"That is one big pile of shit..."

Posted on Thu Aug 12th, 2021 @ 10:31am by Lieutenant Commander P’rel M.D & Petty Officer 3rd Class Sam Saghir & [DECEASED] Gil Silnan Tolbarr

Mission: By Artemis' Bow
Location: Shuttlecraft Malcom
Timeline: Alongside "The Gloves are Off"
1682 words - 3.4 OF Standard Post Measure

"There....this one...on its own..." came the thoughtful, mellow voice of Silnan as he hunched over the cockpit console to his right, way across from his own station and over Petty Officer Saghir's own readout. Sam nodded in acknowledgement and altered the course of the shuttle.

"Why this one...?" the young human enquired, as P'rel looked on from the aft compartment, aware of the growing relationship between the two subordinates.

"The infant...such as it is..." Silnan begun, aware of the ironic humour of his own word 'infant' when taking in the awesome size of the creature. "...fed from an older specimen recently, and has yet to...uhm..."

"Excrete" finished the Vulcan, unimpressed with her colleagues' seeming inability to simply state basic biological functions in favour of foolish bashfulness.

"Well...I yes" stammered Silnan, whilst P'rel certainly caught a fleeting glance of humour between himself and the human.

Standing, the Vulcan moved towards the cockpit to join the other two; "Bring us in slow...underneath the cow, but keep a distance for the moment". She placed a hand on the rear of the headrests either side of her, taking a standing position behind both seats in the cockpit. “Is there any way to tell when it’s getting ready....or can we induce in any way?” Enquired the Vulcan.

Exhaling deeply, Silnan shook his head “no Lieutenant, I’m afraid we will just have to -“

All eyes in the cockpit darted to the master alarm panel in the centre of the panels, the shuttle’s systems automatically activated red alert and the interior of the shuttle now gently pulsed with the red glow. "Athena is under attack!" called Saghir, his urgent voice breaking with nervousness. "Standing by to intercept".

"P'rel" inserted Silnan earnestly, he quickly corrected his familiarity with a more formal "Lieutenant." He spun around in his chair to face the Vulcan; "if we race off now we will startle the creatures - possibly to the extent where we will never get this close again". He voice was serious, a deadly tone she hadn't heard in the young man before.

"And Athena needs our assistance!" inserted Sam, the first time she'd seen so much as a separate thought between the two gentlemen.

P'rel never wanted any kind of command position, leading away teams and running routine, more or less, operations was one thing; being faced with a mission critical choice was quite another. "Status of Athena?" she asked, trying to load some more information into her decision.

"Shields have taken critical impact from some kind of energy dampening mine..."

P'rel's eyes locked with Silnans. They were both thinking the same thing; more use of technology used by the Dominion during the war. Not needing an update from her crewmen, she saw on the tactical display that the pirate vessel had succumbed to the force of the USS Athena. She pictured Captain Kane sat on the bridge in his chair, perhaps something of a grim smugness on his face. "That settles that..." she said, with a hint of sarcasm.

A few minutes of silence passed as the shuttle followed the infant pilgrim. From a distance they were no more impressive than anything else, and indeed had seemed a large waste of time and resources. Their ongoing discoveries about how the animals were broken down and refined into valuable commodities had of course increased her interest in the creatures professionally, but it wasn't until this moment that she had regarded their beauty and majesty. So close were they, that she could see the tiny liquid compounds excrete from the skin like sweat, and rapidly turn into a deep bronze ice, not unlike the Vulcan glass picked from the remnants of a sand fire in the Forge. She watched with something approaching awe, as the musculature of the giant creature rippled underneath its skin as it propelled itself through space.

"Ma'am..." came Sam's voice, as he nodded toward the sensor display. The scans showed the creature was getting ready to excrete. Both he and Silnan stood and moved to the rear of the cabin, whilst P'rel took over the helm.

"Just as we discussed" she informed them both, reminding the crewman of their plan. “Beginning rotation…” P’rel stated, giving them both a bit of a time indication. As she spun the shuttlecraft round and engaged the reversing engines, both Silnan and Sam were quickly donning EV suits. To avoid any damage to the samples, they couldn’t use the transporter nor the tractor beam, and would have to literally open the aft door and catch the debris. As that happened, the pair in the EV suits would grab it in a microgravity containment field, which Silnan would need to modulate to keep the sample free of any interaction with the field. Looking to her crewman, they both nodded from inside the white suits as the telltale sound of magnetising boots thunked through the cockpit. “Activating EV sequence” P’rel stated.

