Source of Life
By BookwormDragon
Disclaimer: Neither the Star Trek Universe nor any of the Characters in the Star Trek Universe belong to me. No profit is made from this story on my part. No copyright infringement is intended.
Jim grinned in anticipation as he headed over to the water café. Featuring fresh water mixes from many different Federation worlds, water cafés were extremely popular with the crews of newly docked Starships, despite the expense of the amenities that they offered. They were so popular, in fact, that you could find them in nearly every well-established port, spaceport, or deep-space station. The closer a port or station was to the common trade routes, the more exotic varieties would be offered at its water cafés - but even relatively remote locations offered the most commonly requested varieties.
When you had lived planet-side for most of your life, you tended to take something as essential as water for granted, unless you were from a desert world, of course. You never really thought about why it tasted good to you; about the unique mix of minerals and trace elements that made it desirable and familiar; or about how fresh and readily available it was.
Living on a Starship really brought the simple luxury of drinkable water to your attention. Oh, shipswater was perfectly safe and potable, especially on a modern ship like the Enterprise, but it was still heavily filtered and recycled, often several times. And the effort to make it as palatable as possible to as many people and species as possible actually ended up making it desirable to no one, of course.
Nobody really liked shipswater, no matter where they were from or what species they were. It just didn't taste like home, and no amount of treatment could really eliminate the artificial, chemical under-taste. No, onboard ship, no one drank plain water if they could help it. Teas, coffees, and other culturally traditional drink mixes helped to disguise the flavor a bit, but nothing tasted exactly like it should have, no matter how hard you tried. Even replenishing the ship's water stores frequently from local planets didn't help much: it still had to be treated to make sure it was safe, and it still tasted alien to most – if not all – of the crew.
Shipswater was the number one reason why Starfleet ships were alcohol-free in theory, but not in practice: fermented beverages stored well and at least tasted the way they were supposed to. Like most Captains, Jim looked the other way as long there were no problems. In return, the crew policed themselves most rigorously: no one showed up for duty drunk, there were no alcohol-related fights, and any other problems were settled quickly and unofficially.
And here was another unmentioned benefit of rank: no long queues at the water café. In the beginning, he had tried to insist that he would wait his turn like everyone else, regardless of rank, but it had made most of the crew uncomfortable – something about looking bad in front of the dirtsiders. So he didn't bother to try anymore, just placed his order as quickly as possible so that everyone else could have their turn.
"I'll take a super-size Earth-Standard with ice, open cup. And a flat of bottled Earth-Standard delivered to the Enterprise Shuttle Berth – Dock 5c, as well, please."
By the time they were a few weeks out of port, real Earth water, even if it was bottled, would be more valuable than Saurian Brandy. And if he felt like sharing with his friends, well…it was his choice, right?
In the meantime, he had been looking forward to drinking real water for weeks now. Icy, fresh water that didn't taste like a chemical experiment gone wrong. He understood now why Admiral Pike and his other superior officers always took such pride in offering fresh water mixes instead of alcohol in social situations. To a career Spacer, nothing said wealth and prosperity like being able to offer your guests fresh water from their own planets. It was the kind of luxury that you just couldn't appreciate until you had to go without it.
Author's Note: Just a random little piece of worldbuilding that was prompted by my recent discovery that Jim Kirk's Enterprise didn't have replicators in either TOS or the Reboot universe. I had been thinking about the number of crew members who would use their replicator credits to replicate drinking water, and why they might do that. But it took an entirely new direction after that, prompted by something I read in a non-star trek original story: that after months in space drinking only recycled water, a spacer would gladly exchange sex for just a single drink of fresh water.