An Impossible Planet - Part 1

Posted on Tue Oct 13th, 2026 @ 8:13pm by Lieutenant Vireya Talvaren & Lieutenant Commander Maximo (Max) Vero & Lieutenant Reruk & Ensign Sok’i T’Luz & Lieutenant JG Luke Beaumont & Lieutenant JG T'Chiara MD
Edited on on Tue Oct 13th, 2026 @ 9:26pm

3,293 words; about a 16 minute read

Mission: Season 1 Episode 2: The Garden at the Edge of Night
Location: Mission coordinates along the frontier space
Timeline: MD6
Tags: Reruk,

ON:

T’Luz shifted slightly in her seat, growing uncomfortable as she flew several senior members of the crew toward something every instinct she possessed suggested she should flee from. The flight had thus far been uneventful, if considerably longer than she was accustomed to.

“Approaching anomaly, sir.”

Max nodded at the Ensign who had just announced they were approaching the system. To see the blackhole more and more on the sensors made him a little skittish but the second officer had assured him, he had planned out a safe route not to get caught and sucked in.

"Report," Max said. He cricked his neck and stretched his arms above his head. It had been a lot of sitting around for everyone in the journey.

"Sir..." Luke started but trailed off almost immediately, his eyes fixed on the forward portal. Through the runabout’s forward viewport, the black hole dominated the darkness ahead, an absence so vast that it seemed to swallow the stars themselves. The event horizon was little more than a perfect void, surrounded by a distorted halo of light as the distant stars behind it were stretched and warped by the immense gravitational field. Threads of superheated matter spiralled around the darkness in a brilliant accretion disk, its light bending impossibly around the edge of the abyss. Even from this distance, there was something deeply unsettling about looking directly at it—as though the universe had been torn open and left exposed.

And yet, orbiting that impossible gravity well was something that should not have been there at all.

A planet hung against the darkness, following a seemingly stable orbit around the black hole. Its surface was illuminated by the strange, warped glow of the accretion disk, revealing vast continents and oceans beneath a thin veil of atmosphere. It looked impossibly serene against the violence surrounding it. According to every known law of astrophysics, the planet should have been torn apart, consumed, or flung into interstellar space long ago. Instead, it remained there—whole, stable, and stubbornly alive.

For a moment, the view was almost beautiful. Then the implications of what they were seeing began to settle in. Whatever had placed that planet there—or whatever was keeping it there—was operating on principles none of them yet understood.

“Sorry, sir…” Luke tore his attention away from the viewport and back to the console he had been working on. He frowned at the readings for a moment, tapping a few controls before finally shaking his head.

“I think I might know why it hasn't been pulled in,” he said, sounding only mildly confident. “Something's keeping it in place. The gravity around the planet is… wrong. Keeps shifting, almost like there's something pushing back against the black hole.”

He looked over the sensor display again, clearly trying to make sense of it himself. “And there's definitely something down there. Big cities, roads, factories… all sorts of stuff. Looks like someone built a whole civilisation.” Luke paused, his expression becoming more puzzled. “Problem is, we're not picking up anyone.”

He tapped the console again.

“No people. No animals. Nothing alive at all. Just the buildings and machines. Some of them are still running, too.” He glanced back through the forward viewport at the impossible world circling the black hole. “Honestly, sir… I don't know what we are looking at.”

"What you are looking at, Lieutenant, is a profound violation of natural law," Reruk said dryly, his tone laced with his characteristic cynicism. "A planet cannot maintain Class-M ecological equilibrium within an accretion disk without massive artificial intervention. My telemetry confirms active planetary life signatures, yet zero sentient bio-forms." He crossed his arms, "Proceed with extreme caution, Commander. Something is generating immense power down there to hold off that black hole—and it didn't build itself."

"That is a contradiction," T'Chiara chimed in, "it is one or the other, either there is nothing alive or there is not. If there is life, then it has some form of sentience even if it is not at our level of it "

Vi had been quiet since the black hole filled the forward view.

There was something about the space around it that refused to sit properly in her senses. A faint pressure had gathered behind her eyes as they drew closer, accompanied by the uncomfortable impression that the seconds around the runabout were slipping past at slightly different speeds. She shifted in the co-pilot’s seat and pressed two fingers briefly to her temple, waiting for the sensation to settle. It didn’t.

