Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 14: Close to the Edge Part III - I Get Up, I Get Down
Scene 6: Amazement
She would gladly say it amazement of her story…
14.6
Amazement
The small, dark gray robot was constructed mostly of metallic plastics, which allowed its protective skin to flex smoothly around its joints. A combined sensor array and control receiver was arranged into a small dorsal fin on its back. Its rectangular head contained stereoscopic eyes, ears and nostrils of a sort, all designed to allow it to quickly locate odd sounds and smells. It also had four legs and a small tail (which both helped with balance and served as a transmitter), all this giving it somewhat the look of a dark gray, metallic pug.
The legs could be folded flush with the torso, enabling the robot to move using levitation plates, in which mode it looked more like an oddly cute metallic grouper, hence the unofficial moniker: dogfish. More people knew the robot by that name than by its official designation, the NEER Model 18, by far the most popular model of the Nakamura Enterprises Exploratory Robot series.
In the murky grayness of the U.S.S. Escort’s engine room, the small robot moved with glacial slowness. It transmitted everything its slime-covered sensors could pick up. Which was mostly… slime. All over everything.
But where the mushroom that lived on the inside of a thorn of rock intersected with the Escort’s warp core, there was a lot of activity. Slimy gray tendrils merged with the control panels for the warp core. Far more tendrils intersected the antimatter chamber. More snaked off along the conduits that carried the excited currents into the nacelles.
The robot followed the conduits toward the nacelles at a glacial pace. Seemingly only slightly faster than the tendrils were growing.
It wasn’t just visuals that the dogfish was transmitting, it was every reading the robot was picking up with a surprisingly broad array of sensor devices, considering the small size of the robot. Even the robot’s skin was a net of tactile and atmospheric sensors.
The readings the dogfish was transmitting were displayed all over both the forward and rear monitors in the tactical launch.
Master Chief Bill Waller was concentrating on the technical readings, including power levels, antimatter balance, and flow isolation. Captain Rhonda Carter was standing behind the veteran NCO, looking over his shoulder. She was holding a communicator pin in her hand, her thumb poised over it. Waller’s fingers were hovering over one of the controls on his panel.
At the front of the bridge, Warrant Officer Seprek Harrison was watching the visual and listening to the audio that the robotic eyes and ears were picking up. His left hand rested on the control panel at the helm station, one finger raised over a single control.
“Roman,” said Waller, “Are you seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
The rather tinny sounding voice of Chief Flight Engineer Roman Hess emanated from the communicator pins on Waller’s and Carter’s uniforms: “If you think you’re seeing readings that indicate we’re about to go to warp at a much higher rate of speed than this vessel was ever intended for, then, yes… That’s what I think I’m seeing as well.”
“It looks like our lepreshroom…” Bill Waller gave a dramatic pause before adding the moniker Rhonda Carter had given this creature: “…Rocky… Rocky has almost fully integrated its own warp intermix chamber with Escort’s.”
“When Stephanie said she was coming to join us, she wasn’t kidding,” Captain Carter quipped.
From the front of the tactical launch’s bridge, Seprek Harrison said, “I am panning up.”
In response to the command coming from the vulcan warrant officer, the head of the dogfish swiveled slowly upward.
“What are those?” It was Lt. Cmdr Zizira Gross’s voice coming over the communicators.
Six large, slimy, oval, dark grey sacks were displayed on the forward viewscreen of the tactical launch. Hanging from the corner of the ceiling that joined the starboard nacelle to main engineering, these large, slimy ovals seemed to pulse and glow very slightly.
“I am reviewing the bio signatures,” Harrison reported. “They appear to be egg sacks. Within each of those sacks, I am reading a single lifeform, each with a number of DNA signatures: Lepreshroom. Space Shrimp…” Harrison used these newly created names for the newly discovered life forms without pause. “I am also reading two other DNA signatures: Vulcan... Human.”
Carter and Waller turned from the rear viewscreen in astonishment. Their voices blended with the voices of Zizira Gross and Roman Hess coming over the communicators:
“What???”
“As you said,” Harrison continued. “When Stephanie said she was coming to join us, her intent was quite literal. The blended human and vulcan DNA signatures are congruent with one individual, a hybrid vulcan and human: Ensign John Sevork.”
“Are you telling me that John had completed the deed before I…” Carter stopped, her voice ragged.
“Yes,” Harrison responded. “His DNA entered the creature that he had described as a cross between a stag and a tiger shrimp, and was carried, or at least the information from his DNA, was carried down into the portion of that creature that lived inside the, um, rock encrusted mushroom it appeared to be riding on top of. And there was, apparently, enough time for that all to occur…”
“In the few seconds before I blew him off the top of that rock,” Carter concluded, coldly.
“He came. And then he went…”
“BILL!!!”
14.6