Guilty Pleasures and Angry Space Nerds
Can I admit to a guilty pleasure?
I really love Star Trek: Enterprise.
I own a stuffed beagle named Porthos. I have a coffee mug with NX-01 on it. I covet those blue flight suits (I’ll own one eventually! I will!). T’Pol is my favorite Vulcan. And that final episode? A wildly inaccurate bit of holodeck historical fiction. Never happened.
My husband, who’s a fan of pretty much all things Trek, is right there with me—up to a point.
That point is the Xindi arc.
Season 3 of Enterprise, if you need a refresher, pits Our Crew against a brand-new enemy: the Xindi, who brutally attack Earth. The Xindi aren’t one species of aliens, but five related species who all evolved on the same homeworld, from the same genetic roots, into simians, reptilians, aquatics, insectoids… and avians.
We see four of the five. The avians are extinct. We never see them.
I may be the only person who cared. But I did care. I wanted to see the avians!
And since that wish is never going to be granted, I went and made up my own.
So: there are avians in the Combined Service universe—sentient bird-people modeled on birds of prey, with what are apparently called “angel arms” (they have both wings and arms). The Magnetar’s XO is an avian named Sasskiek:
Sasskiek, the last to arrive, was fastidiously arranging his feathers as he settled onto his own seat—a perch mounted underneath the table, which folded down to accommodate the avians. The avians, like the octopods, were eight-limbed, having four wings, two clawed hands, and a pair of clawed feet—and quite compact. He could have perched on Chalk’s extended arm for a face-to-face talk. When he spread his great wings, though, he was a full four meters across.
The ship’s chaplain is also an avian, and a reader favorite:
The voice at Charlie’s elbow spoke three times before she realized it was speaking to her. She tore her gaze from the incomprehensible dome of stars and looked down, confused, until she located the speaker—an avian with a gray-feathered head, wearing a cowled vest of dark Combined Service purple trimmed in silver, with service tattoos on both of his bony avian arms. “Would you like to sit, Apprentice?” the avian said, holding out one arm toward an unoccupied seating area nearby. “This is the locus orationis,” he said. “The prayer room. On a Terran ship, I believe it would be called the chapel. I am the ship’s chaplain, Chaplain Aerrett.” “Charlie. AC Cooke. Except it’s not Cooke…I’m sorry, I just walked until I came to the end of everything and I ended up here, it wasn’t intentional.” “There is no need for apology,” the Chaplain said, amused. “It is perfectly acceptable to arrive by accident.”
Anyway. This is what happens when you give a space nerd one unresolved plot thread and a keyboard.