Whatever Works... ((Kent))

[Samantha_Kent 0]

Killer lint.

 

Sam couldn't restrain a slight nervous laugh as she stared at the readings coming back.

 

Killer biological zombie death lint.

 

Strangely enough, this was, more or less, an entirely accurate assessment of the hostile force the ship was currently dealing with. It was a microscopic -- possibly even community-based unicellular -- organism, which had managed to encase itself in a sort of fibrous inorganic shell. This, when Kat and then Sam and Daena had first tried to scan it, had thrown off both sensors and the evidence of their own eyes and led them to believe it might simply be the sort of collected dust one occasionally found under one's bed. Closer scans had revealed the truth, however.

 

It was immobile, probably traveled in much the same manner as pollen or something like that, and at first glance seemed, in fact, remarkably harmless. The bioreadings were so faint as to not even be immediately intelligible, and the small ball of fuzz currently residing under Sam's microscope could not have seemed less likely to be the root cause of mass chaos aboard a Federation starship. But Sam had seen firsthand the havoc that it had wreaked in the minds of all those with even remote psi-sensitivity. The dreams...of things just this side of wrong...Malik and Daena and Tom and...herself...images this thing in front of her had put into her head. Into the entire crew's heads. Violated their minds.

 

Psychomalignant killer biological zombie death lint.

 

There were reports of other fallout as well; Kat had just informed her that a body had been sent up to sickbay, his lungs filled with the stuff. That had Sam very worried; so far she and the others hadn't come up with enough of a sample all at once that could possibly do that kind of damage. Was there some huge store of it somewhere? Or had it reacted with the crewman's body and suddenly multiplied?

 

As the latter option was the only one she could hope to investigate scientifically, she set about trying to determine how she might simulate the different aspects of a humanoid body making contact with the sample. The variables, were, unfortunately, numerous, but it was a starting point.

 

Skin contact -- negative growth response.

 

Hair contact -- negative growth response.

 

Starfleet regulation uniform jacket contact -- negative growth response.

 

Starfleet regulation undershirt contact -- negative growth response.

 

If there was a catalyst, it was not external to the body, then. Progress of a sort. Nothing to account for the relatively massive amount found on the body of the affected officers, though. No useful information except that, for something biologic, it was bloody close to dormant. Sam was starting to get frustrated with the whole process and was also running out of likely bodily materials to test. So she spat in the sample.

 

It wasn't like there wasn't plenty of the stuff left. More samples had come in from Kat and she was rapidly coming to have something like a small collection. So she spat in the sample.

 

And sure enough it grew like crazy. She had to toss up a forcefield to make sure it didn't start spreading out of its sample container, and it piled up the sides until she had what looked like a small grey linty box sitting on her console.

 

Moisture...it grows with moisture. It got into their mouths, hit the moisture in their lungs, and swelled up with it, stopped up their systems like a plug in a drain. Psychomalignant biological killer death lint with a drinking problem. Wonderful.