In this series, we’ve explored the events of the Star Trek Universe between the years 2379 and 2399 as depicted in Star Trek: Online as well as the Star Trek novel continuity, commonly called the lit-verse.
Recently, a trilogy of novels called Star Trek: Coda was released, written by the incomparable Dayton Ward, James Swallow, and David Mack, which aimed to bring the twenty-year novel continuity to a close to tell stories that align with recently-established canon as seen in Star Trek: Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy.
Today, I’ll talk about the tumultuous events of that trilogy and how they end the novel continuity in a way that celebrates the franchise itself and honours the work of the many authors who have made contributions while making a connection to the “NEW” canon.
As you might expect there WILL be spoilers, so DO NOT proceed reading this piece unless you’ve read the Coda trilogy or you don’t mind it being thoroughly and completely spoiled.
Last warning! Here there be SPOILERS!!
Still with me? Alright, then let’s fly!
The events of the trilogy begin in 2387, with a man walking in ruin on a desolate world toward a familiar stone archway. Wesley Crusher, imbued with the knowledge and abilities of a Traveler, has arrived here ahead of an unknown enemy whom he has been fighting for seemingly centuries.
He tries to commune with the Guardian of Forever at the centre of the ruin, but after a cryptic response even he has trouble deciphering, the Guardian is assaulted by a wave of time. Wesley’s next thought: Mom.
Dr Beverly Crusher awakes in sickbay aboard the Starship Enterprise, having collapsed while having what could only be described as a vision of her elder son, Wesley. She ensures her comrades that she’s fine, just disoriented from her experience.
Enterprise is headed to Starbase 11 and Beverly is looking forward to showing its pristine beaches to her younger son, Rene while enjoying leave with her husband, Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
The trip to Starbase 11 comes at a time of change for the crew of the Enterprise. First officer Commander Worf has been offered command of the USS Prometheus, and Picard couldn’t be prouder of his Klingon friend and comrade.
Longtime chief engineer Geordi La Forge is also contemplating a change of scenery, namely the reddish landscape of Mars at Utopia Planitia Shipyard designing new exploratory starships, as well as potential marriage to Dr Tamala Harstad.
Attack On The Guardian
Meanwhile, Wesley tries in vain to stop the attack on the Guardian but fails, as four large, serpentine creatures emerge, followed by a humanoid in flowing black robes. To stop any further incursion, the Guardian destroys itself, declaring “I am my beginning. I am my ending.” Wesley manages to destroy one of the serpents with his Traveler powers, but the rest along with their humanoid handler disappear as the planet destroys itself with temporal distortions. Wes starts reaching out his senses to track them but is met with visions of annihilation, of everything in the universe dying.
Wesley is not the only person plagued with visions. Worf has found sleep hard to come by as his dreams are haunted by memories he shouldn’t have, battles he never fought in places he left long ago, like the corridors of the Enterprise-D.
Even a raucous fight on the holodeck does little to calm his nerves. Aboard the USS Titan, light years away, Admiral William Riker is having similar visions of events he remembers differently, so real they’re nearly indistinguishable from reality.
Specifically, he remembers being captain of the Enterprise-D and catastrophically losing everything, his crew, his family, all in the blink of an eye. The realness of the visions begins to traumatize Riker.
In the 29th century, the timeship USS Relativity is exploring a known temporal anomaly in the Typhon Expanse which has recently begun acting erratically, counter to an activity known to Starfleet via continuum scans.
Captain Juel Ducane soon after receives a distress call from the USS Tempus, operating in the same location but slightly in the future; Relativity tries to receive the Tempus crew via temporal transporters but all 218 beacons are lost. Ducane sets his ship to jump to those temporal and spatial coordinates and finds the Typhon anomaly fully active centuries earlier than it should and emitting waves of temporal distortion.
Several other time ships arrive in response to the anomaly, which has begun bending time and forming new branch timelines in increasingly large numbers. Then, serpentine creatures emerge from the anomaly, large enough to damage a starship, and begin attacking, the waves of chroniton distortion they emanate causing matter to age millennia instantly and severely damaging shields and hulls.
In a short time, all the time ships are destroyed with all hands.
Minutes earlier, Wesley appears aboard the Relativity and tries to steer the ship into the anomaly while using the Omnichron, a tricorder-like device of his design, to activate its self-destruct. He also tests a temporal disruptor rifle on one of the eerie humanoids invading the ship.
But the trip was a trap by his enigmatic enemy, and he shifts himself through time and space seconds before the ship explodes, collapsing the anomaly.
Planet Yko
On a beach on the planet Yko, the location of Starbase 11, the Picard family enjoys their leave, but the joy is cut short when a portal opens above the beach and an elderly man clutches a small rectangular piece of metal soft-lands.
Beverly immediately identifies the man as Wesley, significantly older than the last time he was seen, and beams him to Enterprise’s sickbay. Severely injured and constantly shifting in and out of phase, Wesley manages to breathe a warning to Picard and his mother about running out of time then dies on the biobed.
