Sharky acting up. What a drama queen…
BIG stretch!
Whenever Sharky goes to his “mansion”, he expects a treat –
Therapeutic massage –
Puggy playdate…
Puggy playtime…
***
Kirk opens a private channel to the Vor’nak, just the two captains, and lays it out. The High Council never issued a warrant for Harven Zax, so the document Kordath relayed was a forgery. Also, Kirk knows the Vor’nak belongs to the House of Kerath. Kirk leaves the question of Kordath’s involvement politely unanswered. He’s offering an escape route, not demanding a confession.
“Nobody else needs to know,”says Kirk. “Withdraw, and this conversation never happened.”
For a long moment, Kordath says nothing. Then, a nod of grudging respect. “We will meet again, Kirk. Perhaps sooner than you think.”
The screen goes dark. Moments later, the Vor’nak engages its cloak and disappears. The immediate threat is gone. Whether Kordath is gone is another matter.
The Enterprise resumes course, the drop point less than two hours away. No sooner has it done so than Carter’s voice cuts over the comm: “Captain, I need you in the science lab. Now.”
He finds her there with Data and Dunsel. Carter informs him that much of the little robot’s memory cache has been irretrievably corrupted, but they’ve been able to recover one fragment, a few seconds of surveillance footage from the cruiser’s corridor on the night of the sabotage.
She plays it.
The image stutters and breaks into static. A dark, empty corridor. Then a door opens, and Lucinda steps out. She looks around, then moves to the sealed door directly across the corridor. She knocks. The door slides open. Its occupant, Milo, pokes his head out, glancing down the corridor, then retreats inside. She follows. And the door slides shut behind her. The footage dissolves into static.
“The file’s metadata places this recording in the middle of the cruiser’s night cycle,”Data observes. “Social calls at that hour are statistically uncommon.”
Carter doesn’t have to spell it out. Lucinda told Kirk she was with Zax the whole night. The recording says otherwise.
“It puts them together,”says Kirk. “But it doesn’t put either of them in engineering.”
What do you do?
A) Confront Lucinda. Show her the footage and ask her what she was doing in Milo’s quarters. But she’s a professional who’s just been caught in a lie, and people like that tend to say less, not more.
B) Ask Milo. He’s nervous and eager to please, and he may tell you what she won’t. But he and Lucinda are obviously close, and anything you ask him will likely get back to her, tipping your hand.
C) Put it on the big screen. Gather all four guests, play the footage for everyone, and then question Lucinda and Milo in the open. It catches them off-guard, but it shows the saboteur your entire hand.
D) Watch them. Keep the footage to yourselves and discreetly monitor both. It keeps your advantage, but leaves the question open with the handoff less than two hours away.
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.
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. Everyone retreats to a shielded section of the ship as a baryon sweep clears the organisms, then the crew directs focus to their passengers, engaging them in conversation to learn more about their mission. Harven Zax simply talks about himself while Robespierre laments the fact he has been passed over for promotion three times. Milo demonstrates impressive understanding of the Ancients in his conversation with Daniel Jackson, and Aeryn Sun identifies Lucinda as a fellow ex-military. But the most notable piece of information comes from Dunsel who, it turns out, had his memory stores deleted after discovering that someone had sabotaged the cruiser, forcing the ship out of warp and into the hands of the waiting mercs. One of their passengers is a mole, and the crew must decide how to proceed.
The crew attempts to lure the mole into a trap by revealing they will successfully restore Dunsel’s memory stores by morning. But, rather than taking the bait, the mole springs their own trap. The Enterprise drops out of warp and goes dark. A beacon onboard the ship is broadcasting their position and a mysterious vessel fast-approaches dropping out of warp and hovering over the Enterprise.
Armored strike teams are beamed down the Enterprise. The crew is split into four person teams to meet them.
Kirk leads a team to Engineering where they discover an automated device that was used to disrupt the Enterprise. Once turned off, power is restored. As Kirk and co. head out, they are pinned down by enemy fire. Things look grim until – rescue comes from an unexpected source: Maia the android, Algernon and Mira the mercs, and little Dunsel.
Data and Rommie hack into the strike teams’ comms and direct them to the guest deck where they expect to find Harven Zax. Instead, they find Odo impersonating Zax – and then a horrific alien creature. Before they can react, our crew turns the tables on them and ends their threat. Their transport cruiser, meanwhile, attempts to make good its escape – only to be destroyed by a Klingon Bird-of-Prey that then redirects its weapons to the Enterprise. It’s commander, Kordath, demands the Enterprise hand over Harven Zax.
Councilor Robespierre is enlisted to argue jurisprudence with the Kordath who grudgingly offers up a warrant for Zax’s arrest. Robespierre informs him it may take a full day to run this by Starfleet Command. Kordath gives him four hours.
With time to kill, focus shifts to the mole in their midst. Kirk gathers the four suspect passengers and informs them that one of them was responsible for sabotaging their cruiser. Four suspects – four different reactions. Harven Zax is indignant and makes himself the victim. Robespierre is outraged by the accusation. Milo seems visibly distressed while Lucinda is as inscrutable as ever. They each offer up their whereabouts on the night the cruiser was sabotaged. Harven Zax says he was with Lucinda, and his trusty bodyguard corroborates his account. Robespierre was in his room, working on “none of your business” while Milo was also alone in his room and apologizes for not being able to provide an alibi.
Just then, Data reports that the High Council never approved a warrant for Harven Zax’s arrest. The forgery Kordath provided was a forgery.
Get caught up on our series, crew, and past missions at the AMALGAVERSE site.
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