"... You've been to this island before?"

"... no?"

He frowns. This doesn't make sense, but... "You did not come here deliberately?"

Sipho tugs urgently on Demane's sleeve. "Ask him what he has in the ship," he says in slightly broken Chinese.

"No, I crashed here."

That's a weird word to use for that. "What is in your ship?"

"Just me."

He turns to Kulingile.

"Look, can you put me down, or at least tell me what your problem with me is?"

Demane picks up Harry's phaser. "You can put him down, Kulingile."

He puts him down. "No problem. Only you mustn't hurt Demane."

Another shadow falls over the beach. It's another dragon: long, sinuous, and red, with green spots, and steam jetting out of spikes all over her body. She lands. There are a couple of men clinging to a leather harness threaded around her coils.

"Kulingile! Where have you been! And who is that?" she says, craning her neck to look at Harry.

"Thanks. I don't want to hurt anybody."

Well that's an improvement, sort of. He doesn't really love Demane having his phaser but at least it's a bit less hostile seeming.

"I'm Ensign Harry Kim of USS Voyager. We've been stranded in the Delta Quadrant for the past year. Clearly something terrible happened to Earth since Traffic Control was completely absent when I got here: can you fill me in?"

Iskierka regards him with puzzlement, then makes a heroic effort to be considerate. "None of that made any sense. Well, except for the bit about being an ensign. Are you feeling quite all right?"

"I mean, I got off pretty easy in the crash, but, you know..."

He gestures at his generally bruised and scraped self.

Why did none of that make any sense to the red taxi alien. Also "taxi" is a weird job and also a weird hobby but lots of stuff is weird today.

Are they a kid? A kid should not be a taxi. Maybe she's just really stupid? He really doesn't want to have to explain what a quadrant is while he's waiting to figure out hoW HIS HOMEWORLD WAS DESTROYED!

He takes a breath. He can emotionally grapple with that when he's not being ambiguously kidnapped.

"Uhh, could somebody tell me the most important news of the past year or two?"

A red-haired man wearing a dingy green coat slides down from the red dragon's back.

"Er... We haven't been receiving letters regularly for some time, but the rebellion in New South Wales might qualify. That or the Tswana incursion into the Portuguese colonies in Brazil. Hard to say if anything more significant has happened in Europe the past year, though, since it takes eleven months to post from there to Sydney."

He inclines his head. "Captain John Granby, of Iskierka." Gestures towards the red dragon. "We're stranded, too."

... no, there's no way to reconcile this with his apocalypse theory. It's only been a year! The answer would have to be "The Klingons killed everybody"!

He needs new theories. Let's try this again.

• Apocalypse, and he's in the future, and they've forgotten enough that his explanation doesn't mean anything to them.
• He's in the past, and actually there were secretly aliens on this tiny island in the past.
• He's in the past, and these aliens are time travelers.
• He's in the past of a different timeline where aliens lived on Earth in... what, 1600?