The Orville -

Ed sighed. He looked at Kelly. “Remind me why I took this job?”

“Okay,” Ed said, leaning back in his command chair. “Standard first contact protocol. Kelly, hail it.”

Klytus sighed, wiping slime off his face. “My wife believes the cloud isn’t mindless. It’s a gourmand. It’s been selectively consuming celestial bodies for billions of years, developing a cosmic palate.”

A quick transport later, Ed, Kelly, Alara, and Isaac (the Kaylon whose expression of perpetual mild disdain never changed) stood in the Sagan ’s dripping cargo bay. They found two survivors: Dr. Aris Fen, a brilliant xenobiologist, and her husband, a nervous engineer named Klytus who was trying to re-route power through a gelatinous cube. The Orville

“Activating,” Kelly said.

Bortus stared at the now-empty bottle in his hands. His voice was a low rumble of loss. “We are safe, Captain. But my vintage is gone.”

A moment of profound silence fell over the group. Then, everyone turned to look at Bortus, who had just transported down to assist. In his hands, he held a half-empty bottle of his favorite beverage. Ed sighed

“You can’t fight it,” Dr. Fen said. “You have to offend it. You need a flavor so vile, so fundamentally wrong, that it rejects us like a bad oyster.”

Kelly blinked. “The what?”

Bortus looked at the bottle, then at the desperate faces around him. “You are asking me to weaponize… Pepto-Abysmal?” “Standard first contact protocol

Just then, Dr. Fen hailed them. “Captain Mercer,” she said, a wild, maniacal grin on her face. “You’ve just committed the first act of biological warfare using a fermented beverage. I’m submitting a paper. Title: ‘Palate Cleansing at the Galactic Scale: How a Moclan’s Poor Life Choices Saved the Union.’”

They jury-rigged the Sagan ’s comm array into a disperser. Bortus, with a single, sorrowful tear rolling down his stony cheek, uncapped the bottle and poured its foul, viscous contents into the emitter. The smell alone made Alara gag.