January Plot Summary for the USS Tiger

While the Tiger crew were enjoying themselves at a New Year’s Eve party Deep Space 17 was rocked by an unexplained shock wave that caused chaos throughout the station by taking the reactors for main power offline and wrecking havoc with the gravity control systems.
Engineering crews worked on getting the station up and running and the rest of the crew began investigating a mysterious void in space near the Eratis star. A trio of runabouts was sent to conduct an up-close investigation of the void. During their approach, two of the runabouts were destroyed by an unknown craft.
LtCmdrs. West and Blair, and Ensign Sam Braddock were kidnapped and then replaced by Commonwealth spies. In addition, the Queen of the Erati appeared on the station requesting help against an unknown force threatening the region.
Science officers began working on ways to load science probes with micro warp cores to investigate the rift. And the crew is starting to expect something odd is going on with the trio of officer replacements.
The Commonwealth has launched ships through the rift in an effort to set up pods to pull power from the star and construct a transwarp gateway.
Meanwhile the spies have found out the USS Tiger-A is still in dry dock awaiting the Slipstream drive to be installed. The Commonwealth has decided to make stealing the slipstream drive a priority as it will make building gateways needless.