A single pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, mirrored, overlaid, and rotated a few times around each other
More things to do when running a crew of 735 because your starship rescued another one, and most of the survivors feel well enough to work: get the most dangerous thing your botany department is studying to finally bloom.
“Captain Biles-Dixon – the Firebloom Warriors are finally transforming!”
“You have initiated the appropriate force field strength, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, ma'am, and checked it twice!”
Lieutenant Yoshiko Osaka was the chief botanist on the Amanirenas, and just a joy to work with. So, she had a bit of an adjustment when being paired with the much less personable Lieutenant Gyorgy Wisniewski, chief botanist from the Farragut. However, he had the insight necessary to get those plants to bloom.
“Lt. Osaka, you are a nice person,” he said, “and that is why you have nurtured these things into such a robust condition without them blooming. But I grew up on Khillhool 4 – a third of the plants and fung1 are happy to drink your blood as the price of you living, another third are actively trying to kill you, and the other third are fine. Firebloom Warriors are a fungus No. 1 trying to grow enough in one place to be No. 2. You cannot love these things into doing what they are supposed to do. You have to give them the circumstances to which they are accustomed.”
“Lt. Wisniewski – ewwwww!” she said. “They are not trying to do anything – they are not even sentient! I know anthropomorphism is something we as humans do, but I would just like us to consider that everything in the universe is not the intentional apex predators that we are.”
Not that many people dared to stand up to the looming Polish lieutenant, and no one had done it with such complete class and thoroughness. Nice does not mean weak!
Respect being established, the two began to adjust the environment for the Firebloom Warriors – Lt. Osaka had them cold and dry as their native environment said they should be, but Lt. Wisniewski added some adjustments to the spectrum of light they received to lean more toward the ultraviolet, and adjusted the ratio of malic acid to citric acid in their soil.
“The whole deal is, 'what doesn't kill them makes them stronger,'” he said.
Sure enough, in a week, the Warriors emerged from the soil, perfectly impressive the way they started, and looking dangerous, but flat to the soil. You would not want to step on one in your bare feet, and you might not think that if you could get past the spines you could actually eat them at this stage, but if you did not take them out at that stage, they did transform …
… and then they got to the form in which they could launch themselves from the ground and come after you, lodging in your clothes or skin or fur and staying there until you managed to dislodge them or fell to the earth and fertilized them with your dead body.
Hence the need for the force fields when they went through their maturing process – they went flying after the footsteps of all passers-by before all of them landed on the prepared propagation blocks Lts. Osaka and Wisniewski had made for them. Afterward, firmly attached on their blocks, they could be taken out and examined more closely.
“Good thing we have things in this block they actually like better than human blood,” he said.
“Ewwwww – nobody needed that detail outside the report!”
The two botanists would become the best of friends, and later get married. He is still being mildly scandalous, and she is still checking him with an “Ewwwww!” when necessary.