The only thing someone in the lab had to do was monitor the system, make sure all the vegetation was in good health and ready supply and get the fertilizer mixtures into the tanks at the proper times.
It was a pretty simple but important job.
As Valesque neared the hydroponic room doors, she came upon Lola just about to enter the room herself, with a load of folded sheets in her arms.
The Engineer eyed her curiously. “Is everything alright down here?” she inquired, not sure why anyone would need an armful of sheeting in the growing room.
“No! It’s horrible!” Lola immediately exclaimed, looking as close to crying as an android could get. “They’re dead. They are all deeeead.” she bawled, leaning her pink and blue head on Valesque’s shoulder in grief.
The Virrilian stood there shocked for a moment. “Dead?” she repeated uncertainly. Surely, they could not all have been killed in the jump. There were thousands of plants in that lab.
“Yes!” Lola exclaimed as they both entered the room. “When that Captain person said I had to come down here I asked that cute Pilot what a hydroponics lab was and he said ‘it is a place where you nurture living things.’ And so I thought, I can handle that!” she remembered as she smiled confidently, imitating her first reaction.
“But then I came down here and it was awful!” Lola continued, her happy expression falling into a dark void of depression.
“I don’t know who was in charge here before me, but they did a terrible job.” she complained. “I came in and saw where they had left the poor creatures hanging upside down in the air from these little plastic holders. Their feet were up in the air and their white hair was hanging down, dripping wet. I don’t know how long they had been left like that.” she explained in deep concern.
Valesque took stock of this explanation and tried to decipher it into what she knew of the lab. Lola had apparently thought the bare root plants hanging from the converyor belt were innocent beings left hanging upside down in the air.
The Engineer suppressed a giggle as she thought of the scene as Lola had imagined.
“So, of course, I took them down immediately. But none of them were moving!” Lola went on, getting more upset as she relayed her devastating tale. “Then I looked around and they had some different ones in sectioned trays on tables and none of them were moving either!” she cried.
“So straight away I took their temperature, and they were all COLD!” she said in wide-eyed alarm as she exuberantly gave the details of her diagnosis. “So of course I put them all on warmers to try to keep them out of shock.” she continued.
That would put them all in shock, Valesque thought a bit worrisomely, but Lola’s story was far from over.
“And as I was warming them up I took their pulse, but…..” she paused in distress, “they had no pulse! None of them!” she sobbed, her green eyes wide with concern. “They were all so in shock their hearts had stopped. So right away I did the best thing I could think of to get their little hearts started again. I put an electrical shock through them.” she stated proudly.
Valesque winced as she heard this, imagining thousands of plants sitting on warmers being electrocuted. All she could picture were sizzling, shriveled foliage as the poor plants were subjected to Lola’s ‘treatments’.
“But that didn’t help either.” Valesque was not surprised to hear. “I tried at least three times to jump start their hearts, but they were already deeeeead.” Lola wailed inconsolably.
“So then all I could do was lay them all out on the tables. I made the room cool so their bodies would keep, as I started to write up all their death certificates.” she added sadly, shaking her short hair in pity over the lost souls. “And they didn’t even have all their names on their beds.” Lola complained.
“They had only separated the poor things into family groups. So as I went along I had to think up first names for them all so I could put it on the form.” she said with a furrowed brow incredulously: how could her predecessor have neglected to put all their names down?
“For example,” she went on, adjusting her load so she could have one free hand to enumerate on. “For all the ones I found together under the family name ‘Brassica-Oleracea’ I named them things like ‘Barney Brassica-Oleracea’, ‘Belinda Brassica-Oleracea’ and ‘Baxter Brassica-Oleracea’.” she announced, counting them off on her fingers.
“I could not really tell the boys from the girls though.” she whispered, a bit embarrassed. “So I just had to guess. But it was easy to tell they all belonged to the same family, they all looked alike.” she added.
Valesque was not sure what to say, she was at a complete loss for words.
Lola sighed sadly as she looked over the tables of ‘dead’ bodies she had been working on. Most of the tables had already been covered in the burial sheeting, so all Valesque could see of the poor plants were a few singed leaves and wilting stems.
Apparently, Lola had been so preoccupied with saving her patients she had not noticed the space jump, and as all the exterior windows in the lab had their blinds engaged she probably had not seen any of the flashes of light either.
“All I can do for them now is finish covering them up and keep them in cold storage until we can get to a planet where we can bury them.” she sniffed sorrowfully.
“Uh, riiiiight.” Valesque agreed absently as she surveyed the damage to the vegetation supply. The power was being shut down to all unoccupied areas anyway, so the hydroponics lab probably would have been effected by that even without Lola.
