| Starring |
|
|
| S04E08 | ||
| Stardate | 82947.3 | |
| Series | Series 4 | |
| Spotlight Character | Kestra T'Lara | |
| Previous Episode | S04E07 | |
| Next Episode | S04E09 | |
Summary[]
- Kestra escorts Barry from the brig to his quarters
- Kestra seems oddly impressed with Barry for standing up for what he believes
- The Enterprise investigates an abandoned alien starship in a dense debris field.
- Cetacean Ops is still offline due to "industrial relations"
- The away team of K'Ratak, Jaheem Soto, Brô'c'ĥn and Ensign Price finds grey reptilian corpses on the ship.... and a strange bio-silicate gas suspended in stasis.
- The gas shows high levels of electromagnetic activity for what appears to be a haze of single-celled organisms
- The gas escapes its field, and the away team are put in quarantine.
- Kestra voices concerns to Captain Satlek about the poor treatment of Cetacean Ops; the idea of mind-melding with the dolphins is mooted
- Kestra melds with Madge the dolphin and discovers a large cultural difference; they don't understand the "maze games" they play are serious navigation experiments, nor can the understand the idea of a crime like drug-use in which one does not directly harm another.
- Price has an odd cancerous silicate tumour growing on his arm; somehow he's been infected even through his suit
- Kestra raves to Barry about her discoveries with the dolphins, but Barry is unhappy at the implication she would use this as the basis for educating and enlisting the dolphins as full Starfleet officers: "You're talking about militarising them".
- Kestra and Barry part company on bad terms.
- Brô'c'ĥn deduces a molecular tunneling effect has seen some sort of nanite infect him and Price... but not K'Ratak or Soto
- The only link they can deduce is that K'Ratak and Soto both have cybernetic implants - some sort of interference from the electronics?
- The debris field around the ship is identified..... as a Borg cube. The nanites aren't giving Price or Brô'c'ĥn a cancer; they're slowly turning them into a Borg.
- The process can be stopped with Brô'c'ĥn, but Price is too far gone for them to wholly prevent it happening.
- At a senior staff meeting, Satlek gives Kestra permission to go over the head of Warrant Officer Reeves
- Doctor Brô'c'ĥn watches as Mr Einstein breaks the semi-borgified Price out of quarantine, then turn to face Brô'c'ĥn with an assimilated face of his own...
- "We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. We will absorb your technological distinctiveness into our own. Resistance is futile... but enjoyable.".