The USS Pacific Palisades and the Archanis Detachment of the Corps of Engineers has deployed to Duraxis, a colony near the Klingon border in dire need of infrastructure modernization. When they arrive, they find the colonists skeptical of their motivations, and a leading political figure stokes the fires with claims that things were better before Starfleet arrived with its supposed aid. The Palisades‘ mission is further undermined as things start to go wrong. First, they struggle to meet schedules as equipment goes missing, and then a water purification plant malfunctions, making people sick. All of this pales in comparison to what happens next when the newly-installed fusion reactor loses containment. While the team manages to stop a catastrophic failure that would have flattened everything within a dozen kilometers of it, the colony is plunged into darkness and, afflicted by hysteria of what Starfleet will do wrong next, the colonists begin to riot.

While the USS Pacific Palisades struggle to manage mounting the populace, the Corps of Engineers then make an unsettling discovery: containment was lost, not because of a system failure, but because of highly advanced malware that bypassed their fleet-grade cybersecurity measures. Briefed on the matter by Commodore Agarwal, Fleet Admiral Reyes, along with a team from JAG and ASTRA, take the USS Diligent and head for Duraxis, looking to stabilize the crisis and get to the bottom of what is happening at the colony. As they dig, it becomes clear there’s more at play than some locally-inspired terrorism.