She could just hope that when the power was restored they could find some salvageable specimens among the dearly departed.
Just then the overhead communicator came on again with the voice of the noticeably annoyed Captain who had just been informed by the computer that a Virrilian had been located on Hydro Deck 1.
“This is Captain Fairbanks. Ensign Valesque, report to the Control Deck immediately.” came the stern order.
Valesque made a sour face at the ship’s communicator, as she stopped the bereaved android from finishing her work in the morgue by putting an arm around her shoulders.
“I….think you have done about all you can do down here.” she said in sympathy, for both Lola and the massacred plants.
“I don’t know if you had noticed but we just went through a space jump, so the power is going to have to be shut down for a little while. I think you should come with me.” she coaxed as she led the girl out of the room with one last glance at their dwindling food supply. “There are probably some injured people that will need your help right now.” she furthered, giving Lola a new mission.
Thank goodness she seemed better with people than with plants.
The dejected pink and blue haired figure perked up a bit at the mention of someone needing her assistance, putting down her sheets as her friend guided her out of the room.
Valesque took her time to get to the Control Deck, entering in time to witness a conversational exchange that rivaled even the pink twins in Engineering for sheer frustration.
Captain Fairbanks, Sanic, Tim, as well as other miscellaneous members of the flight and control crew were standing around one apparently unintelligible new crewmate.
They had not met him before as he seemed to prefer to keep to himself down in the navigation room, but the Captain had called the person in charge of navigation to the Control Deck to help them figure out where they were. Unfortunately, that was not as good of an idea as it had seemed.
The crewmember that had arrived had shocked most of the control personnel as soon as he had slithered through the door, and afterwards only succeeded in frustrating everyone present.
He was roughly five feet tall from the floor, not including the trailing tail, and was covered in dark brown scales over his body with light beige plates all along his abdomen.
He had two spindly little arms on his upper body and a face that ended in a pointy snake nose. On the back and sides of his head hung what looked to be
long hair on a balding hairline but was actually limp folds of a spined hood, which when unfolded made him resemble a cobra.
He stood upright on the front half of his snakelike body, the remainder resting on the floor on which he slithered with his tapered tail looped up into the air behind him.
He did not wear any clothing except a short vest with pockets and an illuminated metallic collar around his neck.
The collar was not a decorative item Valesque noted as she watched him in the middle of the group.
As he hissed away, the lights on the collar lit up in intricate patterns, supposedly interpreting what he was saying, but nobody seemed to understand anything it was trying to translate.
This did not really seem to bother him as much as it did everyone else, he just stood in the midst of his agitated fellow crewmembers hissing to himself and then squinting up his eyes and making sounds like a snake laugh. “Sss..ssss…sssss…sssss” he hissed, apparently very amused at something he had just said that no one else understood.
Captain Fairbanks stood with her arms folded tightly against her chest as she sighed irritably over her fate, glancing up to see Valesque looking on with an amused expression on her naturally pale face.
“Ensign Valesque.” the Captain immediately called; relieved at anything that would take her attention away from the hissing snakelike man.
“We were very concerned about you, the computer said you had left the ship during our near escape and it seemed you had just vanished altogether.” she began in an almost accusing tone.
The young Engineer flushed a bit as she thought of a quick excuse. “Uhmm, there must be…..some sensors down in parts of the ship.” she said awkwardly trying to reason away why the ship could not locate her earlier, feeling a little bad for lying about such things.
“I had just …gone down to check on Lola in the Hydroponics Lab.” she finished brightly; putting a friendly arm around the plausible alibi standing next to her.
“Is that so.” Fairbanks mused as she stared at the Engineer with suspicious eyes. “So how were things down in hydroponics?”
At this question Lola regained her look of wide eyed concern as she began to move forward to retell her saga of woe.
“Oh, it was just horri….” she broke off as Valesque put a hand on her shoulder and moved in front of her, effectively curtailing the girl’s tale of terror.
“It is…all under control.” the Virrilian cut in confidently, giving Lola a quick warning look. “Better than it seems to be going up here. What was it you wanted me for anyway?” she asked a bit brusquely.
“It seems the ship has switched to emergency power, and we are not sure where we are.” the Captain replied, trying to ignore the girl’s rudeness. “We called up the person from navigation, but….as you can see.” the exasperated Officer gestured to the latest addition. “He has not been much help.”
Valesque put her hand over her mouth unable to hold back a snicker and sarcastic response.
“Well I can understand that.” she jeered, not missing an opportunity to rub in the Military woman’s stubbornness in taking off with an unfinished ship and unfit crew. “If you hadn’t noticed before, I would say at least half of this, so called, crew of yours are not, have not, and probably never will be I.P.A Officers of any rank.” she laughed.
