Red angel suit

The red angel suit was the centerpiece of Section 31's Daedalus Project and basis of the mythological figure of the Red Angel.

The Daedalus Project suit began as a time travel program set up by Section 31 in the 2230s out of concern of a temporal arms race with the Klingons. Developed by Mike and Gabrielle Burnham, the suit was capable of allowing a single pilot to travel through time via micro-wormholes with the assistance of a time crystal. Since wormholes were inherently unstable, the suit needed to hold them open in order to get home again, which was believed to be achieved by the suit generating a membrane. The membrane was a protective layer that traveled with the operator, with one end remaining attached to their starting point in the future. The suit left in its wake an anomaly that generated tachyon radiation. (DIS: "Saints of Imperfection", "The Red Angel")

Time crystals proved hard to procure, but a young Section 31 operative named Leland learned that one such crystal was being sold on the black market near an Orion outpost and managed to steal it. The time crystal was brought to Doctari Alpha, where a scheduled nearby supernova would provide the energy for a test. With the suit on the verge of being tested, the Klingons attacked the outpost after tracking the crystal. The Burnhams, stationed on the outpost by Leland, were believed killed in the attack, which was later described as a Klingon terror raid. (DIS: "The Red Angel")

In reality, Gabrielle Burnham had managed to use the suit to escape to 950 years in the future. There, she found that there were no signs of life anywhere, antimatter detonations across the galaxy indicated that Control had wiped everything out. Gabrielle also found that she was able to travel in time but remained anchored in this era, so that no matter how many times she went back in time, she would always be pulled back to her relative future. (DIS: "The Red Angel", "Perpetual Infinity")

Gabrielle started to work to avert this future, focusing on trying to stop Control from acquiring data on artificial intelligence collected by the Sphere. However, she kept failing. Among the changes she made to her past were putting Discovery in contact with the Sphere in the hope that it would receive the data and keep it safe. Section 31 believed the suit was lost until 2257, when they learned that the entity known as the Red Angel was apparently using the suit, which was confirmed when the "Red Angel" was revealed to be Gabrielle Burnham. (DIS: "Project Daedalus", "The Red Angel", "Perpetual Infinity")

The original suit was ultimately lost when both it and Gabrielle were pulled back into the future separately. (DIS: "Perpetual Infinity")

A second version of the suit was created by the crew of the USS Discovery in 2258, as part of a plan to prevent Control from gaining access to the data it required to become fully sentient. The suit was worn by Michael Burnham, who used it to open a temporal rift to allow Discovery passage into the future, where Control could not reach it. (DIS: "Such Sweet Sorrow", "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2")

After arriving in the future, Burnham ordered the suit to send the seventh signal to Spock and then to self-destruct. (DIS: "That Hope Is You, Part 1")

Apocrypha[]

In the video game Star Trek: Prodigy - Supernova, Captain Chakotay had the suit's wings and chest piece in his ready room aboard the USS Protostar.

External link[]

Red angel suit at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works