Even as K'pok watched the greedy little energy-sucking bastards on her viewscreen, one of them began to swell, bulging and writhing, and split neatly into two. Almost immediately, the power output display dropped a few points further — clearly something would have to be done, and soon.
Jek Porkins crammed himself back into his undersized EV suit, ignoring the lewd comments from his tactless companions ("Look! He's circumsized!" and so forth), and armed himself with a trusty steel bar. Kappo decided that he too would enter the fray against the Peril of the Space Leech, and asked Jek which persona he should assume for the fight. Jek said sarcastically (and incautiously) "Madam Fifi", and so Kappo immediately began the process of disguising himself. Owing to the urgency of the situation, he did a rush job and slapped on makeup and fake boobs and what-not in only ten minutes, resulting in a figure certain to give Jek and Weptish alarming dreams for months to come. K'pok merely raised one eyebrow in that infuriating Vulcan fashion, and said nothing.
By the time they made it outside, the leeches had reproduced to an alarming rate and K'pok was forced to call on the resources of her emergency fusion plant to keep the ship's systems up and running — even so, there was barely enough power available to keep life support operating. Kappo and Jek went into action, hunting out clusters of the creatures and destroying them with Kappo's home-made claymore mines — Kappo set their mechanical timers and Jek maneuvered the mines into position with his TK, holding them there until they exploded, showering the target area with ball-bearings. Jek's inexperience with explosive devices meant one or two near-misses when the two had ball-bearings bouncing around dangerously close to them, and one of the charges failed to ignite, but overall the tactic proved to be very succesful and after an hour or so of this most of the leeches had been destroyed.
K'pok and Weptish now came out to join in the hunt, to bash the snot out of the immobile leeches mano-a-leecho. Actually finding surviving leeches turned out to be more difficult than anticipated, due to the large quantities of pulverized leech fragments smeared across the hull and floating in the immediate vicinity of the ship. The remaining leeches were still feeding, and still reproducing, and since only Weptish had any training in Zero-G movement, most of Our Heroes were restricted to creeping about painfully slowly.
For a time, it looked as though the leeches would be able to breed faster than our intrepid team could find them and batter them to jelly, but with a little luck and some heroic efforts, they eventually managed to kill the last of them. To make absolutely sure, Weptish, Jek and Kappo did a search of the hull centimetre by centimetre, while K'pok went back inside to check the functioning of the power plants. After a couple of hours, all appeared to be well and everyone returned inside.
They decided to drop out of hyperspace and head directly for the nearest technologically advanced system to stock up on anti-leech supplies, so that they could get back after their potential prize just as quickly as possible. K'pok went into a frenzy of navigational calculation and found that the nearest suitable system was Pantokrator.
