A/N: It is now 12:10 AM January 1st, 2021. That is all.
"The planet Ariannus," Spock said. "A key planet as a transfer point on regular space commercial lanes. It is currently being attacked by a bacterial infection that threatens to render it lifeless. The Enterprise has been asked to decontaminate the planet."
Elle frowned. "How are we going to decontaminate the entire planet?"
"There is a compound that kills this certain bacteria. Under a certain number of parts per million, it is safe for other lifeforms. When we dropped off the documentary crew, we picked up the chemical compound that will decontaminate the planet. The Enterprise will drop down into the atmosphere and release the compound through the Bussard ramscoops. In conjunction with Ariannus' network of weather satellites, they will be spread via air currents and rain to the entire planet."
"Cool," Elle said.
"Indeed." Spock pulled up a diagram of weather satellites. "We will be focusing on weather systems, today."
Three hours away from Ariannus, the ship dropped out of warp for three minutes before resuming course. Elle felt the shift in engine vibrations, but nothing else happened, and no alerts started blaring, so she finished up her history class and went to sickbay. Chapel had promised to show her how the DNA splicer worked.
She found the triumvirate, Nurse Chapel, and two security guards onvened around a single biobed. "Uhhhh, I'll come back later?" Elle asked, when they all turned to look at her. She got a look at the person on the bed and paled. "Oh, no."
"You know who this is?" Kirk asked. "Is this an episode?"
She stared at the man's half-black, half-white face. "Yup. This is that guy who his people are slaves on his homeworld, and there's one other of his people, except he's black on the other side, who thinks that all of the ones like this are supposed to be slaves or animals or something, and they fight, and you take them to their home planet, which is already dead, which I don't understand how they didn't check on their poeple like once, because apparently these guys are fifty thousand years old or something."
Kirk blinked. Blinked again. "Can you try that again but with pauses, this time?" he asked, amused.
Elle pointed. "Activist here. Racist on the way. Okay, techincally, they're both racist, because they don't believe either side are worth living, which is why their whole civilization died..."
"There's a whole species like this?" McCoy asked, getting that 'research paper' look in his eye.
"There is indeed," said a raspy voice.
"He's awake," Chapel said, unnecessarily, and they turned to face him.
"You're aboard the starship Enterprise," Kirk said.
"I've heard of it. It's in the United Fleet of Planets?"
"Federation," Kirk corrected. "So was the shuttlecraft that you were flying in."
Lokai looked uninterested. "It was?"
"Don't you usually know whose property you've stolen?" Kirk asked.
"I'm not a thief," Lokai said. "I do not make off with things. My need gave me the right to use the ship. Mark the word, sir, the use of it."
"The Federation helps people in need," Kirk said, "if you had asked for assistance, we would've helped you."
"Hmph."
"I'm Captain Kirk," Kirk said. "You are?"
"Lokai, of the planet Cheron."
"When was the last time you were home?" Elle asked.
Lokai's eyes narrowed. "A long time. If I'm counting correctly, fifty-thousand of your years."
"Are all your people so long-lived?" McCoy asked.
"Most of us," Lokai said. He frowned. "Will your Federation really help people in need?"
"We will, yes," Kirk said slowly.
Lokai grabbed the captain's arm. "Then you must help me! My people are being slaughtered and enslaved every day."
"If you haven't been to your home planet in so long, how do you know?" Elle asked, and subsided when all the adults glared at her. She sidled behind Nurse Chapel.
"I know," Lokai said. "Our oppressors would never see reason."
"Who is oppressing you?" Kirk asked.
The comm whistled. "Captain Kirk," Chekov said, "contact with alien ship, sir."
"I'll be right there. Notify Mister Spock." Kirk gave Elle a significant look. "With me, Miss Wilcott."
She followed him out of sickbay. "What?" she asked.
"Why are you goading the fifty-thousand-year-old alien being?" he asked, frowning at her. "You should know better."