In an alternate universe’s version of the year 2373, Captain William Riker of the Enterprise-D leads his ship into battle with the Borg in Earth orbit. Using plans for a transphasic torpedo given by an alternate version of his long-lost captain, Enterprise destroys the attacking cube and tracks an escaping sphere as it enters a temporal vortex.
Emerging from the vortex, however, are several serpentine creatures that attack the weakened Enterprise and bore into its hull. Security teams led by Worf and Christine Vale engage the creatures to no avail, their attacks rapidly ageing their victims into oblivion while others are wracked with panic and fear.
Riker orders the firing of transphasic torpedoes into the rapidly enlarging vortex, but the intruders breach the main engineering and trigger a warp core breach which destroys the ship seconds after the torpedoes fire.
Wesley Crusher appeared on the bridge of the Enterprise-D moments before its destruction, witnessing the futility of the torpedo attack. Arriving there gave him an idea of where to go next, and he shifted there as the Enterprise-D was destroyed by waves of temporal distortion which soon destroyed Earth, Luna, the entire Sol system, and that entire reality.
Waking in his stateroom on the USS Titan, Admiral Riker describes the vivid dream to his wife, Deanna Troi, who recommends he see Titan’s Pakwa-Thanh Chief Medical Officer, Dr Ree.
Aboard The Enterprise-E
Aboard the Enterprise-E, Picard and his staff try to make sense of the sudden arrival and death of a four-hundred-year-old Wesley Crusher. His body had a quantum signature that was in flux, explained by repeated contact with other quantum realities as well as exposure to temporal weapons.
The rectangular device in Wes’ hand when he died suddenly activates under examination by Assistant Chief Engineer Lt. Commander Taurik and floats into Picard’s hands. Following this, a rush of air and a white light precede the arrival of someone familiar: Wesley Crusher.
The new arrival, much younger than his doppelganger on an examination table, doesn’t recognize the device itself, but can’t shake a feeling of familiarity. On closer examination, the device has recorded decades worth of information, all collected (or will be) by Wesley. The device seems to have been a beacon for Wes to come to this particular time and reality, and he identifies it as the Omnichron.
It then begins displaying information as a vision for Picard and Wesley, showing them the destruction of the Guardian, the loss of the alternate Enterprise-D (which Picard had encountered via a quantum event in the Odyssean Pass a year earlier, see Dayton Ward’s Available Light), and the collapse of the 29th century in the Typhon Expanse.
Events Wes had tried and failed to prevent several times. Then, the Omnichron showed representations of multiple timelines, all collapsing and ending in desolation and ruin, and Wesley realizes he was trying in vain to save time itself.
Wes recounts further attempts at salvation that failed, including an encounter between the Starship Voyager and a micro wormhole that let them communicate with a Romulan ship in their subjective past which ended when things came out of the wormhole and destroyed both ships.
Entire realities are being destroyed by some unknown assailant, and Wes has been struggling to discover who. He indicates the Omnichron has more information, but accessing it will take some time, so he came to the Enterprise to get help from the only people he knew could provide it.
Working with Picard, La Forge, and his mother, Wesley activates the Omnichron again on the holodeck and the group are transported into a simulation of a desolate world, the same one upon which the earlier information was shown to Picard and him.
Studying the temporal distortions more closely, they detect traces of vitriolic energy, which means the enemy can be only one force: the Devidians, energy beings the crew had encountered decades earlier attempting to harvest neural energy from Earth’s distant past. They have discovered a method of harvesting the neural energy of entire timelines as they collapse.
Picard makes a report of this new threat to Starfleet Command, including Admiral Riker as well as Mejo Ranjea, a Deltan senior agent of the Department of Temporal Investigations. Wesley also describes the beings he’d encountered emerging from temporal anomalies, referring to the humanoids as Avatars as they appear to be remotely controlled and the serpentine creatures under their control as Nagas.
DTI had kept watch on the Devidians since Enterprise’s initial encounter but had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Picard offers to go to the Devidian system and Ranjea agrees.
Aventine Investigates
Meanwhile, the Starship Aventine investigates an unknown anomaly that cut off communications to a Cardassian station. The station contained an artefact called the Axis of Time which enabled communication and interaction with multiple times and timelines, and the anomaly seems to be affected by it.
Soon after, the station is disintegrated by waves of temporal distortion, ageing centuries in seconds, and eight Nagas emerge from the anomaly to attack the Aventine and the artefact, destroying the latter in a blast of energy. Afterwards, a signal was detected from the now-dissolved anomaly leading to the Devidian system.
Enterprise arrives at Devidia II and finds no life signs and no chroniton or triolic energy traces, but does detect a new structure. An away team beams down to investigate and, thanks to Wesley’s Omnichron, several can time shift to a point where this area was fully intact and active, where they encounter an Avatar and several Nagas.
