Uh Oh...
Posted on Thu Jun 24th, 2021 @ 11:37pm by Lieutenant Mar Megara MD & Captain Remas McDonald & Lieutenant Commander Shadi Zatra
2,124 words; about a 11 minute read
Mission: S0:1: What Is Past, Is Prologue
The battle had seen Sick Bay overrun with wounded. Doctors had been dashing back and forth, attempting to attend to them all quickly so they could return to battle stations. Medics and acute care nurses had been rushing in and out, attempting to meet the injured where they had fallen. The ship had shuddered and shaken so much, she had dismissed the movement of the egg as simply echos of the ship's movements.
But now, she knew better.
Because, standing there, staring at the "nest" they had built for it, all she saw was an empty shell, split cleanly in two.
"Dr. Mar to Captain McDonald and Lieutenant Zatra," she said, tapping her combadge as she started the internal sensors scanning the ship. "Please report to Sick Bay immediately. We have a... situation." She sighed, placing her hands on her hips, and said, "ai, Dios Mío," under her breath.
Without a reply, and merely a moment later, Shadi burst out of the emergency Jeffries tube access in Sickbay. "Isss it my egg? Where in the ssstarving bloody hells is my egg?!"
“The egg is not the problem,” Meg said. “It... well, it is over here.” She gestured towards the nest with the shattered egg sitting perfectly still inside it.
"What did I miss?" Remas said as he jogged into sick bay. "I didn't miss the event? Where is the wee'n?"
"That, sir, is a good question," replied Meg, gesturing to the nest. "It seems he has slipped away in the chaos of battle."
"It's a newborn, I wasn't aware it could just slip away being something of a unique specimen," Remas said. "I mean, it's got to be in Sickbay correct? It can't have gotten any further than that."
Shadi was quaking with rage. "You... let... my... spawn... RUN AWAY?!" She lunged at Meg with her talons outstretched. "I WILL SNAP YOUR BONESSS AND SSSUCK THE MARROW CLEAN!!!"
Remas dived into action and tackled Shadi to the floor, a feat akin to catching an arrow in mid-flight and just as dangerous given the sharp pointy end.
Meg, who hadn’t even flinched, simply crossed her arms sternly. “I understand that you are upset- and rightfully so,” she said calmly, yet loudly enough to be heard over Shadi’s screeching. “But killing me will not help you find your child. Now do I have to sedate you are will you stop this foolishness?”
After a bit of tumbling and grappling, Shadi wriggled free from Remas' grasp through use of her double-jointedness. "Where is my ssspawn?" Shadi cried out. She slithered clear up to Meg's face and let out a hissing snort. "Tell me!"
Keeping her cool, Meg simply stared back at Shadi. “If I knew that,” she said softly, “he would have been back in his nest before I even called you. Now. Would you like to help me look for him, or would you rather leave him lost while you rail needlessly against me?”
"I assume you have tried using the internal sensors?" Remas asked.
“As I was calling you,” replied Meg, not taking her eyes off Shadi. While she wasn’t afraid of the reptilian officer, she still respected her as a warrior. “Nothing. He must have gotten into the air ducts.
Shadi jumped away from Meg and sprang for the egg shells. "Give me that!" she shouted before taking up the shards and fragments for deep sniffing. "If I can get the scent, then maybe I can..." She started to wrack her body in tearless sobs. "Oh, it's no use! My spawn is gone and I'll never get them back!"
“We will find him,” Meg promised fiercely. “If we have to dismantle the ship, we will find him.”
"It's a him?" Shadi gasped in horror. "My gender reveal ritual! You've ruined it, you milk-sucking mammal!"
“I did not mean the child is actually male,” replied Meg, hiding her amusement. “I simply defaulted to male pronouns because I do not actually know the gender of the child. I apologize for the confusion. I shall refer to it as the child from now on.”
Shadi gasped again. "There's only one! Oh, Goddess, and I was hoping for at least a small brood..."
Meg blinked, surprised. “I did not even know that was a possibility,” she confessed.
"What kind of doctor are you?!" Shadi screamed. "The sciencey kind that bangsss particles together to sssee what waveforms they make?!"
"Ai, Dios mío, no tengo tiempo para esto," muttered Meg under her breath.
"Well if he, they, she, it got into the air ducts then they can't have gotten far-"
Yellow hazard lights began to pulse along their recessed housings in the ceiling. Remas combadge chirped for attention and he patted it. "Remas here, go."
"Expedition Security here Sir, we have a report from a Canopus Station tech team working on the Travellers EPS grid that 'something' just bull-rushed past them in the maintenance crawl spaces." The dispatcher said in a calm neutral tone. "To quote them: 'A foul-mouthed wyrm from a nightmare'. We've gone to yellow alert just in case, and we have an engineering team checking to make sure we don't have a volatile gas leak somewhere."
"Did they say where?" asked Meg, perking up.
"My spawn!" Shadi crowed with glee.
“Chief Zatra is in pursuit according to log files, she just used her authorisation code to bypass the lock out on the blast shutter heading towards deuterium storage bay 6.” The dispatcher commented.
“Er…Commander Zatra is standing right next to me in sickbay…” Remas said, looking at Shadi.
"Oh, I wish I had my apprentice exorcist right now!" Shadi whimpered while bouncing on the balls of her feet. "The space ghost took my appearance and isss going to steal my ssspawn away!"
"Space ghost?" repeated Meg, alarmed. She could never tell when Shadi was exaggerating and seriously hoped this was one of those times.
"This ship is like a magnet for them," Shadi said.
"It's not," Remas said in all seriousness. He flicked his wrist and a holographic display appeared over his fingers. "Doctor, grab a medical kit. I'm setting up a site-to-site transport as we speak."
