipe out them and the galaxy. Lore had been able to locate Pleroma when Sato pressed the unit that Section 31 (which effectively is an AI bent on genocide) had given her. Crusher arrives back at the Theseus and beams Scotty out of Pleroma using the last of the power in her Aegis pen. She has Scotty and Paris use the information in Wesley’s note to upgrade the drive and plot a course to Pleroma. Sato is devastated by what she did, but T’Lir helps her and together they board the warbird, rescue Data (or at least his head) who Lore had kidnapped. They also cause a disruption to the systems aboard the warbird but that triggers a countdown on Lore’s bomb, and the bomb goes off. The Theseus finds itself riding the crest of the bomb’s shockwave. Sato, T’Lir, and Data’s head make it to the Theseus, and T’Lir holds the ship together when effects seem to be pulling it apart, but the effort leaves him wondering who he is now, but Sato stands by him. The Theseus heads off towards the Guardian of Forever, but they seem to be getting trapped in a closed portal that is the Guardian of Forever. Then Sisko decides to use the powers he learned while with the Prophets, and he vows to rescue his family and his ship and then he will agree to his mother’s demands. He opens a wormhole and returns to the Theseus which is now in fluidic space. [Timeline: circa Stardate 55607.2]
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Star Trek Defiant, Volume 1 (TNG/DS9)
Christopher Cantwell
Comic book format
With the help of Spock, Worf gains access to all systems on the Defiant and becomes its captain, intent on tracking down the renegade Kahless II. They also have B’Elana Torres-Paris and Ro Laren aboard. Worf also has the assistance of D’Enok on Qo’noS. To complete the ‘crew’, they have stolen Lore (Data’s ‘brother’) but keep his head active to serve as ‘Science’ (because of his knowledge of the Crystalline Entity) while his body is kept in storage, to minimize the potential danger from him. It is established that Kahless is using similar destructive power to that of the now extinct Crystalline Entities. The Defiant reaches Orion territory and encounter the Orion privateers who had fitted out Kahless’s ship with Crystalline Entity technology. They attempt to make a deal, trading fake trilithium for the transponder codes of Kahless’s ship. The fake trilithium fools the Orions, but Worf, Ro, and B’Elanna are taken captive anyway, and the Orions fire on Defiant, despite its cloaking device, and set the warp core of the Defiant headed for a breach. Needing more help in stopping the breach, Spock (who had been left in charge of Defiant) reunites Lore’s head with its body, but Lor (without his emotion chip) seems to be eager to help and redeem himself for past actions. The warp core breach is stopped, Worf, Ro, and B’Elanna escape from the Orion ship (the Scarab) with the help of a female Orion who won’t give her name. She does save Worf’s life from a near-fatal injury, but it requires giving him the Red Path’s “Holy Sacrament” which is actually Klingon adrenaline. That makes him fly into a rage more frequently than normal. In escaping, they did get the transponder codes (encrypted) and some real trilithium. They had discovered from the Romulan commander Sela (who helped them decode the transponder code) that Kahless now had three advanced Romulan warbirds at his disposal, and it also becomes known that some Orions had joined him. It is speculated that others may have joined The Red Path too, and it is thought that the Klingon, Korath, is assisting Kahless. It becomes known that Kahless is back at Qo’noS with his ship utilizing what may be a sentient power source, and Worf puts in a call to Sisko to join him at Qo’noS. [This is the third comic book in The Red Path storyline]
Star Trek Day of Blood (TNG/DS9)
Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly & Christopher Cantwell
Comic book format
The USS Santa Cruz arrives at the Korvat colony and Captain Meyerson accompanies Valkor in attending the Kot’Baval celebration at the invitation of Kahless, but it turns out to be the setting for the Red Path uprising, and Valkor is actually Alexander, who Kahless uses to taunt Worf. Kahless’s second henchman is Korath, a scientist who worked on Kahless’s world-destroying weaponry. Meyerson beams back to the Santa Cruz, but Kahless beams there too, and the Santa Cruz is destroyed. Sisko arrives at Qo’noS aboard the Theseus and finds the planet surrounded by what looks like the total Klingon fleet, and sensors indicate that the Defiant is on the planet’s surface. Sisko leaves Scotty in charge of Theseus as he leads a team down to the planet, where they meet up with Worf and his team. The Defiant is damaged and is hiding out among the other wrecks at an industrial waste dump. There is plenty of antagonism between the members of the teams, lessened a bit by the fact that they face a common enemy. Kahless’s fleet uncloaks and tells the Klingon Defense Forces and Theseus to surrender or die. The Theseus tries to escape as