Wesley quickly shifts them to their own time, but too late: the Nagas appear and attack. Enterprise struggles to beam the team up, but several crew members are aged to death before returning to the ship, the Nagas nowhere to be found. Soon after, another distortion forms and the Nagas attack, breaching the Enterprise’s hull.
Wesley realizes that the Devidians are tracking him for some reason, trying to capture him for some purpose yet unknown. The Nagas ravage the Enterprise, causing significant damage and killing multiple crew members; a glancing blow from a Naga causes young Rene Picard to age fourteen years in an instant.
Transphasic torpedoes target and destroy the structure on the surface, which stops the distortions and forces the Nagas into retreat. Wesley was able to subdue an intruding Avatar before the distortions ended.
Memorial Service & Shocking Death
During a memorial service for the lives lost, the USS Aventine arrives with Mejo Ranjea aboard. Using the engineering expertise of La Forge, Wesley’s knowledge of the Avatars, and some temporal trickery from DTI, the Avatar is beamed from a pattern buffer into a containment unit for interrogation.
It explains that it is a vessel for a Devidian, that they and the Nagas exist to remove threats that can travel time and space, in particularly advanced races such as the Metrons, Organians, and Q, none of whom Wesley had been able to contact in any of his future explorations. They especially had an interest in the Travelers.
The gathered Starfleet officers and DTI agents realize that the attacks of the Devidians hadn’t had any effect on the present timeline because they had only just begun attacking there; countless other timelines had already been wiped out to feed the Devidians’ insatiable hunger for the neural energy of the dying. They’d been testing their methods on more unstable branch realities and now had the confidence to attack the main one. Wesley then divines the origin of his Omnichron: a version of himself made and recorded its information in the distant future, and that was where our heroes needed to go.
Several Enterprise crew members, including Picard, La Forge, and Wesley, transfer to the Aventine where its quantum slipstream drive has been modified for a trip into the distant future. Following a bumpy ride, Aventine arrived at its destination, 728 light-years from Devidia II and over four thousand years into the future.
No Federation beacons were present here, nor were any from any other power. The destination system’s fifth planet was host to a massive energy distortion, and upon further examination, the otherwise M-class world had one massive structure at the centre of the distortions.
Arriving at the structure via shuttlecraft, the away team led by Picard closed on it, a familiar-looking terraced mountain from the images shown by the Omnichron. The structure was filled with crystalline lattices and emanated a strange vibration as if it were focusing time itself.
Multiple streams of energy laced with triolic waves flowed into it, each with a different quantum signature, and theoretically, this was one hub of many throughout the multiverse. The away team and the Aventine soon find themselves under attack by Nagas and Avatars. While Wesley gathers as much information as possible with the Omnichron, a valiant fight is put up on both fronts, and many faces old and new are aged to ashes, including Agent Ranjea.
Nagas breach the Aventine as the away team is beamed up; one enters the bridge and is killed, but not before touching Captain Ezri Dax, destroying her and the ancient Dax symbiont in an instant. Aventine shortly after activates its slipstream drive and returns to the subjective present.
Another memorial service is held, this time in Aventine’s shuttlebay, and Picard reflects on the similarities in his ascension to the centre seat to those of Ezri Dax and her successor, Samaritan Bowers. Following the solemn ceremony, a briefing is held in which Wesley and La Forge try to explain the information they’d gleaned from their time in the far future.
Essentially, the Devidians, a dying race, had found a method of channelling neural energy from collapsing timelines throughout the multiverse to an unknown location in spacetime, using that to feed their growing multitudes. They started by harvesting unstable branch timelines, but as they gain more and more energy they also gain the capability to strike more stable timelines, like the subjective present.
In time, they can strike the primary timeline from which all others originated, and that strike could come in a matter of weeks. Picard sets course for Earth and requests Admiral Riker’s presence as well. This was a crisis that needed to be addressed as soon as possible; there was no time.
This instalment of EBC focused primarily on the events of Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward. Our next instalment will cover the second book, The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow. If you think these events are incredible, just wait!
Read The Novels That Cover These Events…
- Moments Asunder: Star Trek: Coda: Book 1
- The Ashes of Tomorrow: Star Trek: Coda: Book 2
- Oblivion’s Gate: Star Trek: Coda: Book 3
Read The Complete Beta Canon Series
- EXPLORING BETA CANON – STAR TREK UNIVERSE POST NEMESIS – PT1
- EXPLORING BETA CANON – STAR TREK UNIVERSE POST NEMESIS – PT2
- EXPLORING BETA CANON – STAR TREK UNIVERSE POST NEMESIS – PT3
- EXPLORING BETA CANON – STAR TREK UNIVERSE POST NEMESIS – PT4
- EXPLORING BETA CANON – STAR TREK UNIVERSE POST NEMESIS – PT5
- EXPLORING BETA CANON – STAR TREK UNIVERSE POST NEMESIS – PT6
- EXPLORING BETA CANON – STAR TREK UNIVERSE POST NEMESIS – PT7
