Captain's Log: Stardate 7521.6

Standard orbit has been established around the outpost colony on Trefolg. Due to the sensitive nature of this mission, I had planned to beam up the prisoners and return directly to Star Fleet Headquarters. However, the governor of the colony, Lerak Kepac, has issued a formal invitation to me to pay a courtesy call. This is a request I have of course agreed to honor.

Kirk thumbed the log recorder off and took a moment to look around the bridge in satisfaction. His crewmen and officers sat at their stations working with calm efficiency or walked briskly with firmness and purpose. No wonder these outpost colonies along the perimeter of the Romulan Neutral Zone felt safer, reassured, when one of the great starships stopped by. Especially, he thought with a touch of smugness, this starship.

The elevator doors swished open and the ship's doctor ambled in, wearing his dress uniform, and strolled over to the command chair. "Well, Jim," Doctor McCoy drawled. "How do I look? Good enough to impress a colonial governor?"

Kirk smiled and looked his friend up and down. No matter what uniform McCoy wore, he managed to make it look somehow crumpled, as if he had just finished a long evening of card playing while wearing it. Kirk shook his head. "It'll do. At least you're wearing your dress uniform. More important, you're wearing your old country doctor persona. That's just right."

"Thought it would be for a colony. Mind telling me what's up?"

Kirk stood up and stretched. "Come to my quarters. I'll have to change quickly before we beam down."

He didn't speak again until they were in his spartan cabin with the door closed. "Sorry, Bones. I didn't want to discuss it any further on the bridge." As he spoke, he stripped his uniform off quickly and chucked it into a small vent in the wall. It disappeared with a faint swooshing sound. He drew a fresh dress uniform with the insignia of a Star Fleet captain from its packaging and pulled it on, checking his appearance perfunctorily in a mirror. "I'm sure you know, since everyone else on the ship already seems to, that we're here to pick up some prisoners. This courtesy call on the governor I told you to dress up for is an extra. Partly it's to reassure the colonists that, even though the Neutral Zone is right ahead of them, the Federation and Star Fleet Command are behind them."

"Nice turn of phrase you have."

Kirk grinned at him. "In addition," he said, walking to the door, "Governor Kepac said he had a message he had to give me in person, something he preferred not to broadcast to the ship."

As they walked down the corridor toward the transporter room a few minutes later, McCoy remarked, "You know, Jim, it sure is nice to see you looking relaxed for a change. As if you're enjoying your job."

"Relaxed, yes." Kirk pondered for a moment. "There's little to wear on you on this type of mission, no real tension, in spite of the kind of prisoners we're picking up. And yet," he shrugged, "I can't really say I enjoy it that much. It's -- well -- it's just too routine!"

McCoy laughed. "Okay, then. Worry about it being too routine."

Four Security guards were waiting in the transporter room, ordered by Kirk to meet them there. Sometimes he wondered how Star Fleet Security managed to keep finding new recruits; the job was probably the most dangerous on any starship. Looking at the four, all tall, heavily muscled, and self-confident, he wondered how Security managed to find so many recruits whose faces all looked alike. It was the expressionlessness that did it, along with that air of power, readiness, and competence. The answer, he knew, lay in their training, a training as long and rigorous, in its own way, as his had been; they were well equipped to handle trouble, and Kirk was confident that these four would be more than enough to handle the nine manacled prisoners waiting for him on the surface of Trefolg.

Kirk, McCoy, and the four Security guards stepped onto the transporter platform and arranged themselves on the six available positions. On the return trip, Kirk planned to use one of the cargo transporters, so that the entire group, which would then number fifteen, could beam up together. He wanted to avoid the complications of sending the prisoners up in two or more groups, splitting the group of Security guards up, and having to have more Security men sent to the transporter room to cover the prisoners as they arrived. The ship was operating smoothly and easily, with no problems; the crew calm and as relaxed as he was himself. He didn't want to take any chance of upsetting that.

Kirk spoke briefly to Chief Engineer Scott, who had come to the transporter room himself to operate the controls. He preferred to be in charge in person when the captain or any of the other chief officers, such as the ship's doctor, were beaming up or down. "Scotty, it shouldn't take more than three hours to satisfy Governor Kepac's social requirements. Have the transporter in Cargo Bay Number Two kept ready and cleared and beam up all fifteen of us there when I contact you."

"Aye."

"Whenever you're ready."

Engineer Scott moved the levers on his control panel forward, listening as he did so to the whining hum that grew in the transporter platform mechanism; he was not even consciously aware that he always did this, listening, with the instinct born of so many years' intimacy with the machinery, for any flaw in the sound, any indication that the transporter was functioning less than perfectly. The six men on the platform wavered, changed into six vague, manlike outlines composed of winking, twinkling lights, then vanished. Moments later, the Transmission Confirmed light blinked on on his panel, signifying that they had appeared on the surface of the planet below. Scott sighed and relaxed, shaking off the tension that invariably gripped him when Captain James Kirk was among those being transported.

