Captain's Log, Stardate 4769.1

Mapping and preliminary contact of Class Q planet Delta Canaris IV complete. After this mission, the Enterprise requires extensive maintenance and the crew sorely needs R and R at Starbase One. I have recommended commendations for several of the crew, notably Mr. Spock for his unflagging efforts in contacting the wafer-thin intelligence on the high-gravity planet. His techniques for contact will establish standards to be used throughout the remainder of our five-year mission and possibly for many years to come by other primary-contact vessels.

"There it is, Captain," came Lieutenant Sulu's excited voice. "Starbase One. It never looked better."

James T. Kirk lounged back in the command seat and stared at the visual display. The orbiting dry docks that would hold a huge starship like the Enterprise floated in perfect geometric arrays to one side of the planet. Just a fraction to the right, under the waxy white clouds occasionally laced with the black of storms and the flash of lightning, lay the sprawling complex of Starbase One. Kirk closed his eyes for a moment and vividly remembered the last time he'd been here.

It had been before the start of the Enterprise's current exploratory mission. Before Alnath II and before finding the amazing millimeter-thick intelligence on Delta Canaris. It had been before he had been given command of any ship. As a lieutenant, he had cut a wide swath through the social circles at this starbase. He still remembered some of the long nights, the parties, the excitement.

Kirk sighed and opened his eyes, the memory fading. That was all behind him now. He had more responsibility than anyone should bear. Running a starship the size of the Enterprise provided full-time work, full-time worry. Let his junior officers go out and try to match the scrapes he'd gotten into when he had been their age. Kirk knew he'd spend much of his time aboard his ship making certain every piece of equipment got repaired and tuned to the strictest Starfleet standards.

He wouldn't have it any other way.

"Message, Captain," came Uhura's soft voice. "From Admiral McKenna."

Kirk let out a long, low sigh. The last person he wanted to speak with was an admiral, especially one with as hard-nosed an attitude as McKenna's.

"Put the admiral on the screen, Lieutenant," he said. The picture of the planet scrambled and was replaced by a woman, with hair pulled back in a severe style that did nothing to enhance her looks.

"How are you, Admiral?" Kirk greeted.

"Fine, Kirk," she said, her words curt and hard. "Don't bother docking. You won't be in orbit long enough."

"What?" Kirk said, coming fully alert. His eyes narrowed as he studied her. Strands of gray shot through her black hair, adding authority to her looks. The once-fine lines across her forehead and around her eyes had turned into gullies--hard gullies that showed the burdens command placed on her. Kirk wasn't about to let the load ease any on her by shifting duty to him. Not now. Not after the battering his ship and crew had just taken.

"If your ship's doctor rules that you have a hearing impairment, I'll see about removing you from command. Otherwise, prepare to beam aboard a party of three."

"Admiral McKenna, you've had time to examine my status report. This ship requires extensive maintenance work. Our engines need refitting. The computer is long overdue for a checkout available only from a starbase cybernetics expert. My crew is--"

The woman cut him off with a wave of her hand.

"You've put in multiple recommendations for Commander Scott. I've checked his record. He is able to keep any engine running, no matter its condition. Your Mr. Spock trained our head of cybernetics. You report 'excellents' up and down the line, in every department. Have you filed a false status report?"

"Admiral, that's unfair. My crew is the best in space. The Enterprise's record shows that, but we need shore leave. I demand it for my crew. They aren't machines able to run forever. They're flesh and blood."

Admiral McKenna ignored Kirk's outburst.

"Look at the ships in dry-dock bays one and four. Tell me what you see."

Kirk leaned back, fingers drumming on the armrest. His eyes never left the screen where the admiral's face peered back at him larger than life. From his station to the right, Spock furnished the information the admiral had requested.

"Those dry docks show starships in total repair conditions. One lacks engines altogether. The other appears to have a large section removed from the bridge area."

"It doesn't have a bridge at all--not anymore." Admiral McKenna's face tightened, her lips pulling back into a thin line hardly more than a razor's slash. "The Romulans saw to that. Blew the Scarborough's bridge, along with Captain Virzi and his officers, into atoms. Commendations went out to four ensigns who assumed command."

