Groceries

I was sitting along on the bridge of the SS Icelandic Troll, enjoying Jerry Macguire as we cruised along at Warp 2. Unexpectedly, Captain Ryan rushed onto the bridge. Rather than plopping into his retrofitted command chair, as usual, he stood next to my console.

“May I?” he asked.

I blinked several times. In all my time aboard the Troll, I’d never seen him at the main console. I’m not saying he couldn’t operate the ship, but I suppose I suspected it. I slid out of my seat, and moved behind the command chair. Ryan began intently poking at the controls, as I picked at the worn and faded Starfleet logo that somehow still adorned the back of the command chair. A moment later, I felt the Troll’s warp engines kick up to Warp 4, our absolute maximum speed.

The Captain likes to say that you can feel the hull thrum at that speed, and asks–repeatedly–that we refer to it that way. Thrumming. I think of it more as a severe shuddering that indicates the inertial dampers are about to give up, and that hull integrity–and the shipboard life signs–is preparing to plunge to zero. Predictably, the “thrumming” brought First Officer Smith rushing to the bridge a minute later.

“Don, why are we at waooooh. Buzz. You’re driving,” she said. She moved to sit next to him at the main console, but he quietly held up a hand. She slid instead into the command chair. “Sooooo,” she continued, making it clear that this was all very casual and not at all alarming, “what’s the occasion?”

“I think he’s–” I began to whisper into her ear.

“He is,” she said, raising a couple of fingers in a request for silence. Ryan had said nothing.

After a moment of watching him poke the console, I became worried. You can’t leave skid marks in space, but we were clearly going to be giving it our best shot. “He’s–” I whispered more urgently.

“I know,” she said.

Finally, Ryan turned around. He looked at us with a grave expression on his face. In a flat voice with just a tinge of existential panic in it, he quietly said, “we’re out of cereal.”

I’m positive I heard Smith blink.

ce·re·al
/ˈsirēəl/
noun

• a grain used for food, such as wheat, oats, or corn.
• a grass producing a cereal grain, grown as an agricultural crop. "low yields for cereal crops"

* a breakfast food made from roasted grain, typically eaten with milk. “a bowl of cereal”

To be fair, I had not ever given much thought to the Captain’s diet. I knew that tacos, of the hellishly inauthentic, fat-laden, nutritionally void, mass-market kind played a starring role. I’d once heard him express the payment amount for a salvage job in terms of how many tacos it would purchase. I suspected that caffeine was a major nutrient. But cereal? I mean, sure. Fine. But this seemed like a lot of concern over breakfast flakes.

I couldn’t recall ever having seen milk on board.

We tore through space at a teeth-jarring Warp 4. When we dropped down to sublight speed, I immediately recognized our destination. “That,” I said, “is Mars.” Smith nodded.

“Let’s go,” Ryan said, lurching from the console and moving toward the bridge access hatch. We followed him down the accessway to his private quarters, and then onto the skiff we affectionally did not call Little Troll in his presence.

“Where are we going?” I asked. I was answered with a curt wave of the Captain’s hand. O-kay. We detached from the Troll a bit quicker than the manual would have specified, had anyone bothered to write a manual for the unholy and ungainly marriage between the main ship and its smaller cousin. Speaking only enough to issue curt replies to Mars space and air traffic controllers, the Captain maneuvered us into a small spaceport near the equatorial belt. We landed, and he rushed into the spaceport proper, Smith and I in tow. He quick-marched unerringly to a small tavern called the Winking Lizard, and walked in. The bartender, an attractive, tall, raven-haired woman of perhaps middle age, noticed him immediately.

“Buzz,” she said, sliding over to where we waited at the bar.

“Lady Stella. You know why I’m here,” he said quietly. She nodded, and placed three shots of something brown on the bar. Buzz picked one up, and gestured to us to do the same. Smith and I glanced at each other and silently decided to play along. We downed the shots, which were extremely alcoholic, terrible tasting, and somehow soothing. My prefrontal cortex immediately went on a small vacation. While Smith and I recovered from the assault on our senses, Ryan and “Lady Stella” had their heads close to each other and were whispering furiously. Finally, they broke apart.

“Let’s go,” Ryan said. He followed him back to the skiff, which he piloted back to the Troll. He practically flew to the bridge, programmed a new set of coordinates, and blasted us back into Warp 4.

This pattern repeated. We visited The Jammer on Ballast Three, where Ryan engaged in a heated, whispered exchange with one “Charlie.” Next was Finke’s Weight on the space station known as Heaven’s Rim, where the next clue in our scavenger hunt was provided by “Angel.” Then the Lone Star on New Texas. The Unicorn on Eros. Duck’s on Altair Seven. Donna’s, on New Rome. This took seemingly forever, during which Ryan permitted no eating and only a little sleep, taken in wary, fitful shifts. At each bar, we were required to take a shot of something horrible, after which Ryan apparently received whispered instructions that set us off on our next tangent. My liver had begun sending urgent panic signals to my brain, which was in no mood to listen. “Walk it off,” said the return signal, and I felt my liver make serious efforts to, in fact, walk off.

Donna’s was apparently the final clue, because our last stop–and honestly, I’m guessing here, because the shots we’d been consuming were adding up, and some of them took hours to even start to wear off–was at an unnamed civilian space station very close to the Romulan border. Once again, we performed the shots-and-whispering ritual. I started to wonder if Ryan had somehow become confused on the difference between cereal, typically a breakfast product, and grain, which is what I hoped most of these shots had originated as. I wondered if this was all some elaborate cosmic bar crawl.

But no.

This time, the bartender disappeared into the back for a few minutes, and re-emerged carrying a nondescript cardboard box, a roughly one meter cube. Ryan took it, nodded gratefully, and led us back to the skiff. Smith and I were, frankly, off our asses–the shot at this place had been at least 100% alcohol, I believe, lightly flavored with more alcohol. Certainly, something extradimensional was happening in our brains by then. “Belly up to the bar, friend, have another round!” we sang loudly together. At least, that’s what I believe we thought we were singing; in retrospect, it probably sounded like a horny Rancor being roughly neutered without the benefit of anesthesia.

We returned to the Troll, where Ryan deposited the box on his bunk.

“Do you want me to carry that up to the galley for you?” I asked carefully. D’you wan me’t curry h’up gelly f’you? Smith giggled.

He stopped, and turned slowly to me. “I do not want to alarm you,” he said quietly and, if I’m being frank, somewhat menacingly. Enough so that the then-squishy parts of my brain made serious inroads toward sitting up and paying attention. “But if you ever touch that box, or its contents, or any of its contents’ contents, I will not rest until everything you have ever loved is scattered across the surface of a million suns.” He turned back to his bunk, sat down, and stared at us. “Okay?” he asked with a bit of cheer in his voice. He may have smiled, but the part of my brain that recognized body language had been asleep since at least Altair Seven.

“Not the galley, then,” I said. “Got it.” N’gelly, g’tit. Smith quietly took my hand, and we drunkenly staggered to the common area on the crew’s quarters to commiserate. As Ryan’s cabin door slid shut behind us, I heard a soft, satisfied sigh, layered over a quiet, deliberate crunching.