[An away team made up of Colonel Jack O’Neill, Dr. Daniel Jackson, the android/AI Rommie, and Dr. Rodney McKay has been dispatched to investigate a seemingly derelict freighter. While on their way to check out an ebbing containment field, they negotiate a hull breach but eventually find their progress blocked by an uncooperative door. The team debates whether they should EVA to the next airlock, blow the door, or backtrack and find another way around.]
A decision is made.
BOOM!
The team, tucked back behind the sealed compartment, feels the blast roll through the deck. They give it a moment, then open up and cross back over the breach to inspect the damage.
“Beauty,”says O’Neill.
He shaped the charge small, a smidge of C4 packed right into the lock housing, enough to gut the mechanism and pop the seal without blowing the door off its frame. The panel hangs open, the lock a blackened ruin, the rest intact.
“Some people work in oils,”notes Daniel. “Others in clay.”
“I dabble in firearms and high explosives,”says O’Neill, admiring his handiwork.
They push through into a depressurized antechamber, cross it, and Rommie seals it behind them, then depressurizes the compartment beyond. Another breathable foothold, the ruined door sealed off at their backs.
They move on, into a dimly lit corridor. The overheads are dead. Only a low red emergency wash bleeds down from somewhere ahead, throwing long shadows along the bulkheads.
McKay stops. “Did you heart that?”he asks, clearly spooked.
Everyone holds up. They listen. Nothing but the hum of the dying ship.
McKay insists: “I heard something.”
O’Neill is about to tell him to getting moving when – they all hear it. A dry, chittering skitter, quick and many-legged. They can’t place the source at first and then they realize – it’s coming from inside the walls.
“Let’s pick up the pace,”says O’Neill. The others need no encouragement.
They move quick and quiet, the skittering keeping pace behind the bulkheads, until they arrive at their destination. A mechanical room, thrumming with what power the ship still possesses. Conduits and machinery ring the walls, and at the center of the chamber, mounted on a raised platform, is a containment field, a column of crackling blue energy.
Suspended within is a blue-skinned service android.
And now the readings make sense. What McKay took for a waning field is actually the energy signature of a charge cycle nearing completion. pouring its reserves into the figure within. The counter is almost at zero.
You have a choice.
A. Let the cycle finish. Let it complete and awaken the fully charged android. Then question the one thing onboard that may have the answers.
B. Restart the cycle. Interrupt the charge before it finishes, keeping the android locked in the field while you search the bridge.
CHOOSE!
END OF ACT TWO
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. They do so. The door slide open to reveal an immense hull breach complicating their progress. Rommie leaps over the chasm and secures a tether to the other side, allowing the rest of the team to pull themselves over. But when they attempt to open the door to the next section, they hit an impasse. The door remain locked and will not respond to their commands.
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