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the two Klingon factions start battling it out. In the High Council Chambers, Martok talks of moving against the Kahless clone but ends up battling the rest of the council. With a communication blockade starting, Spock beams up to Theseus to assist there, and the first task is finding out why enemy fire is reducing their shields so rapidly. B’Ellana and Paris spend their time arguing about Miral’s upbringing as they try to get Defiant flightworthy. Data and Lore work together to discover what they can from Korath’s work, fighting their way into his lab and disabling him. Shaxs, Ro, Sato and T’Lir set out to fix the communications blackout. While the other three work on that, Shaxs has the best day of his life. Crusher talks Sela and the Orion into assisting her. They get into the Council Chambers as Martok is finishing off his enemies, but then Martok collapses from blood loss and Crusher and her team have to set up an emergency blood transfusion. When Ro’s group needs override codes, Sela uses a rough but effective method to rouse Martok and get the codes and then dashes across the rooftops to deliver them. Worf and Sisko learn that Kahless was in his spire, guarded from above by his bird of prey, so they head there in an evac vehicle. A mine leaves them walking the last part of the way. When Data explains that he’ll be compelled to disable Lore again once this is all over, Lore absconds with the unconscious Korath. Scotty hands over control of Theseus and he calls in help from Defiant which is again flyable but without deflectors. Shaxs had noticed that the deflectors had been taken, so he takes the same equipment from the Klingons, and B’Elanna and Paris find that deflectors become available just after taking off. Shaxs has a joyride clinging to the outside of the ship until the thinning atmosphere gets him to ask to be brought aboard. Worf has to fight Alexander, but during the fight he’s trying to convince his son that Kahless is driven by fear, basically suffering from imposter syndrome. Kahless is taunting Sisko about the helplessness of the Prophets, but Sisko is able to reply that Kahless has not been defeated by any gods but by Sisko’s crew, because their combined talents created a replica of Kahless’s orb weapon and used it against him. [Timeline: Stardate 55455.9]
Star Trek Defiant, Volume 2 (TNG/DS9)
Christopher Cantwell
Comic book format
Sela is about to be transferred to a Romulan ship when Worf collapses from the injuries he incurred during Kahless’s failed insurrection almost a week previous, and the Orion (who they finally learn is named Nymira Vondect) has to carry out open heart surgery on him. Sela’s return to the Romulans finally takes place and Worf directs the Defiant to return to Earth, where he hopes to officially be named captain of the Defiant. Instead, despite a recommendation from Sisko and the support of Spock, Admirals Jellico and Nechayev give Worf, B’Elanna and Ro a dressing down and officially a dishonorable discharge, but unofficially tasks the three of them to act as bounty hunters to apprehend Hugh (the ‘freed’ Borg drone), Berlinghoff Rasmussen (a time-traveling thief and conman), and Benny the Munch (a gangster from Sigma Iotia II who had teamed up with some disenchanted Gorn and was engaged in violent criminal activities). To achieve that task and hopefully get himself and the others back in Starfleet’s good books, Worf is able to buy the now decommissioned Defiant, and Spock joins them as Science Officer. There are now 5 of them (Worf, Spock, B’Elanna, Ro, and Nymira) operating the Defiant, which normally has a crew of 20. Their first target is Hugh, but when Worf gets to see how Hugh is helping to free other Borg drones, he comes to see Hugh as a hero, not a villain, and he starts to question his orders. Nevertheless, he feels he has to take Hugh back with him, but he talks him
