Adventure!

The prisoner looks up at you, Robo-Barbie, what appears to be genuine confusion written across his face.

"Bombs? Whaddaya mean bombs?" He looks around at the busted doorway, before barking a short laugh. "You mean the door? That was just a breach charge so we could get to the power grid proper."

He turns to the other pirates, laughing again. "They think we're trying to get blown to hell! Nah, we're just turning off to this stupid thing. Who knows when the crew'll need it again down the road. Blowing it up... so wasteful."

Logic, your mind goes back to a stuffy classroom. You're doodling on your pad, half paying attention to the professor's lecture but mainly thinking about the mechanics of romance. Like, isn't it so interesting that a Gate's electromagnetic array supports a quantum tunnel through mutual attraction, and when one of those elements suddenly no longer attracts the other, it all spectacularly collapses? It's so poetic.

The overhead lights momentarily flicker, and then blink out entirely. For the longest second you feel yourselves growing ever-so slightly lighter, before the power audibly returns and you sink back to the floor.

You see one of the pirates smirk as the lights come back on – it couldn't have been them squinting against the bright light, of course. You take this to mean whatever it was you were looking to confirm.

The pirate's bravado evaporates in an instant.

"They– they're heading to the power couplers! I– I've got a map."

He cautiously reaches for a piece of paper that's protruding from his chest pocket. As he hands it over, you see a faded schematic of the Gate. Three locations are marked with a big red 'X' and a number.

"Them's the couplers. We're gonna– we were supposed to meet up with one of the other crews and help cut the power to number one." He nods towards to a spilled bag of tools on the floor. "It'll take 'em longer now, I'm guessing."

You see the location marked as '1' is only a few minutes away, through the busted door and down a couple of corridors. Location '2' is a third of the way around the circumference of the Gate and location '3' another third again. A small rapid-transit system built into the skin of the Gate appears to link all three locations.