I do not own Star Trek 2009 or Supernatural

"How exactly is it that you've managed to make it this far in life without Darwin catching up with you?"

Jim Kirk flinched playfully at the barbed query. Bones had invented the concept of irritated, honed it into a fine art form and used it liberally with great proficiency. Although to be perfectly fair, Jim's half-assed plan to distract the very pretty, very cruel ruler of the planet they had formerly been negotiating with had resulted in him almost losing his head, literally.

Again.

Jim gingerly fingered the thick rope burn around his neck and grinned cheekily.

Bones glared and continued prodding at his captain. "Damn it Jim, even when you're mute you're a pain in the ass."

Jim thought about shrugging but figured his ribs wouldn't appreciate the effort.

"Of course you think getting lynched is an acceptable solution to a problem as long as none of your precious crew members ended up dead."

Damn straight.

"I swear, you have all the self-preservation instincts of a hormonal lemming!"

Hey! Jim took exception to that and expressed the sentiment through a snort.

"You're right, what was I thinking. Dean Winchester has all the self-preservation instincts of a hormonal lemming. You don't know the meaning of the word self-preservation as it applies to you."

Not true!

"Doctor, while your tirade is overly emotional, I find that the captain's actions over the last month lend credence to your conclusion. Captain, I have finished gathering the pertinent intelligence regarding today's events."

Wearily extending a hand for the PADD, Jim waited for his first officer to cross sickbay.

Spock eyed him pointedly and hung onto the PADD.

Jim glared.

Spock was impervious.

Jim tried to wave his hands around, only to have them smacked out of the way. "Stop that, I need to clean your knuckles right after I finish with your ears and manage to figure out why you neglected to turn on your brain this morning," Bones scowled and Jim wilted. Okay, yes, it hadn't been the most conventional plan but hey, everyone had made it out alive and the only person who'd been hung was him instead of the whole crew. And hey, he'd only been hung for a few minutes. Spock got him down before he suffered brain damage.

"Captain Kirk to the bridge, Captain Kirk to the bridge," Uhura called over the comm and McCoy shot the nearest speaker a nasty glare. Kirk shrugged expressively and scooted out the door before Bones could put the grab on him or worse, stick his captain with a hypo.

Breaking onto the bridge and trying not to look as if a demon was chasing him, Kirk nodded gingerly to Uhura. "Sir, we're being diverted to render emergency aid to Delta 5-B."

Kirk raised an eyebrow, silently asking for more information.

Uhura spun her chair around to face the whole bridge as Spock stepped off the elevator, a long hypo held delicately in his fingers. Kirk's eyes widened and he suddenly, unreasonably felt like his beloved captain's chair was locking him into one location with nowhere to run. "Doctor McCoy has informed me that he will not remove you from duty if you allow me to administer this anti-inflammatory," Spock recited calmly but with a concrete firmness that told Kirk there were only two options.

Trying not to gulp, he waved his first officer over. To his surprise, the hypo barely pinched and the bridge grinned at their captain's expense. Scowling at a highly amused Sulu, Kirk waved for Uhura to continue.

"Yes sir. Delta 5-B is suffering from some sort of crop destroying bug. It's highly effective. Delta 5-B put out a call for help when a quarter of their planet's vegetation was decimated. That was six hours ago and according to the last reports, they are now down to 65% viable vegetation."

Kirk whistled. "Indeed, captain," Spock agreed. "I am intrigued. Few naturally occurring bugs are so voracious. Uhura, this insect is not indigenous to the planet?" The communications officer shook her head. "Captain, I request permission to study this invader as soon as we make orbit."

Kirk nodded and wiggled his fingers about.

"Understood, captain. I will assign security teams to assist in rationing and crowd control. I am sure Commander Sulu and his botany department would be of great assistance."

Kirk waved about some more, feeling like an idiot.

"I do not know who else is assigned to assist. Uhura?"

"At present, the Holden and the Idaho are also rendering assistance but we are the only Constitution class vessel. If you deem it necessary, the Impala will also be in the area."

Kirk nodded and pointed at Sulu, who swallowed a grin when he realized he easily interpreted the motions as "Lay in a course for Delta 5-B, warp 5."