Elle sighed. "I know, I know, but it's so easy..."
He gave her an unimpressed look. "I know it's easy, but you need to resist the temptation. We're going to have enough trouble as it is."
"Sorry."
"There is a time and place for goading powerful beings," Kirk added, smirking. "You have to learn the timing." He tugged at her braid. "C'mon, let's go see what other trouble we've got."
"I bet this'll be the other guy," Elle said.
"No bet," Kirk replied, and they entered the bridge.
"Sir, we are tracking an alien ship, but it does not appear on visual," Spock said. "No malfunction in sensors."
"It's invisible," Elle said. "I think."
"That would make sense," Chekov said. "Sir, sensors show the ship is on a direct collision course for the Enterprise."
"Shields up, red alert!"
Elle hustled over to the empty enviro console and strapped in. No more concussions for her, thank you. She braced for impact as the invisible ship crashed into the shields. The shields did their job, and there wasn't even a jolt. She lifted her head. "Huh."
Spock frowned. "The ship has disintegrated, Captain, but it seems to have deposited an alien presence."
"Where?" Kirk demanded.
"Right here, captain," said a voice, and everyone whirled to face the half-black, half-white man standing by the turbolift. "I am Bele. Forgive my unorthodox arrival."
"Your mode of travel was also unorthodox," Kirk said dryly. "All hands, secure from Red Alert." He raised an eyebrow at Bele. "What happened to your vehicle?"
While Bele was talking, Spock gave her the look that meant 'get off the bridge.'
Elle slid out of her seat and took the smaller, secondary turbolift off the bridge. Sickbay was presumably off-limits, which meant that she now had nothing to do. She went to the rec deck to hang out.
Later that evening, Spock came to find her.
"How are our visitors?" Elle asked.
"Combative, irrational, and highly emotional," Spock said, wrinkling his eyebrows in distaste.
Elle snorted. "Sound like racists to me," she said. She popped another piece of mango in her mouth.
"On your Earth," Spock said slowly. "Did many people exhibit the same attributes?"
"Not to this degree," Elle said. "But the attitudes were there, a lot of them. Where I come from, civil rights only started being a thing like, what, sixty years ago? You see a lot of it, nowadaways, with the government and different racial minorities, lots of violence, lots of protest, lots of everything."
"Was there no forward progress?" Spock asked.
"Some," Elle said. "But lack of prejudice is a change of morals, of principles and worldviews. And if it doesn't benefit someone directly, they don't care to change." She wrinkled her nose. "My world was terrible, come to think of it."
He gazed at her solemnly. "Do you have any prejudice against anyone?"
"No," Elle said immediately. She frowned. "At least, I don't think so? My parents are white and Hispanic, my whole family's all mixed... I've never hated anybody. Well, except like, evil people, but it doesn't matter what color they are if they're evil, right?"
"Their skin color does not preclude them being evil," Spock said dryly. "I did not mean to cause you a moral crisis, Elle, forgive me. I have seen you interact with all the crewmembers of the Enterprise and other worlds with equal courtesy and respect, regardless of species, gender, or skin color."
"Oh." Elle let out a sigh of relief and blew her napkin away. She scrambled after it. "What'd you ask that for, then?"
"The captain and I were concerned that due to your upbringing in the volatile 21st century, which may have included exposure to prejudiced attitudes or thinking, that you may be unnecessarily upset or swayed by Lokai or Bele."
Elle blinked slowly, parsing the long sentence. "You, think, I'm gonna start taking sides?" she asked slowly.
"You have taken on the safety of the Enterprise as your personal crusade against the galaxy," Spock reminded her. "You are, unfortunately, the type of person which both sides of Cheron's population would target to join their cause."
Elle bit her lip. "Are you talking to all the other people like me in the crew?" she asked, wondering if she should feel insulted or not.
"No," Spock said, and ouch. "They have no frame of reference to understand what Lokai and Bele speak of, they do not understand their speeches."
"Lucky them," Elle said, frowning.
