Second Mission: The Delivery (Part 2.1 - Escape Velocity)
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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!
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