It was a quiet night on board the ship. Despite there being no day or night in space, the Chernov, just like all most other ships in Starfleet, were on Starfleet time (San Fransisco mean time). It was a relic of the past – and there wasn’t much logic in that. It was just another human-centric approach the Federation had taken. It was a very human Federation, a very human Starfleet, a very human way of doing things, speaking…

In the old days of the Federation, the various parties agreed on human standards as the most neutral ones. That was the relic.

And as such, at this very point in time, Kastarak walked the corridors of the ships, unable – or unwilling – to sleep. It was a night, and most people – at least the ones not required for night shift work – were in their cabins, hopefully sleeping.

But Kastarak wasn’t sleeping. He simply walked around, feeling an unrest in his gut. Was it something he had eaten? Was it psychological?

He examined the symptoms and the history of them. After all, he was a physician. He could not deduce anything strange or unusual about his food intake or his defecation. He felt nothing strange in the larynx, throat, but the mouth was drier than usual.

Perhaps it was psychological. He examined himself further. He was expecting a new chief science officer, after he had to put the long-serving Mr Grey on leave due to health issues. Grey had been on the ship for over eight years (human years, again another human standard!), and had now been relieved of his major duties due to illness. The new chief science officer would be a Vulcan – around his own age – one he had never met before. These days, most Vulcans knew of one another one way or another, especially in Starfleet, but T’sol had apparently never stayed in his memory. Why was that? Was she unremarkable? Or simply too similar to his own experiences that his traumatised mind refused to take in?

His mind wandered to T’Aria, to Symar… the Vulcan comrades he had who too had remembered the greatest trauma of their species, that of the destruction of their planet. A similar, but not the same, trauma was one that his current only resident Vulcan, T’kul, had to endure, losing his entire universe in a timeline far away from this.

He missed T’Aria, he missed Symar…

Perhaps another Vulcan aboard would be conducive to the common good, and to his own sense of Vulcanness…

Kastarak, Cpt
Commanding Officer