The Enterprise shudders against the gravitational pull as Thor’s counter-field takes hold. Her main deflector brightens, projecting a cone of light ahead of the ship. Inside it, the warped starlight straightens, and a corridor of calm space slowly opens, narrow and trembling at the edges.
Kirk orders full impulse. The Enterprise presses forward, the deck shaking as her saucer pushes into the corridor. From engineering, Scotty warns that the deflector is overheating and the field won’t last much longer.
“Ninety seconds,”Data reports.
The hull groans. A console sparks.
The saucer is in calm space now, but nacelles are still outside, and without them there is no warp.
“Thirty seconds.”
The nacelles slide across the threshold.
“Warp speed. Now!”orders Kirk.
The Enterprise leaps to warp. Behind her, the corridor collapses and the black hole is left with nothing.
Scotty reports: “Deflector’s scorched, Captain, but she held. Took everything she had, mind. I’ll need a day with her before she does anything that fancy again.”
With Harven Zax and his party safely aboard, the Enterprise sets course for the rendezvous on the other side of the expanse. Starfleet’s deadline leaves just under fifty-five hours to get there.
There are three ways to go, none of them safe.
A) The Klingon corridor. It’s the fastest route, a straight warp run with hours to spare. It passes through the border territory of a Klingon Great House that purportedly wants Zax dead.
B) The frontier. A long warp detour around Klingon space that eats deep into your margin. The space it crosses belongs to the Orion Syndicate and is full of bounty hunters who know exactly what Zax is worth.
C) The expanse. The shortest line on the map, but gravity shear makes warp impossible inside, so the ship has to cross at sublight and will arrive with almost no time to spare. Nobody patrols it, which avoids the Klingons and the Syndicate, but there’s no backup to rely on if anything goes wrong.
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.
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.
Now, the Enterprise must contend with the black hole’s gravitational forces.
Get caught up on our series, crew, and past missions at the AMALGAVERSE site.
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