A Rhan & Hakran K’hal Log The door to their shared quarters swished open, and as Rhan stepped through he saw his elder brother Hakran, legs outstretched, propped up against the integrated headboard with a pillow behind his head. In his paw-like hands was a standard ‘Fleet PADD, and the pointy-bearded Cait thumb-tapped to the next page in the scientific paper he was reading. “Aren’t you all comfy and cozy,” remarked Rhan, who had been worried about his brother’s recent detached demeanor. “Hmm,” Hakran murmured, finishing the paragraph he was on and marking his place before looking up. “I guess I am,” he added. “I spent a good deal of the day walking, my legs are due for a rest.” “Yeah, I saw you wearing a trench in the promenade flooring,” Rhan said. “The way you looked, I kept expecting someone to yell ‘Zombie!’ and charge at you with a cricket bat.” Rhan plunked himself down on his bed, kicked off his civilian shoes, and leaned back comfortably. With a snort of amusement, Hakran rolled his eyes. He put down the PADD, as he knew Rhan wouldn’t end the conversation here. Especially the “new and improved” Rhan, which had inherited top-tier nagging. “I was thinking,” Hakran said, “and you know very well about what. So excuse me if I was a little wrapped up in the matter.” “Okay, okay,” Rhan replied, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “’Was’ seems to be the operative word. You haven’t looked this relaxed in almost a month. So spill.” As Hakran had just picked up his tea, he smiled. “Spilling would be a very bad idea right now. This tea is still hot.” As Rhan harrumphed in exasperation, Hakran continued. “Fine. You’re almost worse than Mother, you know that? She could nag a thorn off a rose, but she’d do it methodically over a period of time. You nag with your usual hyperactivity.” “Yes, I do. So get on with it,” Rhan said, with an accompanying hand motion. “I’m staying,” Hakran said. He tilted his own head at the sound of the words, as it was the first time he’d said them aloud since making the decision. “At least if there’s something to stay for, which is still in doubt.” “Yes!” Rhan exclaimed with a pump of his fist. “So… what prompted the decision. I doubt you’ve suddenly realized how much you love the paperwork.” “Ugh, you would mention that. But no,” Hakran said firmly. “It came down to science, in the end. I just don’t have enough data yet. Every mission I’ve been on so far has been crazy. I don’t know what it’s like to just be a normal department administrator. To oversee run-of-the-mill science. I can’t formulate an analysis on such a small, skewed sample size.” “Assuming we end up with a ship that has Excalibur stamped on it, I don’t think the sampling was that skewed, to be honest, bro.” Rhan’s lopsided grin turned more pensive. “Not that I’m trying to make you change your mind, but I’m pretty sure the ship runs on crazy as much as it does on deuterium.” “Well,” Hakran began. “Even if that’s the case I still don’t have the sample size to prove it. Or to know whether I can adjust to it even if crazy is the status quo.” He sighed, looked up at the ceiling. “Plus, I’ve started making friends here. I never really managed that on the Copernicus.” “I don’t doubt it,” Rhan commented dryly. “Your personnel file used the terms ‘aloof’ and ‘isolated’ so often I almost thought there was a computer error saving the file. But then you’ve always lost yourself in your work. All the way from Calculus and Political Science back in high school.” “It’s just how I operate, and how the hell did you… Oh forget it, you always stick your muzzle where it doesn’t belong, and somehow it never gets punched.” “Heh heh” Rhan chuckled. “Never mind my muzzle. You are finally learning to let your tail sway freely. Besides the fact that I think you’ll be awesome at your job, I think the job will be awesome for you. I’m glad you’re giving it a second chance.” “Gee thanks, portable Mom simulator,” Hakran said, receiving an eye-roll in response. “Anyway, none of this matters if Starfleet scraps the ship and starts shipping us off piecemeal to far-flung assignments.” “True, but you made the decision without waiting for that,” Rhan said, his voice singing with pride. “I’m glad you did.” Rhan smiled mischievously. “It gives me someone to poke at. I don’t think I could get away doing it with the new helm officer. One, she outranks me, and two she’s sorta scary.” Hakran made a guttural sound of annoyance. “I’m going back to my journal, it’s far more interesting than you.” “Sure bro, if it makes you happy.” Rhan said, bouncing back off the bed and slipping back into his shoes. He was going to have to share the good news. Knowing the ship’s gossip channels as well as he does Starfleet communications channels, he should be able to disseminate it through the whole crew, even scattered all over the station, within a day.

