Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 6: Perpetual Change
Scene 2: Bridge
6.2
Bridge
Lt. Cmdr. Senek had saved 2nd Lt. Piper Acrele's life with a vulcan neck pinch. She had tried to overload one of the hand phasers that was stored on the bridge. As a preventive move, he had removed the power packs from each of the phasers stored on the bridge and, because the power packs could not be destroyed, he had instead placed the now unpowered phasers in the replicator and destroyed them.
Still, nearly three years after that incident, Piper needed watching. Sakura was made of firmer stuff. Following the folding incident, the three had found themselves isolated on the bridge. They could access the reclamation chamber, which, fortunately, included a vibe shower, and the replicator had reliably provided food and other necessities. But there was one necessity it could not provide...
Senek had been profoundly annoyed at how much Piper and Sakura relied on his mental and emotional stability. As hours turned into days, he had locked the major command functions to enforce Captain Howard's last order - station keeping. No matter how much first Piper, then even Sakura questioned the validity of that order, Senek had felt his captain's thoughts and emotions. There was an unspoken component to that order - it was not to be countermanded by any party other than the captain himself.
As days had turned into weeks, Senek had ordered the image of the roiling starfield into which the U.S.S. Beagle had been projected, to be reduced from the size of the entire port-bow wall to a frame no larger than the typical viewscreen of an Intrepid class vessel - 2.5 meters by 5 meters.
Putting a visual frame around it had helped his human companions compartmentalize what the viewscreen and all their instruments were telling them: the stars had gone mad. Nothing stayed put. Every star was in motion that defied the normal stellar trajectories. Stars were always moving, but they were not supposed to move that fast. Nor were those movements to be so chaotic, defying every principle of gravitation and the conservation of motion.
Stars and groups of stars made inexplicable U-turns, stopped, started moving again, bounced about as if a basketball team was warming up by dribbling them and shooting them through invisible hoops. It could not be fairly referred to as Brownian motion. Brownian motion followed rules, was, once initial velocities and masses were known, predictable.
As weeks had turned into months, Senek had ordered the frame reduced to a half-meter squared and the brightness dimmed so that the perpetually changing starfield would have to be looked at deliberately to be viewed. As annoying as this chaos was to an orderly vulcan mind, Senek had found himself both surprised and exceptionally annoyed at how much human minds depended on order. In the absence of an apparent order, the humans in his care had a much harder time imposing order on their universe.
A universe that had been reduced to the U.S.S. Beagle's bridge. The captain's office was unavailable. The lift doors would not open.
And now, after three years without any contact with his bond-mate, the one barely flickering flame of reason left in this tiny society of three was guttering and threatening to go out... or not to go out, but to be engulfed by the fires of pon farr...
6.2