“Hi,”says Daniel, stepping out of hiding and freezing the scavengers in mid-step. “Welcome to the Waldorf Astoria.”
The scavenger leader’s eyes narrow, flit left and right suspiciously. “Where are your people?”
“Oh, around,”says Daniel glancing about. “Listen, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this ship’s core is about to go critical, so I would strongly suggest you reconsider your long-term plans here.”
“Do you now?”asks the leader. A beat. Then: “Kel!”
The merc to his left moves, the slightest of shift of his weapon and – POK! – a single shot to the chest. He goes down. Another merc reacts, swinging his weapon wide – POK! – single shot; he goes down too. Then, a barrage of P-90 fire sends them all scattering for cover as Daniel ducks out of range. The mercs respond, projectiles and energy beams glancing off the hull.
“When it rains, it pours,”notes Jack.
“With occasional intermittent hail!”adds Daniel as they return fire.
Minutes pass. Jack tries contacting Rommie and McKay, but all he gets is static, the anomaly’s pulses interfering with comms.
The barrage continues, back and forth, eating into time they don’t have. Jack and Daniel are pinned down.
A lull in the shooting. Suddenly, Daniel perks up. “What’s that?” He throws a look to Jack who strains to listen and hears –
A distant skittering of mechanical legs growing louder and closer. Daniel’s eyes widen at the sight of –
Dozens of spider-like bots rounding the corridor behind them, skittering across the floor, walls, and ceiling. Jack and Daniel barely have time to react, ducking to shield their faces. But the bots scramble over and past, straight for the mercs who immediately turn tail and run, retreating into an aft section – that seals shut behind them.
Jack and Daniel poke their heads up. WTF? At which point Maia, Rommie, and McKay round the corner. Maia says she’s bought them time. Now they need to abandon ship. Jack throws a look to Rommie who tells him: “She was telling the truth.”
Daniel jumps to his feet and goes to the utility room holding Rhea. Jack raises his P-90 as Daniel opens the door.
The room is empty.
Not to belabor the point but WTF?!
Maia escorts the away team to the hangar and the waiting puddle jumper. There, she tells them she will seal the bay to further delay the scavengers so the team can make good their escape. She’s staying behind as her final duties will be in service to the ship, and Traugott Corporation. What do you do?
A – Convince her to come along. She’s proven herself.
B – Take advantage of her offer and get out of there. No time to waste.
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 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.
Jack and Daniel, unaware of the arrival of the scavenger ship, elect to hide Rhea, the survivor, in a utility room while they head back to confront Maia, the android. But before they move, they receive an update from McKay, informing them that the core is about to go critical in less than 40 minutes, and that he and Maia are headed to the bridge. Jack radios Rommie and orders her to scan Maia and find out if she is telling the truth. If Maia refuses, she needs to be shut down.
Jack and Daniel prepare to fall back to the hangar bay when they hear someone approach. They duck into hiding as a sealed section opens to reveal a group of diverse group of mercs have boarded.
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