With an assist from the tractor beam, the jumper and its passengers make it safely back into the Enterprise’s shuttlebay. But the rescue has come at a cost. The Enterprise has been drawn dangerously close to the black hole.
“Captain, the hull is under tremendous stress,”reports Pilot. “The ship cannot hold this position for much longer.”
Kirk orders full impulse. The ship shudders, but the gravitational pull is too strong.
Warp is out of the question. This deep in the gravity well, space is curved too steeply for a normal warp field to form, and the attempt would tear the field apart, and the ship with it.
Data, back at his station on the bridge, delivers the verdict: “Captain, at our current rate of drift, we have eleven minutes and forty seconds before escape becomes impossible by any means.”
“Then let’s not waste any of them,”says Kirk. “Ideas.”
The resident nerds brainstorm and come up with three.
Carter pitches the first: “Sir, a low-level warp field around the ship would reduce our effective mass. The black hole’s grip on us would weaken, and impulse could finally pull us clear. Then, once we’re far enough out, we go to warp. But the calibration has to be perfect. If the field destabilizes this close, we lose it, and the ship along with it.”
McKay has a bolder and, in his opinion, better suggestion: “Or we stop running from it. We dive towards the ergosphere, catch the black hole’s spin, and get flung out faster than we went in. Absolutely brilliant in its elegance, but potentially catastrophic if my math is even slightly off. Which it isn’t.”
Thor offers a third option: “Your deflector array can be modified to project a counter-field ahead of the ship. Within it, space will be flat enough for your warp drive to function. It will, however, place considerable strain on your systems.”
Time is running out and the event horizon looms ever closer. Which plan do you go with?
A) The warp bubble. Carter’s slow steady climb out on impulse, if the calibration holds.
B) The slingshot. McKay’s dive towards the ergosphere for a faster way out, if his math is right.
C) The counter-field. Thor’s corridor lets you jump straight to warp, if the ship’s systems can take the strain.
Choose!
[END OF ACT ONE]
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.
O’Neill and Data take the jumper to the cruiser where they encounter four stranded passengers: the annoyingly flamboyant Harven Zax, his silent bodyguard Lucinda Shockley, his mild-mannered protege Milo, a Starfleet official named Robespierre, and the ship’s utility bot, Dunsel. Everyone piles into the jumper and launch, only to be caught by the black hole’s gravitational pull. The Enterprise uses its tractor in an attempt to reel in the jumper while, on the bridge, the crew must decide what to do about the two life signs in the mercenary shuttle headed for the event horizon.
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