Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive ^{Beam me up, Scotty.}

Chapter Text

The Star Beagle Adventures                                                
Episode 6: Perpetual Change
Scene 5: The Galley

6.5
The Galley

Private First Class Raanda Habib had been, once again, outbid in romance. Her options aboard the U.S.S. Beagle were depressingly limited. She was well advised to avoid relationships with other enlisted Marines and prohibited from pursuing officers, whether Marine or Star Fleet. And there were no Star Fleet enlisted personnel assigned to the U.S.S. Beagle, most of those functions being performed either by marines or civilians.

That left the civilians, far less than half of whom were human males and most of those were middle aged, married, or both. 

There was, however, the handsome, fit, 30-year-old and single planetologist from Sierra Leone, Phillip Gorman. Gorman’s features were a blend of West African and Arabic and he looked like a creature of the desert, with magnetic, fierce green eyes that contrasted with his dark face. He was quiet, serious, intense, courteous, and charismatic.

And Guz Maxwell had gotten to him first.

Raanda wandered among the brightly colored tents in the U.S.S. Beagle’s galley. Tents from which vendors offered a variety of fresh fruits and various preserves and jerkies. She wasn’t hungry, but she obtained some jerky for later and a few apples for the horses and camels. Other members of the Beagle’s diverse crew found the blazing heat and the blazing sands that surrounded the Beagle’s galley to be unbearable. 

The heat felt great to Raanda and feeding first a few horses, then one of the camels made her feel better. She had been raised among such animals and felt completely comfortable with them where others might be terrified.

As the sun set and the madness of the stars became visible in the night sky, Raanda wandered back to the main tent where somehow the ship’s systems managed to keep the ever-present sand off the carpet. Private First Class Sasha Soko waved her over to his table. 

“You’re in a brown study tonight,” Sasha remarked. “What has you so mopey?”

“Oh, nothing. And my love life. Which are pretty much one and the same thing,” Raanda responded.

“You’re a girl,” Sasha observed. “And you’ve got those eyes… You should have guys lined up around the block just to talk to you.”

“What guys? Every guy on this ship is out-of-bounds except for that cute planetologist. And Guz got to him first.” Raanda put her elbows on the table, propped her chin on her hands and managed to look even more glum.

“There’s Falok,” Sasha suggested.

“The vulcan?” Raanda asked. “No way. Way too complicated…”

“Humans only, eh?” Sasha prodded.

“No… But… Well…” Raanda, even though dark-skinned, managed to blush violently. Instead of trying at this moment to figure out how she felt about interspecies mating, she changed the subject. “How about you and Chauv? Is that still a thing?”

It was Sasha’s turn to blush, his ears glowing like Bussard collectors. “Apparently what happened on Serrat Prime stays on Serrat Prime. Which is fine with me. I’m not really sure what came over me…”

“Pretty sure that was a 400-pound tellarite that was coming over you there, Sasha…” Raanda teased.

Sasha laughed and grimaced. “Ohhh, that’s… uncomfortably accurate… I mean, she’s smart and funny and cool… But I’m really not the kind of guy who’s into farm animals.”

“Sasha! That’s mean!”

“Well, she does have…” Sasha held his hands out in front of his chest as if holding breasts… “You know… Four…  Um…”

Raanda nearly melted down laughing. Then: “She wasn’t your first, was she?”

It hardly seemed possible, but Sasha managed to blush even harder. He shook his head vigorously. “No!”

“Okay, dish! Come on now,” Raanda prodded. “I’ve been dry as a bone since we got here. I’m having to live vicariously through you… Who?”

Sasha looked furtively about. “Well, Guz spread it about that I was a virgin and that trill oceanographer, Akri Dexx, literally pulled me into her quarters…”

“Oh my god, Sasha! She’s gorgeous! How did you let that slip away?”

“Um… Well… She was pretty wild. For hours. Then she kind of dusted her hands, said something like, ‘now that’s taken care of,’ and kicked me out of her quarters and hasn’t looked at me since."

“What a heart breaker…” said Raanda.

“Then there was that denobulan, the assistant director of planets or something… Risl Phynyx…”

“She’s ancient!” Raanda responded.

“She’s only 240 or so…” Sasha replied. “That’s like… in human years…”

“65! Sasha!”

“Well, you know what they say about older women….”

“Yeah, where are the claw marks? You got snagged by a super cougar… Have you ever even screwed a human?”

“Um…” Sasha was, impossibly, blushing even harder. “The archeologists… Fish Head and Arizona Kind…”

“At the same time??? You bed hopper!!” Raanda pushed Sasha, causing him to rock sideways on the table bench.

“Well, I was with Fish... and her roommate kind of… walked in on us… and…”

“Sasha!!!”

6.5