I do not like them, Sam-I-Am
I do not like green eggs and ham.
- Dr. Seuss
"If you let us help, you'll be done twice as fast," repeated Carter, but Matthew Cross still looked skeptical.
"You're not even supposed to be here," he said, also repeating himself.
Carter could see she wasn't going to get anywhere by being reasonable, so she tried a different tack. She'd beg. "Come on, Cross. We're going nuts doing nothing. Do you know what it's like being grounded?"
"No," replied the Cat's Eye pilot stubbornly, arms folded across his chest.
Darn, that didn't work either. There was only one trick left in Carter's arsenal. Bribery. "I'll buy you a drink when we get back. What do you say?"
Cross pretended to think the matter over carefully. He had always intended to let his favorite women help, but he also enjoyed seeing Carter squirm just a little. "Well…" he began.
"Great! Thanks, Cross!" said Carter, anticipating his acquiescence.
Ten minutes later, the Cat's Eye had parked itself above a particularly large asteroid. The Banshees were dressed in their snappy black & white flight suits and assembled in the rear living compartment, listening to Cross explain the plan.
"This rock is impervious to our sensors," he was saying. "which means someone has to go outside and personally check it out. We meanwhile," he pointed to himself and Dexter, "will proceed to a second unusual asteroid and check it out. After, we come back and pick you up. Clear?"
"Crystal," replied Carter.
"Good. Get going then. And have some fun," Cross added with a smirk just before disappearing through the door in the forward bulkhead leading back into the cockpit.
Carter nodded to her team and they all activated their flight suits. Instantly, Carter felt the soft fabric turned stiff, and smelled re-circulated air waft past her nose inside the small forcefield bubble that had enclosed her head. Max pulled a large red lever on the wall, causing a round portal in the center of the floor to iris open. Beyond the opening, the stars of space shone, beckoning the women to join them.
One by one, the Banshees jumped into the hole, pushing through the atmospheric shield covering it, the way an ocean diver might leap into the sea from his boat, and once outside, quickly found handholds on the surface of the asteroid.
Carter looked up at the underbelly of the Cat's Eye and saw the hatch iris shut again, then the small recon vessel banked and headed off to its next destination, leaving the five of them alone in the dark.
Sensing the surrounding conditions, their flight suits automatically illuminated the white shoulder areas of their uniforms, casting an eerie, blue glow across their faces and the rocky terrain, and gravitized the soles of their boots, allowing them to stick to the asteroid.
"All right, let's get to work," said Carter through the comm system, heading off towards the impossibly close horizon of the small celestial body.
Jo already had her tricorder out and was scanning a sharp projection of stone rising before her, and it didn't take her long to come to her first conclusion. "My tricorder isn't penetrating the asteroid either," she said. "Sam? What about you?"
Sam carefully made her way over to Jo's rock and took a long, hard look. Her cybernetic eyes tuned to frequencies no human eye could perceive, sensing magnetic field lines, subspace wavelets, gravitic geodesics, and a host of other phenomena. Finally, she had to agree with Jo's tricorder. "It's like nothing I've ever seen before, Commander," she explained to Carter.
"Care to guess?" said Max.
"Well, it might be some kind of kelbanite alloy, which explains why sensors can't penetrate it, but whateverit is, it's not natural."
"What?" asked Carter, disbelieving. "You mean someone built this asteroid?"
"And judging by the thickness of the dust coating the surface," added Jo, consulting her tricorder and making a quick mental calculation, "it's at least 100 million years old!"
Carter was incredulous. They had just discovered an alien artifact so old the dinosaurs were still roaming the Earth when it had been built floating here in the middle of the asteroid belt, placed by an unknown alien race for unknown purposes. Was there any connection to the ancient strip mines on some of the other asteroids, or the Trojan Planetoids, or even The City on Tosnoqua? "Incredible," she muttered.
"What I want to know is what's inside this thing that apparently no one wants anyone to know about," said Max suspiciously.
"One way to find out," replied Carter. She pulled her phaser off it adhesion patch and set the power level. "Stand back, everyone."
Once the others were partway over the near horizon, Carter aimed at a random spot on the asteroid's crust and fired. Dirt and stone fragments blasted into space in a thousand sharp projectiles, and Carter felt a few bounce harmlessly off her flight suit which had automatically hardened on detecting the impacts. When the debris had blown away sufficiently to see through, she stepped forward to get a closer look at the interior of the newly-formed crater.
As she advanced, the light from her illuminated shoulder patches revealed in increments what lay in the deep recess, and when the light reached the bottom, Carter gasped and stopped dead in her tracks.
"What is it?" called Alex. She and the others rushed forward as quickly as the almost non-existent gravity would permit, but when they saw what was inside the asteroid they froze as well, their expressions a mixture of revulsion and alarm.
"Not again!" cried Jo in dismay.
Resembling a gigantic, stony egg, the asteroid was a mere shell filled with a bubbling, noxious, green slime. The vile ooze heaved sluggishly to and fro as if it were a living thing trying to escape its prison of 10,000 years now that a hole had been blown in it. The Banshees had encountered it before, first on the Trojan planetoid Pompeii, then on planets all across the Briar Patch Sector.
It was the Smelly Jelly.
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