Starfleet Intelligence had been studying the operations of the Undine group encountered on the AFS New Dawn. The Undine that had been taken prisoner were questioned, and based on the information that was gained there, more research had been done. It turned out more people were taken than just five senior officers on the New Dawn, and Starfleet Intelligence found where they’re being kept.
Starbase 777 was asked to put together a team to enter fluidic space to investigate Terrasphere 23, the base of operations for this Undine group, and bring the taken prisoners back home. On the Eventide, a group of volunteers assembled, where they were given the briefing. The group was divided into three separate away teams; they were to enter the Terrasphere, then to disable generators and rescue the prisoners.
The three teams were beamed down to different areas of the Terrasphere to search for the consoles through which the first set of generators could be shut down. They succeeded with varying degrees of inconspicuousness, after which they headed to the central structure to free the prisoners.
After fighting Undine who were protecting the prisoners, every team succeeded in freeing the prisoners from cryo-stasis-sensory deprivation chambers, which left them with various affected mental states. Then, a message came from the ship that in the centre there should be more consoles to shut down generators with, which would disable the shields of the Terrasphere and allow the teams to be beamed out.
In the centre of the facility, the teams were able to meet again and get started on taking the generators down. However, soon Undine started arriving in waves to try to stop this from happening. After a lengthy battle that caused many casualties on both sides, finally the remaining Undine surrendered, handing over the diplomat prisoners they took, and allowing the teams to beam out.
The Intelligence Department received a message from HQ detailing the results of an investigation conducted on a starship component theft operation, revealing that the operation was based out of 777. The order was given to track down the operation, shut it down, and trace the missing parts before any more components went missing and further jeopardized their owners. 777’s Intel quickly got to work forwarding the message across divisions, preparing a briefing to get down a tactical approach to the situation, while simultaneously gathering a list of complaints about missing parts to try to narrow down what parts went where.
Engineering and Operations were sent to track down the stolen parts and reunite them with their ships if possible, while Command, Tactical, and Security were assigned to shut down the chop shop and bring those responsible into custody, and Intel divided themself up where needed. Medical was asked to be on standby in case of injuries.
Command, Tactical, and Security (accompanied by a few Intel officers) analysed a map they’d been given of the cargo bay the operation was working out of to devise a plan. They decided to shut down the Jeffries tubes nearby to minimize the chance of escape, then infiltrate and arrest accordingly. Engineering and Operations got to work looking at the list of missing parts – vital, but no less easily overlooked in an inspection, and certainly no less dangerous when missing – and assisted in the raid by closing down the tubes near the cargo bay.
The raid turned to a firefight, ending in a few casualties before the majority of the criminals surrendered. An attempt was made to assist via the security footage, though when the cameras were frustratingly slow, power was diverted from multiple places, including powering down the tubes, unfortunately allowing some of the escaped criminals, disguised as Starfleet personnel, to pry them open. A small group was cornered in the tubes, though unfortunately, one slipped through to the entertainment promenade.
The intruder took a civilian hostage with a phaser set to kill, intending to take them to the lift before it was swiftly shut down. Negotiations ensued once a small team arrived, ending in an agreement to trade the civilian for an officer, though another officer stunned the intruder before any such trade could be made. Inventory of the stolen parts was taken, revealing some had already been shipped off, leaving quite a few ships in danger if they went into warp. A broadcast was made to advise anyone to land immediately and avoid going into warp. It wasn’t fast enough, and the ship was destroyed right outside the command deck’s windows.
Starbase 777 was approached by an old acquaintance - RRW Kinaen, the D'deridex class Republic ship that the station had discovered a year prior, approached the starbase with a request to dock and receive repairs for damage that the vessel sustained during her most recent mission. As the ship began docking, a repairs crew was organized and sent to the airlock, and the medical officers were alerted for treatment of minor injuries that some of the Kinaen crew had sustained during the ordeal.
In the airlocks, the repairs crew met with Juler tr’Keirianh, the head engineer of the vessel. The engineer was quick to inform the Starfleet officers about the damage Kinaen sustained, noting that the most important things to look at were the possible damage of the singularity core, and getting the ship’s systems back online. Upon deciding to look at the core first, the repairs crew followed the engineer into the vessel.
In the Minor Injuries Unit, the crew that had arrived were being treated for minor burns and headaches from the rough flying. Despite the initial unease around Starfleet, the camo-clad Republic officers soon came around and accepted the treatment.
Meanwhile, on the command deck, the station’s captain received another request from RRW Kinaen’s Riov. Upon transporting him via transporting lock, Lhaes tr’Korthre provided some of the details of what had happened with his crew and ship. He revealed that they were pursuing a Free State vessel, resulting in successful neutralization - at the cost of the old Kinaen getting damaged. He then proceeded to imply that his vessel’s old age is a concern expressed by the Republic shipyard.
