Space Trippers Book 1: Trippin' (18 page)

The computer was silent for a moment as it ran the request. “Ensign Valesque is no longer aboard this vessel.” was the result that came back.

The Captain made a puzzled expression. “Computer,” she called again, “locate any Virrilian life signs on board the ship.” There was another slight pause as the main computer scanned the decks before it replied, “There are currently no Virrilians on board this vessel.” it informed her.

Tim and Sanic looked at each other from their respective posts, slight concern showing in their expressions.

Fairbanks frowned in thought. She was sure the Virrilian had been on the Control Deck just as their ship was hit.

“Computer, where was Ensign Valesque last located.” she queried again, trying to sort out the puzzle.

“That information is not available due to recent system malfunctions.” came the instant response.

The stern Military Officer furrowed her brow once again.

“Computer, run the scan every five minutes and inform me if a Virrilian is located.” the Captain said, putting in the timed order.

How could a crewmember just disappear from a ship?

Chapter Seven: Tripped

Valesque cautiously peeked up and down the corridor from the hidden panel she was exiting through. She had run out of the Control Room to check on something, but she had not needed to worry it had seemed.

Now she just wanted to get back out into the ship’s main areas without being spotted.

She slowly stepped out into the dim, empty hall and resealed the secret access.

Just one more thing to check, she thought, as she quickly made her way to the Hydroponics Lab to see how Lola had fared during the jump.

The Hydroponics Lab was located on Hydro Deck 1, almost the bottom level of the ship. Since the ship was shaped like a marquee cut gem, the widest and longest deck was the very middle section, which was the Recreation Deck.

The top and bottom decks would then be the smallest in size, roughly 1,760 feet long and 880 feet wide.

The Hydro decks were just slightly larger than the final Omega Deck; it was here that the plant-growing labs as well as all the food storage tanks were located.

The hydroponics room was almost the size of the whole Hydro Deck 1, the plants growing there were essential for many reasons.

One reason was that they provided oxygen stores that could be used in other applications, another was that they provided the fiber, and of course raw vegetation that the food duplicator machines combined to create pre-programmed menu selections. The plants grown here supplied the necessary spice flavors and scents for food recipes, but also for the ship’s room fresheners.

There was nothing worse than traveling in a stale smelling spaceship for months at a time.

The hydroponics room was mainly an automated operation, with different varieties of plants from various regions of space growing in a controlled environment, either in trays or hanging from conveyor belts that circulated the bare root plants through nutrient sprays.

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.