Stardate: 62632.88
SFC Date: 2385/07/20

Disabled and helpless the hijacked freighter lists through space. The captain calls senior staff to the briefing room to discuss their next move. Concerned the Romulans may have more tricks up their sleeves the captain orders a multi-pronged assault; sending shuttles to breach near the crew and living quarters while simultaneously beaming an team over to engineering. The teams assemble waiting for the order to be given. Meanwhile, Chief Diplomatic Officer Kaghat makes his way to the brig to interrogate the suspected Tal Shiar officers that had been taken into custody.

When the captain gives the order, the shuttle crews enter commands to fire up the engines but nothing happens. Quick system diagnostics show no issues, the engines simply did not receive the command. Frustrated the Captain order Chief Paw to energize the transporters and similarly the chief enter the proper commands into the console but nothing happens. Again, system diagnostics show no issue, only that the transporter system never received the energize command.

Frustrated, the Chief storms over to the transporter circuits and begins a manual inspection. Out of the corner of his eye, Chief Paw sees a flash of light followed by a woman’s voice “you know, you’re not going to find anything”. Looking up, Chief Paw sees what appears to be a dark haired human woman in a Romulan Uniform.

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Alarmed, the chief calls for an intruder alert and security teams in the transporter bay draw their weapons. Unconcerned the asks to be taken to the captain before growing impatient and snapping her fingers.

In an instant the senior staff find themselves on the bridge; including Kaghat who seemed to be mid insult. The senior staff quickly piece the situation together identifying the woman as a member of the Q Continuium.

When pressed why she’s came aboard their ship, she simply stated that “she was in the area” and that there were more important things going on that Starfleet needed to pay attention to. When pressed the Q became incredulous and impatient, snapping her fingers in an instant transported the ship and it’s crew to Hobus AB III.

The planet the crew finds themselves in a high-orbit over appears to be an unremarkable Class C planet about half the size of earth with two rocky moons. Sharing their orbit is a massive maintenance facility in the midst of what looks like a hasty evacuation with ships fleeing in all but one direction.

As the crew look in the opposite direction, the view-screen showcases a terrifying sight. In the center of the system a Yype Ia: Luminous Supergiant appears to have gone supernova and is being violently pulled towards some sort or tear in space.

A moment passes and crew realizes that the ships and supernova are not moving and the scene they are witnessing is seemingly a moment frozen in time. Even so, titanic tendrils of energy pulsate menacingly emanating from the tear.

Ships are fleeing the station are in various states of repair and contain mostly Romulan life-signs. Some ships have sections of the ship exposed to space and a few even have exposed singularity cores. Several ships contain Reman life-signs but the vast majority are still on the station.

As the crew inspects the cloud of ships, at the leading edge, several ships have exploded or are in various states of singularity core breaches. Several more appear to be in the process of engaging warp engines. Sometime later the crew launches a probe, expecting it to be lost to whatever phenomena that is detonating the fleeing ships. It does not and the crew determines that the singularity cores are going critical as the ships engage their warp engines.

The System

Pulling up any information they have on the Hobus system reveals that not much is known beyond basic stellar cartographic surveys. The system is/was technically a binary star system but given the size and mass disparity it’s more accurate to characterize the Hobus star’s companion a planet.

Circling Hobus A is an exceedingly rare planet, a Class X “Chthonian” world. These worlds were once massive gas giants which have had their atmospheres burned away revealing it’s core rich with rare and exotic materials. In this case the world is exceedingly rich with dilithium which appears to be an almost inexhaustible supply as it seeps up from the core on the bright side and crystallizes on the dark side.

The massive tear in space appears to be where Hobus AB II used to be and is violently pulling and shearing anything nearby into itself where titanic discharges of energy claw into space. Scans are inconclusive and return gibberish. The anomaly’s affect on the system behaves similar to a quantum singularity but the disturbance itself doesn’t match anything encountered before and is a completely new phenomena.

As the ship and crew accumulate and analyze more data they discover that time within the system appears to be moving significantly slower than the universal norm. Time is moving at a ratio of 1 : 31912. In the Hobus system’s local time the supernova shockwave will reach the anomaly in fifteen minutes but in the galaxy at large this will not occur for 10 months, 28 days, 6 hours ±1 hour.

The Station

The crew assembles an away team and beams them over to the station’s command center. As observed, the station appears to be a massive drydock and maintenance facility similar to Starfleet’s Utopia Planitia Fleetyards. Frozen in time, the command crew seem preoccupied with clearing ships to disembark. Unable to interact with the controls, the crew downloads what they can from local memory cores.

Based on various consoles it appears that there are (were) three major facilities/operations in this system. Orbiting Hobus A I, massive mobile mining rigs orbit on the dark side of the planet, shielded from the massive amounts of radiation emanating from the Hobus A star, now supernova. It appears that in moments these rigs will be obliterated by the blast wave while smaller support and mining ships are racing out of the system, barely able to stay ahead of it.

The second facility appears to have been destroyed, labeled as “Fabrication Facility” and used to be in orbit of Hobus AB II, now a large tear in space.

Collecting everything they could the away team makes their way to the Romulan Political Office to see if there might be any additional information there. Turning the corner the away team encounters a group of Romulan Political Officers flanked by armed security making their way out of the office. The crew scans the officers, copying data from personal computing devices and makes their way into the office. The office itself doesn’t seem suspicious until they make their way into a more secure looking room where computers and equipment have been fried.

Deciding that they don’t have much more to accomplish, the away team returns to the ship to begin decrypting the data they retrieved.

Decrypting data found on one of the political officer indicates that the Fabrication Facility was the major facility responsible for fabricating singularity cores for the Romulan fleet at large. It appears that there was a code-named project to create an experimental core using some sort of exotic material acquired from some redacted source.

The Anomaly

Piecing the information together Science Officer Kizit’gak and Chief Paw determine with a high probability that the anomaly deals with Romulan quantum singularity cores and subspace. Focusing on that line of research they determine that the anomaly is some sort of naked singularity. The behaviors and circumstances are too similar to be a coincidence.

Unrelenting, they theorize that this is actually an artificially created subspace singularity. This could actually be what exists within all supermassive black-holes and would explain all the subspace disturbances (including the great barrier) that exist within the core of their galaxy.

Setting aside the ground-shattering discovery they made, they are presented with the grim reality of what they are witnessing. A subspace singularity is a quantum singularity that has breached the subspace barrier. Matter entering the singularity is annihilated, releasing its energy into subspace with devastating consequences.

Conclusion…

The information they gathered would give Federation scientists precious insight into what is going on in this system. They’ve also gathered a massive amount of data on Romulan Tech which would give Starfleet a significant tactical advantage.

Seeing what Q wanted them to see the crew is left with a dilemma…

Do they simply return home or do they try to save those fleeing the apocalypse?
If so, who? There are too many to save them all and those left behind will certainly perish.
What kind of effect would pulling them out of time have? Temporal-Shock certainly as Q has advised.