Assuming the Position

Posted on Sat Mar 21st, 2015 @ 12:26am by Ensign Sizb

1,132 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Shakedown: Taking Flight
Location: Deck Eight
Timeline: Stardate 241503.20
Tags: #Maintenance, #treetopus, #groucho

After making his report about the rather...unusual intruder outside of his quarters (how hard can it be to find a woman with animated hair?), Sizb logged in, geared up, and reported for his assigned duty shift on deck eight. He read through the short list of incidents from the previous shift--mostly routine stuff, though someone reported seeing a boreglunch near the Main cargo Bay, and a garden-variety rat in the locker room. Starfleet vessels had very good protocols for keeping out unwanted pests, but every once in a while they still managed to find their way aboard, no matter what

That was probably a problem that would solve itself, if the boreglunch found the rat before he did. If he found the rat first, it would ALSO be self-limiting. Although he would make sure it wasn't someone's escaped pet first. It was considered extremely rude to eat other people's pets, after all.

Someone reported strange noises near the aeroponics bay. Strange noises? And this guy tried to write them phonetically: "EEEE--shshshsh--EEEEE--shshshs." Sizb ran through his mental list of Things That Make Weird Noises, and failed to come up anything that sounded quite like that, other than something improbable involving spidercrickets with violins. **You know, your combadge and ANY tricorder has a good "record" function, he thought to himself. You COULD have used that and actually got an audio sample, but nooooo, you decided to take the road less traveled and simply describe the sound. **

Oh well, that's not a bad place to start, he thought to himself, since it's right down the corridor from the lift. He started down the corridor and hung a left, passing a few maintenance personnel chatting in the corridor intersection, just outside of aeroponics, who nodded to him as he approached. "Hey, you must be the new guy," said one of them to him, an apparent human, though it could be sometimes hard to tell. Humaniforms were everywhere these days, it seemed.

"I am," said Sizb. "I was just assigned to the Endeavour. My first duty post on a starship." he said, a little proudly. He extended a clawed hand, in the human custom, and after looking at the razor-sharp claws for a moment, the maintenance tech took it and shook it...carefully. "Crewman Sizb, Security. It's a pleasure to meet you."

The man smiled. "Elias Corso, engineering. So...you're a Gorn, huh? We were told that one of the new crewmen was going to be a little unusual."

"Szzz...yes," he said, hissing a bit in a Gorn chuckle. "So what gave away my clever disguise? The scales? The tail? Compound eyes? The fact that there's only like ten of us in Starfleet at the moment?" He dug out a pair of Grouch Marx glasses out of his uniform pocket, complete with fake nose and put them on, then assumed a heroic pose. The glasses looked incongruous there on the his snout, and did nothing to cover his eyes. "See, now I'm incognito. I think I'm a shoe-in for Intelligence, don't you?"

"You're a shoe-in for something, that's for sure," Corso said, chuckling. "That's so ancient that my great-grandparents would probably have thrown vegetables at you. That's not an exaggeration."

"Yeah, I can't say I'm surprised," said Sizb, taking the glasses off and sticking them back in his pocket. "By the time anything reaches S'sgaron, it's so old it's dead. Humorless bastards, the whole lot of them. Part of the reason I'm here now, instead of there, but it's probably worked out better for everyone involved. At least from my perspective." He looked at the door. "So someone reported some...weird noises in the aeroponics bay," he said, getting down to business. "Has anyone else heard anything?"

Corso shook his head. "Two other people mentioned something earlier, but nothing since I got on shift," he said. "Yesterday, Ensign Rand said that she saw something running in the bay, but she couldn't get a good look at it. Maybe it was the boreglunch everyone's been seeing down here. I hope we find the little bastard soon if it IS," he said, "Because whenever you find one, there's going to be a hundred shortly. Are you very familiar with them?"

"Somewhat, yes," he said. A boreglunch looked vaguely like a Terran cockroach, only it was about ten inches long fully grown, black with red stripes, and with twelve legs. Anyone who worked on ships throughout pretty much this entire quadrant of the galaxy knew about them--they were the ultimate survivors, able to survive and thrive under extremes of temperature, radiation, and pressure that would kill virtually anything else. Freeze them, and they simply went about their business when they thawed out. Desiccate them, and they sprang back to life good as knew as soon as they got wet. Put them in vacuum, and they merely went slowed down and went dormant when their stored oxygen supply was depleted, and they could stay that way for decades or centuries. They could, and did, eat virtually anything organic safely, survive up to a year in their active state without food, and while they were quite timid when there were only a few of them, when their numbers exploded past a certain point, they became both extremely brave and somewhat predatory. They were hermaphroditic, only had to mate once for to continue producing egg clusters once every 9 days for the rest of their lives, and grew from nymphs to fertile adulthood in a little less than two standard months. No one knew where they had came from originally, but records of them had been found that were more than two million years old, and from widely separated regions of the galaxy at that, indicating that they had been spreading for far longer than that. Since in addition to their predatory habits and unnatural vitality they also spread disease AND they also had an unnatural affinity for gnawing on anything and everything that generated an electrical field, keeping the annoying little bastards off of ships and stations was a class one priority in any and all fleets. Klingons and Gorn both employed trained *sliketh* to deal with the problem, since they were almost the only predatory animals that could stomach them. Everyone else used combinations of poison baits,repellent pheromones, chemical toxins and traps, and various specialized tools (read: very big hammers) to deal with them. "I wasn't aware that they made noises, unless you count the scratching sounds they make when they run. I guess I'll be checking it out first then."

"Well, good luck to you, and nice meeting you," said Corso. "Mind Angela. She's a bit...eccentric." Sizb nodded and went through the aeroponics bay door.

Crewman Recruit Sizb
Security Specialist
Security and Tactical
U.S.S. Endeavour

 

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