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into joining the crew and says that he will speak up for Hugh when they get back to Starfleet. The search for Rasmussen takes them to Talos IV, and they are initially subject to the illusions that the Talosians are able to project. Rasmussen had hoped to take over the Defiant to escape with the Talosian known as the Keeper, but Worf and his crew break through the illusions. They also find that the Keeper had been using Rasmussen to get off planet. Although Starfleet had lifted General Order 7 from the planet, they were secretly keeping the Talosians confined to their planet. The Keeper asks if he can leave with the Defiant, but Worf is ordered by Starfleet not to do so, and he agrees. Instead, he gets B’Elanna to repair the shuttlecraft they had previously disabled, which enabled the Keeper and some other Talosians to leave by themselves. The effort to capture Benny the Munch includes Worf in a gladiator-like fight with a Gorn, and now they find that Starfleet has amended Worf’s orders and say he is to eliminate Benny. It looks as if Worf will do exactly that, but he backs down and arrests Benny. By that time, Worf’s crew have had enough of what they are being asked to do to appease Starfleet, and Worf says that when they get back to Starbase 99 he is disbanding the crew. Sela’s welcome back at Romulan High Command is not that much different than Worf’s welcome back at Starfleet, despite the fact that she had tortured Martok into revealing strategic secrets. But Sela had also got her hands on a time-travel device that Korath had invented, and she planned to go back 9 months to find out what secret a group of Romulan astronomers had discovered, and that had resulted in the astronomers being incarcerated on Rator III. She hopes to use that information to blackmail her superiors. Instead, she ends up 19 years in the past, interacting with Tasha Yar (Sela’s own mother). When she gets back to her own timeframe she realizes that Tasha had been a hero and fearless, not the coward she’d talked herself into believing Tasha to have been. Right now, Sela definitely wasn’t feeling like a hero or fearless herself at that moment.
Star Trek Defiant, Volume 3: Hell is Only a Word (TNG/DS9) Christoper Cantwell
Comic book format
The Defiant is delivering its three ‘prisoners’ to Starbase 99, and Worf is well aware that his crew has lost trust in him and his decisions on this past mission. Worf isn’t really happy either with what he felt had to be done, and he is very insistent that Hugh is handed over to a representative of Starfleet Intelligence. That turns out to be a Kelpien named Lieutenant Raydu who tells them of their efforts at finding a way to ‘dissimilate’ the people who are now Borg drones. But then Raydu starts screaming and dies tearing herself apart. She is found to have been hosting the same kind of parasite that had affected high-ups in Starfleet Command years previous (around Stardate 41780.2). They find that Benny the Munch is also infected and initially think that he had brought the parasites to the station, but the station had been infested with them earlier, and Benny and his parasites are happy to join up with them. Worf and his crew find that the station’s shields prevent them beaming back to the Defiant, so they have to battle the parasites and the infected station crew. B’Elanna gets taken over by a parasite and Hugh ‘assimilates’ her to ensure the parasite doesn’t gain complete control over her. Spock mindmelds with B’Elanna but gets caught up with the hivemind of the parasites, discovering that there is a rift on the station from another dimension, allowing the parasites through. The phasers of Worf’s team are drained of power, and it looks as if they’ll be overrun until Sela (who had arrived on a one-person Romulan shuttle) turns up with a full-power weapon and helps drive back the parasites. Hugh finally gains control of the station’s power but is still unable to shut the rift down, but the
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Orion, Nymira Vondect, takes the opportunity to beam herself up to the Defiant. There, she has second thoughts about the way she had been conducting herself, and Defiant’s sensors reveal to her that something on the other side of the rift is draining power from the station and keeping the rift open. As Worf’s team (along with Sela) are making a valiant but futile attack on the parasites, Nymira has them all beamed up to the Defiant and herself beamed down. Against Worf’s orders, she goes through the rift, sacrificing herself to destroy the rift by exploding a large crate of contraband weapons-grade trilithium. Hugh is able to adapt the technique that Raydu had described to restore B’Elanna to her old self, then he is allowed to leave on a station shuttle to return home. At that point, a Romulan warship arrives commanded by General Revo, Sela’s father. He congratulates Sela on capturing Worf and the others, and if she hasn’t got them under control then she will be honored for her sacrifice when he destroys the Defiant with her still on it. She then informs her father and Worf that she has Worf and his crew captive. [Timeline: Shortly after Stardate 54741.3]
