15 hours earlier, L'ak and Moll met with a trader to acquire an item, upon which they killed the man. Moll would later attach this device to Adira's uniform while on Trill. In the meantime the Discovery has arrived at the coordinates provided by Jinaal, but the crew doesn't find anything of note. While Burnham is talking to Rayner in her ready room, there are fluctuations aboard the ship, upon which they try in vain to beam to the bridge. The two suddenly find themselves in the past, during the Discovery's travel to the 32nd century through the wormhole. Then the phenomenon occurs again and takes them to the time when the ship was still under construction. The next leap leads to the battle against Control. Rayner concludes that Moll and L'ak use a Krenim-made chronophage, informally known as a "time bug" as a weapon against them. Left over from the Temporal Wars, it is designed to cycle the ship and crew through time. He and Burnham may be the only ones aboard aware of the phenomenon because they were in the transporter beam when the first leap happened. But Burnham thinks Stamets should know about it too because he lives outside space-time thanks to his tardigrade DNA. When they arrive in a future and everyone is dead after the Progenitor tech has fallen into the hands of the Breen, Zora recognizes a pattern that all destinations are located on a cone in space-time. At some point in the past, they meet with Stamets, but they run out of time. When they attempt to disable the time bug with a device that Stamets built according to Burnham's specifications after another leap to the future, it turns out that the bug possesses temporal shielding, inside which everything ages extremely fast. Back at a time when Michael Burnham just arrived on the ship as a prisoner, the three decide to go to maximum warp and then break the warp bubble to counteract the effects of the temporal shield. After getting into a fight with her past self, Burnham arrives on the bridge and convinces her crewmates that she really is Michael Burnham from the future. But past Burnham and Rhys enter engineering with their phasers drawn before Stamets and Rayner can destroy the bug. Rayner talks to them and finally gets them to lower their weapons. By disabling the bug, everything that happened in the past gets erased from the timeline. The Discovery is now in the present again. However, six hours have passed and Moll and L'ak are in the lead now...

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