The Price of the Prime Directive.

The high-noon sun blasted the abandoned village, glinting off the multicolored glass ghost chimes in the trees and joining with the breeze to create mad dust devils dancing in the brown-red dirt of the square. The hut, threadbare but clean, sagging but lovingly repaired, protected the young ensign in its cool embrace. The sun had cut out a sharp rectangle in the shape of the square door hole, but try as it might, it could not reach Chekov.

His tricorder was recording with dogged insistence as he absentmindedly scanned the last few scrolls. His own gaze had been captured by the newspaper pieces that had been fastened with resin to the hut's walls.

Starfleet had had this planet under surveillance for more than a decade, and the linguistics algorithms were almost perfect. He could have translated the smudged script in a second, but the proclamations of the warlords in the distant capital did not interest him. His attention had instead been captured by the childish drawings that covered the slips of paper: blue skin, red earth, friendly yellow tanka beasts (or an out of proportion bird?). The blue humanoids of the drawings were all heads and feet as if torsos were of secondary importance to the young painter.

They're just like us.

His lips curled in disgust, and looked at the oblivious tricorder.

We're thieves.

Then his eyes travelled to the white veil, so carefully draped over one of the oblong boxes that served as a bench during the day and sleeping pallet for two children at night. There was no escaping its significance in this culture.

We're murderers.

The tricorder chirped in hungry insistence. It wanted more data. Suddenly it was all too much, and Chekov tore it off his shoulder and threw it down hard on the packed dirt floor of the hut.

The impact didn't even graze it. Starfleet knew how to build its tools to handle far worse.

"Ensign?" Came a soft query from the opening, and Chekov looked up, startled, squinting at the light. The golden sun competed with the command gold tunic of his captain, and he drew himself up.

"Sorry, Sir." Damn. He really wanted to be alone. An automatic apology and explanation formed and died on his lips. No, he wouldn't apologize any more for this. There was a fair amount of anger in his eyes before he shifted his attention back to the wall. The tricorder stayed on the ground.

Kirk moved inside the hut, careful not to move anything. Small drones would eradicate their footsteps once they left, hiding their intrusion from the inhabitants when they returned from prayer in the mountain temple. But the drones would need all the help they could get, as the Starfleet officers moved about the village, purposefully finding scrolls and glass work, recording, taking notes, leaving nothing behind.

The sun hadn't left the captain untouched. Small beads of sweat had formed on his neck, and his skin had taken on a reddish hue, even though he couldn't have been down on the surface more than an hour. Chekov had been here all through the night, arriving in the twilight with Spock's away team the second that the villagers had disappeared out of sight and sound. Once the bitter cold of the night had given way to the punishing morning sun, he'd learned to stick to whatever shadows were offered.

Despite the outward signs of discomfort, Kirk projected an aura of confidence and calm. Chekov usually took comfort in that, but now it irritated him.

"Want to tell me about it?"

"I don't think that would be wise. Sir." His tone was harsh, and he felt a moment of trepidation, but then his eyes fell on the mourning veil again. It took a lot of work to keep something white in this place, where the red dust found its way into every crook and cranny. But despite how little these people had, how little she had, she had done it.

"Chekov. Sit down." The captain sat down cross-legged in the shade, and the ensign automatically obeyed, but pointedly stayed on the other side of the door shaped wedge of sunlight, letting it form a barrier between them.

"Talk."

"I will be finished with the last few scrolls in here in another few minutes. Everything has gone according to plan. There's not much to say."

Kirk pinched some dirt of the floor, letting it trail through his fingers. His eyes were on the square outside, his voice gentle.

"There's so much that should be said, Ensign. Permission to speak freely."

"It won't matter what I say." Chekov could not keep the bitterness out of his voice. "It will only get me in trouble."

Kirk shook his head. "What do you think the worst case scenario is here, Chekov? That I tell you to belay, saying that this isn't the time or place for that discussion? That you lose your temper and I rein you in? No, that's not the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that you censor yourself from speaking, keeping your thoughts and your opinions to yourself until it really, truly, is too late for us to do anything. And then you'll hate yourself, and me, and at least I will have deserved some of that, for creating an environment where you're too afraid to speak your mind."

"I'm not afraid! I'm..." he took a deep calming breath, "furious. We're leaving her here to die."

"Everyone dies."

"Not like this! Not in the dirt, not from a lung disease that the doctor could fix in a heartbeat up in sickbay. Not after you've already seen your children cough themselves to death! She has nothing. Their crops have failed. The capital doesn't know or care about these distant provinces. They only care about how they can use their new electricity to make better weapons! And despite of all of that, she still manages this!" He pointed to the scroll on the table, covered in minuscule spindly handwriting. There were few words in the treatise: most of the paper was covered in a peculiar circular notation that she had devised when the local mathematical symbols proved inadequate for her thoughts and proofs.

"She is courageous, and a genius."

"And here she is teaching the local children to read and write! She should be at Olympos Mons University. She should be sharing this with tens of thousands of others across the galaxy. Instead she's carrying her fourth litter, and, assuming that they survive, she will have even less time."

"Yes."

