YES - Close to the Edge: Star Beagle Adventures episodes 12 - 19

[Robert Bruce Scott]

The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 14: Close to the Edge Part III - I Get Up, I Get Down
Scene 10: The Truth Is Written


The truth is written all along the page…

14.10
The Truth Is Written​

John, Jr., Steve, Steph, Jr., Sevrock, Rohn, Key, Jephan, K’Lon, Rock, Ork, and Rider were conferring. The Runt wasn’t able to contribute thoughts so much as emotions to this discussion. But The Runt got a vote. It didn’t matter that she was completely non-verbal and probably not very intelligent. She would get an equal vote. And this was important.


“We must kill her.”

“There is no hope for her?”

“Nothing. The regenerative process continues, but there is nothing left to regenerate. The result would be six clones, none of which could ever have any independence.”

“Worse, her continued presence would destroy our own futures.”

“It is a matter of survival, then.”

“And a matter of mercy! Imagine such an existence! No thought! No independence! Only the moment to moment flow of experience! A nightmare existence without context!”

“I don’t know. It’s one thing to allow a person to die. Another thing entirely to kill her.”

All attention was focused on Jephan. The thought had been offered as if it were self-evident. The new attention focused on Jephan made it evident that it was far from self-evident.


“What is so different? At least, what is so different in this specific instance?”


It was Jephan’s turn to be taken aback. “I… I… I don’t know. I just have this innate sense that it is wrong to kill unless it is absolutely necessary.”

The Runt agreed wordlessly with Jephan. Some of the others did too.

“In this case, it is absolutely necessary. If we don’t kill her soon, kill all of her, she will cut short our lives. We will starve. And the future will die with us.”

“So it is necessary?” Jephan asked.


“Not only necessary, it is compassionate!” Now all attention was focused on Ork.


“How is killing compassionate?” Jephan asked.

“Think of the life, or rather lives of what they, not she, they, will become! A fully developed brain with nothing in it! No memory! No future! No past! Just a frightening, meaningless, never-ending now! Not one such life! Six of them! Would you want that for yourself?” asked Ork.

“It won’t be easy to do. She’ll just keep coming back.”


“We eat her!”


This final suggestion met with unanimous approval. For a moment they fell silent. Then:


“What about her?”

“She has to stand trial.”

“No! We are not qualified to sit in judgement!”

“But she might kill us.”

“And she might protect us. And help us. We have to talk to her.”


“Then summon her!”

14.10​

 

[Robert Bruce Scott]

The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 14: Close to the Edge Part III - I Get Up, I Get Down
Scene 11: Her Own Domain


For the crucifixion of her own domain…

14.11
Her Own Domain​

Captain Rhonda Carter very suddenly stood up, then walked over to a locker near the command chair of the bridge of the U.S.S. Escort’s tactical launch. She pressed a mechanical release and a cabinet deployed, displaying an Extra Vehicular Activity suit. The cabinet was designed to present the suit for ready access. It took only seconds for Carter to step into the suit.

“Captain?” Warrant Officer Seprek Harrison asked as she donned the helmet and fastened it to the suit.

Carter touched a switch on the left arm of the suit. Her voice came out of the suit, slightly distorted. “You’re in command down here, Seprek. I have been summoned and I have to go.”

“Summoned by whom?” Harrison asked. “Rocky?”

Master Chief Bill Waller was sound asleep in his chair, his head propped up by the inflatable neck pillow.

“John’s children,” Carter replied. “Apparently they’ve… um… hatched.”

“You intend to allow them to sit in judgement of you?” Harrison asked.

“I’m not going there to be judged,” Carter responded. “I’m going there to parley. And remind them that, mushroom or no mushroom, this is my boat and I intend to get it back.” She attached a type II phaser to her waist and slung a phaser rifle over her shoulder. “I don’t know what it takes to kill a vulcan-human-mushroom-shrimp-thingy and I hope I don’t have to find out. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to let them take me.”

“I will have to bring the transporter back online, then,” said Harrison. “We had taken them offline, both here and in the shuttlebay so that we would appear less of a potential threat to Rocky.”

“Rocky’s not in charge anymore, Seprek,” Carter rejoined. “But take the transporter offline after you send me to the bridge. Now that my crew are outside of the contaminated area and as safe as I can possibly arrange for you, I am not leaving my bridge until I can safely evict those mushrooms. John’s children or not, I want those baby mushrooms off my ship.”

“Not an extremely healthy place,” Harrison observed.

“Hence the EVA suit. Do you have me dialed in?”

“Aye, Captain.”

