Grasping in the Dark

Posted on Wed Mar 25th, 2026 @ 5:35pm by Andrew Munro

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Arboretum
Timeline: Mission Day 4 at 1610

[Arboretum]
[MD 4 - 1610 Hours]

The arboretum was quiet at this hour. It usually was. The Rhode Island-class wasn't built for sprawling green spaces, so the Sojourner's arboretum was modest compared to something you might find on a Galaxy-class ship. But as Andrew walked a single winding path through engineered soil and carefully maintained light panels, the biologist noted not for the first time how well those who worked here had made it feel lived-in. The greenery and flowers were grounding and cheerful, though the latter landed a bit on the hollow side with Andrew given how he was feeling after his experiences on the Kordra-Lisrit.

Continuing along the path, there were some plants here Andrew recognized and many he didn't. Tor had known all of them, though. As the ship’s resident botanist, she’d meticulously catalogued and cared for the various flora on display. But in the wake of her passing and the shortage of skilled hands to pick up the task, it now fell — at least in part — to Andrew. And he found himself grateful for the extensive notes Tor had taken, which he now flicked through on his PADD as he walked deeper into the forest of flora. Noting the individual needs of each different plant he passed, the biologist was starting to realize just how big a job was actually ahead of him.

Coming around a bend, Andrew stopped short. There, nestled in a carefully constructed alcove, was the plant that had tried to eat Björn not long before Subrek had staged his attack on the Sojo.

The engineers had done good work in crafting a containment area for the plant. The modified forcefield emitters were mounted flush with the surrounding frame, almost invisible unless you knew to look for them. Equally so was the forcefield those emitters projected — just the slightest of distortions of the air, like almost imperceptible heat haze. And within the field, the plant itself occupied a prepared bed of dark soil, its roots spread wide and anchoring it firmly in place. If not for the signage warning people to steer clear, Andrew would have thought the specimen as placid and harmless as the rest gathered in the arboretum. But he knew better, as had Tor, who placed the plant here to thrive rather than keeping it locked away in the lab where it’s growth potential would be almost entirely curtailed.

The plant had been quite small when Debbie had brought it back from Hukatuse Tagumik for Kodak — not much larger than the bonsai trees his partner loved to grow. The Chameloid had been so excited about the strange little plant. But it certainly wasn't little anymore. The incident in the biolab had seen to that. After forcibly grabbing Kodak’s hand and drinking all the DNA from it, the specimen had grown many times its original size and now approximated something more akin to a medium-sized bush.

Andrew stood at the edge of the alcove and consulted Tor's notes:

Specimen: Unknown Delta Quadrant flora.

Common name: none assigned.

Feeds on neuro-electric energy and cellular DNA sampling via direct contact. Sensitive to light spectrum — responds positively to purplish-white, becomes inert under red/infrared. Capable of rapid cellular replication using sampled DNA. Handle with extreme caution. Do not approach without containment field active.

Andrew lowered the PADD.

The plant's head — and it was a head, there was no more fitting word for it — was oriented toward him. The dark leaves had shifted, arranging themselves at an angle that tracked the line of his body. And as Andrew stepped to the left to reach the monitoring panel, it moved with him. Slowly, but deliberately. Following his shifting position, head turning as if it had eyes to spy him. The biologist paused mid-reach for the panel, noting how the plant stopped its own motion in result. The resumption of his reach sparked further following from the plant, which Andrew was now convinced could see him. If not with eyes than with some other mechanism that allowed it to sense his movements.

“Aye,” he said to the plant, “Tor mentioned you could do that. Bit uncanny though, that.”

He ran the standard diagnostic via the monitoring panel. Metabolic activity: stable. Growth index: unchanged since last reading, four days prior — Tor's last entry. Containment field integrity: ninety-four percent. That last figure gave him a moment's pause. He made a note to flag it for Engineering. The Sojourner's systems had been unstable since the attack, repair crews working around the clock, but with ten days still to Pathfinder, anything running on a secondary circuit was living on borrowed time. Björn seemed confident that young Sheldon Parsons — acting Chief Engineer — was up to the task but damage was damage and they only had so many engineers to work on things.

