Brock sat in his office in his specially modified chair behind his desk running his mechanical "fingers" over the controls. Ever since Sevan Lantree had died in the Kelvan attack, he had had almost more work than he could handle -- almost.
An engineer stuck his head through the doorway and said, "We have the tertiary field aligners back on line, sir."
The mechanical voice module on Brock's back said in a voice that was unsettlingly realistic, "Thank you, Ensign. I'll be right there."
The crewman nodded and ducked out again.
Brock thought not for the first time how efficient Humans could be if they put their minds to it. He liked Humans very much; most Horta did.
Horta and Humans were about as different physically as was conceivably possible, Horta being silicon based life forms and Humans being based on carbon -- still, the two species shared an important common trait. Both had an insatiable curiosity about the universe about them. It was this drive that propelled Humans into the galaxy in their starships, and the same drive had moved Brock to leave the planet that had been the entire universe for the Horta for countless hundreds of thousands of centuries. Brock was the first Horta to join Starfleet.
At first, it hadn't been easy. Unaided, Horta were unable to communicate with any other life forms except for other Horta. To correct this, Starfleet engineers had developed a special voice box to provide a spoken vocabulary that other races could understand. It was attached to Brock's topside, toward his front.
Furthermore, Horta didn't have any arms or hands. That made it a little difficult for Brock to use standard control consoles. Starfleet engineers came to the rescue again, this time with a cluster of robotic arms, or waldoes. They sprouted from a central unit attached to Brock's back, near his center. At the end of each arm was a mechanical "hand" that was more versatile and nimble than a Human hand.
Brock folded his arms across his back and rumbled out the office door after the ensign. The repairs were coming well, but it would still be a week before the Knight was spaceworthy again and capable of pursuing the Kelvans. The Commodore was impatient, and Brock was doing everything he could to speed things along.
Tomorrow, the last of the supply shuttles would be returning to the Knight with the raw materials he needed to make replacement parts. Then repairs could begin on the main transwarp engines and their supporting structures.
But that was tomorrow's worry. Today, he would tend to the matters at hand, like the tertiary field aligners.
<< OOC: Horta were introduced in the TOS episode "Devil in the Dark". >>