There's no Coffee in the Nebula

There's no Coffee in the Nebula is the twelfth episode of the third season and is the halfway mark of both the season and the series, as planned.

Tagline
After tracking a sneaky sensor blip for three days, the crew of the ship loses patience, especially since they were flying into a zone of Grust 7 subspace turbulence. They wonder what they lost track of and they are investigating into the matter.

Act One
Putal loses patience over a sneaky sensor blip that seemed to elude the ship for several days. They have detected traces of coffee from the blip while Otto Mann comments about piloting a ship being much cooler than driving a school bus. Taev then commented that he also was an enlisted back in the day. Relm got weighed again and she weighed 840 kg this time around. Upon arriving at the last known location of the blip, they see a tornado-like subspace anomaly, promprting the declaration of red alert. They also detect a, yet they found no Talarian onboard.

Act Two
After ordered battle stations, the ship engages the enemy freighter and it fired merculite rockets, being destroyed in the nebula. The ship has its impulse drive suddenly taken offline and Vaebn Mairex gets to work to reactivate them. Otto complained that he couldn't do what he wanted with the Bouteina's controls, while the enemy impulse engines were being targeted. After the enemy X-ray laser weapons were fired, the enemy shields were penetrated and the impulse engines are taken offline once again. Once the Talarian freighter was disabled, the transporter crews stand by to beam in coffee.

Act Three
After salvaging the coffee from the pirate freighter, they proceed to destroy the enemy ship. However, this was just the beginning. Brianna Reiss, in an attempt to ease the stress on the crew, allowed everyone to drink as much coffee as they needed. Taev ordered Zama to take the conn, but he wouldn't, claiming that he had llhrei'sian, forcing Brianna to take it instead. They go to the heart of the matter, discovering a high concentration of ions. As they flew away from the tornado, the ship did not have its engines stopped this time. Later in their investigation of the phenomenon, they readied a probe.

Act Four
Once the probe was ready for launch, Vox'ula aims the probe at the center of the phenomenon. The turbulence was not enough to cause llhrei'sian either, though. As the probe was activated, it detected nadions and even chronitons. The ship about-faced, giving its occupants llhrei'sian when the ship came closer from the center of the phenomenon. They suspect that the thing is a place of collision between normal space and subspace. The close ranges have even broken the ship's vocoder. Otto is dispatched to investigate the subspace phenomenon as it thinned out, but his shuttle's engines did not even start.

Act Five
Vaebn tries a last-ditch solution to restart the ship's engines: purging the EPS conduits leading to the warp coils. They finally identified the phenomenon as a subspace ghost, with Brianna and Taev telling them of their times as cadets and how they met them in the field of battle. The former flies the ship at one-third impulse to get them away from the ghost while the EMH is activated and go for another holodeck session. In the meantime, Annika tests the World of Warcraft component that could interact with holographic players without them hacking the servers. This time around, this safety net worked.

Background
The title of this episode is inspired from a famous coffee-related quote attributed to Kathryn Janeway, in. Also, the quote in question was used in three different ways during the episode.

Memorable quotes
"There's coffee in the nebula!"

- Taev Radaik

"Still convinced that there's coffee in the nebula?"

- Putal

"Dhiemm, there's no coffee in the nebula."

- Taev Radaik