"Yes sir. Course laid in, proceeding at warp 5."

Once the Enterprise was calmly on her way with an ETA of four hours, Kirk admitted that a nap was perhaps a good idea and turned the conn over to Spock, who would use the time to research Delta 5-B, locally known as Corelis. He discovered that it had been one of the first planets settled back in the early days of galaxy exploration, picked by a rather conservative faction who chose to isolate themselves from the rest of the galaxy and live simply. There hadn't been any trouble with Delta 5-B until two or three decades ago when the Corelians grew dissatisfied with the Federation's open policy regarding "dangerous alien influences." Human terrorists had begun to use the pretty, agriculturally lush planet as a bolthole as bad blood bred between the Federation and the Corelians.

Spock paused in his perusal of the PADD. The Corelians were still technically members of the Federation, but they hadn't reached out for years, even when a viral plague had swept through their population and eliminated a full ten percent. Why now? The only explanation he could arrive at was that the sudden, horrific onset of the insects must have shocked the Corelians into action.

Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to have the Impala around as back up after all, just in case riots broke out or there was a plot of some description. Spock quietly slipped a note off to the Impala. Sam immediately replied back informing Spock that they were babysitting a very uninteresting deep-space telemetry project (and if it was boring Sam, the rest of the crew must be going crazy) and would very happily back up the Enterprise if needed.

Still, when they arrived at Delta 5-B, things ran as smoothly as one could expect a panicking planet of fundamentalists to run under the circumstances. Spock hadn't even needed to awaken Captain Kirk, which he would naturally be hearing about later. Sulu and Spock picked up their samples and quarantined them, the Idaho dropped off her payload of food while the Holden was assigned to long-time support as Enterprise provided sheer manpower, medical assistance and organization. They were on their way within two uneventful days.

Had Spock been as emotional as Captain Kirk or Dr. McCoy, he would have said that the whole thing gave him a bad feeling. There was something off about the incident, something his thorough investigation had not turned up.

A quick trip to the botany lab resulted in Commander Sulu presenting the same conclusion. "This isn't something that just mutates over a hundred years," the pilot-scientist declared knowledgably. Anything related to plants, Sulu knew inside and out. "A voracious insect like this would have killed everything on the planet in its evolutionary phase and then died off. Additionally," and Sulu scowled, "it looks…incomplete."

Spock quirked an eyebrow. "An incomplete organism?" Sulu shrugged helplessly. "I can't explain it. Certain DNA helixes and processes are incomplete while others appear dormant and useless. And it's not like in naturally occurring organisms where dormant systems fall to the background or the rest of the organism works around the system. These are significantly hampering the day-to-day workings of the beetle." Sulu gestured to the microscope. "All I can tell you is that it's like the bug's only the carrier, like an empty bombshell, for lack of a better term."

"Perhaps it is a test run and the insect is missing a payload, to continue your analogy," Spock mused. "Has Commander Winchester come up with anything?" Sulu spread his hands in powerless reply.

"Then there is nothing more for us to do. We shall focus on Delta 5-B's shipping manifests, both legal and illegal, continue our investigation and attempt to contain the insects. Have you created a pesticide?"

Sulu shrugged in defeat again. "I have, but the only pesticide strong enough to kill these things eliminates all planet and mammal life as well. This bug was definitely engineered to be a destroyer."

Spock stared at the insect carcass for a long minute. "Very well," he said at last. "If there is nothing more to be done here, your presence will be of assistance to Mr. Chekov on the bridge as he attempts to extrapolate trader routes."

Sulu nodded and slipped away with a final glance at the bug. Spock was left standing at the science table, eyes roaming unseeing across useless, pointless data while glittering iridescent green, sharp-edged horns, glowing dead black eyes and a hard carapace seemed to mock the Vulcan science officer.

Impala

To the Impala's unending chagrin, the Enterprise did not need their help. Thus they were figuratively marooned in the middle of nowhere, watching a baby space station of scientists scramble about to get their fascinating study of sub-space, sub-atomic particles up and running.