"The Romulans?" Kirk asked skeptically. "I hadn't heard of any trouble with them."

"I appreciate your brush with the Klingons. This situation is potentially as dangerous. To the point: there are no other starships in even half the condition of the Enterprise. There is also no time to waste. This mission will not require battle engagement. I dislike sending you out again without overhaul, but all you are required to do is transport a team of specialists to Ammdon."

"All?" he pressed.

"Almost all. Ambassador Zarv and his peace negotiators will fill you in on any other duties. I've instructed the cargo master in dry dock fourteen to begin loading replacement supplies. If your engineering crew hurries, they might be able to requisition whatever they need to work on your engines while en route to Ammdon."

"Admiral McKenna, I protest your actions. While this situation might be serious--"

"It is, Captain. Ambassador Zarv will brief you. And consider him to be more than just a passenger."

"I'm under his orders?"

"No, Captain Kirk, nothing of the sort. You know that. However, the woman said, clearing her throat, "anything the ambassador suggests should be strongly considered to be the next thing to a command. Have I made myself clear?"

"Yes, Admiral."

"Good." For a moment she started at Kirk, her pale-gray eyes softening a little. "And, Jim, I'm sorry about this. I really am." The picture tore apart and re-formed in the original view of the planet. The white clouds had darkened considerably and gigavolt surges of lightning now racked the leveled mountain where Starbase One rested.

"Captain," came Spock's level voice, "three are beaming up from starbase. Do you wish to meet them?"

"Have we any choice, Mr. Spock?" he asked, a tinge of bitterness in his voice. He glanced up at his science officer and saw one eyebrow lift slightly, the most emotion Spock would show at his balking at orders. "Come on, then. Let's go meet Ambassador Zarv and his team of peace specialists. Mr. Chekov, you have the conn."

The turboelevator doors opened and closed, then opened again before Kirk realized he'd left the bridge. His thoughts were as stormy as the thunder racking the planet. His crew deserved shore leave.

"Captain, are you all right?" Spock asked. The Vulcan stood to one side, hands held behind his back.

"Dammit, Spock, I am not all right. She has no right ordering us back into space. My crew needs R and R. This ship needs to be repaired. Even you could use a bit of recreation."

"I, Captain? Hardly." Spock turned and watched the sparkling motes dance around in the transporter beams. The pillars of scintillant energy hardened into figures.

Kirk stepped forward to greet the peace negotiators.

"Kirk?" demanded a short, piglike man. "When can we start for Ammdon? Time is of the essence in this urgent matter. We must not delay. Not an instant!"

"Ambassador Zarv," Kirk said. The Tellarite seemed an unlikely choice for negotiation of any type. He was brusque, rude and going out of his way to be obnoxious. "Welcome aboard the starship Enterprise."

"I know what this hunk of tin is!" The transporter technician stiffened. Kirk bit back a smile. Scotty had his engineering section imbued with the same love of the Enterprise that he had. If Scotty had heard the Enterprise referred to as a "hunk of tin," he'd have heaved the ambassador back into the transporter and dispersed the beam in empty space.

"Then you're aware that we are taking on supplies, that we require certain maintenance, that--"

"Captain Kirk," cut in another of the trio. "Ambassador Zarv is rightfully upset over the delays already encountered in this vexing matter. We need to reach Ammdon as soon as possible, as your superiors have no doubt informed you."

"For what reason do we endanger all our lives?" Kirk asked. The man he addressed appeared to be from Earth. Dressed in a light-blue velvet jacket, frilled dress shirt and tight black breeches, he might have been a fashion model rather than a diplomat. Kirk didn't make the mistake of dismissing him as a fop, however. The man's eyes were chips of polar ice and only the words he spoke were warm. Everything else about him indicated steel under the velvet.

"The planets Ammdon and Jurnamoria occupy adjoining solar systems. Their diplomatic processes are somewhat primitive and lacking compared with ours."

