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[Apollo 0]

“Computer, run program 46-2, begin scan of sample thirty-nine…”

 

Link placed the small dish of dirt with brown-blue sprouts under the scanning unit in the Republic’s main botany lab and hit the round purple button that activated the scanners on the bulky piece of equipment about the size of a replicator.

 

As the device hummed, Link leaned back into his the back of his ‘high’ lab stool. He had to admit, he rather liked the current arrangement. His position as senior researcher meant he spent most of his time either in the labs or overseeing people in the lab working on his project, and he didn’t have to worry about the hassles of being department head, which meant not really worrying about whatever new trouble the Admiral had found the ship into this week. It was actually very liberating.

 

At first, when he and the Admiral decided it was best for someone else—namely Joy—to take the post as Department chief, he’d considered returning to the Academy and working on his doctorate and masters there. It was a nice opportunity, not only for him career-wise, but it would have put him in closer orbit to his mother and brother.

 

In the end though, the chance to do field work on Republic, with all her amenities, and work towards the degree won him over and he started working on his thesis project. The initial work had been excruciating and tedious, taking nearly three months of intensive work.

 

The hardest part was finding enough secondary research to do a primary lit review and start his basis to build his hypothesis, primarily because he was doing studies on the thaerin grain. Found only in the Gamma Quadrant, it had been nearly ten years since anyone had done any research on it, and even then those records were shaky. Indeed, as he’d discovered, his research would be the first extensive study of what he felt could become one of the most useful plants ever harvested.

 

Similar to terran wheat, thaerin was a bountiful, useful and hearty grain that could grow in low-pressure atmospheres with a minimum of oxygen, water and sunlight. Low gravities actually seemed to cause it to bloom even more fully, making it extremely robust.

 

The scanner beeped and he removed the dish and placed it aside, placing another dish with a slightly healthier looking plant in the scanner and repeated his earlier steps. It was the fortieth sample of the day. Normally his lab assistants would be doing such work, but they found it boring, so he’d given them a more amusing task of cleaning the laboratories, and it kept him well away from the bridge… and thus trouble.

 

So far, the newest variety of thaerin was proving most interesting. One of the major problems to mass production, was that thaerin had proved most difficult to grow in high-iron soils, which ruled out one of the locations being targeted as a primary location for the grain’s use—Mars Colony.

 

In all they were doing nearly ten different experiments on thaerin, some of which would be used in his report, some of which would only serve as background information and could be used in later studies on the grain.

 

Though he wondered if it was more interesting than what he would have gotten into on Earth with all the goodies he would have had at his disposal, he doubted that any project he would have started would have been as satisfying or important. Not to mention, other than the occasional report to Joy, and his weekly reports to Amazon University and Starfleet Science, he was essentially his own boss—something that would have never happened on Earth.

 

As he waited for the computer to beep, signaling him to start again, he sighed happily. This was his dream job.