Many thanks to my wonderful beta, SpockLikesCats. I tweak after, therefore errors are of my own invention. I have no stake in Paramount, although I do have a fine pair of rubber Spock-ears. All this tomfoolery is for non-profit-making fun. Happy Christmas!
In space, no-one can hear you get reamed
Some days you can't just catch a break. Riley was having one of those days. Why did all the ship's command crew think he was their subordinate? That day he'd done three half-watches, one in security, one in the transporter room, and another in engineering, where Jonno's too-loud laugh caressed his senses, as delicate as wire wool on bare skin.
"Life o' Riley? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! Jack of all trades and master of none!" still rang in Kevin's ears as he stomped towards the mess for some well-deserved chow, cursing his peripatetic status on the ship.
Sometimes, a man can cross a room and blend in. Chatter continues as he slides by, thankful for the anonymity, and the chance for a bit of peace. In his bones, going by the day he'd had, Riley wasn't surprised at his dramatic entrance into the throng with his dinner.
The entire body of the mess went silent as a coarse voice blared out, its owner with his back to Riley.
"...bet she has to go on top, that massive drongo would squash her tiny arse flatter than a koala caught under a – "
Everyone knew Riley and Cupcake were good friends, and as Jonno realised who stood behind him, the end of his hysterically funny observation ran out of steam. Heads turned to see what would happen, and breaths were caught in by those fearful they might miss something as the Australian pivoted to face Kevin.
It was the Bunfight at the OK Corral.
If Kevin was getting done for disorderly, it would be for something worth it, not worthless. Furious, but determined to turn the other cheek, he did a mental calculation of his recreational alcohol credits and stalked to the replicator once more. Head held high, he punched in the code for a double Bushmills, jabbing the screen icons as though they were the eyes of his worst enemy.
He put as much distance as possible between himself and Jonno's posse, sat down and gripped his little glass of whiskey until his hand turned white, and a body slid in beside him.
"I'm proud o' ye, man. It's hard not to punch certain folk when they get in full-flow like that. He knows yer pal Cupcake is still on a shoogley peg with the Captain." Scotty's voice was low, his eyes surveying those nearest as he leaned in closer to Riley. "Ye know, if someone else were to, eh, take him down a peg or two – with a prank mind, no violence. If it happened in Engineering, I'd be prepared to take it as a crime o' passion, heat of the moment type thing. Everyone shakes hands and it's all forgotten. It's all part of team-building."
Still looking down at the hand wrapped round his glass, Kevin gave a tiny nod, unsure of what the Chief Engineer really meant. He was positive the Captain wouldn't take it that way; sometimes Commander Scott was a tad impetuous. And what the hell was a shoogley peg?
Something was different about Natsumi's quarters. Cupcake looked about as she smiled up at him in delight, entwining her fingers behind her back, head cocked. "Well?"
"Uh, well?" He knew there was a change, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Without warning, she flung herself to the floor, ass-first.
"Beanbag!"
Watching her slim limbs protrude from the mass, he grinned. "Awesome! I used to have one of these when I was a kid." He budged her over, sat, then lifted her onto his lap so they both snuggled into the bag. It moulded to his body, the beans a comfortable support to the small of his back. With his feet planted on the deck, he was able to move the bag back-and-forth in a pleasing roll. He made a mental note of that motion.
"Me too, and they're quite a lot of fun when you're a grown-up." Natsumi's eyebrows rose and her mouth made a cheeky grin. "And it's not as high as the bed; not so many accidents." Cupcake blushed as she giggled.
"All right, knock it off - I'm getting less clumsy. Know what I used to love doing?"
"Yes. I love it too." Shiny hair bounced as she nodded in agreement.
"Huh? How do you know what I was going to say?"
"Because everyone loves it. You were going to say you opened the seam and played with the beans inside, swishing your hand about. They're like warm snow, and they make the hairs on your arms feel all fuzzy."
"How did you get hold of it? You didn't bring it onboard."
"I brought the cover from home, then I saved up replicator credits and replicated the beans. They're just a long-chain molecule made from hydrogen and carbon, and because they're mostly air it barely cost anything."
"Did I ever tell you how smart you are?"
"Yes, but tell me again."
When Cupcake, with pride, told Riley how Matsumi brought a beanbag on board, Kevin's eyes took on a faraway look.
"Kev, you listening?"
"Yeah, 'course, just thinking about something Scotty said. How does a replicator work, Cupcake?"
"Come on Kev, I'm not at a Starfleet Academy tutorial now - you know how it works - it's transporter technology."