"Get to the point, Lorritson," snapped Zarv. "What he's trying to say is that these barbarians are going to start shooting at one another unless we intervene. The Federation has a vested interest in maintaining the peace in this region. Mining, manufacturing, all that. Worst of all, Ammdon and Jurnamoria are out in the Orion Arm."

"And the Romulans are making aggressive moves in the area," Kirk finished. He remembered Admiral McKenna's terse comments about the Scarborough.

"Precisely. There may be hope for you yet, Captain," said Zarv. When he pulled himself up to his full height, he barely came to the middle of Kirk's chest. Tiny, close-set eyes bored upward, driven by an intensity bordering on fanaticism. "We are experts on the situation, Kirk. Get us there."

Zarv pointed to Spock and said, "You. Take us to our quarters. Now. And get this ship to Ammdon."

Spock glanced to Kirk, who nodded. Spock silently led the ambassador off. Lorritson and the other diplomat remained behind.

"We haven't been formally introduced, Captain," Lorritson spoke up. "I'm Donald Lorritson, chief attaché to the Ammdon system."

Kirk blinked once in surprise. Lorritson was hardly thirty, much too young to hold such a high diplomatic post--unless he was a high-powered negotiator. That made Ambassador Zarv seem all the more capable.

"And the other member of our team is Mek Jokkor. Mek Jokkor's an expert on agricultural products, especially those cultivated in the Orion Arm." Kirk shook hands with Mek Jokkor, felt a slight stickiness when he pulled his hand away. "Mek Jokkor is not animal, such as we are, Captain. No DNA. He is more closely related to the plants of our world than he is to us."

"You don't speak?" Kirk asked, staring openly at the being. A tiny shake of a human-appearing head was all the answer he got.

"Mek Jokkor's expertise lies in adapting plants of Ammdon for growth on Jurnamoria, and vice versa. He's truly amazing. We are going to use this as a bargaining lever, since much of the problem between the planets deals with food supplies."

A loud cry echoed in the corridor outside the transporter room.

"Thank you for your briefing, Mr. Lorritson," Kirk said quickly. "As much as I'd like to hear more about your mission at this time, I believe your ambassador is...bellowing."

Lorritson smiled, then curtly nodded to Mek Jokkor. The pair hurried off, passing Dr. Leonard McCoy in the doorway.

"What's going on, Jim?" McCoy demanded. "What's all the fuss with that Tellarite? And what are they doing aboard?"

"Ambassador Zarv will be more than happy to fill you in, Bones," Kirk said mischievously. "As for myself, I think I've just been pollinated." He wiped the stickiness on his right hand onto his tunic, then left before McCoy asked still another question he didn't want to answer.

"'Tis not possible, sair," Commander Montgomery Scott protested. "Me wee bairns'll nae take the strain." He looked as if he wanted to embrace the powerful engines of the Enterprise.

"Do what you can, Scotty. Get as much equipment as possible beamed over while we're in orbit."

"We need dry-dockin'. Nothin' else will do for us."

James Kirk glanced around the engine room. Everything was spotless, gleaming, perfect. No captain in Starfleet had a better engineering officer than Montgomery Scott. Scotty maintained the engines as if the tiniest waggle of an indicator needle from one hundred percent were a nail driven into his own flesh.

"This is going to be a milk run. Nothing too fast. No emergency speeds or maneuvering. All we're doing is taking a three-man diplomatic team to Ammdon."

"Ammdon!" cried the engineer. "That's on the other side of the universe!"

"Not quite," said Kirk, smiling. "But the ship will hold together, won't it?"

"Aye, that it will," said the engineer with some regret. Kirk saw that Scotty wanted to rip into the engines and lovingly rebuild them from scratch, to make them even more powerful, to give them just a bit more performance. "But I canna recommend it."

"What's the worst that can go wrong?"

"The magnetic bottles. The fields get mighty thin in places. One rupture and we lose all power. We might nae survive that, sair." Scotty made an expressive gesture with his hands showing everything blowing apart.

Kirk thought that over, then asked, "What warp factor do you consider safe maximum? Other than impulse power over to a dry dock?"