“Take Sanic for instance, he is a Science Officer in a command position, and yet you call him a Military Ensign.” she pointed out, as Sanic blushed modestly.
“And I don’t know if you saw Jimmy over there in charge of communications? He has never operated anything like that before in his life. Hi there, Jimmy.” she waved at the relieved looking young man at the communication console.
“He was a delivery boy for ‘Sam’s Soppy Subs’. I could never understand liking a wet sandwich myself, but they were very popular with the construction crew.” she added, shrugging and shaking her head at the thought of it.
“He probably just happened to be in the area when the orders went out. So, I am not surprised you are finding some of these poor people a bit lost and confused, Captain.” she finished, quite happy with herself that she finally was able to speak her mind, and not violently.
“That may be the case, Ensign Valesque.” the Captain relied unsympathetically. “But they are all ranking Officers now and will carry out their assignments accordingly.” she proclaimed looking over her crew with a critical eye.
The Serpantial-man hissed at this, chuckling to himself and saying with that statement she had proven herself adequately qualified to be the Captain of this ship of fools.
He was apparently used to people not being able to read his communication collar, because he had the habit of saying the most inappropriate and insulting things about those around him, and then sticking out his forked snake tongue, squishing up his eyes and hissing out a long snake laugh, “Ssss..ssss..sssss..sssss”
He was surprised this time when someone else joined him in his laughter.
“That is so true!” the other voice chimed in.
He turned in shock towards the person in question to see Sanic snickering along with him.
The snake man’s beady little eyes widened in alarm. “You underssssstood what I sssssaid?” he hissed, stunned at the thought. Not one person on any of his other assignments had ever understood him.
Sanic paused a moment as he watched the lights flashing on the collar and then deciphered it in his head. “That part I did.” he smiled in reply. “I had a little trouble at first, but I think I’ve got it figured out now.” he explained, still chuckling at what the snake had said.
Sanic had always been good with puzzles and codes and could usually figure things out pretty quickly. That was one reason he had chosen to be in charge of ship operations, everything there was like a big puzzle he had to make work together in order for the ship to run, it was a challenging and rewarding job for him.
The snake man looked visibly upset, the hood around his face rose slightly while he regarded Sanic warily, his forked tongue licking the air before him as he contemplated this development. It would be bad if this person were to replay everything he said to everyone, he thought, especially the strict Military Captain.
Sanic just smiled in a friendly, reassuring way.
“So what race are you?” the Etherian began, trying to get on pleasant terms with his unusual crewmate.
“Sssssserpential.” the one in question replied.
Again, Sanic paused as he processed the collar’s signals in his head. “Serpential.” he finally repeated, sounding out the new word. “I don’t think I've ever come across one before.”
“We are rare.” the scaly man replied plainly, trying to size up his interrogator’s purpose.
“My name is Sanic, I am an Etherian.” the Ensign went on casually. “That is our Pilot over there, Lieutenant Baine. He is an Earthian.” he said motioning to where Tim stood leaning back against the railing. “That is Engineer Valesque by Lola over there.” he continued, gesturing to where Valesque and the Android stood off to the side of the main group. “She is a Virrilian.”
The Serpential squinted up his little eyes and crinkled his nose in a snakelike sneer as Valesque was introduced before replying, “My name is Ssssssssesssssil. I am an assssstronomer in the navigation department.” he hissed looking back at the Etherian with a superior air.
Captain Fairbanks looked back and forth at the two low ranking officers talking casually before her. “Do you understand what this person is saying?” she asked her Operations Commander.
“I think so, Captain.” he replied respectfully. “He says his name is Cecil, he is a Serpential and he is an astronomer in ship navigation”
“He can understand all of us then?” she clarified trying to get a grasp of the situation. “Does he have any idea where we are?”
Sanic looked at Cecil as he started to hiss his reply, beginning with a belittling laugh as he said, “Of courssssse I know what you are sssssaying, you ssssssimple minded human.
You are the onessssss that are too ssssstupid to undersssstand anyone. I have been telling you all thissss time my computer’ssssss chartssss are not ssshowing thissss location.” he prickled and then looked quickly in Sanic’s direction as he realized what he had said.
However, Sanic did not look to be upset, he even laughed a bit while he relayed the essential parts of Cecil’s reply to the Captain. “He says he can understand perfectly. And he has been trying to tell you his charts are not showing this area.”
Cecil relaxed a little at hearing the Ensign’s translation. He had not tried to get him in trouble by revealing what other things he had said about the stupid humans. Perhaps it would not be so bad to have someone understand him after all, he thought.
Space Trippers Book 1: Trippin' Page 15