Star Trek Defiant, Volume 4: The Stars of Home (TNG/DS9) Christopher Cantwell
Comic book format
Worf, B’Elanna, and Ro extract Praetor Neral and Chairman Koval on behalf of General Revo (Sela’s father) and deliver them to the planet Antara, but then they find that Revo has betrayed them. He is now calling Work’s team the Hand of Ganmadan terrorist group and puts a price on their heads, and Spock (who they had hoped would be released) remains in Romulan custody. Revo also declares himself to be Acting Praetor and Sela to be Acting Chair of the Tal Shiar. Meanwhile, O’Brien had been alerted to Worf’s plight by Bashir. Bashir was supposedly warning off O’Brien on behalf of Section 31, but he ends up joining O’Brien and his holonav aboard the Defiant. A team (the Ran’kara Special Forces), led by Maiek, is sent by Revo to eliminate them, but with determination and luck, plus the arrival of the Defiant, Worf’s team and the Antarans (who were still recovering from a Borg attack 550 years earlier) defeat Maiek’s forces. The Romulans had tried to develop a way to shield their system using power from their star, but instead they had destabilized the star so it would soon go supernova. Neral and Koval knew of this, but they were hiding it from the Romulan public. Revo also knew it and wanted to take over Antara as a new home for the Romulan Empire. Sela had come to realize that her father was concealing something from her, and she rescues Spock, although she ends up fighting, and ultimately killing, her father. With Neral, Koval, and Revo all dead, Sela declares Senator Hiren to be the new Praetor and aligns herself with Worf, and Worf hands over command of the Defiant to B’Elanna, telling her to take it back to Kira on DS9. Spock is planning on rescuing civilizations. Worf and Alexander are reconciled and set out together on a new task.
Sons of Star Trek
Morgan Hampton
Comic book format
Jake and Nog were back on DS9, Jake to be with his father (Sisko) and his half-sister (Sarah) for her 6th birthday. Jake tells Sisko that he’s going to stay and attend Pennington School, giving up his writing career, and Nog is expressing doubt about his posting to the USS Burton. They both go to see Alexander, who is being held in the brig after the Red Hand affair. Alexander mentions
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how he had felt welcome with the Red Hand, while he’d always felt like an outsider before that. Then Q’s son, QJ (Q Junior), turns up, saying he can help them all, clicks his fingers, and the four of them find themselves on the Avery in an alternate universe where Starfleet is at war with the Breen. The Breen are trying to capture nearly all the available dilithium in order to move their home planet, which is threatened by the heat from the system’s star. Jake finds that the ship’s captain is Dukat, who had been his father’s main enemy, and Alexander finds that Valkor (who he had murdered in his own universe while with the Red Hand) is among the crew. The Avery gets destroyed by the Breen, but then they discover they are in a time loop, and they go through same loop 57 times before Jake approaches Captain Dukat and tells him how the four of them had ended up in that universe. Dukat only believes it after Alexander mindmelds with Tuvok and confirms the story. This time, the ship is not destroyed but does receive serious damage, although when the boys start acting the way they feel, embracing their differences rather than just following orders, the situation is improved. When the ship is invaded by Breen wearing personal cloaks, Alexander immediately sets out to track and kill them, and he finds that a Breen helmet will let him actually see the cloaked invaders. Nog finds that his hearing lets him hear them coming, and he develops a way to recrystallize the ship’s powdered dilithium and get some power back. On the other hand, QJ finds that he has lost his powers. That had happened to him before, and he had got them back after apologizing to the Q continuum. After discussions with Commander Mariner (Dukat had been killed by a Breen), QJ tries apologizing to the boys for bringing them here (he’d really only wanted to be friends), but clicking his fingers still has no effect. It is when they end up battling the Breen’s primary ship, the Chimera, that Nog notices that QJ has powers when QJ claps his hands. The battle ends when QJ gives the Breen all the dilithium they need to move their planet. Back home, Jake tells his father that he is still going to go to Pennington School but will use the experience to develop his writing talent. Nog is now feeling at lot more comfortable about assuming his post on the Burton. Alexander had been a medic on the Avery and decides to continue in that direction to make up for the previous harm he had done. Worf and Starfleet support Alexander’s plan. Q had been observing his son’s efforts and applauds them. [Timeline: Stardate 55450.8]
