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USS Relentless Medical Log: Chief Medical Officer's report. It has been three hours since completion of recovery operations for the destruction of the USS Heinlein. Triage and treatment of the Heinlein crew is as follows: 416 crew all accounted for. 43 admitted to sick bay, details follow: 19 treated and released for minor injuries relating to the attack and evacuation of the vessel. 2 serious injuries from the initial Hattoran barrage resulting from hull breaches to engineering. Both patients are in regenerative therapy and are expected to recover fully within 2 standard days. 22 security and officers who responded to the Hattoran incursion were treated for lingering effects related to a stun device. Additionally 7 of these had more serious but easily treated injuries from the direct confrontation, including concussions, broken bones, minor internal injuries, and burn/blast injuries, all simply treated and discharged. With that out of the way, on to the subject of our guests. Ambassadors? Pirates? War criminals? Well, that's to be decided and above my grade. Below are the notes I've gathered to this point. I will tighten them up and formalize them when all this is over. Science Division is going to go mad over this. They were delivered to my medbay heavily sedated. Two hours under the best medical scanners in Starfleet have only revealed how far they are from anything we have seen before. If I had five more lifetimes to study these two Hattorans, I still wouldn't be privileged to a tenth of their secrets, and that's just biologically, genetically. We can start with the easy and obvious, and the complexity just goes up as the scale grows more fine. Subjects are bipedal digitigrade dracomorphs, both approx 1.6 meters tall not including accoutrements. Endothermic, and quite warm at that. Scaled in one way or another in near entirety. The scales themselves are remarkable, with an interlocking structure that is very effective at spreading force, and with a material strength that is well off the charts of any organic defense in our database. In addition to this the outer layer has what appears to be thermal superconductive qualities. Any directed energy below what I can only estimate is a remarkable threshold would be quickly spread over nearly the entire surface, and dissipated without penetrating deeper layers. Dermis, where it can be accessed, is flexible yet tough, a structure just underneath being highly resistant to penetrative force. Eyes are highly developed with vertical slit pupils* (There are a few anomalies here for a later look), not only with visual acuity that would make a Terran eagle jealous, but with structures able to detect light well into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums, as well as other structures that are as of yet unidentified. By all indications, their other senses appear equally acute. Another layer. Musculature is highly efficient, tremendous power available with minimal bulk, their muscles are laced with superstrong materials. I can only anticipate their physical strength is more limited by leverage than power generation. Organs are, well, they operate at efficiency levels higher than anything even remotely natural. More on that later. Nothing entirely remarkable otherwise save an unidentified structure partially enshrouding the heart and aortic area. Some anomalous brain activity has been recorded from the white one, and I have to wonder if there's some coincidental similarities to our own Aaenar sub-race. A question for later to be sure. Bones follow the same theme of the rest of their bodies, though stronger, heavier metals and nanostructures are found throughout. This extends to their rather obvious claws, which when combined with their likely physical might, could be rather worrying. Teeth are large and configured as an obligate carnivore. Their muscular tails also carry dense exposed bone-structures at the tip, giving another available natural weapon. The dense bone combined with external armor account for their higher than average physical density. Given this, their fully-developed wings seem to be a legacy as full flight seems unlikely outside of low-to-zero gee environments. Perhaps they also aid in heat regulation, given a lack of sweat glands? Such high-performance bodies have to generate a lot of waste heat. Now to the worrying part, on the micro and cellular level. There are the remnants of what would be considered a massive, biologically speaking, colony of nanomachines within their tissues and bloodstream. A small population seems to remain, apparently sustaining and optimizing necessary bodily functions, but from all appearances they had, and purged before capture, a staggering suite of specialized nanites, the functions of which I could not hope to catalog given months, much less a few hours. Intensive scans have assuaged my worries that the nanites might be a threat to the ship, (any extracted nanites seem to self-annihilate when removed from the very close vicinity of the host, making study difficult) however quarantine procedures will be in effect for some time. Genetically, where do we even begin? The hallmarks of genetic engineering and manipulation are everywhere. Layer upon layer, even getting started on any useful analysis will take months, then likely decades to make any sense of it. Just because the Federation prohibits this sort of thing outside of correcting for disabilities, it doesn't mean we are in any way ignorant. What's remarkable is the depth and intensity of the modifications, as a species the Hattorans must have been doing this extensively, or having this done to them, for a very, very long time. Just to begin making sense of it in short order I had to place an order to Engineering to divert more resources to the ship's computer cores. Whatever species they were when they first decided to reach for the stars, it could not have greatly resembled what the Hattorans are today. As for these two examples, scans place the physical age of both at around 50 years, earth standard, but as for physical development all signs point to something around late adolescence. Their genetics (fascinatingly partially triple helix DNA) use something we can identify as analogous to telomeres, and these show as close to zero degradation as I can measure. As far as I can tell, aging processes have come to a near standstill, past a slowed version of typical development towards full adulthood. There is all possibility that, so far as the ravages of time are concerned, theHattorans may be effectively immortal without external aid. |