"Luck has nothing to do with it. The Federation has made a concerted effort to rid itself of attitudes that harm others."
Elle looked up at him. "But even if Lokai's speeches got to me, there'd still be no point. He's not wrong, slavery is bad and we should take a stand against it, but there's no one left on either side to stand against. And he's just as prejudiced against Bele as Bele is against him. They're both wrong."
Spock's shoulders relaxed a fraction of an inch. "You are correct," he said. "I am pleased that you understand this."
"But you still don't want me around them," she guessed.
"Yes."
She nodded slowly. "Okay. I don't want to be around irrational racists either, so that works out."
He stood. "Good night, ax'nav."
"Good night, a'nirih."
He gave her a fond smile and the door closed with a whoosh behind him.
Elle went to bed.
-/\-
She was woken in the middle of the night by the whoop of a red alert. "All hands, this is the captain. The ship is on Red Alert. Repeat, the ship is on Red Alert. There has been an unidentified malfunction in the ship's directional control. Repeat, the ship is off course and out of our control."
Elle groaned. It had been too much to hope that Bele and Lokai would let the Federation mediate peacefully. She pulled a pillow over her head to block out the noise.
The Red Alert ended after the longest five minutes Elle had ever experienced.
The comm whistled. "Spock to Elle."
She flung out a hand and tapped the comm. "Elle here." She yawned.
"We are approaching Ariannus, if you would like to observe the decontamination procedure in person," he said.
She sat up. "Cool, let's do it. Where?"
"Science Lab 4."
"On my way. Elle out."
By the time she dressed and made her way down, they were entering low orbit. They'd have to drop right into the atmosphere to drop the payload, but with Sulu at the helm, there wasn't even a rumble.
They made three passes over the affected areas, and Elle watched in fascination as live sensor updates from the ground showed the contamination levels dropping within minutes.
"Another day or so, they'll be completely out of danger," Lt. Ellis said, pleased. He gave Elle a high-five.
"Nice." Elle checked the time, decided to go up to the bridge to see if Spock could tell her anything about the other uses of ramjets. Something about them sparked a memory of an episode, though she couldn't remember if it was TNG or Voyager where they were used... probably both.
She entered the bridge and immediately regretted it, faced with both Lokai and Bele shouting at each other. Guess Spock had told them that everyone on Cheron was gone.
"Your band of murderers did this!"
"Your genocidal maniacs did this!" They grabbed each other.
She got back in the turbolift, barely catching sight of Kirk's expression. "Stop it! What's the matter with you two?" he said loudly.
The doors closed. "Deck five," Elle said tiredly.
The turbolift dropped her off on Deck Five and she headed for the mess hall. It was too early to be up but now she was hungry.
Lokai shot past her at a run, pushing her into the wall.
She caught herself against the wall and watched in shock as Bele followed a few moments later, his eyes narrowed in single-minded focus. She hesitated, and then followed at a light jog. She reached the transporter room just in time to see Bele beam himself down.
"Okay then," Elle said, to the empty transporter room. She turned on her heel and went back to the mess hall. It wasn't her business.
The captain came into the mess hall a few minutes later, looking defeated. "They're gone," he said. "Beamed down to Cheron to chase each other around."
"Can they even kill each other?" Elle asked.
"I don't know," he said. "They certainly gave it a good try. We're headed back to Starbase Four to return the stolen shuttle, though, and we're going to post a beacon in orbit as a warning." He shook his head and poured himself a cup of coffee. He sighed. "They are two powerful, educated beings, and they chose to hate each other instead of work together to preserve their planet. I don't understand it."
"They've spent too long hating each other," Elle said. "It's comfortable."
He gave her a sharp look. "Is that what happened on your Earth?"
She nodded slowly. "Of course, I don't really know," she said. "Things might change." The pain of loss was easier to push away this time. "If our time was like your twenty-first century, then we have some hope, right?"
"There's always hope," Kirk said, and gave her a hug.