Chapter 3 – Kirk's Mission: To Seek Out Female Companionship

Captain James T. Kirk was happy. It was four months after he'd taken command of the Enterprise and this was going to be his first official shore leave. He needed it. After a couple unfortunate incidents his first month, Adm. Pike had had 'The Talk' with him.

While Starfleet had very strict rules regarding harassment, coercion and 'conduct unbecoming', regulations governing fraternization were minimal. As long as everything was above board and didn't affect professional duties, it was generally okay. After all, Kirk's own father had been second in command of the Kelvin when he had met, romanced, married and conceived a son with a crewmember - all without even once running afoul of regulations. As Pike had said, "Take a few hundred people, stuff them together in a tincan headed for parts unknown for years at a time, and expect nothing but strictly platonic interactions?...only if Starfleet wants to restrict its recruiting pool to monasteries." A blanket rule that nearly ever crewmember would find difficult to obey undercut the authority of all the rules and hurt morale. Kirk had been totally with him on that.

But then the Admiral had pointed out that in a closed environment like a Starship, the other thing that could seriously hurt morale was a senior officer hooking up with various crewmembers indiscriminately. "Turn your ship into a warp-capable Soap Opera, and you might as well return those Captain's braids." After that Kirk had resolved to confine his favorite sport to non-ship's personal. And he had succeeded in keeping his hands and his eyes (mostly) to himself when it came to crewmembers. Fortunately, there had usually been enough of missions allowing him to visit strange new worlds and seek out female companionship.

At least until last month, when they had been 'rewarded' by being assigned 'light duty' mapping astrological phenomena at the edges of federation space. From Kirk's perspective, it had been weeks and weeks of nothing, and no one, to do. Worse yet, although Kirk had been trying to work on the 'becoming best friends' thing with his science officer, the fact that Spock not only seemed to be enjoying this lame mission, but also enjoying plenty of off-time with Uhura, had started getting under his skin. By the third week, the way the Vulcan had just looked so…satisfied…had lead Jim to start flirtting a bit with Uhura and taking some less than friendly verbal jabs at Spock. Not good.

So when a Klingon battlecruiser had appeared off their port bow, he had practically cheered. And although they had chased the Klingons back across the Neutral Zone, when he heard the damage to their port nacelle would require immediate diversion to a Starbase for at least a week of repair work, he almost wanted to beam over and kiss the Klingon commander on the lips. Of course, after over a month of self-imposed celibacy, he was willing to kiss just about anything.

But now he was dressed in his coolest civvies and had a week of shore leave ahead of him. The Starbase lounge was before him. And lo and behold! The fates were going to reward him for his self-control – sitting at the bar, all by her lonesome, was one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen. Even better, McCoy and Spock (!) both seemed to be checking her out from a distance.

This was going to be fun.

to be continued...

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Note: Just had to give a little backstory to Kirk and Spock's relationship at this point, as well as Kirk's dilemma. (I always did wonder if this wasn't the reason he kept breaking the rules to join away teams in TOS.)