Andrew spent a few minutes adjusting the light panel settings, cycling through the spectrum until the plant's leaves lifted toward the purplish-white end and brightened to almost silver. Tor had noted that it seemed to prefer that particular brand of light but Andrew didn't know if "prefer" was the right word for something without a nervous system in any conventional sense. The brightening looked enough like contentment that he didn't argue with it, though.

He was manipulating the monitoring panel to send its readings to his PADD when the lights suddenly went out. Not dimmed. Out. Complete darkness, the kind that pressed on your eyes like a thick blindfold. As the darkness continued to press in from all around him, his breathing changed without his permission — shallower, faster — and for a moment he wasn't in the arboretum at all anymore. He was hanging on that rack again, the pungent odors of his body and blood flooding his nostrils, the sound of unseen footsteps behind him. Recognizing (thanks to Qo) that panic was attempting to take over, Andrew remembered his breathing. Inhale for one, two, three, four. Exhale for one, two…

He continued to count. He was at four when something suddenly touched his hand. Andrew didn't think. He just swung.

The PADD connected with something solid — a dull, meaty impact — and then the lights came back up all at once, stuttering once before stabilizing, and Andrew was standing two feet from the alcove with his arm still raised and his chest heaving and the plant's head was lolling at an angle it hadn't been at before, leaves in disarray, one of the outer fronds bent sharply where the edge of the PADD had caught it. His perceptions of everything were coming in one super fast, super dense explosion and it was only after two more measured breaths that Andrew realized what had happened.

The forcefield was down. The emitters had cut out when the power had failed.

"Oh no," Andrew breathed. "Oh, no, no—"

He stashed the PADD in the crook of his arm, held against his body, and pulled his tricorder out. The device’s trilling confirmed what his eyes were already telling him. The bent frond. The angle of the head. The way the plant was now swaying from side-to-side in dismay. He'd hit it. He'd actually hit it. Whatever it had done to him in the dark, it hadn't deserved to be panic attacked in response. It was a plant. It was hungry and, with the field down, it had reached for the nearest available thing in the dark, the same as it had reached for Björn in the biolab — the same as it had probably reached for Tor a dozen times and she'd simply known to stay clear.

The tricorder readings steadied. Metabolic activity: normal. Growth index: flat. The frond was bent but not severed, and as Andrew watched, the plant's head slowly righted itself, reorienting — inevitably, inexorably — back toward him.

He let out a breath. Then Andrew looked at the back of his right hand. There was a faint mark — circular, already fading, barely more than a slight redness against his skin. He pressed a thumb to it, feeling a little tenderness there.

"Is this what you did to Björn?" he wondered aloud, eyes moving from the mark to the plant and back. His partner's incident in the biolab had been well documented in Tor's notes — the feeding, the rapid growth, the broken pot, the DNA replication. This had felt smaller than that, though. A taste rather than a meal, maybe? But the question sat with him as he reached past the alcove frame and manually reactivated the containment field. The familiar shimmer reappeared and the plant settled, leaves shifting back toward their darker resting hue.

Why did the plant sample DNA? What was it doing with it? Surely DNA wasn’t a source of nutrition — the purple-white light and nutrient solution seemed to care mostly for that need. So what was the point?

Andrew didn't have an answer. He put away his tricorder and pulled out the PADD again — there was a fresh scuff on its corner — and made some notations on it:

Power fluctuation at 1613 hours, approx. 4 seconds. Containment field dropped and was manually restored. Specimen appeared to make contact with my right hand during the outage — faint mark, already fading, no apparent injury. Bent frond on outer left — accidental. Recommend routing containment emitter to primary backup before next inspection.

He looked at the last line for a moment. Then added:

Will follow up with Dr. Wang re: the contact.

He looked once more at the plant, which had brightened considerably in the restored light. Satisfied that it was safely secured and had, for the moment, what it needed, the biologist decided to resume his walk through the arboretum. There were other plants to check in on and care for, though Andrew certainly hoped none of them would be grasping in the dark for him. His steps hurried some as he made his way deeper into the bay.


=/\= A post by… =/\=

Andrew Munro (now played by Brad)
Civilian Biologist