As Scotty's square face faded away and the functional buildings of the colonial administration center on Trefolg replaced the control room, James Kirk felt his own tension rising again. Sometimes, as during the last few days, he could relax while onboard the Enterprise, but he felt somewhat unprotected and on guard when he left the ship's protective walls and beamed down to a planetary surface.

Governor Kepac came hurrying out of the building in front of them in person to greet the party from the Enterprise. He was accompanied by an aide. Kirk remembered having met Kepac some years earlier, before he had assumed the governorship of the Trefolg colony, and he remembered him as having been short, chubby, carefree, and constantly cheerful. Now Kepac was almost thin, his clothes hanging on him indicating that he had lost a great deal of weight quite recently. His carefreeness was gone, and his once-smooth face was creased with permanent worry lines. Nonetheless, he smiled broadly as he came up to Kirk.

"Captain Kirk! I'm delighted to see you again."

Kirk nodded and shook the outstretched hand. "Governor. This is Doctor Leonard McCoy, my chief medical officer. I thought you might like to have him look over your medical facilities and supplies. We might be able to provide some things from ship's stores."

"By all means. We'd be delighted. Mr. Johnson," he nodded toward the man who had accompanied him, "will show your guards where the prisoners are being kept and we can meet them there later."

There was a refreshing lack of ceremony and large groups of subordinates on these frontier colonies. After they had dropped McCoy off at the colony's main hospital -- a small and primitive affair compared to the medical facilities on the Enterprise -- Kirk and Governor Kepac were alone. "Well, Lerak, you said you had a message for me?"

They had reached a large open field beyond the buildings. Shapes, trash of some kind, were scattered all over the field. There was something familiar about the shapes that Kirk could not pin down.

"Yes," Kepac said. "I do. After Star Fleet had dispatched your ship here to pick up our prisoners, we received a coded subspace message from Trellisane. Very weak. It's only because our receivers are so powerful out here that we picked it up at all."

"Trellisane," Kirk murmured thoughtfully. He knew something of that world because of its unique and sensitive position. Could this be the trouble that the Federation had feared for so long?

As if reading his mind, Kepac said, "I don't think the worst has happened. But they did request that Star Fleet send a ship. I doubt if their transmission even reached Star Fleet Headquarters in any coherent form, so I thought I'd let you know and leave it to you." He hesitated. "I didn't want to broadcast any of this, either up to your ship or to Star Fleet, because I was afraid I'd start some sort of panic here. This colony always skates along the thin edge of panic. We're next-door neighbors to the Neutral Zone, and if the Romulans decide to start a war, we'd be the first to go."

"Of course, Lerak. I understand." Kirk thought he understood, too, why Kepac had changed so greatly over the last few years. "I hope the Enterprise's presence will at least reassure your colonists that they haven't been forgotten. Now, tell me what this place is." He pointed toward the field.

"I thought you might find this interesting. Shows the length to which fanatics will go. As I told Star Fleet Command, the prisoners you're here to pick up are members of the United Expansion Party. They were about to enter the Romulan Neutral Zone, hoping to provoke a war between the Romulans and the Federation, when one of our ships intercepted them."

Kirk shook his head. "In spite of what the United Expansion Party may think, the Romulans have grown more tolerant. They wouldn't go to war over an incursion by a group of fanatics in a civilian ship."

Kepac grunted. "It was more serious than that. They had bought an old cargo ship, but they added an enormous amount of metal superstructure and plating to it so that from the outside, visually at least, it resembled a Star Fleet scout ship. They knew enough to make it look to the Romulans like a military provocation."

"But the Romulans would have known better as soon as they boarded her."

"They wouldn't have gotten the chance. The prisoners have been telling us all this quite freely, by the way. They're proud of it."

"Because they see themselves as the true patriots and you as the traitors for stopping them, I suppose," Kirk remarked.

"Exactly. They planned to put up the appearance of a fight -- enough anyway to make the Romulans destroy them. Then the Romulans would have no way of knowing what they really were, and they would be convinced the Federation was planning to take over the Neutral Zone, in violation of the treaty."

"They would have died when the Romulans destroyed their ship!"

"Of course. No price too great to pay. All of this in front of us," he swept his hand in a broad arc, encompassing the piles of jumbled metal all over the field, "was their ship. I ordered it dismantled so no one else with the same ideas could use it, and also so that we could use the parts. We can always do with more metal, especially when it's already been refined and alloyed for us."

Kirk looked over the piles of scrap metal, and he had a sudden vision of the Enterprise itself ending up the same way some day, piles of anonymous junk from an old and decommissioned vessel, that left him shaken. Quickly, he said, "The message from Trellisane -- did they say what their problem was?"

Kepac's face turned grim. "Not really. However, they did refer to the Klingons. That's another reason I wanted to tell it to you in private. The message was weak and garbled and that's virtually all we could understand. Let's get back to my office and I'll have a recording of it played for you."