McKay stares in horror at the mechanical spiders swarming the core. He is torn between drawing his sidearm and bolting. He considers, then throws a look to Maia, deferring to the android, who calmly asks: “Are you alright? I’m detecting a sudden spike in your heart rate and blood pressure.”
“What the hell are those?”he asks, swinging his gaze back to the spiders.
“The repair drones?”asks Maia. “Do they make you uncomfortable?
“Yes,”replies McKay without hesitation. “Very.”
Maia turns towards the drones and sends a neural command. They scatter at once, skittering away like cockroaches in the light, clearing the room and disappearing into the vents.
Maia proceeds into the room. An uncertain McKay follows. He watches as Maia manually vents the drive, then redirects focus to the readings.
Not good news. The venting worked, he reports, but it was only a stopgap. Containment and regulation have been too badly compromised. This thing is going to breach no matter what they do.
Maia double-checks the readings and confirms as much: “We have less than seventy-five minutes before catastrophic containment failure and total structural loss.”
“Oh God!”says McKay. And then: “Wait. Is that seventy-five Earth minutes?
“No,”replies Maia. “My default clock runs on Traugott Standard Time.”
McKay is palpably relieved. “So in Earth minutes that’s…?”
“Roughly forty-two.”
“Oh God!”
Maia exits engineering, McKay on her heels. The Waldorf Astoria is doomed. And so are they if they remain onboard. McKay tells her they must abandon ship. She agrees, but not before she returns to the bridge, tags the cargo with recovery transponders, and jettisons it into space so that Traugott can reclaim their property once the ship is gone.
What does McKay do?
A – Head straight for the hangar. Contact the team, regroup, and evacuate now.
B – Accompany Maia to the bridge. Back her up first, then evacuate together.
CHOOSE!
Previously On Amalgaverse…
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 slides 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 remains locked and will not respond to their commands.
O’Neill blows the lock with C4, allowing them entry into the adjoining compartment where they discover an android in a containment field, completing its regenerative cycle. When the android awakens, it informs them it is the caretaker of this freighter, the Waldorf Astoria, and warns them off pillaging its contents. Daniel assures the android, Maia, that they harbor no ill intent and asks for her assistance in accessing the bridge and restoring ship’s systems. But Maia remains suspicious. She requests a peer-to-peer interface with Rommie to confirm that your presence on the freighter is, in fact, benign. Rommie agrees.. Maia explains that her memory stores and parts of the ship were damaged after the freighter encountered an atemporal force during FTL transit. She offers to help the team access the ship’s systems in exchange for their assistance in tracking down and eradicating a mysterious entity that has boarded the freighter.
Maia helps the team access the bridge where they discover the freighter’s analysis of its encounter with the atemporal entity has yielded harmonics very similar to residual energy signatures from their crossings into this reality. This could hold the key to their return home, but the data is corrupted and Rommie needs time to decipher it. Daniel, meanwhile, notes that the life sign he detected earlier is fading, and he wants to check it before it’s too late. But Maia flags a more immediate concern – the likelihood that the ship’s core is in danger of going critical unless they vent the drive.
The decision is made to split the team. McKay and Maia head to engineering where Rodney is startled by a half-dozen mechanical spiders.
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