Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 4: Starship Trooper
Scene 13: Interesting People
4.13
Interesting People
“I don’t know why,” said PFC Guz Maxwell. “Everything just… stopped. The warp engine is running, but we’re not going anywhere.”
“Shut it down,” ordered Lance Corporal Petra Spitze. “We’re feeding something. Stop feeding it.”
“It’s down,” Guz reported.
“It’s a web,” PFC Raanda Habib, said. She touched a control and a series of interconnected white lines appeared in front of the stars on the viewscreen.
“Oh crap…” said PFC Sasha Soko. “I recognize that pattern… Tholian…”
“Is the web fully formed?” asked Spike.
“Looks like they’re closing it now,” Raanda Habib responded. “We didn’t see them because they were on the other side of it.”
“It’s a small web,” Sasha observed. “Tailor made for a ship this size. Would the tholians be using a ferengi probe?”
“Unimportant,” Spike rejoined. “They’re about to vent heat into this cabin. Everything in the crates will be fine, but we’re about to get roasted. We’re going to them. No phasers, no spitfires, no explosives - we don’t want to ignite their atmosphere. Arm yourselves with bullpups and can openers.”
“Combat suits?” asked Sasha.
“We’re going to have to use the replication circuit and hope that new program works,” said Spike. “I’ll program it. Get me a bullpup and a can opener.”
Raanda Habib was already at the crates. She handed bullpups (small, automatic rifles that looked like two largish pentagons jammed together - a short barrel sticking out one end and a shoulder pad on the other) and can openers (heavy, triangular maces that could be used either as an axe or a sledge hammer) back to Guz, one at a time.
Guz passed these weapons on to Sasha, who in turn handed them to Spike, who looked back, confirmed everyone was armed, then hit the transporter control.
The transport sensation was the oddest any of them had ever experienced. They arrived, empty-handed, in a hellish, poisonous soup of a red environment. But because they were still in transit, the transit field held the environment back as a EVA combat suit was replicated around each marine. Their weapons transported last, arriving in their gloved hands.
The bullpups came equipped with clips that allowed them to be clipped to a tether on the front of their combat suits. The marines were just securing their weapons when two tholians entered the rear compartment.
The tholian ship was about twice the size of the runabout. The marines had beamed into what was apparently a storage compartment. The walls were divided into a honeycomb of hexagonal compartments - several of which contained brightly glowing gems.
Someone in Star Fleet had dubbed the tholians “Crystal Lobsters,” but they looked more like glowing ants... glowing red ants with a white stripe that included their eyes that glowed even more brightly.
One of them raised something that looked like a gun.
“Scatter!” Spike ordered as a visible wave of force pulsed through the atmosphere. Guz had dived forward and spread out flat on the deck. The others had leapt to the sides and the wave of force sent them to the corners of the room.
Guz had his bullpup in front of him and was the first to open fire, shattering the head of the tholian who had fired. Raanda and Spike fired next - a burst of about 20 bullets converged on the head of the second tholian, shattering its head.
Both newly headless tholians immediately charged forward. Guz concentrated his fire on the chest of the first one - dozens of armor-piercing rounds chipping and shattering what were, apparently, layers of crystal.
Sasha let his bullpup hang by its tether. He stepped out with the can opener (kind of a cross between a tomahawk and a hammer) in his left hand, knife in his right. Spike, who had been next to him, switched her bullpup to her left hand and hefted her can opener with her right. On the other side of the room, Raanda stopped firing, but did not lower her bullpup.
Despite their layers of crystal, the headless tholians weren’t much slower than their human intruders. Guz kept firing until Sasha kicked the bottom of his foot. The tholian in front of him unlimbered a pair of scythe-like weapons as Guz rolled to the side. Sasha stepped forward and brought the cutting edge of his can opener through the creature’s chest, then reversed the weapon to cut back upward again, causing the front half of the creature to split. It fell, inert, to the deck.
Spike used a downward blow with her can opener to open the hole in the 2nd tholian’s neck, then jammed the barrel of her bullpup into it and sprayed armor-piercing rounds directly into the creature.
“Okay,” said Sasha. “They can survive getting their heads blown off and still see us somehow. Aim for the chest.”
