A Most Agreeable Arrangement

Chapter 13 - Mrs. Troi

My hair was pulled up into a ponytail as I sat hunched over a patch of soil in the lab. It had grown out quite a bit in the months I had been on the Enterprise, and it rested against my shoulders now.

We had just visited a planet with soil that wasn't very fit for growing crops, and I was trying to find a simple way to modify the soil to support plant life.

We would have equipped them with replicators, but they insisted that they didn't want 'charity', which made my job more difficult.

I didn't mind, though. I was working closely with a woman named Keiko, who was a civilian botanist living aboard the Enterprise.

"It needs to be something that they can acquire on their planet," I was explaining, sighing as I stared through a microscope. "They don't want us to ship any chemical substitutes to them periodically."

Then, something occurred to me. "But..." I pulled away from it, wheeling my chair over to a handful of things I had grabbed on the surface of the planet, "we won't have to ship anything to them if we can make these compounds grow naturally on their planet."

"How will you do that?" Keiko asked as she looked up from her station on the other side of the room.

"There's a chemical that exists naturally in their water," I began searching for something on the terminal. "This chemical should react with another, which we can introduce into their water system, and it will spread."

"Wouldn't that affect their drinking water?"

"Nope," I shook my head. "It's completely harmless and nearly undetectable. But, it'll grow in the water by feeding on the chemical that already exists. I think on their planet, they call this naturally existing chemical itsekium or something. But I was looking at the make-up of it in the microscope, and this should work."

"What are you doing now?" Keiko asked as I drew a vial of green liquid from the replicator and rolled back over to the sample of materials from the planet.

I grabbed the small beaker of water that had been drawn from their planet and took a dropper out of the vial before dropping it down into the water.

The green liquid spread out in the water, like it was growing tiny tendrils and reaching out. Then, the water cleared as if nothing had happened.

I sat the beaker under a microscope and stepped back.

"Computer, display the microscope's image on the screen."

It appeared, and Keiko and I watched as the chemical spread through the water.

"There we go," I grinned, looking over at her. "That easy."

I grabbed the beaker and dumped a small amount of the water onto a patch of soil with a type of root growing in it, then held up the rest of it and swished the liquid around. I called an ensign into the room then. "I want to set up a closed environment where the water will evaporate and then drop back into liquid form, so I can see the effects of the water cycle on the chemical. I'm due for Bridge duty now. Please set that up for me."

"Yes, sir," the ensign nodded and moved to take the beaker from my hand as I left the room.

On my way to the Bridge, my comm badge beeped. "Lieutenant Fae, report to the Transporter Room."

I changed my mental map of where I was headed and soon reached the room.

As I entered, I saw Lwaxana Troi materializing on the transporter.

I stopped and stood, folding my hands behind my back.

Her image, sitting down with her back to us, stabilized and she gasped.