Subject: Grail: "Great Brightness" - 'Can't sleep'

<Stardate 47307.31 - 03:05 hrs>

<Ramin's quarters>

Lights were on. The replicator had some ale spilled on the tray. And Oku Ramin had some ale spilled onto his very stomach. And his brain. And his liver, as long as it keeps up with the drink. He thought the first whisky would make him sleep, but no. The next was a Ferengi gin. Then an Orionii beer. Then a Thairian ale. Now the replicator was about to make a light one.

As Oku sat on his chair in front of his desk, he checked the specs of the dreadful bacterium that threatened the ship as if a Starfleet engineer was checking the specs of a Romulan Warbird or a Klingon Bird of Prey. And the more he learned about the bug, the least he knew about it.

Oku realized that, fortunately, he had the mother strain down at the lab, the bacterium that bred some of the infecting bugs all over the ship. There, locked in a disruptor, the suspended-animation bacterium was ready to infect (however, no one was going to shoot the weapon, at least not for now). So he could study it all the way to the Delta Quadrant and back, but guessed there would be millions of life forms there to study.

Why had the Ambasador T'Nek put him the donkey ears and made him stand at the corner of the classroom? In a sense, he had. Oku felt as ignorant as a first-year medical student about nanosurgery when the alien spoke about the bacterium. But could it be that they have had a similar disease? The bacterium was certainly similar to a Vulcan strain but modified by Romulans. But Oku really thought that he had made the discovery. And that's why he hated the alien somehow. And because the guy read his mind. And Thairians are very sensitive to mind-reading, except when trained (when they can mimic a Ferengi on that regard).

As ethanol flowed through Oku's cerebral vessels and made its depresive effect, Oku recalled his meeting with Counselor Tzavaras. But the matter that got him now wasn't the meeting itself, but the fact he knew almost no one aboard. And that made him feel miserable. And the "light" drink, this time a drink of Vodka-lime, hit his throat in a gulp, making himself more miserable to the eyes of his conscience. He thought that, besides his boss Dr. Ramius, Lt. Hunt and the captain of this ship, and of course the counselor, he knew no one because he wasn't good enough to know. "And" he thought "maybe I'm guilty for one third of the infections aboard", although he didn't know how. "No, one half of the infections. No, maybe the whole bunch of them. Anyway, there isn't a cure now, and maybe the Kerestians will be dead when we get there"

"Quarantine ship" he shouted "We=B4ll rename the Grail, to Quarantine ship. Or Ghost Ship. Don't approach, stranger, or you=B4ll die from K'Pla."

K'Pla. Oku laughed to the name. It sound like a Klingon saying hello. Then another drink came, a Tequila Sunrise. And Oku started to cry. He cried for the hell of life he's been through, aboard and before getting his ass there, when he was at the prison, the psychiatrist, the Horus epidemic, med school, home. He couldn't by now recall any good memory from the past (because depressive effects of alcohol show stronger in Thairians than in any other humanoid) or present. And he cried. He ordered the computer to turn off the lights and went to bed, just after the Pisco-sour drink.