"Sam, tell me, how is this particular little experiment vital to anything in life?" Dean begged his brother, looking for any sort of justification for their cruel and unusual punishment as he and Ash played solitaire on the bridge (Sam and Jo had banned poker after Dean and Ash's little game of bridge-side strip poker had gotten busted by Admiral Chandra).

Sam rolled around in his chair, acting highly unprofessional and very out of character. "It's not. At all. In maybe sixty years when we can actually make use of the research, it'll change the face of science as we know it. Until then, all these brainiacs with a marginally better understanding than your average genius will sit out here catching glimpses of something they barely understand and feel extremely smart and self-justified when they could be doing something far more practical and life-saving."

The bridge crew blinked at the rather vehement speech. "Aw Sammy, are they smarter than you?" Dean drawled, grinning at the virulent bitch-face lasered his way.

"Intelligence cannot be properly quantified," Sam sniffed before turning back to his console.

"They are! They're smarter than you!"

Sam's bitch-face amped up to singularity level before he huffed and swivelled back to the more practical problem – the bug carapace Spock had beamed over. "You think they'd be better off trying to figure out why that bug's indestructible," Dean continued, less teasing and just a hair more serious.

"I do," Sam replied snippily. "People are going to suffer because of it. Their lifetime in a Petri dish isn't going to be useful. And they could get the recognition they crave by saving thousands of lives."

"It's all right Sammy. We'll let you, Spock and Sulu take the credit for this one," Dean consoled and laughed when Sam accurately pitched a stylus at his brother's head without turning around.

"We're being hailed by the Lugosi," Sam reported with mild surprise (and no small relief – he was considering allowing strip poker again just to shut his brother up) two days after receiving the alert from Enterprise.

"The what?" Dean asked sceptically.

Sam flipped through several Starfleet registers and when he came up empty, a few keystrokes had him dipping into less legal channels. "Um, it's a single-pilot trader registered to a Bela Talbot. She's wanted for no less than fifteen or so charges of grand larceny but there's never been enough evidence to convict. Additionally, she's never stuck around long enough to end up in court."

There was a pause on the bridge. "So why the hell is she hailing a Starfleet vessel?" Dean demanded aloud.

Sam shrugged. "I don't know, but I'll bet she's gambling on our curiosity. We'll want to know what she's up to instead of just beating the shit out of her ship. You have to admit, we're somewhat predictable."

"What are you talking about, I'm not predictable!"

Were there crickets aboard the Impala, they would have been chirping noisily as crew members eyed their first officer cautiously, who shrugged.

"Impala? Are you going to blow me out of the water or not? Because if you are, can you do it now? I hate waiting," an irritated, cultured British accent demanded. Dean squared his shoulders and nodded to Sam.

"Open a channel. And if she's a pain in the ass, I'm so blaming you."

The view screen flared to life and the predominantly male crew of the Impala tried very hard not to let their tongues hang around their ankles. A lovely brunette with a killer figure wrapped in black piloting leathers crossed her booted legs sensually and smirked. "There you are. My, you are a good looking bunch. Bela Talbot. And I presume you're the infamous Captain Dean Winchester?" A thread of disdainful amusement rippled through her chuckle and set Dean's hackles up as he scowled.

"Yeah, what do you want?" he demanded, settling into his chair with all his manly authority drawn around him like a protective cloak.

Talbot leaned forward with a smooth lunge. "I have information that will save the Federation. Naturally, I'll be expecting to be paid for my neighbourly good will. You see, I can lead you to a dead planet. Those bugs you've all been trying to crack open? They just killed everything on PD-4503. I believe Commander Winchester has a probe floating in the atmosphere to register anomalous nitrogen levels. You should check it, see if I'm lying or not."

Dean cut his brother a glance. Sam finished tapping away at his console before turning to Dean with a tight frown.

"Dean, diagnostics on that probe indicate that it's running just fine but there's absolutely nothing alive on PD-4503. You know, the one you called the jungle planet from hell?"

"The one with the insanely tough blow-dart dudes?"

"That's the one. Dean everything, including the indigenous people, is dead. The atmosphere's toxic, the plants dead and there's an obscene amount of insect life registering. Mars pre-terra-forming would be friendlier than PD-4503 at the moment."

Talbot's smirk grew to satisfied, vulpine levels. "Shall we talk price?"