The Enterprise is at the Roemler Array for a radiation sweep intended to remove excess baryons. In preparation, the ship is completely evacuated, as the sweep is fatal to living tissue. However, when Picard flees a boring party to get his saddle from his quarters, he finds that the crew making last-minute preparations for the sweep are not what they appear to be, and in fact appear to be terrorists.

Subduing one of the terrorists, Picard attempts to leave the ship for the station on the nearby planet, but fails; ship's power is cut off just at the wrong time. He returns to his "victim" and attempts to find out what's going on, but to no avail. He does, however, overhear others trying to get in touch with the other man (apparently named DeVoor), and finds that they're meeting in Engineering. He heads for there himself, only to be caught. Meanwhile, at the party for the senior staff that Picard fled, their benign hosts suddenly turn violent, shooting both Geordi and Commander Hutchinson with a laser weapon and holding the others hostage.

In Engineering, a woman named Kelsey (apparently the hijackers' leader) is checking on everyone's progress when Picard is brought in. Picard identifies himself as Mot, the barber, and pleads ignorance when asked what he's still doing on board. Kelsey, annoyed, puts Sadler (one of her technical assistants) on guard duty while she works with Neal (another tech) on extracting the trilithium resin they're after from the engines. Planetside, Riker and company begin planning to use Geordi's VISOR as a weapon, rigging it to deliver a hypersonic pulse that will knock everyone but Data unconscious.

Back on the Enterprise, the hijackers manage to grab the resin. Picard, however, uses a hidden laser-bore to create a diversion. He then destroys the field diverter intended to protect the hijackers from the looming baryon sweep, and flees into a Jeffries tube, with Sadler in hot pursuit. Picard evades him for a while, then finds himself staring right at the advancing sweep...

Sadler arrives only moments later, but finds only "Mot's" jacket. He removes it to find the hole Picard cut into the next floor, but is caught by the sweep before he can react. As the four remaining hijackers figure out (thanks to Picard's insignia) that Picard is a Starfleet officer and plan their escape, Picard picks up a crossbow in Worf's quarters. He communicates with Kelsey, urging her not to move the highly toxic resin and insisting that he'd rather destroy the ship than let "terrorists" like her have the resin. She, nonchalant, gets a very jumpy Neal to finish extracting the resin and store it as safely as possible, and then both head out.

Picard coats his crossbow bolts with some kind of toxin, then begins cooking up something explosive while talking to Kelsey, who is now quite annoyed at having found one route to Ten-Forward cut off. Both talk of the ship coming to take Kelsey and her team off the Enterprise, with Picard expecting to be on it. Riker, meanwhile, creates a brief distraction to assist Bev's preparations by punching out one of his captors. While he is subdued, Bev finishes the final modifications.

Picard takes out one of the hijackers with his crossbow and reaches for the hijacker's weapon, only to be caught by Kiros, the same one who caught him before. She informs Kelsey of her catch and arranges to meet her. Kelsey, after getting some information about the resin storage from Neal, kills him and goes to meet Kiros and Picard. As the hostages planetside trigger the pulse and let Data take charge of the situation, Picard tells Kelsey his true identity and offers himself as a hostage instead of the resin. Kelsey, however, is not interested in political gain, merely commercial gain - and rejects Picard's offer out of hand.

In Ten-Forward, however, Kiros triggers Picard's final booby-trap, and an explosion separates all three from each other, from their weapons, and from the resin. Kelsey and Picard battle for both as the sweep enters Ten-Forward. She wins, beaming to her ship alone, but with the resin. Picard manages to contact Data at the last moment and stop the sweep, and observes that with the "control rod" he's holding separate from the resin, Kelsey's ship won't get far. The ship then explodes, and a heartsick Picard begins to take charge of the Enterprise again.

Highlight Listing:

"Starship Mine" - While the Enterprise is bombarded with lethal rays, Picard is trapped on board with a band of interstellar thieves.

Advertising Headline:

RACE AGAINST TIME! Trapped aboard the Enterprise, can Picard stop a band of thieves before a deadly force kills them all?

TV log listing:

Picard trapped on Enterprise in race against time/STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.

Technical design, graphic design, interactive features, HTML & CGI programming by Andrew Tong. || All materials Copyright © 1987-1995 by their respective authors. || Document created: January 28, 1995 || Last Modified: July 12, 1999