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Phobia

14:00 hours

"Captain, it's coming closer!" Malcolm warned.

"On screen," Archer said immediately. "Hoshi- can you get any signal from it?"

Hoshi sat at her station pressing the earpiece closer to make sure. "No Captain, not a thing." She shook her head regretfully.

The Bridge viewscreen switched from the view of a blue sun with an enormous amount of gravitic pull ahead of them to the object coming towards them from the port side- a large bubbly gelatinous blob, for lack of a better word, with jellyfish-like blobby tendrils and looking otherwise distinctly like an amoeba. It was a greyish colour, and translucent- they Bridge crew could still just make out the brightest stars through the 'blob', and it was coming towards them without hesitation, and without any regard for the Enterprise, nor the people inside it seemed.

"It seems to be some kind of vast single-celled organism," T'Pol warned, her voice slightly louder than normal to be heard over the tactical alert.

"Captain!" Malcolm warned, shouting, "it's about to hit!"

Jon reached for the comm panel on his chair arm, raising the ship-wide alarm- "All hands, brace for impact!"

It wasn't quite the impact they were expecting. The 'blob' didn't hit them like a weapon, it instead enveloped them, the Enterprise bucking once to starboard, and then slowly was brought back down to normal level, as if it was sinking comfortably into the jelly that was this entity.

For a second, the only sound to be heard was the alarm until messages started to be relayed to the Bridge crew's terminals from all over the ship.

"No casualties, no fatalities Captain," Malcolm said, looking at Jon as he did.

"Good," Jon's shoulders relaxed, and he sat back in his chair, momentarily thankful for that report. "Keep Tactical Alert going, but silence the alarm." Then he stood up and went to Hoshi. "Did we get anything from it at all? Anything?"

She shook her head. "No, nothing at all Captain."

"Captain," T'Pol said, anticipating his question as he turned to her, "as I said, this seems to be a single-celled organism. It appears to come from the gravity well of the sun that we have been studying, although I do not know how it itself seems to defy that same gravity. It is quite possible that it has no concept of communication, especially if this is early in the stages of its species evolution."

"Great," Jon said, exasperated, "I guess that means shooting it off us is out of the question. What do you suggest?" he said to T'Pol.

"The basic instinct of any species is to survive," she said. "Logically speaking, we should assume that it is requiring something from us, and won't automatically allow us to leave before it gets what it needs."

Jon frowned, looking down as he tapped his right hand on the railing in front of T'Pol's station, thinking. "Well," he said, looking up at her, expression clearing marginally, "scan this creature. Work with Phlox, and see if the two of you can't find what this thing is made from and what proteins and stuff it needs- maybe we can find something on board to feed it that will make it leave us alone."

T'Pol stood, holding a PADD and went to the turbolift. "Understood Captain."

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15:30 hours

After confirming with all of his senior staff that apart from having an amoeba attached to it, the Enterprise and everyone on board was fine, Jon went to Sickbay to see how Phlox and T'Pol were getting on with their medical scans of the creature.

He walked through the Sickbay doors, and found the two of them to the left bank of medical screens, Phlox looking up at the screens, and T'Pol inputting data into her PADD. They both stopped and looked towards Archer as he walked in.

"We're at all-stop now until we've moved this thing off us- I don't want to risk damaging either it or our engines."

Phlox smiled, reassuring Jon that there was no immediate or obvious threat. "Ah, Captain. This is a marvellous opportunity for a study of an early lifeform! Slightly tempered by it being attached to us, but I don't believe it means us any harm. On the contrary, what we can learn from it will greatly enhance our knowledge!" He looked quite gleeful at the thought.

T'Pol on the other hand, looked her usual calm self, which at this point, was reassuring Jon more than Phlox's glee was.

"I believe that this organism is able to defy the sun's gravity by the fact that it lives there," she told Jon. "The elements which bond to create it are the same that exist on the surface of this sun. The apparent blue colour that the sun has appears to be in fact be several million of these organisms clustered on the surface."

Jon nodded, "Kinda like a giant petri dish then?" he asked.

T'Pol inclined her head in affirmation. "That would be a suitable analogy."

"And this one attached to us?" Jon asked.

"Who knows," Phlox piped up, "it is possibly a rogue organism, or maybe it was on the outside of the surface cluster around the sun and found us to be another, hopefully temporary, form of heat. But never fear Captain, we will study further and find some answers for you!"

"I'm glad to hear it," Jon said before leaving them to carry on working.

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