"Well, sair, nothin' beyond warp factor three. The strain..."

"I know, Scotty. How well I know." Kirk took a deep breath, scanned the engine room once more, then said, "Carry on. And I'll try not to ask more than warp two."

"I dinna mean it was all right to go even that fast, sair. I meant to say that warp three is the max."

Kirk left Scotty mumbling to himself, fiddling with dials and making volumes of notes on new and different ways of fine-tuning the precious engines. Still, Captain Kirk worried over the instability in the magnetic bottles in the warp engines. The powerful magnetic fields held in the colliding matter and antimatter that thrust the ship through warp space. The slightest weakening of that field meant loss of power at best and total destruction at worst.

Then Kirk put it out of his mind. He had his orders. Let Scotty carry out his.

"Status report, Mr. Chekov."

"All fine, Captain," the navigator responded. "On course, warp factor two, as ordered."

"Spock?" he asked. "What's ship's status?"

"The computer checkout is proceeding according to schedule, sir. It employs a new program I wrote for just this purpose."

"You wrote it in your spare time, I assume, Mr. Spock?"

"Of course, Captain." Spock sounded almost indignant. "I would never take time from duty to work on a personal project such as this."

Kirk shook his head and settled into the command seat. During the three weeks since leaving Starbase One, the Enterprise had functioned perfectly. Only the presence of the diplomats aboard shattered routine. And Ambassador Zarv did all he could to make everyone in the crew feel as if they were personally responsible for preventing him from reaching Ammdon and the peace conference. Kirk had spoken with Donald Lorritson about the ambassador's attitude, but Lorritson had offered little consolation.

"Ambassador Zarv," he'd said, "is a man obsessed. He sees the danger in any war in the Orion Arm. If the Romulans intervene, we either lose all contact with the free planets scattered along the arm or we launch an interstellar war. Zarv is an adroit negotiator, one of the best in the Federation. Just put up with him for a few more days."

Kirk hadn't liked the suggestion but had no other course of action. The ambassador's constant harping on the slowness of the ship distracted the crew from their duties and reinforced the anger at not being allowed shore leave.

"Mr. Spock, since this is a relatively unmapped region of space we're crossing, have all the appropriate crew make accurate records for future use. The Enterprise ought to be more than a taxi service, after all. When we return to Starbase One, I want to show Admiral McKenna complete charts of our course."

"The mapping is already under way, Captain. I took the liberty of ordering it to keep the crew occupied."

"Good." Kirk slumped back in the command seat, eyes dancing from one control console to the next. Sulu's work at the helm was precise, perfect. But then there was scant reason for it to be anything else. Besides being capable, the Oriental helmsman had little to do. The course had been locked in and then forgotten. Only dreary, gas-cloud-littered space reached out in all directions from the ship. Pavel Chekov took the time to make practice runs with the phaser crew, shaving fractions of seconds off their response time. Spock worked with his computer. Uhura daydreamed, her services as communications officer unneeded for at least another week. Even then, contact with Ammdon would be by the book and routine.

Routine. All around him was nothing but routine. And he was bored.

The flashing of alarm lights and the siren running up and down the scale jerked him away from his thoughts.

"Spock, report!" he snapped.

"Unidentified vessel off the port side, Captain."

"No voice or visual contact, sir," came Uhura's quick words.

"Deflector shields at one-half power."

"Aye, aye, sir." Chekov quickly changed from drill to reality. "What about phasers, sir?"

"Power up, but hold your fire."

"Captain, the ship is adrift, powerless, a derelict. But I detect faint life-form readings. Correction, I detect one life form of an unusual nature."

"Explain."

Spock looked up from his scope and shook his head. "I cannot. The life-form reading does not conform to any recorded in our data banks. Also, the ship design is unknown."

"Sulu, plot a vector parallel to the derelict." Kirk stabbed one of the com buttons on his seat arm. "Transporter, ready to beam aboard one life form of unknown species." Another quick jab of the com button. "Dr. McCoy to the transporter room. Bring full alien medic gear." Before McCoy could respond, Kirk had punched several more command buttons.