Soon after, another question was brought up, regarding the security data that the Starfleet officers had downloaded from Kinaen during her discovery by the starbase. Upon learning that the data was not only salvaged but also uncorrupt, Lhaes offered to work on it together.
Upon entering the RRW Kinaen’s turbolift, something unexpected happened - as if hearing the officers, the lift spontaneously stopped. With a little bit of persuasion both from Starfleet officers and Juler, the turbolift reset its course. Eventually, the repairs crew reached the singularity core.
While searching for issues, the team had discovered that despite what the head engineer had told them, the readings seemed to be fine. Upon investigating further, they found out that the ship was - quite literally - hiding the extent of her injuries. Suddenly, the heartbeat-like humming of the singularity core made much more sense…
In the station commander’s office, the two captains could talk alone. Lhaes revealed that the data, that was currently being analyzed by the Intel officers, was his and his security head’s collected data about Free State and Tal Shiar officers and ships.
After performing the repairs and witnessing the ship flinch in pain, the two present Kinaen senior officers finally revealed that the ship is, indeed, sentient, as a result of the failed Free State experiment with the Borg drone. The Republic did not know about that - the crew was too scared to tell them about it. Now, with the vessel’s old age and the corruption that went through it during the assimilation process, the Kinaen was, essentially, dying.
The idea to transplant the dying ship’s computers and singularity core into a different ship, one that just arrived at the station when answering the distress call Kinaen had sent out previously. With the whole senior staff present, the operation could start - and thanks to the skill of the officers present, it was a success.
In the early hours of the morning (around 0400, to be exact) Starbase 777 received a hail from a weather monitoring system on Gamma Hromi I. They reported that they’d been hit with an ion storm that mostly fried their communications system and that the very same storm was headed for the starbase. Sensors then indicated that an inversion field was headed in from the opposite direction. The red alert klaxon only sounded for a moment before everything went dark. Androids, Liberated Borg, and those with any form of cybernetics found their technology shut down.
The backup generator kicked on a moment later, bringing emergency lights up. As the turbolifts were shut down, officers were forced to use the Jeffries tubes in order to get to their stations. Engineering and Operations set to getting power back on, Medical was tasked with keeping their Liberated Borg patients alive without their implants and nanoprobes functioning, and Command set up a functional message relay through the tubes. Science came up with a solution to reverse the functionality of the shield generators, harnessing the energy of the storm, while Engineering troubleshot the life support systems using a backup LCARS (BCARS). The Liberated Borg patients were kept stable thanks to the help of neuroflux mesh; Vau N’Akat tech controlled and kept in a liquid state using the mind, which could manually stimulate the nanoprobes. The remaining Liberated Borg were safely moved to the medical bay for the potential fix to be administered.
Disaster struck on the Commercial Promenade, where a restaurant was broken into during the chaos of the blackout when no security officers were immediately available, leaving an Intelligence officer and a civilian to deal with the group of three would-be burglars. It quickly escalated into a hostage situation when the Risian man grabbed hold of the Ferengi woman, threatening her life if they weren’t released. BCARS chose this time to divert power from gravity to fuel life support systems, leaving people, objects, and just about everything floating around.
The situation on the Promenade was eventually de-escalated, and the neuroflux worked as intended, stabilizing those in the medical bay. With the help of Science’s calculations, Engineering took power from life support in order to fuel the shield generators, and… Everything went dark again. Silent. No lights blocked the view of space outside, before 777 was bathed in shades of greens, purples, and blues as the shields interacted with the storm outside. Full power was restored to the station, lives were saved, and the burglars were taken into custody.
With the head security of the RRW Kinaen present, the coordinates that he intercepted from Tal Shiar transmissions were visualized by putting them on a map and comparing said points with available data. Upon seeing that these were most likely Romulan and Reman colonies, an unsettling theory was born - namely, that these colonies were all attacked by the Tal Shiar. To confirm that, multiple away teams were deployed and sent to the nearest locations.
One of such away teams boarded USS Eventide and went to a planet called Ishai V. After discovering the possible location of the colony, the away team was transported to a clearing in the forest on the planet’s surface, where they would soon find signs of humanoid activity, namely in the form of cut down trees, which then lead them to a path to the colony itself.
Unfortunately, no survivors were found - the beginnings of the city that the away team went through was abandoned and left to rot, disruptor and plasma cannon marks on the walls and the ground a clear sign of a battle. Besides finding multiple belongings and possible surviving data, as well as collecting water and soil samples, the away team also discovered skeletal remains of a Tal Shiar agent - a grim confirmation of the prevailing theory of an attack. The body was later buried.
By the river, multiple signal boxes were found, pointing at the satellite above the colony. Upon receiving an error after trying to send a signal, the away team left for Eventide. The remains of the satellite were approached by Eventide in hopes of gathering more data. However, the hole blown through the satellite’s bus, prevented them from doing so.
