[An away team made up of Colonel Jack O’Neill, Dr. Daniel Jackson, Rommie the Android/AI, and Dr. Rodney McKay are exploring a seemingly derelict freighter. On their way to check out an ebbing containment field, they encounter a sealed door. Rommie informs them the area beyond is exposed to space, but it’s the most direct route to their destination.]
The decision is made to unseal the hatch.
Rommie locks down the compartment, the hatch behind them sliding shut on the downed bot where it fell. “Hold on tight,”she advises. Everyone braces. Then, she unseals the door.
The air tears out of the section and takes everything loose with it. A couple of widgets whip past. McKay’s eyes go wide as a pocket wrench comes tomahawking straight at his head. He flinches, but – CLANG – Rommie’s forearm snaps up and knocks it off course, sending it spinning past them, out into the blackness of space.
The wind dies. The team steps through and stops. The grating ahead is torn away wall to wall, a ragged gap in the deck a good ten to twelve feet across, open to the stars below. Beyond it, intact floor runs to a sealed hatch. Silence.
Then Daniel: “So. A hop, skip, and a jump?
“More like a spring, jump, and a prayer,”counters McKay.
Rommie says McKay has it about right, prayers aside. The gravity on this deck is running a fraction of normal, so a hard run-up carries further than it would groundside, and there’s little pull to drag them down before they clear the gap. The leap isn’t the problem The landing is. The instant boots hit the grating on the far side, the mag locks fire and anchor them, before their own momentum can carry them into the bulkhead.
O’Neill calls the play: one of them makes the jump with a tether, anchors it on the other side, and the rest haul themselves over hand over hand. And since he’s team leader, he volunteers to go first.
Daniel notes that he is, with all due respect to Jack, younger and appreciably more spry. HE should be the one to go.
Rommie states the plain fact: she is the most capable of the three, and if she misses, vacuum won’t do to her what it would do to them. She says that she should be the one to go.
McKay concedes they all make pretty compelling arguments.
So who leads the way across?
CHOOSE!
PREVIOUSLY ON…
You and 19 others have been stranded in an amalgam universe of myriad SF realities. All 19 are sci-fi’s Best of the Best. And then there’s you, uniquely qualified given your encyclopedic knowledge garnered from your world where these characters, their technologies, and their stories are fiction, beloved TV shows you have watched time and again. Together, all 20 of you have set off on the Enterprise-D, tasked with finding a way home.
For your first mission, you’ve decided to investigate a seemingly derelict freighter broadcasting an emergency beacon. An away team and puddle jumper have been dispatched to the ghost ship, anomalous energy pulses making beaming and communications a challenge. After parking and cloaking the puddle jumper in the freighter’s hangar, the team crosses the airless bay into the ship proper. There, they make the decision to check out the waning energy signature of a containment field en route to the bridge. But they immediately encounter a utility unit that advances on them menacingly. Rommie connects to it and relays a shut down command that causes the robot to collapse. Further along, they encounter a sealed door and Rommie informs them that the compartment beyond is exposed to space. She suggests locking down their current section and then unsealing the door since it’s the most direct route to the bridge – and that ebbing containment field.
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