Lieutenant al-Kwaritzmi’s personal log, supplemental: I can’t write. What is happening. They are

Iskander had rushed to his quarters — his shared quarters, to be fair — and barricaded himself inside.

He had, of course, booby-trapped the door to explode in the case that someone was to try attack him. As he had, he had felt a world of guilt at the thought that Ishvenyal could fall into his trap: he had tried contacting him but communications were down ship-wide; at the end he had elected to write, on the outside of the door, a warning (“Dear Dhae: danger, do not come in”). Of course that had required deactivating the trap and opening the door and exposing himself to the corridor, which had been almost intolerable, but he had survived.

He had turned off the lights and was currently sitting on the floor in the corner of the small sleeping room, holding his knees and trying very hard to ignore the voice in his head that reminded him that the posture he had assumed was called “fetal position”.

He didn’t know or understand what was happening to the ship, but everyone had started acting threatening and suspicious. The dinner had been pleasant enough even to Iskander — even though he had found the discussion topics to be somewhat frivolous and forgettable, very much to Dhae’s liking — but after Doran’s attack, and especially after Ishvenyal’s departure, the tone had quickly gone wrong: people would give each other the side-eye, their movements brusque, their sentences hesitant. Iskander knew that those people weren’t his friends — he wondered why he had friends at all, he who had so little to offer in terms of entertainment or chitchat — and it had become clear to him, after Ishvenyal had left, that they’d never be. It was Freema Gwa who had suggested interrupting the dinner, and Iskander had gladly accepted.

Now, in the darkness of his quarters, he wondered what he was doing here. People didn’t like him. Except Dhae, of course, which puzzled him. That Orsos had loved him was somewhat easier to understand — Orsos and Iskander had been childhood best friends, they knew each other intimately, they had few secrets and a great complicity: but what had Dhae found in him? Did Ishvenyal really like him — or, thought forbid, love him? Was Ishvenyal even his real true name? What proof was there of that? Saying any name would have had the same effect and would have been as unfalsifiable.

Sitting in the womb of his sleeping room, Iskander pondered on what to do. He couldn’t tolerate staying on this ship any longer, surrounded by people who didn’t like him, who despised him, who judged him — or, even worse, who condescended to him. The only rational thing was to leave. If he made a dash now, he could get to the shuttlebay and steal a shuttle; he could then fly to some uninhabited moon — any rock would do — and spend a long life building a habitat for himself and putting his engineering skills to good use. Yes. No one would ever again terrorize him, no one would brutalize him anymore.

Why was he even in Starfleet? He knew, in his heart of hearts, that no one liked him — but did he even like anyone back? Had he liked the engineering personnel of the Redding with whom he had spent years of his life? Mir Durbus, Sirti-nei-Plex, and the rest? He always had thought that Diran was a very good friend, and he liked the big spider, but — did he really? What good had they done for him? He had risked his life — almost died — for Starfleet several times: and what for? That had bought him not even a shred of appreciation.

Bastards, all of them. He probably should have run to the shuttlebay and fled. But probably someone would have tried to stop him. And if that was the case —

The door rang.

Terror gripped Iskander. Who could that be? One of them? Someone who wanted to — what? Would they go away? They’d die if they came in, so they’d better go away.

The door rang again.

For the person who came in to die was a horrible thought: their entrails disseminated in all the living room of the tiny quarters by the surprising force of the detonation, and maybe their head still intact, its dead eyes glazed in astonishment. But the more terrifying thought was, of course, if they didn’t die, if they got past the trap, if their rage —

The door rang again.

“Go away” screamed Iskander. Why wouldn’t they leave him alone?

The voice at the door intercom spoke. “Iskander, it’s me. Can I come in? I need you.”

That sounded like Ishvenyal’s voice, but how to be sure? Voices were easy to fake.

“Go away, Dhae” he said. “I’m sorry — I know these are also your quarters — but I need to be alone.”

“This can’t way, beloved. We need you.”

“Listen, I can’t speak. Please go away.”