"Can you ask Natsumi how many credits it took to fill her bag? And if she still has the formula code for the beans?"
"What are you thinking, Kev?"
"Honestly? Not a clue, but I'll come up with something."
.
.
Meet me in the rec-room, deck 17 at 21.00. Destroy this message.
Cupcake groaned at the message on his Padd. Riley in secret agent mode meant only one thing - antacids. Was there even a rec-room on deck 17? A cursory glance of the ship's schematics confirmed there was, and it was listed as 'unfinished' on the maintenance record. Cupcake blew out a sigh. Riley was becoming a mole inside his own organisation, and who better to be sneaking around than one and a half security officers. No wonder Natsumi nicknamed them Laurel and Hardy.
"Don't touch anything!" That was the frantic greeting from his friend when Cupcake met Kevin as agreed. "I don't want you getting in trouble. Just sit there and keep still."
As a rec-room, it wasn't much good, carpet tiles were missing from half the floor, the sparse furniture was still covered in plastic film and the bulkheads were undecorated, showing raw, unfinished plas-steel. Even the replicator's shiny frontage was still swathed in protective peel-off strips.
"Who knows you're here, Kev?"
"Just Commander Scott. I'm checking it out for a project, he thought it would be good for some of the younger engineering crewmen to fix it up. The Captain OK'd it."
"And?" Acid bubbling at the level of his diaphragm indicated Cupcake's sixth sense for BS was kicking in.
"I volunteered to get the replicator working ahead of time, so they could get coffee and food."
"Very generous of you, Kev."
"Wasn't it?" Riley bounced a little, and Cupcake's stomach began to talk to itself while Kevin whipped out a stylus and stood in front of the replicator in the manner of a college professor. "Now, as we know, molecules are assembled into their component parts here using variant transporter technology," he tapped the stylus on the bulkhead some two feet above the replicator, "then beamed along with appropriate containers here, into the dispensing slot...
"...or not."
"What?" Cupcake's head hurt now too, Riley had gone mad, that was it. "Kev, have you been drinking the Vulcan port?"
Kevin jiggled, and grinned the grin of an excited toddler on the way to his first space-flight. "Or, with minor adjustments, the replicated matter can be beamed anywhere aboard this ship, say – for instance – into the personal locker of a certain someone who has been getting on our last nerve."
Despite himself, Cupcake felt the corners of his lips turn up, so he clamped his mouth shut, trying to maintain the facade of a conscientious and professional security officer who didn't put up with such blatant disregard for rules. Commander Giotto really got under your skin.
"So, let me recap here, Kev, you're going to beam food into Loudmouth's locker?"
"No," more bouncing from Kevin-on-a-spring, "I'm going to fill it full of polystyrene beans, right up to the top. So when he opens it...wham! Snowstorm!"
.
.
Their tactical assault was planned for a day when Riley was in Engineering. Cupcake could watch from afar on a security feed, safe in the knowledge he couldn't be implicated in Kevin's devious prank.
The day before the great jape, scenes flitted through his head; of Jonno opening the locker and being buried in beans, beans floating through the Enterprise, being scooped up by laughing crewmen, who danced and whirled, throwing them into the air with joyful glee, Jonno at a court-martial. Man, that was a daydream. Cupcake didn't think they could court-martial a man for beans, could they? Never mind, the look on the ass-hat's face would be enough recompense for his crude talk about Natsumi. He stretched out, seated at his station, arms folded behind his head, and smiled.
So the following day, no one was more surprised than Cupcake to find himself crouched in a toilet, knees 'round his ears, at 06.00 hours, sweating. With a communicator clamped to one ear, and a finger jammed into the other, he loud-whispered, "Abort! Abort! Surprise locker-inspection by commodore April, guest dignitary!"
On deck 17, in an unfinished rec room, Kevin Riley's hand hung in mid air, stopped in its trajectory towards the replicator's touch-screen interface.
He was relieved.
One week later...
At last, things were settling in on the engineering deck, and Scotty was having a good day. So far, nobody had stuck their fingers where they shouldn't, dropped tools into vital engine parts, or – again - put Keenser where he couldn't get down. Even the replicator tea was beginning to taste like a proper Scottish brew. It only took three weeks to tweak the program that produced the dishwater that had first poured into his earthenware tankard. He'd no time for piddly wee teacups. All was well. He should have known better.
"Sir! Sir! There's ooze coming out of one of the lockers! Do you think an alien's beamed aboard?" A breathless, panting ensign barrelled into his office, her face flushed. Kovacs was her name, and she barely looked old enough to be in high school, never mind working on a starship.