Her attention moved to the planet. That was worse in a different way. Oceans, cloud cover, cities lit beneath them, machinery still working, and apparently nobody left to care.

Vi drew another tactical sweep across the near side of the planet and watched the returns crawl in. “Nothing’s tracking us,” she said, quieter than usual. “No weapons lock, no obvious defensive traffic.”

She kept studying the display, then looked through the viewport again at the world hanging beside the black hole.

“But this whole place feels wrong.” Her fingers rested lightly against the controls. “Something down there is holding that planet where it shouldn’t be, and whatever it’s doing, I can feel it from here.”

Vi glanced towards Max.

“I’d give it room until we know what’s keeping the lights on.”

"It is only a contradiction if you insist on oversimplifying xenobiology, Doctor," Reruk countered, his tone cool, abrasive, and utterly dismissive. "The sensors indicate flourishing botanical life - flora, microorganisms, perhaps simple non-sentient bio-mass - yet zero higher-order neural signatures. The ecosystem survives, but the architects who built those cities are absent."

"Listen to your Tactical Officer, though, Commander," Reruk urged Max as he stepped closer to Vi's console. He spoke as he read over the graviton distortion readings, "The spatial pressure Lieutenant Talveren feels is localized chroniton friction. Whatever device is insulating that paradise from the event horizon is warping time and space around it. Standard orbit is an operational hazard until we isolate the central power grid."

"I listen to all my officers Lieutenant," Max said simply. "And I'm not convinced what Lieutenant Talvaren is feeling isn't intuition on top of any chroniton friction as I've got a gut feeling too but the mission is we have to investigate this planet so with that in mind, Reruk help Ensign T'Luz plot a route down to land avoiding as much of this "friction" as possible.

We need to understand and establish who or what is holding this planet here and how is this possible. Take us somewhere that sheltered from view if you can and away from anywhere with too many bio signatures sentiment or not for the moment. That's something to properly establish later. We will set up the runabout as a base of operations and start with some detailed scans with less hopefully, interference from that monster out there," he indicated the hulking black hole.

T’Luz’s fingers were already moving across the flight controls before Max finished speaking. There were many variables to consider with the rapidly changing information of the mission.

“Aye, sir.”

Luke remained unsettled. It wasn't simply the sight beyond the forward window—the utter darkness at the heart of the black hole, the sensation that he was staring into an abyss that seemed to stare back. It was the planet itself, impossibly holding its position despite the immense gravitational forces surrounding it. Something was keeping it there. He just couldn't work out what.

A flicker across his console caught his attention.

“Commander…” Luke leaned closer to the display, his brow furrowing as he worked through the readings. “There are two other planetary bodies orbiting the black hole and one's got a moon of its own—the one we're approaching.”

His fingers moved across the controls, bringing up the sensor data.

“The other one's a Class Y planet. Pretty much what you'd expect from something that close to a black hole.” He hesitated, glancing at the figures again. “Surface temperature's over five hundred Kelvin. Atmosphere's full of toxic chemicals and corrosive gases. Sulphuric deserts, heavy radiation discharges…” He shook his head. “Nothing you'd want to spend much time on.”

Luke fell silent for a moment, staring at the orbital calculations. The planet was sitting almost two AU closer to the accretion disc than their target world, yet somehow it remained intact.

“I don't know how that thing is still there,” he admitted, sounding genuinely baffled.

He brought up the readings from the final body. “The last one's just a ball of rock. Some minor dilithium deposits, nothing particularly exciting.” He paused, squinting at the display. “Although… I might be picking up something underneath the surface. Looks like some kind of facility, maybe. Can't be sure, though. There's too much interference from the black hole.”

Max looked at him. "Well that didn't show up on the initial data. Curiouser and curiouser ..... Okay change of plan then. We will go look at all three but might as well start with the closest first. Ensign set course for the closest one."

T’Luz acknowledged the commander in the affirmative and abandoned the approach that had been constructed for the Class-M planet. She plotted Luke’s newly identified bodies onto the navigation display. The change in destination was simple enough. Getting there while space itself appeared to be misbehaving was somewhat less so. T’Luz studied the orbital tracks for several seconds.