Consequences & Considerations A Rhan & Hakran K’hal Log The K’hal brothers were together in their guest quarters on the Mont Blanc. Rhan reclined, stretched to felinoid maximum, on a lounger; a fruit smoothie clutched in one hand and a look of concern on his young leonine face. Hakran sat hunched, his head down, on one of the armchairs. “You need to stop taking this so hard,” Rhan admonished his brother. “You had a hard choice to make, and even though it turned out FUBAR you were still making the decision that was best for the crew and the timeline. In case you forgot, the Captain is as much scientist as you are and agreed to the plan.” “I nearly got us all killed,” Hakran grumbled miserably. “I may have killed an Irene from a completely different timeline, I nearly destroyed a planet, and the Excalibur is so damaged it may end up used for scrap.” “S**t happens,” Rhan snapped back. “In the end, it’s only a ship. If you didn’t notice, we didn’t lose a single crew member, or guest, in that whole escapade, and that’s what really matters, that’s what makes a ship.” Sucking down a good muzzle-full of his smoothie, he set it down with a thud on the table before swinging his legs off so that he could sit up and face his brother directly. “As for the misplaced Irene, we don’t know what happened to her. No she didn’t ask to get yanked into this timeline, but you know that quantum particles aren’t the only things that can get entangled in the multiverse. Starfleet wouldn’t have a division explicitly assigned to these incidents if there weren’t temporal, multiphasic and multiversal entanglements popping up all the time.” “Wha…” Hakran looked up in surprised. “You think I daydreamed through dad’s mini-lectures at dinner for all those years?” Rhan asked, referring to their enthusiastic scientist father, a professor of astrophysics at Starfleet Academy. “I guess I thought you did,” Hakran replied. “I should have known better.” “Yes, you should have. You should know better now that being a department head isn’t all power trips and paperwork,” Rhan scolded. “If you’re having second thoughts about being a Chief, you need to make up your mind about it soon. We may get leave when we get back, we may not, so Captain Swain and Starfleet deserve to know while they have time to find a replacement, if that’s what’s needed.” Rhan stared boldly at his older brother with that challenge hanging in the air. “I don’t know,” Hakran said miserably. “I don’t know. I sure as hell didn’t plan on getting a Mother-style tongue lashing from you about it.” He sighed, shook his head slowly. “I suppose I should have known better about that too. You’ve really grown up on me,” declared the elder K’hal. “This ship…” Rhan started, then jerked a thumb toward the aft part of the ship “well, that ship really forces you to ‘shape up or ship out’ as the saying goes.” He snorted. “All those stories Mreh told us in the communiques, I always thought it was bulls**t. My first Excalibur mission made me change my mind fast enough.” “Yeah, and then my first mission was arranged by you, and almost got us all killed” Hakran needlessly reminded him. “As I said at the time, they needed you more than they needed me with that intellectual harpy in command.” He rolled his eyes in remembrance. “Anyway, I was right. I usually am,” Rhan said with a roguish grin. “Gods,” Hakran said, rolling his eyes. “You’ve never been short of confidence.” “No, I haven’t. Looks like I need to share some with you.” Rhan left the lounger to squat in front of Hakran, his hands on his brother’s shoulders. “If I thought a different scientist would’ve been what the Excalibur had needed, I would’ve arranged it that way. I chose you because I knew what you were capable of even if you didn’t. Captain Swain did the same when he kept you on as cee-sci.” Rhan gave Hakran’s shoulders a squeeze before rising, and then cufed his older brother upside the head. “Now you find out what you’re capable of, and do it fast.” “Ouch!” Hakran exclaimed. “You really have turned into Mom,” he grumbled with the tone of it not being a compliment. “Why, thank you!” Rhan replied, very much in the tone of it being a compliment. “Now I’ll leave you to think. I’m going to hunt up Maryse, see what sort of trouble we can get into.” Hakran seemed to remember here that he was the elder of the two and gave Rhan a sharp look. “Not that kind of trouble,” Rhan said in exasperation. “Geez. Even if it was, it’s none of your business.” With his tail haughtily raised, he swept out of the room. Hakran sat back in the chair, expelling air in one long, steady whoosh. Besides having an existential crisis about his role in the Excalibur’s predicament and his role as a Starfleet officer, he now had to mentally process that his little brother wasn’t so little anymore, and clearly owed as much to his personality from their mother as their father. With a little shudder, he swapped position into the lounger and began a good, hard think.

The Agonies of Responsibility A Hakran K’hal Log Hakran felt extremely guilty as he stretched out in bed (he had sent all the scientists who had been an active part of the attempts to get home off to get sleep, including himself). He knew it was “all hands on deck” for Engineering while they worked to keep the ship from falling to pieces. Again. He knew though that such emergencies, while not routine (except maybe on the Excalibur), they were at least part of engineers’ training. His people were used to what were once called “bankers’ hours.” Therefore, the extended on-duty shifts for his physical and theoretical scientists had been very difficult, and those with less physical stamina had pushed themselves to the point of literal collapse during the leadup to the final phase. His biology staff, sans-Irene, were assisting medical as was usual, and anyone in the other sub-departments that could be made useful were, so it wasn’t as if he’d taken his entire department offline, but still… He felt like he should be doing more to make up for the mess he made. Irene could blame herself all she liked, but she hadn’t been the one to suggest and approve the mining of her DNA as if it were a precious metal; the slap-dash genetic engineering of a race to defecate said DNA out on demand; and then trying to tune it all like the universe’s most finicky violin. All of which resulted in the temporal gutting of a planet, the further breaking of the ship, pulling another Irene from a different universe, and bringing the historically vital Enterprise-C into the situation. Things were so much simpler when he could be the one in the lab, hunched over a console looking at a string of complex equations. They were much more enjoyable for that matter as well. Good intentions be damned, he was thus far making a horrible Chief. Becoming the department head had fit about as well as a baby bonnet on a Nausican, and now he had screwed up so badly he wouldn’t be surprised to find the next console he was hunching over to be in the private sector. He not only felt like he deserved it, but slightly looked forward to it. Anything to avoid that kind of responsibility again. In the very back of his mind he knew part of his despair was the exhaustion that would shortly drag him under, but it was true. He had not sought to be on the Excalibur, he had not sought a leadership position, and he had certainly not sought to be the source of life and death decisions. He was the wrong man for the job. With those cheery thoughts weighing on his mind, he finally fell asleep after nearly 48 hours on duty. Having not set an alarm, he wouldn’t be up again any time soon.