|
When the U.S.S. Voyager picks up a
distress call, Janeway finds escape pods contaminated with
radiation. Two survivors, Fesek and Pelk, are beamed to sickbay
as the crew discovers the source of the radiation is a disabled
Malon freighter. During a mission to export their toxic waste, a
leak forced them to evacuate. Fesek explains that when the ship
explodes, the waste will ignite and destroy everything within
three light-years. Before Voyager can travel to a safe distance,
its warp drive collapses. Now, the crew must board the Malon
ship and disable it.
With only six hours to go
before the storage tanks explode, Fesek, Pelk, Chakotay, Torres
and Neelix beam to the freighter. They plan to start in the
least affected chamber and clear a path to the control room by
opening airlocks and decompressing the ship. An inoculation
created by the Doctor affords them a few hours of protection
from the radiation. While checking on a jammed airlock, Pelk is
attacked by a creature superstitiously believed to be created by
radiogenic waste.
Pelk tries to convince the team that the creature exists, but
they think he is hallucinating. When he dies, Pelk is beamed to
sickbay to determine his cause of death. Meanwhile, Janeway
prepares a contingency plan based on a nearby star. She
concludes the corona would absorb the radiation from the blast
if the freighter could be nudged close enough to it. On the
freighter, as the team races through the decks to the control
room, an airlock opens and creates a sudden vacuum. Everyone
escapes but Chakotay, who is struck by flying debris and beamed
to sickbay.
As Torres works to reinitialize the power matrix in the control
room, the Doctor finds tissue samples on Pelk that suggest a
being is aboard the freighter that has adapted to the radiation.
From Astrometrics, Seven of Nine scans for a lifeform blended in
with the ambient toxins on the ship, and the creature is then
revealed. Suddenly, it closes in on the team in the control room
as gas envelops everything. Neelix and Fesek are attacked, but
Torres keeps the creature at bay and realizes it is a Malon core
laborer.
The laborer insists sabotaging the ship is the only way to make
the Malon understand how horrifying the radiation poisoning is
to the men who sacrifice their lives working on the core. As
Voyager emits a series of tractor pulses to steer the freighter
into the star, the laborer uses maneuvering thrusters to disrupt
its course. Torres tries to reason with him, but ultimately she
has to resort to violence to stop him. At the last second,
Torres, Neelix and Fesek are beamed to Voyager before the
freighter explodes into the star's atmosphere. |
