Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 1: The Eye of the Beholder
Prelude: Tyr’phoyx 8
Prelude
Tyr’phoyx 8
Project Manager Kiasias Tidun wrestled desperately with the computer, trying in vain to undo what she had just done. But she couldn’t remember the command codes - nothing worked. She seemed to remember scrambling them, but her memories were rapidly fading. She was fading. It was like her spots were fading - she didn’t even feel like a trill anymore. And she wasn’t just any trill.
Tidun had clawed her way to the top of the Tyr’phonyx exo-mining operation - from ore processor to mine construction engineer to prospector and eventually project manager. It was extremely rare for an unjoined trill to move up through so many different hierarchies so quickly - or even at all. Layers of tradition and racial prejudice tended to block trills from her background from climbing out of the lowest, dirtiest, most menial jobs, not to mention into project management - which, for the purposes of this operation, essentially meant captaining a mining ship.
But all of that was slipping away. She could barely remember any of it. She remembered setting the self-destruct and scrambling the codes so that she could not undo it. She could barely remember how to use the controls at all - only that she had to - even as her memories were slipping away.
She couldn’t stop the overload in the warp core. Somewhere in her mind, the tiny part that was still Kiasias Tidun went into the same problem solving mode that had won her this job; she jettisoned the warp engine and hit it not with a torpedo - which would tear the ship apart - but with a tractor beam from a mining skiff to carry it away from the ship at maximum speed. The explosion was enough to rock the Try’phoyx 8, sending a few of the trill mining engineers to their knees, but not enough to harm them otherwise.
Not that any of the trill miners could remember who they were anymore. Not even Project Manager Tidun. Their minds had finally been assimilated. Not by the borg, but by another collective. The more minds they could link, the more they began to feel… something… like there was something it was like to be them. 127 trill minds pulling together - that was enough for them. More than enough. Supergenius material…
But Tidun wasn’t finished yet - even though nothing was left of her personality. There was one more trap to spring - a countdown she had put in place in case she could not stop the assimilation of her crew - and herself. Most of the crew was currently locked in the main ore processing floor - originally called there to await an announcement from their project manager. When Project Manager Tidun failed to enter the failsafe codes in time, the compartment vented to space, blowing most of the former trills out of the back of the ship. The collective was now restricted to only 18 survivors scattered in other compartments on the Tyr’phoyx 8.
It was still more than they had had in centuries. It would be enough…