Revenant (DS9)
Alex White
Jadzia Dax is surprised and pleased to find an old friend from Trill, Etom Prit, among the Trill delegation at DS9 for discussions with the Bajorans. However, Jadzia realizes that Prit must be there for some ulterior motive, and it turns out that his granddaughter, Nemi (who Jadzia had viewed as a younger sister), had joined up with a group called the Kael’tach (The Elevated), and he hopes to get Jadzia’s help in bringing her back. Although initially reluctant, Jadzia takes vacation leave and tracks Nemi down at a casino (the Avendawn on Argelius II). The encounter is less than friendly, and Jadzia works out that she is cheating at tongo with the help of one of her friends in the Kael’tach. A later encounter that night ends up with Nemi knocked unconscious, and when Jadzia scans her, she finds a lifesign for a symbiont (yet she had been refused by the Symbiosis Commission on Trill) but no lifesign for Nemi. Apparently, the symbiont had been controlling Nemi’s body, and Jadzia is determined to find out what is going on from the Commission, and she also informs Prit of what she discovered. Since meeting Etom Prit, Jadzia had started having visions involving Joran (Dax’s past host who had murdered three people before he died). Jadzia’s meeting with Bentis Brac from the Commission is adversarial from
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Bentis’s side, and Jadzia finds that her access to the Commission and the Caves of Mak’ala is severely restricted. However, her reacquaintance with Doctor Renhol proves more advantageous eventually. That night, Jadzia is attacked in her hotel room by a Starfleet ensign (Colin Hart) who then seemingly commits suicide. When his body is recovered days later, it shows indications that he had had a symbiont in him at the time of death. Jadzia calls on Kira Nerys to assist her, and they are able to recover a map showing how to get into the Caves of Mak’ala, which they do together and meet Guardian Olome who urges Jadzia to find out what Joran is trying to tell her. That leads to Jadzia going through a ceremony at a morden’oct (Death House) where she discovers that Joran had proved to be incompatible with the Dax host because Joran wanted to keep total control. Doctor Elta Vess (one of Curzon’s old flames) and Doctor Hoq urge Joran to voluntarily go through an unauthorized procedure that would effectively kill Joran but let him live on in Dax’s memory, while Dax took control of the body. Joran would die anyway if the symbiont was removed. Those choices had led to Joran killing a male orderly, his female assistant, and Dr. Hoq before Joran himself died at Vess’s hands. When Sisko learns of what Jadzia was up to, he sends Dr. Bashir and Worf to work with her, and orders Nerys to return. Jadzia, Bashir and Worf investigate the Path of Sky Institute which Jadzia had found reference to, and they discover that they were carrying out illegal joinings using cloned symbionts. The original symbiont had been the one that Elta had had. Dr. Hoq’s son (Sameron) had idolized Elta and when she was dying of Fventik’s Disease, he had come up with a procedure that would end his own life but let her symbiont (Vess) live on in his body. The clones, that communicated by electromagnetic energy and could carry out joint actions while led by the original symbiont now in Nemi’s body, were now infiltrating Trill society. Jadzia, Bashir, and Worf have many narrow escapes as they come under attack from Vess’s clones, and the Commission is of little help until an explosion happens in the Caves, but the action was in one of the Commission buildings (the Grand Archives). Vess had been trying to free some other rebellious symbionts (the Lor’inor, or Lost Lights) who were held there in cryo tanks. It is there that Jadzia finally gets to facedown Vess, but she can’t get past the fact that it is her friend Nemi’s body. Happily, Worf has his senses about him and does kill the Vess symbiont. Without the link to the original symbiont, the clones and the bodies they are controlling, including some people at the Commission, start dying. Trill society has been shaken to the core, and Jadzia is ordered off planet for at least 5 years. She is rather relieved to be returning to DS9 and is now more at peace with her symbiont’s past hosts, including Joran. [Timeline: Year 2372, not long after the Klingon assault on DS9 in the TV episode “The Way of the Warrior”]
