The jumper leaves the shuttlebay and swings toward the cruiser.
The black hole’s pull keeps dragging it off its line, and O’Neill has to keep correcting to hold course.
Data informs Jack: “Colonel, I am detecting fourteen fragments of debris from the cruiser’s damaged thrusters on an intercept course.”
“Shields gonna hold?” asks Jack.
“Without a doubt,” responds Data. “Provided we do not hit anything.”
Jack considers this, then shoots Data a look: “Was that a joke?”
“More of a wry observation,” answers Data. A beat. “Colonel Carter says my timing is improving.”
“Here’s a tip for you,”says Jack. “Never take comedy advice from someone who tells physics jokes.”
Data, deadpan: “I am reading a book about anti-gravity. It is impossible to put down.”
Jack sighs. “Gonna have a talk with Carter when we get back.”
How to proceed?
A) Punch through. Ride the shields and take the hits to save time, but at the risk of damaging the jumper.
B) Thread it slow. Plot a course around the debris while the cruiser drifts ever closer to the event horizon.
C) Clear a path. Launch drones to blast the wreckage, but every drone you spend now is one fewer you’ll have later.
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. Upon arrival, you discover his cruiser inoperable, drifting towards a black hole, the ship’s automated defense systems preventing Scotty from using the Enterprise’s transporter to simply beam them aboard.
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