The Science of Science
Posted on Sun Sep 6th, 2026 @ 2:35pm by Lieutenant Damien Saunders
Mission:
Character Development 7/26
Location: Science Lab 02
Timeline: Current
[ON]
Damien stood at the center bench in Science Lab Two with his sleeves rolled and a PADD propped against a sealed sample case... Deck eight was quiet... shore leave quiet... the isolation fields low harmonic sitting just under the enviromental processors... He liked it that way... Fewer voices... fewer variables... Just the work and the faint vibration of the ship through the deck plates...
He had come down after the walk through engineering with a short list and a longer curiosity... Power routing... field geometry... whether Lab Two could be locked down without starving the rest of the deck... Ordinary questions... The kind a new chief asked when he did not want to break something on day two... The answers was in the numbers now... or they should of been...
He keyed the assay again... watched the culture take the spectrographic sweep... blue eyes narrowed the way they always did when the metabolic curve almost resolved and then drifted... "Computer... hold substrate temperature at three point two Celsius... stabilize the containment field at point eight four... and log thermal variance across the last four cycles..."
The display flickered... settled... residual ion scatter on the right hand trace... respiration rate climbing a tenth of a percent when it had no business climbing at all... He exhaled through his nose and almost smiled... Almost...
"Come on..." he murmured to the tray... voice kind even with no one there to hear it... "Your baseline was clean a hour ago..."
He trimmed the field geometry by a hair... waited for the chromatograph to catch up... watched protein off gassing tick up and then flatten... Catalogued it without meaning too... ozone... faint warmth off the emitter coil... the particular stillness of a Vesta class lab when the isolation field was holding... Exo-science habits die hard... He had done this on the Kincaid with someone elses name on the door... Now the roster said Saunders... Chief Science Officer... The thought sat warm in his chest and he let it sit... then put the professional look back on...
"Computer... overlay the last Kincaid control set... same strain... same nutrient matrix... highlight any deviation above two percent..."
A second trace laid itself over the first... close... not identical...
He leaned in... tall frame folding a little over the bench... brown hair still neat from the start of the shift... five oclock shadow not yet... and frowned with that patient Toronto courtesy he gave even to a culture that could not hear him...
"There you are..." he said softly... "Your not dying... your just hungry in the wrong direction..."
He adjusted the nutrient feed... logged the change... reached for the next slide without rushing... Shore leave could wait...
The labs were his now... and he intended to know every stubborn reading in them before the ship left dock...
[OFF]
Lieutenant Damien Saunders
Chief Science Officer
USS Amandora
