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.
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By Ensign Burgundy