Unexpecting
A few days into the USS Pathfinder's shakedown cruise, the crew discovers a mysterious ocean world that has a rather peculiar effect on some of the female members of the crew.
2400.07.05 - 2400.07.06
A few days after the new Vesta-class explorer USS Pathfinder departed on her shakedown cruise, the ship arrived in orbit of a mysterious ocean world, named Oralius' Tibia by the crew. Sensors were unable penetrate the world's oceans below a certain depth, and plans were made to send down an away team to one of the island chains the next day.
Several female crew members were unable to wait that long, and took the captain's yacht down to the planet. When their unauthorized beach trip was discovered, the women on the planet found out that some of them were suddenly pregnant, with the pregnancies progressing much faster than natural. It was also discovered that those affected were unable to break contact with the planet's surface without suffering, and a medical team was sent down to investigate.
A day of medical examinations and some hormone-induced panicking later, alien entities calling themselves Ambassadors contacted the stranded women and also the crew on the ship. The Oralians had just wanted to communicate with the crew, as they had never interacted with any of the species they had observed from afar, but the Oralian Ambassadors realized that the pregnancies were the result of their attempts to 'interface' with the members of the crew.
Due to the accelerated nature of the pregnancies, it wasn't long before the affected women went into labour. The 'blobs' that were born quickly disintegrated and seeped into the soil, something that seemed to supply the Oralians with more data, and from this they learned that the Oralians were in fact a singular being that needed to 'become one'.
The alien entity was unable to explain what this process entailed, but once it started, the planet started to shrink and the Starfleet crew on the surface had to scramble to get back to the shuttles and into orbit. The planet continued to shrink rapidly and when the shuttles had barely made it back aboard the Pathfinder, the ship was unable to escape the gravity well of the collapsing planet.