Without a word, Meg walked the five steps to the nearest medkit, glanced at the contents to make sure they were complete and returned to stand next to the captain and Shadi. “Ready when you are, mi capitán!” she said.
+++
Unlike the standard formula for a horror movie, Deuterium Storage Bay 6 was not poorly lit and filled with hissing pipes and dank metal catwalks. It was illuminated properly, the trio of spherical pressure vessels filling the bay slick with condensation but not alien lichen. Remas, Meg, and Shadi appeared in a free space of decking in a flurry of exotic particles.
"Security just set up a quarantine field around the bay, and have temporarily disabled your command code Shadi," Remas said after a moment's consultation with his wrist display. "It's in here, we'll find it."
“The space ghost,” Meg said, halfway between statement and question. “What is the best way to catch a space ghost?”
"Each one is unique," Shadi said without hesitation or a hint of joking. "Arivek was a backstabbing traitor who's been imprisoned inside a secure data storage, Clee'san was tamed by my holy wrath and now assists the tasty computer, Innocent Bystander has been given room and quarter, the Clock Makers took my leg..." Shadi shrugged. "I guessss we'll just have to find the ghost and see what kind it is before we know how to vanquish it."
"There's no such thing as ghosts."
The voice was small, piping, and in the fuel storage room's acustoics impossible to pin down.
"They require an essence that cannot be quantified but is only perceived as the philosophical endpoint of debating the nature of Id and Ego," the voice said. "But, then again, what's a hologram but an ergo proxy of selfhood? A spatial ghost in the machine?"
Shadi squinted one dark eye in order to allow the other one to bulge all the larger in suspicious expression. "That sounds exxxactly like what a space ghost would say!"
Meg rolled her eyes at the “ghost’s” words. “Sure, why not?” she replied to its question. “But we did not come to debate the properties of ghosts. We came to find my comrade’s child. Or children, as the case may be.
“I am singular, I think.” The voice said, this time coming from behind a control console for one of the storage tanks. “I have the memories of my father, and some of my mothers though those are far less clear than you might imagine. I know the seven decimal primes of gravitational drive theory, but I also know that the warm liver of a kantor beast is always best served fresh.”
There was a disquieting growl, and something slithered and crawled up onto the console.
It was as tall as the console plinth, coming to Remas waist, and resembled a reptilian otter. Fine red and gold scales overlapped each other, with two large eyes behind a snout from which a flicking tongue licked. Its limbs were much more well developed than Mazarians, actually holding his weight up on two as the arms were held behind their back.
“I find myself most famished and in need of nourishment,” the creatures said…and was joined by two more, one a dull grey colour and the other sky blue.
“In fact,” the blue one said in a high whistling voice. “Mother, we are most ravenous.”
“WE DESIRE THE MEATS AND VITAL ORGANS OF OUR ENEMIES!!!” The grey one declared. “THEY MUST FLEE BEFORE US, THE BROOD OF THE TRAVELLING WRATH SO THAT WE MIGHT SWEETEN THEIR MEATS WITH THE HUNT!!!”
"MY SPAWN!!!" Shadi gasped. Scooping them up in her lean, overpowered arms, she squeezed them all together in her unbreakable mother's embrace. "MY TASTY SPAWN!!! I THOUGHT I'D LOSSST YOU!!!"
The three infants...Saurtualli? Castrians? (Kobolds?) Well whatever they were they crooned happily in their mother's arms, making a sound not dissimilar to that of a charged phaser going off.
"And so the joyous event has a joyous ending," Remas commented.
"Not until one of them dismembers another," Shadi corrected. "A pecking order must be determined, or else it will be chaos!"
"That hardly seems the best form of self-organisation mother," the red one said, as the grey one beside nodded in agreement. The grey one, eager to fulfil whatever grand destiny 10 minutes of air-breathing had decreed on him, tilted his head back and somehow was able to grab onto Shadi's elbow with impressive bite force.
"YOU'RE DEAD!" the grey one side with a mouth full of arm and sleeve. "I WIN!!"
"No! Bite and then tear," Shadi said. "Like this!" She nipped a few scales off the grey creature's hide and spat them onto the deck. "And let that be a lesson not to bite the claw that spawned you!"
“And people think Klingons are rough,” Meg muttered. “So I take it there is no space ghost after all?”
The Grey one took this lesson to heart, and after squirming out of Shadi's grasping arms, still gripping onto the elbow with his jaw, began to shake it violently from side to side. But because Shadi was bigger, and he was a small creature, this resulted in his body swinging from side to side from his neck.
"Brother! Your actions diminish us both!" the red one decreed with preternatural tiredness. Apparently, time within the egg had given them all a chance to get to know each other very, very well.
Meg grinned at them. "They are fearsome, Shadi," she said, opting for a more potent word than the typical 'strong' or 'healthy.'
"And very robust," Remas said.
"Thank you, Captain," the blue one said, her voice high and piping. "but my brother was quite right, I am famished. As no doubt are the rest of my brood mates."
"Then I think we should go get them something to eat," Remas said.
"Is...Porkin's BBQ still an establishment operated on the Traveller?" the red one asked, trying to reach out and pull the grey one back in before it dislocated his jaw or their mother's arm.
Shadi's eyes lit up. "YASSS! Porkies is the best!" She scooped all three back into her gangly, scaly arms again and ran as only an upright reptilian could toward the door. "They keep an entire secret sub menu jussst for me!"
The grey one again wriggled from her arms, this time taking a pose out on her left shoulder.
"TAKE US TO THE SOURCE OF THE SAUCE!!!"
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