Riker visits Captain Jean-Luc Picard in his ready room to report only to find Picard puzzling over Fermat's last theorem. ' We've got ourselves a little puzzle, Number One.'

Riker asks to be kept informed so that they might resume their mission in a timely fashion. These scans also reveal debris in orbit of the planet. Initial scans of the planet by Geordi La Forge show it to be quite inhospitable: nitrogen, methane, liquid neon, surface temperature −291 ° Celsius, and wind speeds up to 312 meters per second. The Enterprise has arrived to investigate.

This diversion was caused by a report from a Klingon cruiser regarding the discovery of a strange vessel in the atmosphere of the planet below. The USS Enterprise-D enters orbit of the eighth planet of a previously unmapped solar system, Theta 116.