“Lieutenant Reruk, sir, I would appreciate your opinion before I commit us to an approach.”

She expanded the navigational telemetry between the runabout and the nearer world, overlaying it with the chroniton readings he had identified. Beyond the brilliant violence of the accretion disk, there was an uncomfortable absence of the debris she had expected. She had imagined drifting rock, gas, something visibly surrendering itself to the black hole’s gravity.

Instead there were the planets, distorted starlight, and the enormous black absence around which everything seemed arranged. Her stomach flipped as a shot of adrenaline pumped through her. She wasn’t entirely certain whether that sensation was fear or excitement.

“I can compensate for predictable distortions upon approach, however, I would prefer not to discover which portions of this are unpredictable by flying through them.” Her eyes flicked briefly toward the impossible blackness dominating the forward view screen. “Particularly when the consequence of an incorrect assumption is unusually definitive.”

She looked back toward Reruk. The course she believed offered the greatest stability blinked patiently on the display, awaiting confirmation. Under normal circumstances, she would have trusted her calculations without hesitation. These were very decidedly not normal circumstances. Space itself was behaving in ways she did not entirely understand. There was no logic in allowing pride to substitute for expertise.

“If you can confirm the least unstable corridor, I can fly it.”

"Your trajectory is logically sound, Ensign, but you've failed to account for localized chroniton shears," Reruk said as he stepped up behind T’Luz’s console. Seeing spacetime artificially warped revolted his Hekaran sensibilities, but his voice remained cool and abrasive, "At that angle, fractional temporal displacement will sheer our maneuverability and pitch us into the gravity well."

"Slant our entry angle by seven point four degrees. It'll be turbulent, but it keeps the hull intact," he began tapping precise corrections onto her display, adjusting the flight corridor. "Take us in before the shear frequency shifts again."

“Acknowledged.”

T’Luz did not overanalyze Reruk’s corrections. She incorporated them in real time as they appeared across her display, shifting their approach by the prescribed seven point four degrees. The navigational computer redrew the corridor ahead of them, and she committed to it before the chroniton shear had an opportunity to make their calculations obsolete.

Her hands settled more firmly over the controls. Turbulence she understood and knew well enough how to mitigate.

“I would advise the crew take their seats and secure their safety restraints.”

The runabout responded beneath her hands as she guided it into the corrected approach, her attention narrowing to the instruments and the rapidly approaching world ahead. Whatever excitement she had felt looking into the impossible geometry of the system disappeared beneath the immediate demands of actually flying through it.

There would be time to be fascinated later. Assuming, of course, they arrived somewhere capable of containing later.

The turbulence picked up as they drew closer, starting as a rumbling rattle of loosely secured equipment. She glanced between the viewscreen and her readouts, making adjustments as needed to ensure none of the crew kissed the ceiling when they hit a pocket of unavoidable distortion.

The runabout shuddered again beneath them. T’Luz compensated, easing them through the worst of it until the shaking gradually diminished as they reached the outer atmosphere. Her eyes immediately swept the instruments, looking for an explanation for the sudden change.

Max didn't need to be told twice to strap in to his seat and along with the others watched as they got closer and closer to what looked like a big rock in space. He activated his own scans. "If it wasn't for the fact its exhibiting what looks to be a very molten core I wouldn't believe it was a planet. It looks like it could be a huge asteroid," he said. "Starfleet would likely love to mine the Dilithium. How strange to find a planet with some much so close to something like that," he indicated the blackhole.

"Ahhh I think someone else got there first look," the dark haired Italian continued magnifying the image as T'Luz flew them in closer. "It looks like a port. Big enough for ships to dock. I see no life signs. Anyone else?"

Vi had already turned her attention from the planet itself to the structure Max had enlarged. The closer they came, the less it looked like a simple port. There were too many berths, too much machinery built around them, and several sections disappeared beneath the rock as though most of the facility had been cut directly into the planet.

“No life signs,” she confirmed after another sweep. “But it isn’t dead.”

Her fingers moved across the tactical display, separating the power returns from the interference around them. “There’s power throughout the complex. Docking systems, internal systems, what looks like maintenance infrastructure…” Vi studied the enlarged image for another second. “I think we’re looking at a shipyard.”

That bothered her considerably more than an abandoned mining post would have.

