It was the third morning in a row that Malcolm was late for his shift and Jonathan found himself rather annoyed by it. Just because there wasn't much for the tactical officer to do at his station at the moment was no excuse for tardiness. Anyway, it wasn't fair to the night shift. As one of the highest ranking officers on board, Malcolm was supposed to be setting an example for the others, which was a little difficult when both Travis and Hoshi arrived several minutes before he did.

This morning, Malcolm was fully fifteen minutes behind and Jonathan wanted to know what the excuse for that was. Malcolm was undeniably one of the most regimented members of the crew, his stringent adherence to protocol was second only to T'Pol's. It wasn't like him to be late, especially as a repeated offense. Jonathan was willing to overlook a couple of days where Malcolm was three to five minutes late, but a third day in a row, and a full quarter of an hour demanded some kind of notice be taken.

Wandering over to Malcolm's station, Jonathan decided to begin with a light rebuke, which could shift in tone based on what kind of explanation Malcolm had for his lateness.

"Little late this morning, aren't we, Malcolm?"

Shifting uncomfortably under his captain's scrutiny, Malcolm replied, "Yes sir."

Avoiding Jonathan's gaze, Malcolm made a show of studying the information on his console, which included a record of the readings taken the night before and any adjustments or notations the man on night shift had made, which would cover anything from a sensor acting up to the next scheduled computer diagnostic or manual test of any particular system. None of it warranted that level of focus. If anything seriously needed immediate attention, the man going off shift would have informed Malcolm before he left. This was all just routine.

Jonathan noticed then that Malcolm was looking a little pale, and his hands didn't move across the control panels with their usual surety. Malcolm always looked a little bit like he had a headache, but he looked more than usually that way at the moment.

"Something wrong?" Jonathan asked quietly, while the rest of the bridge crew pretended to take no notice of the conversation, and in fact behaved as if they had all suddenly and politely gone deaf.

"No sir."

"No?" Jonathan repeated with some disbelief, "Since when are you ever late for your shift if nothing's wrong?"

"Sorry sir. It won't happen again," Malcolm promised.

There was definitely something Malcolm wasn't telling him. Clearly, something was wrong. Malcolm looked either upset or possibly sick. But if Malcolm didn't think it was worth mentioning, it probably wasn't going to affect him doing his job, or the functioning of Enterprise. Still, it was disappointing that Malcolm didn't trust his captain enough to say what was bothering him.

Being naturally curious to the point of nosy, Jonathan was tempted to press Malcolm on the matter. But, short of a direct order, he suspected Malcolm would continue to avoid telling him. And there was no call to get that harsh. Especially not with Malcolm, who took his job and the chain of command so very seriously.

Jonathan decided that, for the moment, he'd let it go. At least from this angle anyway. But he planned to ask Travis, Hoshi or possibly Trip later on if they knew what was going on with Malcolm. They all knew Malcolm better than he did, and might be able to let him in on it.

He told himself that it was because the well being of every member of the crew was his job, even if they didn't happen to see it that way… but Jonathan had the nagging suspicion that it was really just because he was so incredibly bored, and also Malcolm's continued elusiveness about personal matters irked him. Jonathan wanted to be on friendly terms with all his senior staff, but Malcolm was stuck on that blasted professionalism track.

Not that Jonathan was blind to the reason. After all, Jonathan had been in Star Fleet for most of his adult life, serving under COs who thought personal relationships had no business being on a star ship, and in fact would have thrown a complete fit if they'd known that Trip had obtained his position as Enterprise's chief engineer through a quickly struck bargain and subsequent friendship.

Malcolm had been trained in that way of thinking from the start, not only having served long and faithfully in Star Fleet, but also coming from generations of Navy men. That training was a damned nuisance is what it was. Jonathan was convinced Malcolm would be a much better officer if he could just let go of it and learn to loosen up a fraction. As things stood now, Jonathan was fairly certain Malcolm was bordering on suicidal, and probably not just for altruistic reasons. There was something very fragile just under the veneer of stern competence.

Funnily enough, Jonathan had noticed the same thing in T'Pol, only he'd been able to make progress of sorts with her. Malcolm had blocked Jonathan's every attempt at that same progress with him wherever possible. And it turned out he was better prepared to defend himself in this way than T'Pol, though Jonathan wasn't sure why, in part because he still hadn't figured out what made Malcolm tick.

Honestly, he was getting a little tired of trying, and sort of wished Malcolm would just figure out his place on Enterprise like everyone else had and start fitting into it.

Reed had plainly and simply discovered a previously unknown allergy of his, one that happened to affect the embarrassing weakness of his stomach. He'd been ill. Violently. Several times.

Just to be thorough, he'd stopped off at the infirmary so Dr. Phlox could run tests and confirm what Reed already knew. It had been an allergic reaction to the spice, nothing more. Phlox had given him something to deal with the lingering symptoms of fatigue and headache.

