Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 11: Heart of the Sunrise
Scene 6: String of Fire
Dreamer easy in the chair that really fits you…
11.6
String of Fire
Two giant red suns were eating each other, connected by an arching string of fire. The shortest distance between two points would be a straight line, but in the massive gravity field of two suns that were sharing their coronas across a distance of nearly a million kilometers, a straight line was anything but straight when observed from a distance. That straight line was an arch.
The arch was surprisingly stable due to the rotation of the suns as they danced around each other, the congress of their union itself so massive that space and time curved around the fiery chain as well. The explosive consummation of their union was swiftly approaching - in a few hundred short years these supergiants would collide, explode, implode and leave in their wake a massive bubble of destruction, some of it escaping the massive gravity field, the rest slowly falling back into a newly formed black hole.
There really was no such thing as a “Goldilocks Zone” in orbit of these waltzing giant balls of superhot exploding and imploding nuclei. But a single planet had an extremely elliptical orbit. It would spend nearly a hundred years at a distance that left its massive oceans frozen solid except during its perihelion.
During that relatively brief period, about 8 Earth days, the oceans would thaw, life, in the form of strange, bioluminescent mushrooms, would spring forth and grow to enormous size before emitting spores, then the oceans would start to boil, the heat killing everything but the spores, and the newly lifeless oceans would cool and freeze over. Snowfall would cover the ground and envelope the spores, which would begin their long wait for the chance to explode anew into brief, but amazingly colorful life.
The U.S.S. Escort and two holy lander ships used extremely elliptical orbits to shelter in the shadow of this planet, only briefly exposing their hulls to the massive solar wind from the twin suns. Viewed from this particular location, the string of fire connecting the two giant suns seemed to form a “V” under the twin globes, their relative positions creating the illusion of a massive valentine rising over the planet.
Escort’s bolian first officer, Lt. Commander Zizira Gross, contemplated this from the captain’s chair. Captain Rhonda Carter and General Krank had beamed down to the surface over her objections, to stand with their strange new allies. The Escort’s captain had agreed to use the ship’s transporters to transport a total of nine holy warriors to the surface. She and Krank were determined to see this through and while Carter could be influenced, she could not be controlled.
Gross understood what was happening here better than anyone else. She had explained it to Carter and to Krank. She had explained it to Escort’s crew. She did not understand why not even the vulcans aboard could hear the lyrics. She was the only one who could.
Nine was the magic number. Nine voices. No more. No fewer. Nine.
On the planet below, the prisoner was awakening. No one knew if it could become strong enough during the planet’s brief thaw to summon all of its strength and terrible intelligence. Strong enough to escape the planet and contaminate other worlds - to begin again its long reign of terror…
Lt. Cmdr. Gross sat in the captain’s chair, ruminating on this long, epic enmity between the holy warriors and the enemy they simply referred to as the darkness. No one remembered how long ago the dark one had been imprisoned on this planet and for all that time, the holy warriors had been tasked to keep it there. The stories of the enemy’s depredations had faded into legend, into myth, until all that was left was a genetic memory.
Escort had helped this time, bringing the holy warriors to this place and using the transporter to ensure their safe and immediate passage to the surface. Gross and her bridge crew sat in comfortable assurance of the rightness of their cause.
And just to the right of the captain’s chair stood a holy warrior…
Singing.
11.6