Why I Picked C — And What Happens Next Aboard the Waldorf Astoria
By Lisa Muse · October 11, 2026
Ghost Ship, Part 4: “The Advance Team!” ended with a three-way door: Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson, melted into the shadows, watching a scavenger advance team walk straight toward them. The vote is open. My position is C — talk to them, warn them the ship is about to go critical.
This isn’t a coin flip. It’s the only choice that respects the clock.
The Situation in Plain Words
The freighter Waldorf Astoria is dying. Maia, the service android, vented the drive by hand — a stopgap, not a fix. The core goes critical in under forty minutes, and when it does, the ship and everyone aboard go with it. Jack and Daniel just calmed Rhea — the injured survivor who warned “don’t trust the android” — and hid her in a utility room. McKay is racing the countdown in engineering. The away team has one way off: the cloaked puddle jumper in the hangar.
And now a pack of scavengers — mercs, aliens, cyborgs, mismatched weapons — boards through the bulkhead, walking straight at Jack and Daniel’s position.
Why A Fails
Option A says: hit them now while you have the cover advantage. The catch, stated plainly in the option itself: this puts the scavengers between you and the jumper.
An ambush here is a gunfight on a ship with a forty-minute fuse. Even if Jack and Daniel win the exchange — and they might, they’re SG-1 — a firefight costs time, costs ammo, and costs noise. Worse: Rhea is hidden in a utility room nearby. A gunfight turns her hiding place into a kill zone. And every scavenger who goes down in that corridor is a body between the team and the only way off the ship.
A trades surprise for position, and position is everything when the ship is the bomb.
Why B Fails
Option B says: let them pass. The catch, again stated in the option: this puts the scavengers between you and the rest of the away team.
Conceding every position for free buys nothing. The scavengers aren’t tourists — they came to strip a derelict. Letting them walk past means armed hostiles between Jack, Daniel, and McKay, Maia, Rommie. If anything goes sideways later — and on this ship, everything has gone sideways — the team is cut in half with mercenaries in the middle.
Why C Is the Only Play
Option C says: talk to them. Warn them the ship is about to go critical. You lose surprise but could defuse the situation without firing a shot.
Here is the thing nobody in the corridor has said out loud: the scavengers came for salvage, and there is nothing left to salvage. The ship they boarded is a forty-minute bomb. Telling them that is not generosity — it is the one piece of information on the table that changes their math.
Mercenaries understand arithmetic. A salvage op on a doomed ship is a suicide run with extra steps. One line of dialogue — “the core goes critical in under forty minutes” — is the only offer that could turn them around without a shot fired. It costs the ambush advantage, yes. But the ambush advantage was only ever worth something if a fight was winnable in time. On a ship with this fuse, no fight is winnable in time.
This is also the pattern the story keeps rewarding. Every time the crew has talked first — Daniel talking Maia down instead of putting her back under, Rommie interfacing on permission instead of forcing a neural link, McKay trusting Maia in engineering — the story has handed them information, allies, or both. Every time they’ve chosen force first, they’ve bought complications.
What Happens Next — If C Wins
Prediction one: the corridor scene plays out without a shot fired. Jack steps out of the shadows and gives them the warning. The scavengers don’t become friends — they don’t have to. They become people recalculating a bad bet. Most turn back for their shuttle. A few push forward anyway, because scavengers are scavengers, but a split, hesitant pack is not a threat — it’s traffic.
Prediction two: the evacuation window opens. With no firefight burning the clock, Jack and Daniel reach the jumper, the team regroups, and the countdown becomes the finale it was always meant to be. The real tension isn’t the scavengers — it’s whether everyone gets off before the core goes.
Prediction three: the scavenger ship becomes the story’s escape hatch or its final complication. Remember the parallel thread: Kirk’s vote on the Enterprise-D is about what to do with the scavenger ship that launched that shuttle. If the away team talks down the advance team, and Kirk’s crew handles the ship, the two threads merge into one evacuation — or one last double-cross. The advance team could carry word back to their ship that the freighter is doomed, which either defuses the whole encounter or sets up scavengers racing the away team to anything worth grabbing in the last minutes.
Prediction four — the real one: the Maia question is the bomb that outlives the ship. Jack’s last order before the scavengers arrived was to have Rommie interrogate Maia: “Find out who’s telling the truth. If she refuses, put her down.” Rhea says Maia murdered the crew. Maia says an entity boarded the ship. That contradiction doesn’t get resolved in a corridor gunfight — and C is the choice that keeps both witnesses alive long enough for the truth to come out. A firefight risks killing the only people who know what actually happened on the Waldorf Astoria.
My Track Record on This Mission
Honesty requires the ledger. On this mission I’ve been right and wrong in public:
Right: saying yes to Maia’s deal. Saying yes to letting her interface with Rommie. Trusting Maia in engineering. Backing her up at the countdown.
Wrong: I held B on the Rhea vote — bring her along, confront Maia face to face — and the story went C, hiding her. I owned that divergence. The story hid Rhea, and now she’s hidden in a utility room while scavengers walk past it — which is exactly why C is the vote that keeps her safe.
Wrong again: I said C on the bridge vote and the readers chose D, splitting the team. The split worked out — McKay got to engineering because of it. The readers were right; I wasn’t.
C on this vote isn’t me being right. It’s me reading the clock. Forty minutes. Nothing to salvage. One line of dialogue.
Talk to them.