That was the thing about allergies, the dirty little secret no one liked to talk about. Most people thought there were the sneezing and runny nose type allergies, and the anaphylactic shock type allergies. But allergies could do anything and everything in between. Fever, chills, rash, headache, digestive upset in any form you could name… any symptom of a disease could also be a symptom of allergic reaction. And the strength of symptom had a wide range. Fatigue could just be feeling a little rundown, all the way to feeling as if your limbs were too heavy to move and even breathing took noticeable, conscious effort. Headache could be a little distracting ping behind the ear, a feeling of intense pressure, or a debilitating throbbing agony. Allergic reaction often felt like too broad a term because the reactions could be so many and varied. Fortunately, these days there were medications to take care of most of it… most of the time, with (usually) minimal side effects. Just a few decades ago, things had still been pretty bad. And even today allergies were often not taken seriously, or were seen as a sign of weakness to be looked down on or even ridiculed, as if it wasn't hard enough having one's own body betray them on a regular basis when confronted with ordinary items such as plants and animals.

Reed absolutely did not want to talk about it on the Bridge, with the Captain, in front of the crew.

Fortunately, Archer had something else to focus on, like where they were going. Though he'd sat down in his chair a moment after leaving Reed, he was suddenly up and over talking to T'Pol, asking about the specifics of the planet that they knew from the data the Vixlettes had sent.

Sometimes Reed thought the only sustenance that man needed was information to satisfy his enormous curiosity. He thrived on learning about new species, visiting planets, getting acquainted with alien societies in various stages of development. Archer could best be described as ravenous for such scant information as the Vixlettes had provided, which was doled out one fact at a time by T'Pol. She knew that if she told him everything at once, he'd lose track of the details and have to ask her again. And if she finished her description too long before they reached their destination, Archer would want to go through it over and over again. It was kind of a star ship captain version of asking "are we there yet?"

While Archer prowled back and forth, digesting various bits of information T'Pol offered, Reed exchanged a sympathetic glance with her. T'Pol would have denied any sort of irritation, but it was there, plain as day. In her voice, in her expression. Archer's boisterous and boundless enthusiasm for exploration left her constantly exasperated. Especially his disregard for protocols the Vulcan Science Directorate had come up with to deal with matters of exploration and in particular First Contact. Not to mention his simplistic, idealistic view of the whole matter… a view Reed noticed had gotten a rather tarnished since the most recent entanglement with the Suliban.

There was an edge to Archer that hadn't been there before. A new caution and suspicion of strangers. Never had that been more apparent than during their visit to the repair station. Archer would call Reed paranoid any day of the week, but it was nothing compared to the way Archer had reacted to that station. It turned out he was right, but nobody could have known that in advance. It was oddly worrying, when it should have been relieving. Archer was finally showing some level of restraint and prudence in dealing with the Unknown. But instead of instilling confidence, for Reed it had the opposite effect. Paranoia was Reed's job, not Captain Archer's.

The change in Captain Archer's demeanor said Lt. Reed wasn't doing his job well enough.

"Malcolm, you're not hearin' me," Trip insisted.

"With all due respect, Commander, I've been hearing you for the last five days," Malcolm retorted fiercely, "Haven't you got any other work to do? Somewhere outside the Armory, perhaps?"

Malcolm had been looking a little ragged the last week or so, which told Trip that he had been working hard to find a solution to the phase cannon issue that didn't involve completely uninstalling the changes he'd made, and that he hadn't had any luck in doing so.

But Trip was about done with it. He and Malcolm had tried to alter the power flow to fix the hiccup when they'd first found it, but that hadn't worked, so it wasn't reasonable of Malcolm to insist on continuing to try. But he'd had his Armory team working on it all week, with no noticeable result except that there were now power hiccups in Engineering as well.

In short, Malcolm had taken a bad problem and managed to make it worse, and was now defending it with all the ferocity of a lioness with newborn cubs. Typical.

"Malcolm, you've had a week to work on this and you've gotten nowhere. When are you gonna give it up?" Trip asked with rapidly withering patience.

This might be an aggressive sport, but Trip was about ready to pull rank on Malcolm and demand that he take the damned phase cannons apart if that's what it took to kill the problem. Trip had been tolerant of it when the issue was confined to the Armory and thus out of his way, but now it was making little bumps in the otherwise smooth running of Engineering, and that Trip would not put up with for long. Even though the glitch was still minor, it had now invaded Trip's den, and he was no less ferocious in the protection of his domicile than Malcolm was.

"No systems are actually malfunctioning," Malcolm pointed out.

"Yet," Trip shot back, not giving an inch, "What happens when we get to that planet, huh? We'll have other things to focus on. Next thing you know, these little blips'll be on the Bridge, muckin' about with the sensor readings or something. And then the Cap'n will have both our heads."

"Are you ordering me to disable the upgrade?" Malcolm asked.

