Run Synopsis
Melissa Osogoe (Chantal), pilot of Starship #1172 waits uneasily as her crew becomes overdue in the task of shuttling cargo from the warehouse to the ship. There is a request for admittance and - Cindy Goldbergstein (Theresa) enters the ship to be greeted with Chantal's pointed blaster. Hastily holstering the weapon, Chantal explains the problem, noting that the last she'd heard of the team was when Gim Allon (Lyle) asked that she bounce a message to Sam off of the place that doesn't exist - after he'd had Michael Jordon (Robert) hurry ahead to help protect the remaining cargo. Chantal then asks Theresa to stay with the current cargo while the pilot goes to check on her crew. Theresa refuses, offering to go herself.
That being settled, Theresa jets over to the warehouse only to find 4 armored guards at the entrance. She radios to Chantal for an explanation and Chantal says that she should say that the pilot of #1172 is concerned about the tardiness of her cargo handler, Igor Korbut, and wants to know what the hold up is. Theresa and one of the guards exchange words while smoke continues to billow and klaxons continue to wail. Various waves of guards and injured people depart through the warehouse door. Eventually Boris and Lyle come through with the full load-lifter. Theresa can make out a figure in a battered suit sitting atop what remains of "our" cargo back in the warehouse. Boris and Lyle try to convince the guards to make sure to question the former door guard thoroughly. Theresa catches a ride back to the ship and Lyle gives her the story via helmet-to-helmet contact. Back at the ship they tell their version of the story to Chantal as well. It isn't until the final load is stored that Robert arrives - in a very battered and burned suit. Chantal makes him promise to tell her the full story; he agrees. Both Lyle and Robert admit in their tales to having "shot their man" - but it is Lyle, the techno-geek, whom the ladies applaud.
Although the orders have come from the warehouse that all involved in the recent brouhaha must stay available for the next 3 days to a week; once the cargo is secured, the team decides to take off. The mooring latches are manually disconnected and the ship floats free. Chantal manages to file an amended flight plan, but an inadvertent pun keeps her from coherently reassuring the conning tower. An order is sent out to render assistance to #1172. Theresa takes over the com-link and sorts out the conning tower, but two ships - one with a Star Corps military transponder and the other with a civilian beacon - continue their intercept paths. The military craft refuses to change its maneuvers and the civilian one does not respond at all to Theresa's hail. Robert watches the sensors. Chantal refuses to try a warp jump so close to occupied space. The ships continue the intercept course. Suddenly lights blossom in the vicinity of the military craft and its transponder disappears from Robert's scope. Almost at that time a Latvian voice comes over the com-line as the civilian crafts' transponder bounces through various codes coming finally to identify itself as a Star Corps Battleship: Sam wishes us "sayonara" to Chantal's disgust.
#1172 takes off and makes the jump to hyper-space, forgetting, in the excitement, to run some of the extra checks that Lyle and Robert had devised on earlier runs. Because Lyle had calculated for only 4 crew members on the earlier runs, he has Theresa spend an hour in her space suit so that he can recalculate the air consumption so that he can still detect possible stowaways. None are found. A week passes. The ship emerges from hyper-space and the team finds that they are still at Star Port! Except there is no Star Port! Or anything else man-made. Various scans are run to determine when and where we are ... and then we move closer to Earth. No signs of man-made features: no Great Wall, no cities lit by electricity, no Panama Canal, no bases on Mars or the Moon. This isn't our universe, though it appears to be. There are populations concentrations on Earth here; detectable by heat-signatures. No radio. Sol doesn't even radiate radio and higher waves. And - although we have left hyper-space - Theresa's instruments indicate that our hyper-drive is still running in some sort of feedback loop.
Knowing that, of all our supplies, we are shortest on oxygen, the team debates landing on the south pole or somewhere populated. Further experiments indicate that the ship and equipment are only functioning because the hyper-field (that should not be functioning but is) is maintaining us as a small pocket of our own universe. It seems to be maintaining our laws of physics rather than those of this place (which include a lower Speed of Light and no high-level electron motion). Robert recalls a significant unit-less function which Lyle can add to his calculations but - we are not sure just what to calculate in order to return to our own universe! [Sheryl fails to understand most of the conversation at this point.] We decide to merely enter the terrestrial atmosphere to a level where we can cycle air through the airlock and so replenish our supplies. We will not turn off any of our equipment.
We speculate that the data sent us by the conning tower by which our computer set our course was bollixed in the same manner that lost the Second Mormon Crusade. We speculate that if we could determine that the Second Mormon Crusade actually settled on this Earth (although its approximately 500 people landing 50 years ago couldn't possibly be responsible for the totality of settlements we can distinguish - it could be one of them) we would at least know that the data given us ignored whatever destination setting we originally computed - rather than only modifying it - as the Mormon's original destination was not supposed to be anywhere near Earth. We speculate further that "Pittsburgh" might be a good choice for the Mormons given that they would have a predilection for North America and would have realized that - without electricity - they would need a source of power such as coal and oil.
Further experiments indicate that if the Mormons did not "turn off" all their 100 hundred ships, if they kept any running as ours currently is and they set up an open radio beacon, manned, therein, they would be able to receive our radio signals if we used equipment inside our ship via the open door lock. Thus we could short-circuit the physics of this universe. That's a lot of "ifs".
[ Further ideas must wait until the next episode. ]
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