“I’m coming in, then” said Dhae.

On the off-chance that this was the real Dhae, the thought of him dying was horrifying. It gripped Iskander’s heart and clouded it in a shroud of the darkest despair. Orsos had died and it had been nobody’s fault; the thought of Iskander murdering Dhae was even more horrifying. He couldn’t decide whether he loved that silly Romulan or distrusted and hated him, but he knew for certain that he needed him alive.

“NO!” he screamed with urgency.

There was a pause and — fortunately — no noise of a door swooshing open.

“Did you build a trap in the door, Iskander?” asked Ishvenyal. He sounded amused. “Is that the danger you allude to in this crudely written warning?”

“… no. I just want the door to stay closed.”

A long silence.

“I have a tricorder. I can detect the trap.”

His trap had been found! That was terrible — how had he not thought of that? How had he not toiled at his trap until it eluded tricorders? “… no you can’t?”

“Don’t worry about it, Iskander. I can disable it remotely” said Dhae. “Give me one minute and I will be with you.”

Iskander’s first thought that disabling it remotely wasn’t possible. He had made sure of it. It was a good trap — powerful, yet almost completely analogical, impossible to hack remotely, sensitive to its triggers. But it was a Romulan he was speaking to — a creature of subterfuge and secrets. Had Dhae, for instance, left a tiny spy drone in their quarters, maybe the drone could be used to attack the trap and dismantle it.

On the other way, if this wasn’t Dhae — if it was, say, a Changeling pretending to be Dhae, a creature capable of liquefying their body and passing in the interstitial molecule-wide space under the door and thus elude the trap, or a telekinetic creature capable of dismantling the trap with their mind, or — or —

Terrorized, he got out of his fetal position and peered into the living room, at the door. Nothing was happening to the open panel next to it, where the trap was located. NOTHING WAS HAPPENING.

“It’s almost disabled” said Dhae from outside..

But Iskander’s eyes could tell him something different. How could it almost be disabled if nothing was happening to it? HOW? What dark magic did he have? Would he die of not having deactivated the trap?

The tension in Iskander’s mind became intolerable. In either cases — no matter whether Dhae succeeded or failed in deactivating the trap — he didn’t want to be in the quarters.

“Do not come in” he screamed. “You will not find me! I’ll be gone. Please just leave, let the door be!”

In the back of the sleeping quarters was a Jefferies tube access. It was bolted from the inside and quite difficult to get into from the outside — the designers of the ship hadn’t wanted to give everyone an easy way to get into other people’s private space — but easy to unbolt from the inside. The history behind that was quite interesting: the designers had reviewed the missions of the USS Enterprise-D and of the USS Voyager and discovered that the crew had been locked into their quarters with a certain regularity — sometimes on a weekly basis: they had decided that on an Echelon-class starship it should be reasonably easy to escape one’s quarters. Gone would be the days where three plucky Kazon could confine everyone on board to a prison in their quarters (or some equally implausible history — the Voyager files were in equal parts embarrassing and redacted).

He ran to the tube access panel, unbolted it quickly, and slid inside, into its dark silvery cave-like emptiness. Where was he going? He didn’t know, but he just had to be out of his quarters.

He reached the first Jefferies junction — JJ02/4E1 — and as he was about to take a breather a hand came out of a converging Jefferies tube.

The hand, and the arm it was attached to, easily grabbed Iskander by the arm and shoved him effortlessly — not that it would have taken much force to shove the panicking human. A second hand emerged, holding a hypospray, which went straight to Iskander’s neck.

The human engineer felt himself losing his force as a pleasant numbness started emanating from the locus of the injection. He slid to the floor of the Jefferies junction and, in a much more relaxed state of mind, saw a face emerge above him. It was Counselor Sakar.

“I have been ambushed in a Jefferies tube by my analyst” he mumbled. He wondered why this wasn’t an absolutely terrifying idea.

“Yes. I do hope that this does not aggravate the trust relationship we have built” commented dryly the Vulcan as Iskander temporarily lost contact with reality.