With all hands sheltered in the shielded core, the baryon sweep rolls across the Enterprise, a red glow moving section by section from the nacelles to the engineering hull, then finally up and over the saucer. The subspace organisms burn and flake away into space, and the hull comes up clean.
But the sweep has scorched the warp coils. “Cooked,”says Scotty, “like a Burns Night haggis.” He starts repairs while the Enterprise limps on through the corridor at reduced warp. The margin on Zax’s delivery is shrinking by the hour.
With the ship out of danger for the moment, the crew turns its attention to the passengers.
Thor volunteers to ask Zax what makes him worth all this trouble. Zax is delighted to tell him, launching into a series of personal reflections that provide absolutely no insight into his current circumstances but paint an excruciatingly detailed portrait of his childhood on Rigel and his strong opinions on Andorian theater. Two hours in, Thor raises a hand and says: “Stop talking.” Zax falls silent, mid-sentence. “Thank you,”says Thor. He leaves, later reporting: “I learned nothing. Except that Andorian theater is apparently very derivative.”
Aeryn Sun takes a seat across from Lucinda in Ten Forward and attempts to engage her in conversation. But Lucinda neither confirms nor denies anything, and politely turns every question back on Aeryn.
“She never sits with her back to the door,”notes Aeryn, “and always keeps her right hand free. Clocks anyone who comes within three metras of her. She’s ex-military. I’d know.”
Daniel shares a meal with Milo, expecting small talk, and ends up deep in a debate about the Ancients.
“He made a couple of great points about ascension I’d never even considered,”marvels Daniel. “And I’ve actually ascended!”
G’Kar, no stranger to diplomats, finds Robespierre happy to discuss his distinguished career, including the three promotions he was unfairly denied. Every question about the mission, however, meets a polite and immovable wall.
“He reminds me of a Centauri I know,”says G’Kar. “All smiles, and a vault of secrets behind them.”
Then Carter calls you to engineering. She and Data have been piecing together data recovered from Dunsel, who trundles nearby, cheerfully greeting the same wall panel for the third time.
When the cruiser’s engines failed, Dunsel apparently ran a diagnostic and logged his findings before anyone could stop him. The failure was no accident. Someone sabotaged the engines and forced the cruiser out of warp, which is how the mercs knew exactly where to find it. Then they tried to bury the evidence by wiping Dunsel’s memory stores. The wipe damaged his neural network, which explains his odd behavior.
Someone aboard that cruiser sabotaged their own ship. And that someone is now aboard the Enterprise.
What do you do first?
A) Search the guest quarters. Fast and direct, but a careful mole will have hidden anything worth finding, and you’ll have tipped your hand. Also, a diplomat’s quarters are off limits, and Robespierre will make sure Starfleet hears about it.
B) Request background checks from Starfleet Command. They’ll be thorough but slow, and the answers may not arrive before the delivery.
C) Surreptitiously question them about their whereabouts in the hour the cruiser was sabotaged, but don’t tip your hand.
D) Confront them. Gather all four passengers, announce there’s a saboteur among them, and watch how each one reacts. It might shake something loose, or it might drive the mole to ground.
E) Use Dunsel as bait. Let word slip that his memory can be fully restored, and watch who comes for him. It could catch the mole in the act, but Dunsel may not survive a second attempt.
Choose!
[END OF ACT TWO]
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.
You set off for the rendezvous point and your guests settle in: no-nonsense Lucinda, meek Milo, officious Robespierre and, of course, the bombastic Harven Zax.
While Data works on repairing Dunsel the robot, you check in on the mercenaries you beamed off the doomed shuttle headed towards the black hole’s event horizon. They offer to talk in exchange for their freedom. Instead, you have Garak chat with the alien mercenary, Algernon. In his own incomparable fashion, the simple Cardassian tailor convinces the merc to talk and reveal he and his partner were in the employ of a Klingon Great House who want Harven Zax for a secret he carries. Algernon also reveals that he and Mira were given coordinates to the damaged cruiser transporting Zax. But Garak finds this mysterious. The cruisers engines failed without warning. So how did anyone know where to find it?
Suddenly, the Enterprise shudders and slows. Data reveals the ship’s nacelles are encrusted with glittering green growth that turns out to be a subspace organism that feeds on warp fields.
Get caught up on our series, crew, and past missions at the AMALGAVERSE site.
Leave a Reply