6 months later: Michael Burnham is on a prisoner transport when spacebourne creatures drain the shuttle of its energy. The shuttle is rescued by the USS Discovery where the prisoners are given a cold welcome. Saru is also aboard the Discovery, as the ship's first officer. Burnham is called to the ready room where Captain Lorca enlists her help for his ship's mysterious mission, at least until the transport can continue its journey. She shares quarters with young Cadet Sylvia Tilly and witnesses strange occurrences during a so-called "black alert" that Tilly is not authorized to talk about. In engineering, Burnham gets tasked by Lieutenant Stamets with some number crunching, still without learning anything about the project. She decides to break into Stamets's top secret lab where she discovers a huge room full of plants and spores. Captain Lorca informs the engineering team that the whole crew of the Discovery's sister ship, the Glenn, including Stamets's colleague Straal, were lost. Burnham is ordered to join the team to explore the Glenn, which is now adrift in space. They discover that not only the crew but also a Klingon boarding party has been killed in a gruesome fashion by some creature. Thanks to Burnham distracting the creature, the survivors of the Discovery boarding party can escape. Captain Lorca wants Burnham to stay aboard. He tells her that the experiment with the spores is not about the development of a weapon but of a new propulsion system. Burnham eventually agrees, and the prisoner transport leaves without her. Lorca, however, still hides something - dead and living creatures in a room like a cabinet of horrors.

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