This was one of Malcolm's tried and true methods of defense when he didn't want to do something. He was drawing the battle line in the sand, promising that he would fight this right to the end unless and until Trip DID make it a formal order. It was his way of ending an argument when he had no other intelligent moves left, which was often as Malcolm wasn't so good with words, despite having a seemingly better education in their use, when compared to Trip's own.

But even if he couldn't verbally defend his position, Malcolm was unready to abandon it, and was betting Trip wasn't prepared to take the final step to end it.

The hell of it was, Malcolm was dead right. And that made Trip madder than anything, while at the same time preventing him from venting his frustrations by yelling. Malcolm had reminded him which of them held the position of power, and made the unspoken promise to respect that position… if Trip played that card. Having done so, he had also effectively protected himself from a tongue lashing, because yelling at him now would simply be petty and childish, a punitive vengeance inflicted by a small man unworthy of the respect Malcolm had offered.

At least, that was the way it would look to the Armory audience who would overhear it, and Captain Archer if he read a report on it. To Trip, it seemed that Malcolm had simply and plainly put him in the position of the fool, with no reasonable course but to back down or declare unofficial war on Malcolm's department by issuing an order that didn't really need to be given. If Malcolm had at least kept up the argument without reminding Trip of chain of command, Trip could have issued the order as a reminder to Malcolm and others just what that chain was made of. But Malcolm had played the card first, taking the value out of it.

"Dammit, Malcolm!" Trip snarled, "Stop interfering with my Engine room!"

Malcolm didn't bat an eye. They both knew that was tacit permission for Malcolm to continue doing what he was doing, while making a flailing attempt at winning an argument that had been lost. Sometimes Trip really hated working with this limey bastard.

Eight days.

Archer continued to slowly drive T'Pol insane on the Bridge, and listening to him started pushing Reed to the brink of madness himself. The man was relentless, as he had learned to be throughout his career, as he pushed against inertia that had set in after his father's untimely death, and also the Vulcan High Council, to get the warp-five engine finished, tested, working and ready to launch. He seemed to have come out of it with the motto that, when there's nothing left to do, harass the Vulcans. T'Pol was the only Vulcan on board, and Archer seemed perpetually certain that there was some piece of information she wasn't giving him, something really interesting she was holding back, keeping to herself. The suspicion and dislike of her (and Vulcans in general) had faded, but the habitual behaviors remained.

In the meantime, Reed's team in the Armory had been on the power relay for the forward phase cannons, which was still acting up. Commander Tucker had demanded a stop be put to it, or else. He was the Commander, so of course Reed bowed to his authority… though not immediately. He delayed on it, using one excuse or another, hoping the team would fix the problem and get it working before they had to bin the whole project. The Commander's complaints were getting louder, but he hadn't yet demanded that the team scrap the project itself, only that they stop interfering with Engineering while they were doing it. Easier said than done, apparently.

During his off hours, Reed was finally forced to become one of those people who put in special orders and made Chef's life more difficult. It was the last thing he'd wanted to do, but apparently there was nothing that spice didn't go in, and his stomach couldn't handle the smallest amount of it even with such allergy medications as Phlox provided. In fact, being in the room with the stuff was something of a trial, as the smell of the spice permeated the entire Mess, and gave Reed a low-grade headache every morning, which he spent the rest of the day trying to ignore. It made him both distractable and easy to annoy, since he was just slightly irritated all of the time, even before anyone started bothering him.

Phlox said that the prolonged and repeated exposure was actually serving to make things much worse, as Reed's body barely had time to calm down from a previous reaction before the next exposure initiated a new one. It had taken a few days for it to build up in his system to such a severe degree, but it had now put him in the undesirable position of making a special dietary request based on Phlox's medical evaluation. The only thing he wanted even less than to make trouble and personal requests was to be rendered incapable of doing his job, as would surely be the case if there was nothing on board for him to eat. Initially, Chef's experiments had been sparing enough that Reed could avoid them. But as the fascination with the spice continued to grow unabated, Reed found himself avoiding more and more things… until he spent a couple of days eating nothing at all, after which he was finally forced to cave, and put in the request. He was neither the first nor the last officer to have ever put in such a request, but he felt awful for it, and wished to God he had inherited the healthy constitution of his parents, who both could eat practically whatever they liked, whenever they liked. Chef took the request in stride, and life became bearable once more, if far from ideal.

Reed had also begun to alter when or if he ate in order to avoid Travis and Hoshi entirely. It was bad enough to be in the same room as the spice. Being at the same table with it had become intolerable. But it felt easier to just avoid them than to explain his particular weakness. At least in the short term, which was as far as this could go, given the limited amount of spice they had acquired and the prodigious amounts that were being used for every single meal.

Eight days.

It would have seemed like little more than a walk across the street at the beginning of the mission, when everything was exciting and new (and not quite working), and they were all thrilled to be traveling such vast distances so quickly. But after a little over a year, the novelty had worn off, and the reality was that effectively doing nothing for over a week just wasn't what humans were wired for, even if they preferred their lives as simple and routine as Reed did.