SD242011.04 - "It bugs me..." [Burgundy]

Months. Many of them.

Burgundy was usually quick to snap back whenever he didn't like something. He was cocky, so to speak. Rude and obnoxious, even.

The last many months had been, or at least should have been, a humbling experience for him. Some sort of insect had flown aboard the ship, surfing a tachyon beam to do so, and he had been tasked to find it. This, it turned out, was a sisyphean task. Each time he made progress, the bug eluded him somehow once again.

46 times he had managed to observe it. 19 of those times he had tried, but failed, to catch it.

After the initial interest in the gigantic sports event had died off aboard he had managed to wrangle access to sensory equipment to help out. The bug in question only intermittently manifested itself in three-dimensional space, yet still wreaked havoc in a bunch of systems on the ship. In strange, strange ways.

For an entire week the warp core had shut down for six seconds every hour.

During two days a couple of months ago the colour green was nowhere to be seen on the ship, as that particular wavelength of light warped around a movement caused by the bug.

Perdita Animo had been unable to make themselves heard telepathically for a blissful six hours in July. Hours that Burgundy was nostalgic about now, but that had caused a large amount of stress to some of the senior officers in the Science Department; especially Lieutenant Karien.

The hunt had been long, excruciatingly difficult, and painstakingly boring. But now Burgundy was staring at his price. The bug, no larger than a needle pin head and glowing softly orange as it was held in stasis in an electromagnetic field, was soon to be his.

He opened the small translucent container constructed for the purpose of keeping the tiny creature in three-dimensional space and still.

He lowered it towards the little thing, muttering curses at it under his breath.

=-=

By Ensign Burgundy

SD242011.01 – "Famous Last Words." [Felix/Regina]

​Eleven months after the world's weirdest olympiad had poured into Lone Star space, the wayward vessel continued its drift through the outer reaches. Felix found himself once again opposite Regina Monkfish. It was funny how someone that used to drive you mad could end up being reassuring with their madness a decade later.

Each of them had a whisky; the Captain watched as Regina wiped the rim rhythmically with a damp disinfecting wipe after each sip.

"And there's still no news from Starfleet, Captain? Honestly. You would think they had all come down with some sort of virus. Perhaps a purging tincture was supplied about at Starfleet Command. Maybe long-term communications are down. *There might have been spiders.*"

Felix pretended to mull her suggestions over. He missed having an XO; even Casparo Zolog's mutton interruptions would do but instead he had become the galaxy's first trappist communications officer. The Chief of the Boat and her inane, hypoxytrithate-induced elucidations would have to do for now.

"The last pod was supposed to contain our new Chief Medical Officer and Executive Officer. That was four months ago."

"But it exploded," Regina added helpfully. "Into 4.7 million pieces. I catalogued the majority –"

"And your work was instrumental," Felix replied. His head rung. "We've had the two test communications from Outpost 404. But other than that, we've scanned and we've scanned, and there's nothing."

"I could clean the array again, Captain?"

Roused to stand, Felix levered himself out of his ready room chair. "You did an excellent job of it this morning, Chief. No need to go out again." She had, he thought, to be the only person ever to have rubbed down the *outside* of the external sensors. Alone. With vinegar, and wire wool. "I'm not sure the problem is at our end. So it must be at theirs."

"So we should go back," Regina added, after a time.

That wasn't the question. He heaved artificially and lent his empty glass down on the table. One of Regina's underlings – a pair of identical twin Andorians she had taken to having in her shadow –provided a bottle to the CoB, who topped them both up. The Andorian petty officer retreated back into the shadows. Sometimes, Felix couldn't tell if they were still in the room.

The question was: how could he do best by his crew? Hell, it had been boring out this far. All the new races they'd met had been demure, polite, in hoc to some grand organisation or other that paid little mind to their starship from a far-away federation of planets. Not like anybody else on board held all that too dear anyway; they'd all taken it as read that Starfleet didn't want them long before anybody had actually told them, collectively, to scram. Would going back make things any better for them? And if they did and there was nothing to save? They'd be breaking mission orders and voided from saving themselves in the future. Out here together, then, or sectioned off back home.

"We'll give them another week," Felix said again. "And then – and then we'll see."

He sat back down, his blond fronds bouncing into place after him. "Cheers, Chief."

Regina beamed, enjoying her role as confidante. "*Yes,* Captain*.*"

"You must be enjoying the peace and quiet anyway? No–"

The room's hue crashed into flashing burgundy as a certain Ensign came on the line.

"Red alert, senior staff to the bridge!"

Felix rolled his eyes. "Famous last words," he mumbled to Monkfish. As the doors opened he seemed to pass his glass into an open space in the air, which took it away.

=-=

​by Captain Felix de l'Isle and Chief Regina Monkfish

SD242001.04 - "Challenges/Orders" [Burgundy]

There are several factors that can complicate the search for a weird space beetle on a starship. One of them is not knowing anything about the bug, other than the fact that it somehow travels on tachyon beams and may or may not be able to phase shift either fully or partially.

Another is when all processing power for the sensors has been allocated to analysing race ship data in order to determine odds for ship-wide betting rings.

“Are you serious?” Burgundy asked lieutenant Karien when he found out. “Is this even legal?” he forgot to add “ma’am”, but Karien was the only senior in the Science Department who didn’t go out of her way to make the ensign’s life difficult. Besides, she hated titles and ranks. She had chosen to remain in the Lone Star’s Science Department for personal reasons.

“There’s nothing illegal about math, Ensign.” she replied dryly, seemingly unaware that she was speaking in unison with Perdita’s telepathic voice inside Burgundy’s head. The prepondrian shivered and pressed a thumb against his temple. He often did just that when experiencing these uncanny-valley moments involving his gelatinous department head. Karien gave him a quizzical smile, as if she knew more about him than he did himself. Burgundy peered at her uneasily; sometimes it was hard to tell where Perdita ended and Karien began. They’d been working together for so long.

“I am under orders from the Captain to find our critter passenger,” he said sternly, almost petulantly. For a second he wasn’t sure whether he was addressing the lieutenant standing in front of him or the cube in the tank some metres away. “Surely that trumps any fun-and-games sort of usage of the sensors?”

He was surprised to see that lieutenant Karien simply laughed at his request, shook her head and walked off without answering. His surprise was eventually replaced by anger when lieutenant commander Animo’s tin-can voice echoed in his head again: You weren’t given an order, Ensign. You were issued a challenge. Good luck!

Burgundy wanted to scream and shout. He wanted to instill fear and respect in the people around him. He wanted them to feel as scared and diminished as he did. But in truth he was closer to tears than he was to any sort of authoritative expression; when he saw that some senior officers turned to him with amused smiles he grabbed a portable sensor kit and stormed off.