A forcefield activated, separating herself in the cockpit from the two men in the aft section of the shuttle. Though there was nothing loose as a visual telltale, she knew that the gravity in the aft cabin was no longer operating and the cessation of hissing told her that the atmosphere was vented. She couldn’t help herself but turn around to look at the creature, albeit from behind, without so much as the polarising filter of the window as the aft door opened to space. “Remarkable” she whispered, feeling as though she could almost touch the animal they were so close, she could only imagine the experience of the other two actually in the aft compartment, open to space and the creature.

“This is one for the books…” Sam uttered over the comm line, as his tricorder confirmed that the massive shimmering creature was about to defecate towards the shuttlecraft. He shook his head and winced, being willingly shat on by an enormous baby space cow hadn’t been in the recruitment brochure.

“Now Lieutenant!” Silnan called loudly, indicating that P’rel should quickly close the distance between the shuttle door and the increasingly visible orifice from which they were expecting the sample to emerge from. He and Sam both spun around and picked up their respective field modulators, aiming the sparkling blue tractor-like beam towards the aft doorway. “Marvellous!” cried the Cardassian biologist, with perhaps more enthusiasm than was befitting such a grim task, as their field modulators began to wrap a field around the mass floating into the cabin.

P’rel turned around again from her cockpit seat, she couldn’t help but watch the spectacle. Floating in through the aft hatch; a large semi solid, semi liquid, deep purple bubbling mass looking as though it were a thick boiling tar-like substance. “We only needed a small sample!” she called, marginally alarmed that the volume of material in the aft cabin took up almost its entirety, leaving little room for the two men in the EV suits.

“We could hardly control the volume of expelled matter from the baby, Lieutenant…” offered Silnan, his furrowing brow now obscured to even the man opposite to him by the floating purple mass. “Uh oh…” he muttered…”the door! The door!” he called in desperate panic.

Her reactions on point, P’rel unquestioningly pressed the console to close the door as a shrill alarm sounded from Saghir’s instrument, followed almost immediately by Silnan’s. The two beams had been replaced by a form sitting static bubble sitting around the sample, and it now flickered with increasing rapidity. Standing from her console seat, she grabbed a tricorder and scanned the mass. “It’s emitting some kind of electro magnetic field….there’s a complex bioplasmic reaction occuring….somehow….I don’t understand….” another alarm, this time from the shuttle’s console itself. Wheeling around, the Vulcan officer saw the spiking power management levels across the board, they had to expel the fecal matter themselves, and explosive decompression would be the quickest and most effective way. “Quickly!” she called to the others, rebalancing the environmental systems and taking down the forcefield. The moment the two men were back on the cockpit side, she reactivated the forcefield, which flickered worryingly as the floating microgravity containment field interacted with it.

Desperately trying to balance the power fluctuations across the secondary systems, and knowing she was hopelessly out of her depth, she even began to wish that Lieutenant Keating was on board. Hapless or not, any engineer was better than no engineer. Pointing to the auxiliary panel she had thrown the decompression controls over to, she braced herself as the wave of realisation came over her like warm water - she was too late. Within a matter of a second or two, though watching it seemed longer, both the containment field and the forcefield flickered rapidly, and flashed with a bright white light as both collapsed. Taking a deep breath in, she rapidly expelled it along with the contents of her stomach, as the bubbling purple mass crashed to the floor with far greater force than it’s appearance would have suggested. The impact caused what little solidity the mass had to disappear, as the most deeply foul smelling liquid splashed across the floor, seemingly expanding as it went, and surging up the sides of the craft and consoles, leaving a thick coating of dripping alien space cow feces across every surface, including the Vulcan Lieutenant.

Standing speechless, and protected by their EV suits, the two younger men looked at P’rel and then to eachother, and then back to P’rel. The woman stood ankle deep in the excrement, soaked from head to toe, thicker clumps clinging to her hair, face and body randomly. A few moments of stunned awkwardness passed, with both mean very much relieved to be in a fully contained suit; the Lieutenant, although vomiting, was obviously unhurt. Looking back to eachother, neither man could contain it any longer and the pair simultaneously collapsed to their knees in near fitting hysterical laughter.