B'elanna has a complicated relationship with her Klingon ancestry. She would not, normally, refer to Klingons as "we". But she's incredibly tempted to say "We killed our gods."

She's not going to do that. She is a rational person who doesn't pick fights for no reason.

"About two years ago, the Enterprise discovered a message from an ancient species that most intelligent life in the galaxy is descended from. So it's not entirely shocking."

He's softening this a bit. More accurate would be to say that most intelligent life in the galaxy was created by the Precursors, but that might get into the religion thing. 

It's amazing how unhelpful his class on "interacting with religious aliens" is here. With aliens, who knows? Maybe their god is real! They might have some sort of energy life-form living in their moon and if you've been there for 2 days you might not have detected them yet, so it's easy to take it seriously. It's a lot harder with a, what, Catholic? guy, whose religion died about 300 years ago.

Laurence is having trouble making sense of Kim's sentence.

"'Intelligent life' -- by that you mean to refer to ... humans and the alien races? But how can they be 'descended' from this ancient ... species?"

Oh boy, evolution is also a bit of a minefield with catholicism, right? And if he's forced to elaborate on the Precursors that's going to be even worse.

"It might make sense to ask the computer? It's probably got a better explanation then I can come up with off head."

A bit cowardly, maybe, but it's kinder to let Laurence have a crisis if faith in private if he's going to.

(Laurence would be SO offended to be referred to as Catholic.)

"Er. Of course. I must apologize for my ignorance of such matters." He's not quite sure what matters he's referring to, but oh well, he's ignorant of pretty much all of them.

Moving on! Let's see if Laurence can avoid putting his foot in his mouth for like five seconds at a time!

This is a slightly more delicate subject. Hopefully it is just delicate in a way he can actually understand, instead of some bizarre future way that he has no way of knowing about.

Laurence gives it a few more tricks of quiet before speaking again.

(He glances at B'elanna, more uncertain of his judgement of her than before.)

"It seems relations among the original crew and the Maquis crew members are still rather... strained, are they not?"

It seems like things are fine? B'elanna was made chief of engineering and Chakotay is first officer, so hopefully the Maquis feel well represented. Nobody's complained to him, anyway.

And B'elanna is actually fairly friendly towards him? Which obviously doesn't necessarily generalize, but still seems like a good sign.

But he doesn't really want to speak for the Maquis here, they have the more awkward side of this. He's not going to answer first if he can help it.

It seems like things got worse just today for some reason. More cold glances from Maquis crew at superior Starfleet officers when they weren't looking. And Tuvok in particular seems to be very unpopular all of a sudden. He doesn't know why: it's not like the Maquis confide in him.

Obviously he's not going to take this one.

What is with this guy. Half the time he seems to be trying to make friends, and half the time he seems to think she's trash. If she takes this obvious opening to talk about her feelings, he's probably just going to do his wooden-faced "you're super rude but I'm going to ignore it because you're beneath me" face. Screw that.

"Oh, we're doing just great."

Wait B'elanna sounds pissed actually, maybe things are worse than he thought?

Oh, so she is an insubordinate hothead after all.

He frowns, unwilling to drop it just yet. Why did Kim and Paris stay silent and look at her? Have they no opinion on the subject?

He takes a sip of his wine. "That was evident enough at boot camp this morning. Not least in your conversation with Lieutenant Tuvok." He places a faint emphasis on the man's (man's? Vulcan's?) title. "Did he do something to offend you?" He is verging on sarcasm himself at this point.

And there it is! Amazing.

"Do you mean when he betrayed me and the entire crew of the Val Jean? Or do you mean that boot camp, as if the Maquis don't know how to run a starship?"

Oh crap.

"Hey easy now-"

"And another thing! You should learn how to read rank insignia before you pull rank on somebody else's behalf -"

She makes a show of looking at Laurence's collar.

"- ensign."

His hands itch. He can't strike a woman.

She isn't wrong about his own rank, at least.

"Tuvok is the commander of security on this vessel, is he not, Lieutenant?" he says frostily. He inclines his head at her yellow uniform.

"And I'm chief engineer. So?"

Does Tuvok outrank her? The answer is "it's complicated". Tuvok is 3rd in line for the captaincy, while she's... quite a ways down that list. But if Chakotay or Janeway are on their feet, they have non-overlapping responsibilities. Tuvok can order her around if the ship is boarded: she can order him around if it'll help with a warp core breach.

Of course, none of that is really relevant, since the question at issue seems to be "Does B'ellanna have to scrape and grovel around Tuvok." The answer is no, regardless of rank. She'd have said the same to Chakotay or Janeway. 

(Maybe not Janeway. But Tuvok certainly isn't the captain.)

He looks like he wants to hit her. That would be amazing, she hopes he does it. She's going to try and not throw the first punch here, though: she sent Leiutenant Carey to sickbay yesterday, and while that worked out okay in the end, probably Chakotay wouldn't like it if she did that again too soon.

Well this is spiraling out of control really fast. He makes eye contact with Tom.

They should probably both try to drag one person away. If either of them succeed, they might be able to avoid this actually descending into violence, which incredibly appears to be where this is going.

Harry, unfortunately, has the best raport with both B'elanna and Laurence. But he thinks he stands a much better chance than Tom does with B'ellanna, so he should try and talk her down.

Yeah, he and Harry need to try and break this up. He should take Laurence, since Harry is probably the only Starfleet officer B'elanna actually likes. Hopefully he'll reach the same conclusion.

He turns to Laurence.

"Hey, can I talk to you for a second?"

Yes! Good Tom. He turns to B'elanna.

"Hey hey hey, let's take it easy, huh?"

He drags his eyes away from B'elanna and gives Paris a very stiff, small nod.

Hmm. Unfortunately he hadn't thought past this point.

He doesn't actually know how to talk Laurence down here, because he... doesn't actually know why Laurence is needling B'elanna? Is it because she blew him off on the Maquis thing?

Well...

"I'll be honest with you, I have no idea how that got that bad that quickly. But it looked like you two were inches from a fistfight. Now I don't think that would be a good look for your first day as ensign, and I don't think that would be a good look for her first day as chief engineer. Can you tell me what just happened?"

Harry is conversing inaudibly with B'elanna on the other side of the room.

"Better that than to be thought a coward," he snaps.