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
