Dust, heat and discontent. That was all Ensign Alessa Elara could feel. These colonists, they were weary from a hard frontier existence, and they were wary of Starfleet’s sudden arrival. Some were even angry. Downright angry. Disconcertingly so. The only reassurance the young Betazoid had of her safety was her disguise, a pair of well-worn coveralls and dirty matted hair, plus a familiar figure beside her. Jason Gideon, the Executive Officer of the USS Pacific Palisades, had gone local too, abandoning his neatly pressed uniform, his commander’s pips and his clean shave in favor of a pair of cargo shorts, a jean jacket, and a scruffy beard.

“Starfleet won’t help! They’re too late! On Duraxis, we decide our own fate!” 

Raised fists and raised voices, a thousand angry men and women shouted in unison. The ground shook beneath her feet. Whether it was a physical manifestation or just unadulterated emotion flowing off of them, the Betazoid intelligence officer wasn’t sure, but either way, it was unsettling. Quite unsettling. What had made them like this? Didn’t they realize the Pacific Palisades was here to help?

“Starfleet’s aid comes with a cost! We won’t be bought, and we won’t be bossed!” 

Absent boundless energy, industrial replicators, and the other niceties most took for granted, life was hard on Duraxis. You bartered for what you needed, and you offered what you produced. The idea that Starfleet had come for purely egalitarian purposes was as foreign to them as their frontier experience was to the crew of the Pacific Palisades.

Another chant should have followed if their cadence stayed consistent, but instead, the angry cacophony began to soften, quieting to a muted din as the crowd began to part in the middle. Through the seam, a man stepped forward. With his soot-stained cheeks, shadow-drowned eyes and weather-worn skin, it was evidence he was a man of this place, a man built by the hardships of this place. Slowly, the man climbed onto a makeshift stage, duranium sheets lain atop stacks of cinder blocks, as the crowd waited expectantly.

“Who’s that?” Ensign Elara asked quietly, hoping someone would offer an answer.

“Where’ve you been, kid?” laughed a middle aged man. “That’s Voral, the speaker of our truth, our savior from Starfleet, and, come the elections next week, our next governor!”

“Ah yeah, of course,” Ensign Elara smiled sheepishly, trying to excuse her ignorance in case he took it for something more. “Forgive me. I’m from the outer vill…” 

But the middle aged man didn’t care. He hadn’t waited for an explanation, vanishing into the crowd before she could even finish, pushing forward to get a better look.

“Voral! Voral! We stand tall! Voral! Voral! We heed your call!” 

The man on the stage looked out over his congregants as the crescendo built. Whether relishing in the moment, or letting the crowd work itself up, or some mixture of both, the Betazoid intelligence officer wasn’t sure. She reached out, trying to touch his mind, to get a better sense of the person he was, but against the backdrop of emotions emanating from the frenzied crowd, she couldn’t sense anything from him. Nothing at all.

When at last it seemed the anticipation couldn’t have built any more, Voral raised his hands and, like a conductor cutting off the pit, the crowd grew silent. “Friends, neighbors, colleagues, from the Veilspur Mine to the Cragspire Refinery, we come together to say enough is enough!”

“Enough is enough!” they chanted back.

“We’ve been on our own for so long I doubt most of our newly arrived benefactors could even pick Duraxis off a star chart,” Voral continued. And he wasn’t wrong, Ensign Elara knew. She’d certainly never heard of Duraxis before they received their orders. “Where was Starfleet during the drought of ninety-five? Or when the Klingon raiders descended on us in ninety-eight? They know nothing of what we’ve endured, nor the successes we’ve made for ourselves, yet now they ride in on their high horse like somehow they know what’s best for us. Now, their ship and their engineers descend on us, and for what?”

The crowd was silent, waiting.

“To poison our children with their supposed water purification system?” Voral spat, vitriol rolling off his tongue. “Our wells and our filters worked just fine before!”

The crowd erupted in jeers, shouting how they or their loved ones had become sick from the water ever since Starfleet had replaced the colony’s trusty multi-stage filtration system with some fancy new paramolecular decontamination unit that they claimed would be far more efficient.

“Is that true?” Ensign Elara whispered quietly to her colleague.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Commander Gideon nodded. It had gotten so bad, in fact, that Doctor Goodwyn was forced to deploy a medical field unit to treat the sick while the Corps repaired the system. “Feng is clueless as to why though. She’s deployed hundreds of these across dozens of worlds, and never before has there been an incident.” Truth be told, it was low tech stuff, leveraging well-understood mechanisms that’d been put to practice for hundreds of years.

“And what of their empty promises to fix our subspace communications array?” Voral poured more fuel on the fire. “Just delays, delays, and more delays! If I shout up at the sky, my grandmother on Kyban is as likely to hear me as if I use their fancy new system!”

Again, the crowd erupted.

Ensign Elara looked at Commander Gideon again. “What about that?”

“Westmoreland says his shit keeps going missing,” sighed Commander Gideon. “And even stuff he’s sure they fixed, it ends up broken again. His best guess is the locals.”

“There are solutions to that…” Ensign Elara mused. “Can’t Rivera do something?” The Pacific Palisades had a well-staffed security department, and while Lieutenant Commander Gabe Rivera wasn’t the greatest security chief ever to exist, surely he and his team could protect a handful of power couplers and subspace antennas.

“That useless bag of air…” Commander Gideon grumbled. “He’d probably accidentally shoot someone or something.” It didn’t take an empath to sense his displeasure he felt towards their security chief. Commander Gideon had taken his assignment aboard the Pacific Palisades as a stepping stone to greater things, but what he found aboard the California class utility cruiser was a ship full of mediocrity, save for a few of the young ones like Ensign Alessa Elara.

All around them, the crowd’s anger just continued to build. “Better off before!” Their chant was loud and rhythmic, their fists pumping the air, their feet pounding dirt, rage in their eyes. “Better off before! Better off before!”

“Are we sure this was a good idea?” Ensign Elara whispered.

“I’m really not sure,” admitted Commander Gideon.