The Romulan commander, Ael, who went missing leads her officers to try to retake the bridge. She steals a shuttle and escapes to the Klingon ship (the Stardragon), which is almost crewless.
The Marines storm the Life Support compartment, downing all the Klingons within.
The Klingon ship starts moving away, gaining speed.
Peltier leads an away team onto the Romulan ship (the Sparrowhawk), which is deserted. Its torpedo tube is destroyed, but everything else appears to work. The Enterprise engines need time to power up, so Peltier chases Ael in her own ship!
The chase crew is Peltier, Hannah, Riva, Ramirez, Boone, Kaaj, Cpl. Hicks of the Marines, rookie navigator Surdu and Dr. Mitchell.
Ael heads for a particularly deep nebula. Kaaj groans -- she is headed for the place where she found the stasis boxes he stole from her. What she intends to do there, he doesn't know, but a lot more people are finding out about the secret treasure hoard.
Within the nebula, Ael bypasses several enormous spherical ships. They are powered down, but Hannah detects frozen life-forms aboard. The first one has humans, dogs, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, massive Irish deer, and shaggy bison -- a collection of Ice Age life forms.
The second one has humans, dogs, cattle, sheep, chickens, horses, houses, stone buildings, catapults, sailing ships and paving stones, as though sampled from the Roman Empire.
The third one has many machines as well as lightly irradiated humans, including a Court of Fact and drug-sniffing infantrymen. This is an exact parallel to the post-nuclear period of Earth history, before the invention of the warp drive.
But the fourth ship doesn't contain humans. It contains Romulans, from a period where they wore winged helmets and electronic shoulder-mantles, riding swooping sky-cycles and raising tall slender crystal spires.
The ship opens to Ael's code, the longitudinal segments peeling back like the slices of an orange. She takes the Klingon ship inside, with the Romulan ship following.
Riva goes over to the Romulan ship, with Hannah and Kaaj jumping along uninvited. In an epic Romulan karate battle, Riva stuns Ael. Ael is taken back to the Stardragon and restrained.
But then, a glowing cube shows up! It's about the size of a large shuttlecraft. It glows with radiation, then unleashes a crackling red spotlight beam. Riva uses the Klingon ship to block the beam, but then the Klingon ship sparkles and disappears! With no more barrier, the Romulan ship is also hit, and vanishes ....
Episode 6 begins with both ships appearing in a starless void. There is a huge round diamond in the distance, glowing with energy.
This is apparently a cosmos unlike our own, in which gravity is somewhat stronger. All the mass of this universe is concentrated in one place, a huge crystalline structure slowly drawing the Stardragon, the Sparrowhawk, and everything else into itself.
Because space here is completly free of gas and dust, the warp engines are much more efficient. Azunderkar devises a way to duplicate the beam that brought us here, but it has to be activated while travelling at Warp Ten. That's almost impossible in our universe, but here it's quite easy.
The damaged engines of the Stardragon are altered into a transwarp drive, with the Sparrowhawk providing motive power. The two alien ships are fitted together top to top, looking pretty strange, but the combination easily reaches Warp Ten and then pow! The sky turns dull red.
And they appear in another universe entirely, again!
Not our universe, alas. Here, there are blue galaxies made entirely of Population I stars, with very few heavy elements. There are no planets anywhere, just stars, and plenty of interstellar gas and dust. This would normally mean Warp Ten is impossible, but in this universe, inertia is greatly reduced. Standing up can accelerate you to Mach One! The ships can easily reach Warp Ten .. in fact, a small tap on the controls sends them to Warp 76, right out of the galaxy and into a neighboring galaxy in minutes!
Peltier tries to steer in one particular hyper-direction: "hyper" is the direction the red beam sent us, and "sub" is the opposite. He steers hyper-starboard and pow! The sky turns red.
And stays red. Now we're inside a red giant star, although the shields are holding the fire at bay for a while. This universe appears to have enhanced electrical attraction, so plasma tends to cohere together better than ours. There aren't ten billion suns here; there's One Big Sun.
This medium is very dense, so we can't reach Warp Ten. Will we be doomed to live out our lives in this flaming hell? Well, no, because the shields can't last forever and before long we'll burn up. But by piling on all the power we can, shutting off life support, sensors and everything, we can attain Warp Nine. Azunderkar cuts power to the shields, the plasma strikes the hull, but for an instant before the ship melts, we reach Warp Ten ... pow!
And the sky turns red, but darker red. So that's good.
Now we're in a universe of galaxies, stars, and planets! But the stars are all Population I stars and the planets are made of light elements, without heavy metals. One, in fact, is a sodium-vapor world, whose atmosphere is gaseous sodium and lithium. Far too hot for us, of course, but an astronomical oddity, because all the sodium-vapor worlds in our galaxy are studded with white salt-streaked craters. This one has no cratering.
No one beams down, of course. But a ship, made of metal, is detected drifting without power. It's a Tholian ship, distinct from its diamond-shaped design and solid-crystal internal structure. The central core of the ship is cold, but there are life forms in suspension.
Tholians need a temp of 800 degrees to function. So Ramirez carefully heats the ship with the Romulan phaser beams on minimum power. The crystal hull spreads heat evenly, so the ship gradually warms, but at 100 degrees it starts cycling the freezer units to thaw out the crew! If they are Tholians, they're going to freeze to death, and if they're anything else and we keep phasering the ship, they're going to burn!
And they are literally the only ones to talk to in this ENTIRE UNIVERSE ...