Carter took a deep breath, then: “Energize.”




When Captain Carter had last been on her bridge, it was a dark and slimy place. All grays, no color, no active controls with the exception of one monitor that was tracking the ship’s distress signal. And all of it a bit wavy and out of focus.

The bridge she arrived on was clean, well lighted, and, probably most importantly, entirely in focus. She was the only person there. But something about the size of a small cat was standing on the helm station. It moved with a slight, skittering motion on six spindly legs, each ending in a small, three-toed foot. It looked like a minuscule cross between a stag and a tiger shrimp with dark orange and gray striping. It was, Rhonda Carter realized with a shudder, the exact likeness of its deceased mother.

Only instead of gigantic, extremely alien and threatening, the small creature was, oddly, devastatingly cute.

The rear port door to the bridge opened with a hiss and a much larger and far more unsettling creature entered. It was tall enough to need to duck to get through the hatch. Its legs and feet were very similar to those of the tiny creature on the helm station, except there were only two legs and they were much larger. This creature was vaguely human-shaped, but with very long, spindly, straw-colored legs and very long, spindly, straw-colored arms. Loose folds of skin seemed to mimic a tunic reminiscent of a Star Fleet uniform. The creature's head was somewhat misshapen, a bit longer on the left side than on the right. Its face was the face of its deceased father, Ensign John Sevork, right down to the vulcan’s distinctive ears and eyebrows and even the purple mohawk that Sevork had sported the last week of his life.

It was more unsettling when the creature spoke. Its voice was, right down to the pronounced Texas drawl, very much the voice of its father. His father, Carter corrected herself.


“You can safely remove your protective suit, Captain Carter. We have adjusted this environment to your needs and have removed the spores from the air recycling for this compartment. We do not intend to harm you if you do not intend to harm us.”

Rhonda Carter was not about to do any such thing. She used the external speaker for her helmet. “Do you have a name?”

“I am John, Junior. My sister…” John Jr. waved a three-fingered hand toward the helm station… “The Runt. She is not able to speak. She can only convey emotion.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Twelve.”

“And I suppose you’re going to introduce the lot of you?” Carter looked about the bridge, then gestured toward The Runt. “Are most of them closer to your size, or hers?”

“Somewhere in between, but closer to mine.” John Jr. drawled, his west Texas accent wildly incongruent with his extremely alien appearance. “But I am only going to introduce three others for now. No need to overwhelm you or make the bridge too crowded. And there’s another reason…”

“What would that be?” Carter asked.

“Rocky is dying,” John Jr. answered. “Keeping his intermix chamber alive and successfully integrated with the Escort’s warp engine and keeping us on course to return to our home galaxy is taking a lot of effort. The Runt can’t help with that, so she is free to be here. My siblings insisted that two others accompany me to negotiate with you.”

“Wait,” said Carter. “You said, our home galaxy?”

“We may have been born here, but we were intended to be creatures of the Milky Way. It is as much our home as it was our father’s. We all regret that we can never meet him. We’re strongly motivated to make him proud of us.”


“So you and your siblings want to negotiate with me? Negotiate what with me?”


“Our surrender.”

14.11​

 

[Robert Bruce Scott]

The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 14: Close to the Edge Part III - I Get Up, I Get Down
Scene 12: Coming of Age


How old will I be before I come of age for you?

14.12
Coming of Age​

Ork was kind of formless. His shapeshifting was quite limited and he usually appeared as a roughly cone-shaped blob that occasionally became rectangular. In order to create sound, he literally transformed into a conically shaped speaker cabinet. A similar device functioned as a microphone, allowing Ork to hear.

He had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no legs. He was able to move very quickly by changing shape into a ball and rolling. It was in this guise that Captain Carter first saw Ork. A light brown ball, about 1.5 meters in diameter rolled onto the bridge through the port entrance, then transformed into a conical speaker cabinet and, with a thick west Texas accent, announced: “My name is Ork!”


Carter was both deeply surprised and extremely amused. “And my name is Captain Rhonda Carter!”

“I know!” Ork replied. “You killed my father! And my mother! And Rocky!”

Carter was taken aback and left slack-jawed. Before she could muster a response, another creature with a feminine voice said, “Don’t mind Ork. He shouts everything. That’s just the way he talks. He’s not angry. Just loud.”

This creature had four spindly legs and two spindly arms. A paddle-shaped head with no mouth, eyes, ears or nostrils. But little wavy tendrils sprouted from the front of the paddle, giving her the look of both a stag and a giant tiger shrimp. but with hands. And a pronounced Texas drawl.

