Episode 16: The Die is Cast, Pt 1

125. We have a new helms-person, a Deltan named Lt. Lora Tal-Shent.

126. Aldrin is called to the Admiral’s office. He finds Kargan yelling at the Admiral about missing communications from the Klingons.

127. The Admiral dispatches the Nightingale to deep in to the Shackleton Expanse. With some additional crew.

128. The guests are more “tactical” in nature, but from Starfleet. They ask for some medicine to help with Theta radiation and ask us to outfit a shuttle with some special shielding.

129. Skeek and team take care of outfitting the shuttle (in record time!). Prell installs a manual switch on the holo-emitters on the bridge.

130. We are suspicious of our guests

131. Around day 7 we drop out of warp and an Omega symbol appears on all screens on the ship. All systems are locked.

132. The captain quickly leaves the bridge. A few moments later the Omega symbol has disappeared and the Captain orders the crew to stand down until he has ordered otherwise.

133. He returns to the bridge a few moments later, directing Lora to take us to some new coordinates. The flight is rocky. He then directs Prell to help with some scans. Prell finds some interstellar...disturbances that point back to a moon named Ephaet. Using Prell’s guidance, Lora continues towards the rendezvous point.

134. Prell also vaguely figures out what is happening by reading the Captain’s surface thoughts. He finds signs of life deep on the moon.

135. We arrive at the rendezvous point. The shuttle disembarks. The Nightingale gets a VERY garbled communication from the moon. It’s….bad. Really bad. The captain is holding back.

136. The away team missed their check in. Shuttles are taking off from the planet. Not ours. The away team’s shuttle has crashed.

137. Aldrin decides that he is going to go deal with this problem. He is taking Prell and his own away team to go deal with it. He turns over full command of the ship to Zodd and gets some radiation inoculation.

138. As the away team is about to disembark and Dolrean ships arrive.