Captain’s Log – Stardate Unknown. We are approaching coordinates 188 mark 44 to take aboard and transport a man named Harven Zax. He’s a broker who has spent years selling secrets to anyone with the latinum for them, and by all accounts he has finally sold one too many. Three separate parties are hunting him, each for reasons of their own. Starfleet wants him delivered alive, and they’ve left the details to us.
The Enterprise drops out of warp. Onscreen you glimpse a black hole in the distance, two ships drifting toward it. The nearer one is your target, a luxury cruiser. The farther one, a mercenary shuttle, is smaller and has drifted deeper, slipping toward the point of no return.
Kirk hails the cruiser. A man who introduces himself as Harven Zax answers, rumpled and indignant that a man of his importance could die somewhere this shabby. He lays out the situation: his engines are dead, and the unmarked ship farther in belongs to a mercenary crew that came to snatch him and cut it too close. They’ll hit the event horizon well before he does, which he considers his one consolation.
Getting him off that ship is the problem. His cruiser is running an automated anti-abduction shroud, a defensive field built to stop exactly this kind of snatch. It switched on when the mercenaries closed in and locked in place when the power failed. The Enterprise can’t beam through it, and the black hole’s pull is too strong for a tractor beam to drag the cruiser clear.
The jumper can make the crossing and, if it comes to it, carry everyone back itself. But every minute spent alongside the cruiser drags it deeper into the gravity well, and a fully loaded jumper climbing back out is no sure thing.
Data proposes another way: “Captain, if we close to tractor range, I believe we can slow the cruiser’s descent. We will not be able to pull her free; the gravitational gradient is too steep. But if Mr. Scott holds the lock from engineering, I can assist Colonel Carter and Doctor McKay in bringing down the shroud from here. I should note that it will likely bring the Enterprise closer to the event horizon than I would recommend. Our margin for error would be four minutes and twelve seconds.”
Sheppard counters: “Or I just fly the jumper over and we find a way to switch that thing off by hand. If we can’t, we all pile in and ride home together. Getting there’s easy. Getting back’s the interesting part.”
Whose advice do you follow?
A. Risk the jumper and an away team. Board the cruiser and bring everyone back, shroud or no shroud.
B. Risk the Enterprise and use the tractor beam. Hold the cruiser while Data, Carter, and McKay try to crack the shroud from the Enterprise.
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 t.v. 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. On its first mission, the crew answered a distress call from a dead ship and found it was far from empty. Aboard, the away team awoke an android named Maia, discovered a “survivor” named Rhea who turned out to be something else entirely, and fought their way off as scavengers closed in. They came home to the Enterprise with two things: a new crewmember in Maia, and a fragment of the signature an entity left behind when it crossed into this reality. Colonel Carter believes it’s one piece of a much larger puzzle, and that the rest of it is still out there waiting.
For your second mission, you have elected to follow a Starfleet directive, traveling to pick up and transport Harven Zax, a dangerous intelligence broker, to a rendezvous point at the edge of the Expanse.
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