The Enterprise is on her way, and Starfleet’s orders remain thin: deliver Harven Zax to a set of coordinates on the far side of the expanse before the deadline and hand him over to whoever is waiting there. The orders don’t say who.
With time to kill, the crew gets its first real look at their guests.
Harven Zax holds court in Ten Forward, regaling all with dubious tales of his own daring. None of the dates or places in his stories quite line up, and he seems confident no one will notice.
Lucinda Shockley, his bodyguard, has a deadpan wit and the air of someone you do not want to cross. She shadows Zax, yet her eyes keep drifting to his young protégé, Milo. Unrequited love, perhaps?
Milo, for his part, keeps to the edges at first. Once he opens up, however, he turns out to be quite knowledgeable about the border sector’s tangled history. A true nerd.
Oswin Robespierre has clearly never waited for anything in his life and is handling the novelty badly. He complains about his quarters and keeps a sealed diplomatic pouch close at hand, refusing every offer to lock it in the ship’s secure vault.
And then there’s Dunsel, clanking after everyone like an adopted stray. Something is wrong with him. He starts tasks and forgets them halfway through, and every so often he freezes, lights dimming, before shuffling on. Data suspects damage to his memory core and offers to take a look, though the repair could shut him down for good.
The orders say where to take Zax but not why he’s worth so much trouble. Kirk isn’t satisfied. If the Enterprise is going to protect this man, the crew needs to know who might come for him and why.
Where do you start?
A) Question Zax. Go straight to the source and ask the man himself why he’s worth all this trouble.
B) Ask Lucinda. His bodyguard must know who has been coming after him, and why.
C) Talk to Milo. A protégé hears everything, and the shy but friendly young man may say more than his employer would.
D) Press Robespierre. He is the Federation’s man on this trip, and he likely knows what Starfleet is holding back.
E) Fix Dunsel. Set the questions aside and help Data repair the little robot, knowing it could cost Dunsel what’s left of his memory.
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.
The Enterprise escapes the black hole’s gravitational pull by using the deflector array to project a counter-field ahead of the ship and then jumping to warp.
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