Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 12: Close to the Edge Part I - The Solid Time of Change
Scene 7: Leprechauns
Not right away, not right away…
12.7
Leprechauns
The U.S.S. Escort could not go to warp. The nacelles were damaged and needed significant repair work and then to be recharged. Before the nacelles could be fully recharged, they had to be decontaminated. Repair would require the construction of replacement parts, particularly the coils and the transfer plating. These parts were not particularly difficult to replicate… As long as the rather rare materials were available.
There were a number of rocky planets on which any number of materials could be found. But the more rare materials would be easier to detect among the five asteroid rings that were the wake of failed planets. It was not surprising that there were so many in this trinary system, with its twisting and shifting fields of gravity.
The asteroids in these clusters were so far apart that it could take the Escort from several minutes to well over an hour to navigate from one to the next, gradually finding, mining out and collecting the various elements needed to repair the ship’s nacelles. Praseodymium, promethium, samarium, terbium, thulium, ytterbium, yttrium and scandium… All quite rare. The terbium and praseodymium were the hardest to find. There were trace amounts, but at this rate, unless Escort found a large deposit, it would take several weeks of collecting the trace amounts to collect enough for the needed repairs.
Captain Rhonda Carter was on the bridge when the signal was found. And the veteran Chief of the Boat, Master Chief Bill Waller, at the “eyes” station, was the one who found it.
“Jackpot! We have a winner! At least 90 kilograms of praseodymium and 10 kilos of terbium. More than twice what we need of both.”
“Okay, Bill,” said Carter. “What’s the hitch?”
“Captain?” Waller asked.
“Wherever there’s a pot of gold, there’s always a leprechaun,” Carter responded. “What’s the leprechaun?”
“Looks like three large asteroids in a cluster,” Waller replied. “The big one between the other two has the deposits.”
“Okay, so the other two are leprechauns,” Carter said. “How long until we get to them?”
“2 hours, 27 minutes,” said Waller.”
“Eyes on the leprechauns. What are they?” Carter croaked.
“They appear to be contiguous chunks broken off the main body. Mmph, that’s weird…”
“Elaborate, Bill.”
The chief of the boat was a thoroughly unremarkable looking man in his mid-50’s. He kept the ring of gray hair around the sides and back of his head clipped to a close bristle. At 5’6”, he was of less than average height and reasonably fit, despite a hardened pot belly. Brown eyes, a soft voice, and a bit of a double-chin rounded out a remarkably unremarkable appearance.
But he was very highly regarded by everyone who knew him. A jack of all trades, good at interpreting new data, fixing pretty much any hardware and just as handy unsnarling contaminated code. And a great teacher, constantly upgrading the knowledge and abilities of every enlisted astronaut, and often providing wisdom for the officers as well.
“Well, they’re about the same size and configuration,” Waller elaborated. “The configuration looked familiar, so I’m running some comparisons… Lines up with the rough configuration of those swarm-like things that were following the holy landers and made them head for open space. And also similar to those little mushroom bugs we just fought off when we first entered this system.”
“So those little mushrooms grow up to be these guys... Leprechauns... Lepreshrooms,” Carter mused. “And they’re at least smart enough to set up their ambush next to the nice watering hole… How do you think they’d react to a warning shot?”
“Is that what you think Captain Howard would do?”
The appearance of Krank’s avatar and words on Rhonda Carter’s wraparound screen startled her. She had been unaware of the klingon general’s presence and wasn’t certain when he had arrived on the bridge. She had granted Krank unlimited access to the Escort’s bridge long ago and the elderly general often found a corner to lurk quietly in, his coming and going so inconspicuous that it served as a reminder that klingons did not need cloaking devices to be stealthy.
Carter almost needed a double-take to locate Krank on the cramped bridge. The man was capable of an incredible stillness. She took a breath. “He would probably call a meeting… No, he would show up at a meeting that Sakura would call, and everyone would talk about it for several hours.”
“And if I had called such a meeting before we approached that gas giant and everyone carefully reviewed the sensor readings we had of this system before you gave the order to approach the planet, might things have turned out differently?” Krank asked.
Carter was not accustomed to being questioned on her bridge, but her respect for Krank kept her from responding combatively. “Who knows?” she replied. “Let’s try it now. We don’t have a conference room, so we’ll have to confer here on the bridge. Tie in comms to engineering and medical and activate view screens. Okay Bill, show us a picture of our lepreshrooms…”
What appeared on screen looked nothing like a mushroom. It looked like a thorn made out of rock. A wide and more or less flat top had a sort of main root that twisted down to a vanishingly small point.
“I thought these things were mushrooms,” Carter remarked.
“The mushroom grows on the inside,” Waller responded. “The tip of the thorn is the interface between the creature’s expression in subspace and relative space. The little ones were moving at warp, but at sublight speeds. If these are the same things we saw chasing the holy landers, they can, at minimum, move at warp 4.”
“And we can’t move at warp at all,” Carter mused.
“Leaving us quite vulnerable if there are a large number of adult, um, lepreshrooms in this system,” Krank concluded.
“So what do they want?” Carter asked. “They could just walk over here and get us at any time. They don’t have to set up an ambush.”
“Perhaps they are evaluating us,” Krank mused.
“You think they’re intelligent?” came Lt. Cmdr. Zizira Gross’ voice over the comm system from her post in engineering.
“All stop,” ordered Carter. “Let’s test that theory. Zizara, Commander Dutch Holland gave us a dozen dogfish. How about we put three of them on a probe and send it over there, nice and slow, to see if our thorny friends will let them mine those materials for us and send them back to us on the probe.”
“Now that is something Captain Howard would do,” said General Krank.
12.7