Iskander al-Kwaritzmi’s personal log, supplemental: I am going to speak to Dhae about our relationship AS SOON AS WE HAVE SOME TIME!

To say that a California-class starship was made for battle would have been a mistake nobody would have done; to say that it belonged on the frontline of a battle between a mid-sized Klingon armada and a mid-sized Romulan Republic Navy fleet would have been lunacy.

The Captain of the Redding was, of course, a special person who possibly didn’t buy into concepts like “lunacy”, because the Redding had been fighting non-stop and the engineering teams had been almost entirely spent.

After more than one hour and a half of combat, Iskander was outside of the ship, on the hull, in an EV suit. Standing next to him, Sublieutenant Dhae looked quite dashing in his EV suit.

“Is that the last one?” asked Dhae. His tone was smokier than the usual, a sign that he was probably getting quite tired.

“Yes” answered Iskander. They had had to repair a good amount of shield modulators manually after the remote commands had failed. That had increased the shield potency from 8% to 17%, which was impressive, and had required almost ten minutes of work out there.

The view had been, of course, amazing. Above them, and below them, and on all sides, the battle had raged: Iskander rarely got to see a battle as it was happening, and the spectacle was as majestic as it was deadly and wasteful. The Romulans had fielded a large array of ship types, ranging from modern birds-of-prey to even a couple of antique and enormous D’Deridex. The Klingons had brought a highly mobile armada of mostly smaller vessels. Seen from the hull of the Redding, ships would cloak and uncloak in unexpected and speedy manoeuvres, and would sometimes explode in bright coronas of light.

Quite far away, Iskander could also see the other Starfleet ship that had found itself in the system as the battle had started. An unnamed Echelon-class beauty, it had taken quite a heavy beating and was floating without much power. Iskander couldn’t quite stop worrying about them more than he did about the Redding.

After all, that the Redding had survived until now was probably due to the fact that the Klingons, more than happy to attack some Romulan in search of quick honour, probably didn’t want to create a large diplomatic incident by openly targeting a Starfleet ship, even one that had joined the fight alongside the Romulans. The Redding was probably in one piece because it wasn’t considered a dangerous target to the Klingons.

“Should we go back in, Iskander?”

Goodness me, thought Iskander, his voice is so deep and smoky, I swear I could just lose myself in it. He was exhausted, also. “Can we instead pretend that we’re dead?”

“Come on! I’m sure there’s some subsystem that needs your love.”

Iskander let his body become very very lax. In the presence of gravity he would have sat, but without gravity standing took less energy. It felt weird to relax by standing — it gave the sensation of lying on something enormously soft but gave the optical information of being upright — but one could get used to it.

“I think that we could talk about… you know…” he tried to say.

“On whether I should accept Commander Siouinon’s suggestion of applying to an officer exchange program and be transferred to Starfleet.”

“Yes.”

Dhae breathed. Inside of his helmet, he looked sweaty, and his amazingly curly hair looked a bit damp.

“It is true that I’m probably going to be expelled from the Navy. In part because of the many rules I broke, and in part because it would be uncharacteristic if the loss of the Koruba wasn’t blamed on almost everyone who survived.”

Above them, the battle had seemed to cool down, and suddenly Iskander saw the Klingon ships cloaking and disappearing one after the other.

“Dhae? The Klingon ships –“

“They are retreating. Look at the Underspace portal: they are getting out of here!”

It was true: quick orange flashes could be seen, showing that the Underspace was being entered into.

The communicator of the suit started speaking. “This is the Captain to all hands. We have fought hard and the Klingons have retreated! WE LIVE! Sheven out.”

For a moment neither Dhae or Iskander said anything. Space above them was clearing, now that no torpedoes nor disruptors were being fired: it was filled with debris and half-crippled ships, in a way reminiscent of the Underspace, but the Romulan planet was as beautiful, clear and pristine as it had been. The Klingon fleet had been repealed.

“Oh, I could kiss you right now” said Iskander finally, somewhat allowing himself to feel exhausted.

“I wouldn’t remove my helmet right now. We could stop pretending to be dead and go back inside.”

Iskander laughed. “Yes please. And we can finish the discussion.”

One thing that Starfleet personnel doesn’t really think about is that the power source of several Romulan ships is a small artificial singularity — for all effects, a small black hole. During a battle, ships could be destroyed, but that didn’t in any way destroy the singularity — it merely freed it from its energy-producing cage and pushed it into open space where, black on black, it could just travel and absorb matter.

In front of Iskander’s eyes, a small black hole went through the right warp nacelle of the Redding, eating a large chunk of it, breaking the pilon, bending duranium and dursteel, causing what was left to explode in a bright and shining corona of plasma. The light of the explosion was still slightly bent because of the gravitational distortion of the singularity.

With Dhae and Iskander on the hull, looking at the spectacle, the Redding had lost one nacelle after the battle had ended.

For a moment Iskander really thought about pretending to be dead and hide in a Jeffreys tube for a couple of hours. But he found the force to say something. “Dhae?”

“Yes?”

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”