At the end of October 2002 Pandora Station’s first mission ended and we said goodbye to the USS Odyssey (yay, finally! 
). Now it was time for Pandora’s first solo mission.
This mission was titled “Sitol Strangers,” because it was about strange aliens (or alien strangers, alien aliens, strange strangers, whatever) in the Sitol system. The Sitol system is close to the Pandora system: it’s on the opposite side of Din’ghes nebula. There are two inhabited planets there: Sitol IV and Sitol V. Both species were prewarp, and nowhere close to developing warpdrive, so Starfleet wasn’t really interested in them. But why, I hear you ask, did Pandora’s crew visit the Sitol system then? The answer is really simple: one morning the science department on the station detected a weird energy reading on Sitol VI. Since both species in the system didn’t live on that planet (even if they had spacetravel, they would die because there’s no atmosphere there) and their technology level couldn’t explain it, Captain Janssens decided to do what Starfleet usually does in cases like this. Send a ship and investigate.
Send a ship? Pandora is a spacestation!
Yes, it is, but that was not a problem (still isn’t!).
Starfleet was smart enough to give Pandora a bunch of Delta Flyers and shuttles, so a Delta Flyer (the Phoenix) was prepared and an away team was sent away (otherwise it wouldn’t be an away team) to the Sitol system. The energy reading turned out to be a cloaked vessel. The crew of this ship were the strangers from the mission title, but they wouldn’t call themselves ‘strangers’ of course. They were called Kioshians.
They didn’t appear to have hostile intentions, but they didn’t like the presence of the away team very much (they were afraid Starfleet would interfere with their mission in our galaxy) so with a single thought the Delta Flyer and its crew were transported to an underground base on one of the moons in the system.
Meanwhile on Pandora Station, this ‘disappearance’ didn’t go unnoticed. What does Starfleet do in a case like this? They send a (bigger) ship to investigate.
Send a bigger ship? But Starfleet only gave Pandora a few flyers and shuttles.
Yes, they did, but the station also has a docking bay, and inside that docking bay was the USS Epimetheus, at that moment being retrofitted with a transwarp engine. The ship wasn’t really ready yet, but a normal warp test flight was soon to be done anyway, so Captain Janssens ordered the ship to be prepared for a mission. This turned into a ST3 Excelsior moment. The warp engine refused to work.
Uhoh. What now? The only ship available didn’t work!
Indeed, it didn’t work, but people who checked the specifications of the USS Epimetheus might remember that the Prometheus class features a multi-verctor assault mode. The saucer section has its own independent warp drive, and this one hadn’t been disassembled, modified and reassembled, so in theory it should still work. Apparently in theory wasn’t the only place where it worked, so the saucer went on its way to the Sitol system, taking the shortest route possible: straight through the Din’ghes nebula.
Until then, nobody knew about the miscroscopic lifeforms living inside the nebula that could infiltrate and disable a starship’s systems. It didn’t take long (well, actually, it did take some time, and it happened right after the event that’s described in the next paragraph) before it was discovered that there were microscopic lifeforms living inside the nebula that could infiltrate and disable a starship’s systems, because when they exited the nebula there was a power failure of some kind.
Weirdly enough, the alien ship decided to move the Epimetheus saucer into orbit around the 6th planet (just by thinking it) to assist with repairs. The alien leader moved himself and the away team to the Epimetheus to explain what happened.
At this point, the micro-organisms from the Din’ghes nebula were detected;t I already said they were discovered, but I really have to apologize for the random order in which I am telling you about this mission. I have to, but I won’t. I like being silly, and silliness is a nice way to make this blog entry look longer than it actually is, or will be, because at the moment it’s still being written. Well, at the moment for me, not for you, because at the moment for you, you’re reading this blog entry. You can only be reading it if I finished it, so I can’t be writing it anymore.
Right… Where were we? Oh right, the alien and away team were aboard the Epimetheus. The entire away team? No, two members of the away team had stayed behind on the alien ship: Lt. Naragona and Ens. Roberts. They found out that the power failure on the Epimetheus wasn’t the only thing the aliens had detected. Their sensors also showed a cloaked Bird of Prey heading towards the Sitol system. Ferengi Ewok and Frool were aboard that ship (which Ewok had probably bought instead of the Odyssey, during the Alc’Traz mission).
There was some shooting, and another problem: one of the aliens (Konmar, who used to be in command of the aliens’ mission to our galaxy) had kidnapped the two starfleet officers and the two Ferengi and threatened to kill them if the alien Selar (a scientist who had been the second in command, but who had to relieve Konmar from duty for reasons I can’t remember) didn’t return control of the ship to him. How this situation was resolved, I can’t remember either and the mission summary on the website ends rather abruptly.
So we’ll never know how Naragona and Roberts were freed (they were), how Konmar was defeated (he was), or how Lord Baldrick got captured again after escaping from the brig (on Pandora Station), killing at least one guard (assuming he was captured again).
The summary for Pandora’s next mission, ‘Vortagoma’, about a weird wormhole thing and some aliens that appeared out of it (like in the TV series ‘Sliders’, but different) is completely non-existing so next time I will not be able to write something about that. Instead there will be yet another apology or I will just move on to mission 4, ‘Remnants of the Past’, a very nice mission which introduced us to the USS Solstice, Ensign (now Commander) Jalando and Ensign (now Lt. Commander) Truesdale.