“And that is Stephanie, Junior!” Ork announced. “She is my sister!”

“He also has a habit of stating the obvious,” Stephanie, Jr. opined. Carter wasn’t quite certain where her voice was coming from. “But Ork is smarter than he sounds. And compassionate.”

“So, are all of you…” Captain Carter looked about in some confusion… “So… completely different from one another? Were all of you born fully formed?”

“Why does that matter to you?” Ork asked. The combination of his full volume delivery and thick Texas accent made him sound slightly like an auctioneer. “You just want your ship back! You’re thinking about how to kill us!”

“It’s true,” said John, Jr. “The Runt knows that you’re thinking about how to kill us.”


In response, Carter entered a number of commands into a control panel of the left arm of her EVA suit. Then she removed her helmet and walked over to the command chair and sat down.

“I don’t want to kill you. You’re John’s children. I have a responsibility toward you. But I also have a responsibility to my ship and my crew. So do not make me choose.”


“It is well beyond a matter of choosing,” said Stephanie, Jr. “When you killed mom and dad, you also mortally wounded Rocky. Rocky integrated with the heart of Escort. He is getting much worse and as he is breaking apart, your ship is breaking down with him. They are thoroughly integrated.”

“It is taking everything that we can do to hold it all together at this point,” said John, Jr. "If we had not been born fully formed, we would not have had a chance."

“We can’t survive without Rocky!” Ork exclaimed. “And Rocky is dying!”

“We need your help if we’re going to survive,” Stephanie, Jr. drawled. “And you need our help if you want your ship to survive. Since Rocky integrated with your ship, Escort has become vulnerable to Rocky’s deterioration.”

“Have you tried increasing the structural integrity field?” Carter asked.


“The what?” John, Jr. asked.


“We do not know how to use your ship things!” Ork announced.

“I’m going to need an increasing number of my people in various places on this ship to help hold it together,” Carter replied. “But if you cannot live without Rocky and Rocky is dying, how can I save you?”

“There are parts of Rocky that are still healthy enough to sustain each of us,” said John, Jr. “But they can only survive inside the rock environment. We will have to, somehow, break Rocky into a dozen pieces, build rock environments to transplant each piece into an environment.”

“But it all has to happen at once,” Stephanie, Jr. continued. “The pieces of Rocky cannot survive for more than a second outside, even if the environment is not fully sealed.”

Captain Carter leaned forward in the command chair, her elbows on the arm rests. “It can be done. But it’s not something that I could do by myself. I do have people who could do it, but it would be a team effort. In fact, between that and keeping this ship together, it’s going to require pretty much all of my people.”

“I do not understand!” Ork exclaimed. “Why would you help us? You killed our parents!”

“She doesn’t have much choice,” John, Jr. observed. “She needs us to keep Rocky alive until he can get us back into the Milky Way galaxy.”

“But will she keep her promise to help us survive?” asked Stephanie, Jr.

“I can’t promise it will work,” Carter rejoined. “But I can promise we will do everything possible to make it happen. It is not going to be easy. Well, actually, I have almost no idea just how hard it is going to be. I know how to do it in a general sense. But it is going to take tremendous precision. My people are great at teamwork and great at precision. But you and your siblings are going to have to be great at communication.”


Ork didn’t turn so much as simply flowingly change form so that his speakers were pointed at John, Jr. “Do you believe her?”


John, Jr. looked around the bridge and focused on the cat-sized replica of their mother stag / tiger shrimp.


“The Runt believes her.” He ran a long, spindly arm over the brush of what appeared to be purple hair on the top of his large, oddly misshapen head. “And if she believes the captain, so do I.”

14.12​

 

[Robert Bruce Scott]

The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 14: Close to the Edge Part III - I Get Up, I Get Down
Scene 13: I Get Up


I get up…

14.13
I Get Up​

“Just when I think I have the slightest clue about what we’re doing, everything goes topsy turvy.”


After having beamed everyone out of the tactical launch to various locations throughout the U.S.S. Escort, Master Chief Bill Waller was alone on the narrow bridge of the launch, seated in the command chair. Still wearing the inflatable neck brace. Captain’s orders.


“Come on, Bill, how long have you been in Star Fleet?”

“32 years. 33 years in a few months. Most of it seemed to make sense at the time…”

“Yeah, right Bill, consolidate your crap… Now you’re even talking to yourself…”

“Wait… is it “You’re talking to yourself?” or “I’m talking to myself?””

“Crap. I wouldn’t last five minutes in a monastery.”


