Captain Santiago and his Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Monty Centress, transported to the surface of Draloos V from the Excelsior where they had previously been with Seth and the others. Or at least, it was their surrogate androids, their SA’s, that went to the surface. Santiago decided that he wanted to know more than what Seth was telling him. For one, he wanted to know what was beneath the surface that they had shied away from earlier. And he did not want to tell Seth about what he was doing.
“Here,” Santiago said. “This is where we first blasted a hole into the ground.”
Had it not been for his tricorder, Santiago never would have known the location. The hole had already been covered back up. They fired their phasers in a wide-dispersal pattern at the highest setting, and blasted a huge deep hole in the ground, even getting past the massive ‘crust’ that had separated them before. The crust was certainly thick and incredibly tough, but once they got past the outer layer, they immediately recoiled and tried to climb back out of the hole. Dr. Centress lost his footing and was slipping more and more into the hole, and might have fallen in were it not for Santiago.
“Be careful,” Santiago told him.
It was dark and damp, but deep within the hole seemed to be an infinitely large but disperse mass of biological tissue, with brief moments of flashing from one area to another. They did not want to fall in, even if they were only their SA’s.
Dr. Centress was horrified, and Santiago very concerned. Both of them managed to climb back to the surface, but that didn’t shake their fear. “I want you to do your own studies on these organisms, as well as any others from this environment that you need. Transport them to our medical facilities and quarantine them, like the Dragonfly did. I want us to do our own investigations and for us to draw our own conclusions. Take as many as you need.”
“But sir, isn’t this Captain Seth’s miss—“
“I’m ordering you to do it…” he began. But having barely finished that last sentence, the hole that they had blasted had already closed up.