On Stardate 91585.84, Starbase 777 was taken over by a terrorist organisation called the Marked Resolve for unknown reasons. All Starfleet personnel was locked into their quarters, while civilians were allowed to remain free. A communications officer implored any available civilians to at least attempt to get the station back into Starfleet hands by messaging every civilian on base.
Several civilians gathered to live up to this task. At first, they were sent up to the Station Commander’s office, where Ether, the leader of the organisation, had taken office. Ether explained part of the reason why they were there, but upon insinuating that they wanted Starfleet back, she teleported them all down into the environmental ring, immediately banned from entering anywhere outside of regular civilian areas.
After coming together to deliberate for a while, the civilians decided to take on the Marked Resolve in two groups; one group would go down to the shops, and stage a fight to distract the security team, who were already stretched thin. The other group would head down to engineering, shutting down the transporters and the door locks on the environmental levels. Within a few hours, the Marked Resolve was once again off the station, with several of their members captured, including Ether.
A local celebrity donated a series of scripts to Starbase 777’s theater troupe with hopes of them performing it sometime in the future. Not long after the fact, however, those who came in contact with the books (and those who interacted with the troupe) started exhibiting strange symptoms. These people began speaking in riddles and behaving… abnormally, to say the least.
Chaos began to erupt on the Starbase; bloodwine poured out of replicators, lights and temperatures were tampered with on and off, and a riot of civilians and officers alike broke out on the entertainment complex. A fight broke out in the command deck as Science and Medical received word of a potential pathogen and prepared to analyze samples received from a patient. Scientists tiptoed their way around an infected officer to meet up in medbay as those still sane within Security were dispatched to deal with the riot.
A proper analysis revealed a parasitic infection was rapidly spreading across the Starbase, small & worm-like, which spread through touch. Another patient in Medical had ink stains on her fingers and clothes, revealing the parasites were coming from said ink. Science and Medical worked quickly to develop a cure for the parasitic infection & an acidic solution to be rid of the eggs once and for all.
Once the officers on board were back in their right minds, they found that the celebrity had brought the scripts, but she knew nothing of the parasites contained within. An alert in Engineering drew their attention to a replicator producing many copies of the scripts. They found her assistant, who they learned been jealous of her fame and attempted to kill her, and she was arrested for the attempted murder of her employer.
After hearing an emergency alert weather warning from Helios III, the Eventide (being the closest ship to the planet) was quickly deployed to render immediate rescue and aid. On arrival, it became apparent that transporters wouldn't work - so the entire ship was brought under the clouds, using shuttles to ferry the relief between the ship and the ground. After high winds sent debris and earth flying around the away teams, backup arrived in the form of the immense USS Thunderbird who was able to relieve the Eventide and take over the rescue attempts. The crew headed back to the station with the injured they had received, ready for the next deployment.
Starbase 777 received a distress signal from a location they had no record of in Federation space. A group of people had been trapped on “Hamar IV”, and had finally made it through to interact with someone on the outside world. While initially skeptical, the crew of Starbase 777 ran some tests and proved the signal was legitimate, so they went on board the Eventide to check it out.
The away team landed on a desolate, snowy tundra, five life forms on the planet coming up on scans, before one of them fizzed out about as soon as they landed. They found a body next to a broken crudely-fashioned communications machine, a human woman who had been strangled to death. They followed fire in the nearby caves to locate the remaining four survivors, who revealed most of their surroundings were circuits created by a massive computer known as AZRAEL, who had kept them trapped for 113 years. Their comms had been disabled, severing ties to the Eventide.
They relocated to a cabin that appeared in the tundra, where one of the computer's creators revealed that AZRAEL had been trained off of every war that they could get their hands on in order to be the ultimate weapon. The computer “woke up” and expended that violence outwards, wiping out the colony and leaving 5 people alive to take their frustrations out on. AZRAEL appeared then to taunt the group while they scanned for a way to temporarily disable it (as it had gained sentience, and could not be shut off, as it would kill it) before retreating, all but welcoming them to its core.
The computer core was hidden beneath the ruins of the colony, where the survivors revealed a device had been created to store AZRAEL in, but it needed to be made vulnerable first. They proceeded to the trap door into the computer core, a tangled mass of wires, where all hell broke loose. Wires were severed, the team was injured, a hand was removed, until AZRAEL was significantly weakened enough to successfully move it into the storage device. One of the survivors was fatally wounded in the process, but they regained contact with Eventide and rushed everyone up to safety.
On Halloween a circus arrived to Starbase 777 and everything seemed set up for a spooky time, especially when everyone associated with the circus was noticed to be wearing masks that obscured their entire face. However, when an accident with an acrobat revealed a puzzling resistance to the aid ouf outsiders, further mysteries emerged. Next there was a missing persons case from seven years ago coming to light, and then the revelation that the circus seemed suspiciously like a cult. The officers involved with the case had to make a decision: solve the case and thereby possibly put someone in danver, or leave the case for what it was, despite knowing what happened.