Just as Waller was considering calling someone, anyone, to preserve his sanity, a call came through from Chief Flight Engineer Roman Hess. “Master Chief, I think we’re going to need your expertise with the structural integrity field generators. You helped Ki source the generators. Do you remember when the jem’hadar chased us into the atmosphere of that gas giant? It was right after we installed the supplemental shields and industrial replicators. Ki linked them to create a positive pressure within the hull to keep us from getting crushed by the atmosphere…”

“Chief Hess,” said Bill Waller with some exasperation. “Are you anywhere near asking a question?”

“Sorry, Master Chief,” Hess replied. “It’s just that the damage this mushroom is doing to the ship… Well, it’s as much the warp field as anything else that is holding it together. At the moment, I’m really concerned about the pylons holding the nacelles on. Especially considering our current velocity. It’s like this mushroom is trying to fly us apart…”

“I’m still not hearing a question, Chief,” Waller said.

“Well, do you have any recommendations on how to set up the structural integrity fields?” Hess asked. “I mean, the bulkheads are deteriorating so fast you can almost see them disintegrating…”

“Okay… let’s assume the little mushroom bugs have gotten into the metal itself and are trying to reconfigure the ship’s structure to rebuild its rocky shell. I think that’s how these things build their, um, shells,” Waller mused. “So we need to use the multiple structural integrity generators to address different issues. Use the primary SI to create apparent negative pressure to hold the ship together. You might have to continually fine tune it as conditions develop. Then use one of the secondary systems to create apparent positive within the structural elements themselves to drive those little subspace mushroom bugs out of the metal. Collect them with the transporter and beam them into the healthy tissue identified by John’s children.”

“And the other secondary SI generator?” Hess asked.

“Keep it in standby mode to address emergent issues and plug the leaks until you can get in with a focused program from one of the industrial replicators and conduct emergency repairs,” Waller replied.

“Thank you Master Chief. Hess out.”


Before Bill Waller could stop and think about structural integrity, another call came in, this one with Chief Transporter Engineer Eva Mendez, Chief Medical Technician Kara Garrity and General Krank. Mendez was doing the talking: “Master Chief, can you review the grand plan for us for what we’re doing with Rocky and John’s children?”

Waller took a deep breath. “Okay, draw up a flow chart because this is going to be intense and we have to precisely resolve each part of it. If any part isn’t up to specifications, we could fail, Rhonda’s godchildren could die and we might be left with a bunch of wild mushroom spores that could re-infest the ship and crew, which could be disastrous for us…”

“Okay,” Waller continued. “So here are the steps… First, we design a program that will tie the industrial replicators into the main transporter. The transporter will be set to divide the remaining living tissue into 12 parts as apportioned by Rhonda's godchildren. Each one of the godchildren will need a different amount of the, um… viable living mushroom tissue for their particular environment. At the same time that the mushroom tissue is beamed overboard to twelve separate locations, the industrial replicator will remove all the rocky shell from the interior of the ship and replicate 12 separate, complete shell environments for the living tissue to be installed in.”

“Now here’s the tricky part…” Waller added.

“You mean what you just described wasn’t the tricky part?” asked Chief Garrity.

“Yeah, the first part is just getting the math right,” Waller confirmed. “The art comes in with shaping the external environment that each, um… juvenile lepreshroom will extend above its… um… tabletop? Shape that external environment and install each godchild in each their own environment. The really tricky part will be creating and correctly sizing and positioning the ports through the top of the shell for their legs to comfortably extend through the shell and into the mushroom tissue. Positioning, angle, size all have to be correct or we’re going to cut these god-kids off at the knees and they’ll die before they can take control of their own lepreshroom.”

“And all of this has to happen simultaneously?” Mendez asked.

“That’s why Kara has to be part of the team,” Waller confirmed. “Kara, you have to think long term on each of these projects. We won’t really get much opportunity to adjust the positioning. Each godchild has a different number of legs in a different configuration. They’re going to have to live with this setup for at least a century. We want them to be comfortable, not spending decades and centuries in pain because their legs aren’t comfortably positioned…”


“The final part of this puzzle is the defensive position we are likely to find upon re-entry to the Milky Way Galaxy,” said General Krank. “John’s children may be attacked by the holy landers when we arrive. It isn’t our fight, but the... um... godchildren can make it our fight by trying to reintegrate with the Escort. So we need the separation to be complete shortly after and not before we re-enter the Milky Way. It will be to our advantage to provide them some sort of cover until they can go to warp and escape. After that, they are no longer our problem.”


“I never thought of klingons as such misty-eyed optimists,” Waller opined.

14.13​