He reveled in the action. He wasn't bored any longer. The Enterprise's mission wasn't to ferry obnoxious diplomats; it was to explore the unknown, to find and contact new life forms.

"This mission might actually prove worthwhile," he said, more to himself than anyone else.

The opening and closing of the turboelevator door behind him gave him a few seconds to prepare for the verbal onslaught he knew was coming.

"Kirk, what's the meaning of this outrage?" bellowed Zarv. "We can't take the time to go scurrying off to poke into odd corners. Ammdon and Jurnamoria are at each other's throats now. I need to be there to stop them. I need to be there to stop the Romulans!"

"Ambassador Zarv," Kirk said, his voice low and calm, "we cannot abandon that ship. You, as a Federation expert on space law, ought to know that a distress signal takes precedence over any other mission. Any other one."

"Distress signal? What distress signal? Was there any radio communication?" Zarv turned and poked a chubby hand at Uhura. "You there. What signal?"

"A life-form reading is sufficient for a rescue mission, Captain," Spock pointed out. "We are in the process of beaming the sole survivor of this disaster aboard."

"He might carry a space plague. We might all die. Then I'd never reach Ammdon. By the Antares Maelstrom, I've got feebleminded peasants all around me. All around!" The ambassador threw his stubby arms in the air and stalked off the bridge.

"Mr. Spock, let's see what we've beamed aboard. Mr. Chekov, you have the conn."

In the transporter room, Dr. McCoy already bent over a tiny form. All Kirk saw was a light fluttering of a diaphanous sea-green material until he moved around for a better look.

The woman's eyes fluttered open and locked on his. James Kirk took an involuntary step forward, his hand lifting to reach out to her.

"She's in shock, Jim. I think."

"What, Bones? Oh, yes. Shock. Aren't you certain?"

"I'm only a doctor, not a mind reader. Outwardly, she looks human enough."

"I'll say."

"But look at the medical tricorder readings." He held up the device for Kirk's inspection. The flashing lights all indicated severe problems--for a human. "She's alive, and she shouldn't be. Heavy radiation exposure, yet she's alive. No indication of a significant metabolic rate, yet she's warm."

"Warm," Kirk said in a distracted tone. His eyes never left hers. A tiny smile curled at the edges of her lips and a light blush graced her cheeks. "She's lovely."

"Help me get her to sick bay. Maybe I can find out more then."

"There is no need, Dr. McCoy," she said. Her voice came light and airy, a spring breeze caressing tall pines. "While I am not entirely healthy, I shall live."

"How is it you speak our language?" McCoy demanded. "I checked your bioreadings through the ship's computer, and the Federation has never found a race such as yours."

"I...learn languages quickly. All languages." She sat up, smoothing the thin gown about her slight figure. She leaned forward and looked once again into Kirk's eyes. "The spoken languages are the easiest to master. The unspoken ones are much more difficult."

"What happened to your ship?" Kirk managed to ask.

She shrugged. "A mechanical malfunction. The crew all perished. I know little of starships. I am a Speaker."

"A speaker? From what planet?"

"I am native to Hyla."

Kirk looked up at Spock, who shook his head. "That planet's unknown to us. Can you give us more information about it?"

"Certainly, though my knowledge of location is limited. I have been alone aboard the Sklora for almost two months. During much of that time, our engines fired at random. When the fuel ran out, the Sklora continued on its last vector."

"So you don't know where Hyla is?"

"I do not know where we are now."

"Jim, dammit, can't you see she's been through a lot? Stop grilling her like she was a spy: I need to do a full bio on her."

"Please, Doctor, believe me when I state I am relatively uninjured. I am in no danger."

Her gaze again went to Kirk.

"Do you have a name?" the captain asked. "Calling you Speaker seems a bit... distant."

"Yet these friends of yours call you Captain." She smiled and took any sting from the words. "We do not have names such as McCoy and Spock and Kirk."

"So we call you Speaker."

She smiled, and Kirk almost melted in its radiance. "Call me Lorelei."