“These might help,” said Spike, picking up the weapon dropped by the first tholian. She tossed it to Sasha and unlimbered another from a holster on the second tholian. “We have to get to the flight cabin.”
The door at the front of the bay was a sphincter that opened in response to a touch, leading to a long corridor with a single door opening off each side and another sphincter-like door in the ceiling at the front.
Spike knelt beneath this sphincter with her bullpup pointed directly up. Sasha reached up, touched the control and stepped back as the door opened - directly under another tholian. Spike fired a burst directly up at it, then rolled out of the way as the tholian fell out, landed heavily on the floor and thrashed about a moment before collapsing.
Spike didn’t hesitate - climbing over its body up into the flight cabin. Guz followed her up to look at the utterly alien controls.
Guz pointed at a control. “That one?”
“No,” Spike replied. “That one.” She pushed and twisted the control and the ship jerked as it released the webbing that had extruded from the back. At the same time, lights throughout the ship started flashing, faster and faster…
Spike entered a series of controls on a panel on the inside of the left arm on her space suit and the marines beamed out just as the ship started to self-destruct.
The Bluebird’s transporter beamed the marines into the back of the other tholian ship.
But this bay was crawling with tiny tholians…
“Babies?” asked Raanda.
“Hatchlings,” said Spike. “They’ll burrow through your suit and start eating you.” She lifted the weapon she had taken from the other ship, aimed it at the floor in front of them and activated it. Waves of force scattered the tiny tholians across the deck, shattering dozens of them.
“RUN!!!”
Spike ran forward, leading the four young marines to the door. She touched the control, but this door appeared to be locked. She stepped back and aimed the tholian pulse weapon at it and the door blew open enough for her to push through. Guz, Sasha and Raanda followed suit - into a corridor that was swarming with more baby tholians. Guz swatted a few from Sasha’s suit. Raanda swatted a few from Guz’s suit.
Spike made it to the front and activated the tholian weapon as Raanda started screaming. She turned around and Sasha used his knife to sweep a number of hatchlings from the back of her suit, where they had started burrowing in, causing a leak that was widening.
The tholian pilot fell out of the cockpit, dead from a point-blank blow from the tholian weapon. The recoil from the weapon dislocated Spike's right shoulder. “Guz - I need you up here!”
Guz ran forward and scrambled up into the cockpit. Sasha was using the other tholian weapon to blow the tiny tholians back toward the rear of the corridor - it was a losing battle.
“Got it,” Guz called just as the lights started flashing.
Spike managed to activate a number of controls on her EVA suit and the marines were transported back into the rear compartment of the newly freed Bluebird as the second tholian ship self-destructed. A large number of baby tholians transported back with them.
“Hang on to something!” Sasha shouted. He sprinted up to the flight cabin and activated a control, blowing the rear hatch open again, venting the overheated internal atmosphere and a number of tiny tholians into space. Guz was vented out the back as well.
Dozens more somewhat larger juvenile tholians had previously been transported into the Bluebird. With the atmosphere vented, the temperature inside the runabout dropped to well below freezing. The internal lights went out inside the juvenile tholians as they instantly froze to death - their red crystalline bodies turning blue before shattering, leaving only shards.
Guz used the attitude controls on his spacesuit, little jets of gas, to steer himself back toward the runabout, grasped the top of the rear hatch and crawled back into the craft.
A few hours later, the Bluebird was underway again. The cots had been moved into the flight cabin. No one wanted to be next to the rear hatch at this point.
“Those ships are hatcheries?” asked Raanda.
“And we were to be their first meal,” Spike answered. Her shoulder had been popped back into place and she was exercising it very gently.
“Why don’t they carry food with them?” Guz asked.
“They probably do,” Spike mused. “But if that was a second round of hatchlings, they might have run out. I suspect any adults on that second craft had locked themselves away from the hatchlings.”
“Could they have been the ones using that probe?” asked Sasha.
“They were definitely not friendly,” Spike responded.
“But they were so interesting…” said Raanda. There was some grief in her voice.
“Join the Space Hounds…” Guz started.
“Travel the Galaxy…” Sasha continued. They were looking at Raanda.
Raanda shook her head slowly: “Meet interesting people…”
“Kill them,” Spike concluded.
She paused for a moment, then: “Not so funny now, is it?”
“Nope,” Raanda replied. “Not so funny now…”
4.13