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Introduced into the Star Trek universe, a new space station with its creative design has left even the eminent engineer Geordi La Forge speechless. La Forge teams with Data and O'Brien in the most recent Star Trek Annual 2024 release to track Lore, Data's villainous brother. Their search leads them to some of the most famous sites in the galaxy, finally to a god-level space station La Forge finds breathtaking.
Written by Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly and illustrated by Rachael Stott, the Star Trek Annual 2024 comic tracks Data, La Forge, and O'Brien as they hunt Lore and the renegade Klingon scientist Korath. The three find Korath on a massive space station that, as Chief O'Brien notes, "docked right into the accretion disk of a black hole." The station generates subspace ripples by releasing several kinds of radiation.
Then this radiation points toward the black hole. La Forge battles to hide his envy; the station is evidence of remarkable engineering. Over his career, Geordi La Forge has seen many technical wonders; Star Trek Annual 2024 marks his (as well as Chief O'Brien's) participation in the vast story developing in IDW's Trek series. Ben Sisko assigns Data, Geordi's closest friend, to the Theseus to hunt down the Klingon Emperor Kahless. Declared war on the divine entities of the universe, Kahless and his destructive Red Path have La Forge had not been included into the narrative, but Data's choice to quit Starfleet in search of Lore has brought them back together.
Geordi's respect of Lore's space station is justified as it is an amazing technical achievement. This unidentified station was Korath's lab, where he thought he might achieve immortality. Actually, the station's design could seem to support such hubris. The station is docked inside an accretion disk, a flattened collection of stellar matter revolving a black hole, as O'Brien notes. Already an amazing feat is the station's not being pulled into the black hole. Still, the station also has the capacity to protect itself from the massive radiation output coming from the black hole.
Over its 58-year existence, the Star Trek universe has seen many space stations. Among these are Deep Space Nine and the massive space dock circling Earth. These stations all seem to be pale in relation to Lore and Korath's cosmic laboratory. Here, the pair has perfected technology able to change Lore's vision of reality, a frightening possibility. Geordi La Forge should be cautious even if he was right to be amazed given the size of the station and dangerous technology involved.