Eyes raised to the ceiling, Commander Scott rose without a word and gestured for her to lead him to the source of this mysterious 'invader'. Whatever it was, an alien was far down his list of possibilities. More likely, someone was making illegal hooch, and it exploded.
A vile pus of red, brown and green bubbled through the ventilation slots of the locker, pooling on the deck, the putrid seepage from an infected wound.
Kneeling upstream of the flow, Scotty dipped a finger in the revolting goo and gave a tentative sniff. "Aye, well lass, if that's an alien, it's a coffee-lime flavoured one," his face screwed up, "with a hint o' tomato."
"Excuse me sir?"
"I dinnae know any more than you, lassie. Go and find the emergency override combination for these lockers. Then get a clean-up team over here, we dinnae want to attract space-weevils. And put a wet-floor sign up."
With saucer-eyes, she whispered, "S-space weevils?" and shot off to obey orders as if her life depended on it.
Gorn, this lot were gullible, ripped from their studies a year early by Nero. Scotty almost felt guilty teasing them. Tomorrow, he might send her down to stores for a tin of tartan paint to decorate his quarters, or a long stand. What in bloody hell was going on? He went to get a tricorder, and to wash his hands, but no sooner was he drying them off, than he was interrupted by the crackle of the comm unit.
"Commander Scott?"
"Scott here."
"It's Harris, from the squad fixing up the rec room. The replicator isn't working. We were told it would be. The display says 'functioning', but it's delivering empty crockery."
Tapping a lime-scented forefinger to his top lip, Scotty glanced out of the door towards the locker area. He added one plus one and made two, as was only proper for a mathematical genius.
"Get down here to my office, all o' ye's."
"Aye, sir. Harris out."
Four expectant faces greeted Commander Scott across his desk. Bless them, they didn't even think they had done anything untoward. He pinched the bridge of his nose, hard.
"... and you didn't think tae report the replicator out-of-order after your first request failed?"
"Well, we thought perhaps it was just drinks sir. When we couldn't get tea or coffee, we tried soup, then dessert." Harris was a tall, sandy haired chap, earnest and freckled.
Head in hands, Scotty gave an almost inaudible groan, then looked up at his merry band of eager crewmen, first class. They didn't seem very first class today. "Dessert?"
"Yes sir, pudding."
Lord preserve him from hungry youngsters, their growing bodies and no-doubt rampant sex-lives meant they couldn't go without food for longer than a couple of hours. A forty-year-old man would have just waited 'till dinner-time. He spoke slowly. "So, tell me again, what exactly did you order from the replicator? I need an inventory."
A round, cheery girl offered up a list in Italian-accented standard; "Four large lattes, four teas, four cups of tomato soup, oh – and a coke, and ah," she looked at the floor, picking at a nail, "four pints of lime pudding and two strawberry jellos."
With the fingers of his left hand, Starfleet's finest engineer rubbed at his forehead, just above his nose, willing the day to go away. "Fo – four pints o' lime pudding? Four pints?"
"Yes sir, it's the only flavour that tastes like real – "
Bam!
They all jumped as Scotty's fist hit the desk. He could feel his face heating up to resemble the colour of his shirt. "I don't care why you ordered the damn pudding. In future if something doesn't work – DINNAE KEEP USING IT!" A loud, exasperated sigh escaped his lips. "Did it no' occur to ye's all that there could have been a co-ordinate error? That all that gloop could hae been gumming up the replicator mechanism?" Before they could offer any defence, he shook his nipping head. "Well think on it the next time. Everybody oot! Dismissed!" Slumped back in his chair, Scotty scrolled through maintenance records on his terminal, a niggling at the back of his mind.
"Ohh – ohh – woah!" Splat! In the distance, the Chief Engineer heard the slap of a slipping... falling...connecting-with-the-deck body.
Exasperated, he bellowed out of the door, "I SAID GET A WET FLOOR SIGN!"
Arm stretched over his desk, he flipped the comm-switch and asked for Ensign Kovacs. "Belay that order for a clean-up team, Kovacs; I reckon I've found a … volunteer."
It became legend - it would be talked about for the rest of the five-year mission - Commander Scott, striding through the corridors of the Enterprise, his complexion purple.
It was the shout heard 'round the world...
"RILEY!"
~~The End ?~~
Scotty-isms
Shoogley peg - an unsure footing
Nipping head - headache, as in 'ma heid's nipping me'