She widened the scan around the visible docking areas, searching for anything that resembled defensive emplacements or vessels tucked into the bays. “I’m not seeing anything openly armed yet, but I’d assume the place can defend itself until we prove otherwise. Whoever built this had ships, a lot of power, and apparently no difficulty operating next door to a black hole.”

Max nodded. "Open a channel to Genesis. I know there will likely be a time delay to them receiving it but if they have impulse engines back and wanted too they could dock down there and carry out repairs."

Luke tapped a few commands into his console, calling up the communications array and engaging a subspace link to Genesis. "Channel open sir".

"Vero to Steyn. Sir its not just one planet but three out here. One has what looks like a deep underground mining facility and a proper ship yard. Repairs could likely be made there sir. No life signs but the lights they are on." He signed off the message.

“Understood, Commander,” came the reply, the shrill wail of the red-alert klaxon audible in the background.

“We have something of a situation here. Expect further contact shortly.” there was a pause in the captains words, nothing but the red alert klaxon could be heard. “If you don't hear from me again, assume the worst. You'll be on your own, Commander.”

The channel closed.

“ Santo cielo,” Max stated not happy too hear that. “Okay well let’s not assume the worst. I have more faith in our engineering department than that. Run every possible scan on this “mining rock”. Can we beam down or land near the mining equipment to take a look? Is there any atmosphere or shall we break out the EV suits?”

"A red alert aboard the Genesis and a captain blithely inviting catastrophe," Reruk muttered, his tone dripping with characteristic cynicism and sharp irritation. He stepped up beside Max’s console, tapping his own diagnostic pad to pull up atmospheric telemetry on the rocky, molten-cored body below, "To answer your query, Commander: atmospheric sensors indicate a thin, highly pressurized exosphere saturated with heavy particulate matter and corrosive trace gases. You wouldn't survive five minutes in a standard uniform. EV suits are mandatory if we intend to breach that subterranean facility."

He glared at the automated shipyard architecture glowing across the viewscreen. "Furthermore, this facility is entirely automated. Interfacing with its power grid or docking infrastructure without isolating its localized chroniton dampeners could trigger a feedback loop. Proceed with your EV preparations, Commander, but don't expect the local machinery to welcome us with open arms."

T'Chiara has merely listened, besides watching the planets from the forward window. "Should we not synchronise our systems?" She asked, the engineering involved well beyond her level of understanding.

Vi looked across at T’Chiara. “I wouldn’t synchronise with it. Not yet.”

Her attention returned to the facility, following the steady power signatures buried beneath the rock. “Where I come from, you listen to a system before you let it speak into yours. Something this sophisticated won’t just accept information. It’ll respond to it, interpret it, possibly decide what we are from it.” Her fingers moved across the tactical display, isolating the shipyard’s emissions from the interference around them. “Until we understand how it thinks, I don’t want it learning the runabout’s command protocols, navigation architecture or power configuration simply because we opened the door.”

The absence of life signs bothered her less the longer she looked at the readings. Whatever had built this place had engineered machinery capable of surviving conditions that should have destroyed it long ago. The facility still had power, still maintained itself, and apparently still knew how to keep a shipyard functional beneath a corrosive atmosphere beside a black hole.

“We’re assuming nobody’s here because we can’t find anything biological enough to satisfy the sensors.” Vi glanced towards Max. “I’m not willing to make the same assumption about intelligence. This could be automation. It could be something else entirely. Either way, it’s been looking after itself rather well without us.”

She pushed herself out of the co-pilot’s seat and headed towards the equipment lockers. “So we watch first. Scan it, map whatever signals we can, see what answers when we get closer. But no docking link, no shared power, no system synchronisation until we know what we’re actually connecting to.”

Vi opened the first locker and began pulling the EV suits forward, checking seals and life-support packs as she went. “If we’re going down there, I want everybody’s suit checked before we leave the runabout. Seals, comms, oxygen, emergency patches. And nobody connects their tricorder directly to anything they find without clearing it first.”

She glanced back towards the facility on the display.

“Whatever built that place knew considerably more than we do about surviving here. I think we should have enough respect for that to be careful.”

"T'Luz take us down as close to that ship yard as possible and everyone get suited up," Max ordered.

TO BE CONTINUED...

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