The Dog of War (DS9)
Mike Chen
Comic book format
It is nearing the end of the Dominion War and control of DS9 has been restored. The station is being scanned for recent Cardassian technology that Captain Pearl, Commander T’Lith and Dr. Kortat of the U.S.S. Magellan are to take for analysis by Starfleet. Then scans reveal a piece of Borg technology, and the location is Quark’s Holosuite 4. A Borg headset is found, but it also turns out that Holosuite 4 is running as a dog park with the hologram Vic keeping a corgi, named Lattie or Latinum, happy. Quark was acting as a broker in a deal between a group (that is later identified as ‘The Brokers’) and a buyer (who Quark later discovers is a poacher) for the extremely valuable genetically-perfect dog. The Borg headset was supposedly part of the buyer’s
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collateral, but it becomes known that the Brokers are mostly interested in the tremendously valuable information that the headset can gather. Quark had tried the headset on, but it had been so loud he quickly removed it. When Sisko informs Starfleet about the headset, they want to know if it could help coordinate the Federation, Klingon, and Romulan fleets, because their first joint effort had been a bit of a fiasco. Sisko tries out the headset and finds that it gives him access to all resources on DS9 and even those of the ships attached to the station, and he probably could extend further. But then the station is raided by the Brokers, and they steal back the headset and Lattie, and Sisko realized that the headset now contains all the information about DS9 including everything from its main computer. So they set out in the Defiant to recover the headset and the lovable dog. They successfully board the Brokers’ ship and recover the headset. That allows Sisko to wear it again and effectively gain control of the ship, but the effort from ensuring safe passage against the Brokers’ crew so that his team could rescue Lattie proves to be taxing on his brain, and his efforts in stopping the transmission of the stolen data to the rest of the Brokers’ fleet is almost too much for him. However, the transmission is stopped, the Brokers’ network disabled, and Lattie is rescued, but Sisko gets O’Brien to make sure the headset gets lost, as it would be too much for anyone to try using to coordinate the combined fleet. The supposed buyer is still expecting to pick up Lattie from Quark, but Bashir is able to fix Lattie so that he isn’t genetically perfect, and it’s passed off as one of Quark’s scams which makes the buyer stop the conversation immediately. Morn ends up adopting Lattie. [Timeline: Stardate 51758.3]
Pliable Truths (DS9)
Dayton Ward
The Enterprise arrives at DS9 (then known as Terok Nor) after Picard is given the task of acting as mediator between the Bajorans and the Cardassians as the Cardassians are in the process of evacuating from Bajor after the events at the Minos Korva system. At that time, Picard had been tortured by Gul Madred, so he is not too eager to be facing Cardassians again. Further complicating the situation is that, while the Bajorans recognized that they needed help, they were far from happy about the way the Federation had ignored their plight while the Cardassians were enslaving them and devastating their planet. The conference was to have been held on Bajor, but that is changed to DS9, which (like the planet) has been damaged and booby-trapped as the Cardassians left. The California-class ship, U.S.S. Oceanside, also arrives at DS9, and while Picard prepares for the meeting, Dr. Crusher and Dr. Tropp from the Oceanside head up a mission on Bajor to care for the sick and injured, and Geordi La Forge and Miles O’Brien head up a team trying to fix the rising number of issues on the station. Then a message is intercepted addressed to Ensign Ro but attached to a Cardassian signal, in a code that she and Panat Hileb (who she had known when they were both children) had developed between them. The message said that Panet was among a group of Bajorans held on a planet in Cardassian space, but they didn’t know the name of it. It seemed likely that it would be somewhere near Minos Korva, so Riker is sent with the Enterprise to see what could be ascertained. The Bajoran team for the negotiations is headed by First Minister Kalem Apren and Kai Opaka, and the Cardassian team is headed by Commissioner Wonar and Arbitrator Ilson along with Dukat, although Dukat is later unceremoniously replaced by Gul Madred, presumably meant to unsettle Picard further. Kalem is looking for recompense from the Cardassians, but they claim that any misdeeds were carried out by rogue individuals and not sanctioned by Cardassian authorities. The Cardassians are trying to maintain dominance and the Bajorans are preventing that, while leaving the door open for
