Sharky got a part-time job delivering baguettes…
Mom with the healthy snacks…
Halloween pug…
Wild turkeys…
Don’t forget anything at airport security…
Stubborn!
Our Amalgaverse First Mission continues!
After calming a frightened Rhea and securing her in a utility room, Jack and Daniel prepare to head back and confront the service android.
Suddenly, McKay’s panicked voice comes over radio. He tells them that the ship’s core will go critical in less than 40 minutes. They have to abandon ship. He’s headed to the bridge with Maia to pull Rommie.
Jack and Daniel exchange looks. Jack keys his radio and raises Rommie directly, bringing her up to speed fast.
“It’s Maia’s turn to open up,”he tells Rommie. “Find out who’s telling the truth. If she refuses, put her down same as the big bot.” A beat. “Can you do that?”
Rommie can.
“Just once I’d love for one of these spooky ghost ship ops to go smooth,”says Jack as he and Daniel turn to head back to the jumper.
KA-CLUNK. The bulkhead door dead ahead releases. Jack and Daniel melt into the shadows as it grinds open.
Through it comes the scavenger advance team, a hard-looking pack of mercs and marauders – human, alien, and cyborg – mismatched weapons up and ready, moving with easy menace. They start forward, straight toward Jack and Daniel’s position.
What do Jack and Daniel do?
A) Hit them now while they have the cover advantage. But this puts the scavengers between you and the jumper.
B) Let them pass. But this puts the scavengers between you and the rest of the away team.
C) Talk to them. Warn them that the ship is about to go critical. You lose the advantage of surprise but could defuse the situation without firing a shot.
CHOOSE!
[END OF ACT FOUR]
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 that he, at first, assumes to be replicators. But Maia assures him they are simply the ship’s repair bots. Maia vents the drive but McKay’s reading of the data confirms they have only delayed the inevitable. In approximately 42 minutes, the core will go critical and the ship – and everyone on board – will be destroyed.
Jack and Daniel discover a wounded woman in a crew uniform who warns that the android cannot be trusted while, back on the Enterprise, Kirk weighs what to do about a scavenger ship that has just dropped into sub-light and dispatched a shuttle to the Waldorf Astoria.
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