Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 2: Astral Traveller
Scene 6: Battleships
2.6
Battleships
This time Rhonda Carter was meeting Organ Chord Voice on a battleship - a strange battleship. It looked like something from Earth’s 2nd World War, but the colors were all wrong. A purple battleship floated on a gunmetal gray ocean.
Organ Chord Voice had three faces this time. All speaking in unison, but with different pitches so that each word was a triad. Major, minor, diminished, augmented - not following any recognizable or predictable musical pattern, but musical nonetheless. The three faces were appended to the ends of the three guns of a large gun turret - gigantic gun barrels that flexed and swayed and danced in unison.
Organ Chord Voice had not been appended to a battleship. Organ Chord Voice was a battleship.
Two other large gun turrets also had flexible gun barrels that danced in unison with the turret that was speaking to Captain Carter. These other guns were not crowned with faces, but the ends of the guns were hatched, like the pipes of a great pipe organ. The barrels writhed and flexed and danced joyfully, but the three faces were theatrical masks of sadness.
As the music swelled, Organ Chord Voice, who seemed almost indistinguishable from the entire battleship, cried out in sorrow as the other guns joyfully launched broadside after broadside, gleefully shelling a far away shoreline, burning dully in the distance.
Organ Chord Voice was apologizing for this joyful attack and the unseen terror and carnage of those huddling on the shore, seeking scant refuge from the tonnage of blazing, exploding terror and death raining down on them.
Organ Chord Voice was sad about this, but it was in the battleship’s nature. This was, after all, the reason for its existence. And there was a deep, undeniable satisfaction in fulfilling its nature.
All the battleships.
Organ Chord Voice was not alone, but was only one among a vast armada of purple battleships - each with a different design. All designed to create a reign of terror - no - an ending. Gleefully fulfilling their purpose, yet somehow sorrowful in their overwhelming success.
“Dolnok Nor,” sang Organ Chord Voice.
Rhonda Carter looked up as Organ Chord Voice’s cannon launched a cannonade directly skyward with deafening, thunderous report.
The explosion took the form of an antique cardassian space station in the atmosphere-less sky. Not unlike Deep Space 9. But different stars than those visible in the starscape around Terok Nor.
Different stars.
Rhonda Carter, like most starship captains, had developed the ability to create a star map in her head. She committed the star map she was being shown to memory.
2.6