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reconciliation. Meanwhile, La Forge and O’Brien find direct evidence of sabotage on the station, and Crusher and Keiko (assisted by Kira Nerys) discover that the water source, near the camps they were at, had been deliberately affected by an alkaloid substance, and they also discover and apprehend Gul Tranar who had been smuggling art treasures off the planet. Panat and the other Bajorans with him were being used as slave labor to mine uridium ore, but it was really a cover for a project deep underground where illegal genetic engineering was being researched along with biological and other outlawed weapons. Although the official line was that all such Bajorans were to be returned to Bajor, in this instance the planet’s Prefect, Gul Havrel, knew his duty was to destroy the secret facility and kill all the Bajorans to stop knowledge of the planet leaking out. However, when Ijok (who had been instrumental in uncovering what Havrel planned) was caught and executed, the Bajorans rose up and overwhelmed their Cardassian overseers. Panat gets a message out to the Enterprise to come quickly, then goes after Havrel, following him into the secret underground area. The Enterprise encounters the Cardassian vessel Reklar, captained by Gul Lemec, at the border but, when Panat’s message arrives, they head at maximum warp to what they have established must be the planet (Satera III). By that time, Havrel had set in motion a plan to collapse the ground above them and destroy the secret facility. The Enterprise and the pursing Reklar arrive at the planet, and Riker talks Lemec into beaming the Cardassians onto his ship while the Enterprise rescues the Bajorans. Havrel and Panat die when the planet collapses on them. The negotiations on DS9 end when the Cardassians withdraw from the talks, although by that time Woner had been killed in an explosion which Odo is unable pin down as being caused by a disgruntled Bajoran, by Madred (who took over as lead ‘negotiator’), or maybe Garak. And the actions of Picard and the Federation crews had started to soften the antagonism that many Bajorans had been feeling against the Federation. O’Brien suggests to Keiko that DS9 could be a better place to bring up Molly, and Keiko goes along with the idea. A ship arrives to take the surviving Cardassian delegation and any other remaining Cardassians (except Garak) back to Cardassia Prime, but as the ship is about to go to warp, it explodes. Odo suspects Garak of involvement but has no evidence. [Timeline: year 2369]
Wonderlands (Discovery)
Una McCormack
Aboard the partially derelict Spaceport Devaloka, Aditya Sahil introduces Michael Burnham to the aging courier, Jeremiah, who likes working with old technology, and she gets him to see if he can get the data off of her data chip. But she is getting frustrated about not hearing any response to the messages that she had sent out, hopefully, to Discovery and to Terralysium where she thinks her mother might be. Needing to be doing something, she tries her hand at being a courier. Cleveland Booker (Book) helps her find a small ship (that she names Alice) that is able to be brought into working condition without much trouble, and she makes some money selling salvaged Starfleet memorabilia to people known as Reenactors. But she seems to be better at getting herself into trouble by responding to calls for help, and then having Book and his cat, Grudge, come to her rescue. Then a Cardassian courier, Iliana Pa’Dan (who Michael had rescued from the planet Atalis IV), tells her of a space station, Starbase Vanguard (that used to be Starbase 906), that was very well run, and Michael checks it out. At first, she is very impressed by it and its commander or chief executive officer, Remington, but then she discovers that its economy is underpinned by the “White Palm” pirates (lead by Dell Leavitt) that had started terrorizing the region of space around where Devaloka was, as it started expanding its “empire”
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