"Then why don't we do something about it? We are leaving her to die, and stealing her thoughts!"

"What do you propose?"

"...We could talk to her, get her out of here. In secret. Fake her death." Chekov's voice was low and defiant.

"Yes we could. What about her children?"

"...Them too."

"What about their fathers? Their grandparents? Their friends? This hut might not look like much to us, but she might not want to leave it. Her schoolhouse might not look like much, but to this village, it may be a beacon of light. And what about the people whose minds we aren't interested in, don't they deserve a better life just as much as she does? At some point, secrecy doesn't work. We'll be exposed."

"Maybe we should be exposed."

"Maybe. But we tried that." Kirk looked down at the red dust in the palm of his hand, and when he spoke next, his voice was low.

"The early Federation spectacularly failed in First Contacts a dozen times before we finally realized that we can't impose a post-scarcity democratic society on a pre-scarcity tribal civilization without disastrous consequences. Warlords, planet-wide struggles for control. Chaos. That's what you get when you try to intervene in a complex system with the best of intentions. We killed whole worlds, Chekov, before all that blood on our hands made us realize that you cannot will planetary unity into existence. They have to be ready, they have to get to a certain level on their own before they are ready to meet us."

Chekov rose suddenly, moving into the harsh glare of the sun.

"And what do we say when we do meet them?" he almost shouted, but then checked himself, continuing in a low, intense voice. "'We stood by and saw your ancestors die, because they were too primitive? We stole whatever we thought profitable of your ideas and your arts, and gave them to our well-fed friends while their originators died of starvation?'"

Kirk rose too, unhurried. "No. We say, 'Your ancestors were courageous and admirable'. We say, 'One of them, the self-taught school-teacher Hanahela of the Roteka province, came up with a proof to what we call the T'Hela Theorem, and one night we came to her house and took it. And that was what made large scale nano-tech replicators possible, something that improved billions of lives on thousands of worlds. But not on yours. We honor her. And we left her to slowly die, with her family, the full potential of her genius untapped, in the small but proud home that she built with her own hands. And we did it because the alternative was worse.'" He placed a hand on Chekov's arm. "And then we stand back and accept their judgment."

Chekov held his breath for a moment, and then exhaled explosively. He ducked his head, crossing his arms over his chest, and when he finally spoke, his voice was low and unhappy.

"I'm sorry, Captain. I know all of this. I've read about it. I've discussed it at the Academy until my head was spinning. I shouldn't… need to take up your time like this, Sir."

"Chekov… This is what I'm here for. Besides, I had this talk with myself this morning. And now with you. And in a minute or so, I'm going to have to have the same discussion with my First Officer."

Chekov took another deep breath, looking at his captain a little ruefully.

"I doubt that it'll be the same, Captain. I doubt… that he'll argue with you."

"Ensign… I can only hope that he does. That he will have seen some way out of this that I haven't seen."

Chekov bent down, a little stiff from sitting on the floor, and picked up the tricorder and wordlessly turned to the next scroll. Kirk rested a hand briefly on his shoulder before ducking out of the hut.

The tricorder chirped happily, awakened from its slumber, and Chekov let it devour the information on the scroll as his gaze followed the captain outside. Kirk headed out to the center of the small village square, and, if by some undetected signal, Chekov saw Spock come out of the larger school-house hut opposite, where Hanahela had her small office. He had a single scroll in his hands, which he deposited carefully on a large piece of plastic on the ground. His movements were fluid, controlled, but for a second, as he saw the captain approaching, Chekov saw him stiffen.

Kirk sat down next to him on the ground, saying nothing. They shared a long look, before Spock picked up the scroll, handing it over. Kirk borrowed his tricorder, looking at the translation on its screen and Chekov could see how he took a deep breath before letting it out slowly, painfully, saying softly, "This is it?"

"Yes."

"Even I can see that it's... beautiful."

"Yes."

Silence reigned, while the two officers looked at each other in a quiet debate that none of them truly wanted to win. Finally Spock looked away, long fingers reaching out to rest on a scroll. Kirk seemed content to wait him out, and it was another minute before the Vulcan spoke.

"If there had been a violent altercation here… If we had come while the marauders in the hills attacked the village… If we had been here when her needless death and pain was carried on the blade of a knife rather than in microbes and viruses and malnutrition… You would have saved her."

"No. I would not." Spock looked up, eyes dark and challenging, but Kirk held his gaze with quiet purpose. "I would not. Because you would have been here to stop me."

After another minute, Kirk rose.

"Are you ready to leave?" In a gesture that went against all Starfleet protocol on interaction with Vulcans, he held out his hand.

And, after a moment, with a gesture that defied both Vulcan propriety and necessity in such a low gravity planet, Spock clasped it, rising smoothly to his feet. He held on for a second, before letting go, surveying the village square in brisk efficiency, evaluating the progress of several junior officers disassembling equipment around the huts, meeting Chekov's eyes as the ensign ducked out of the hut, the scanned scrolls safely returned to a locked cupboard that its owner would never suspect had been opened.

"Yes. There is nothing more that we can do."

Author's note: Hanahela is a more extreme variant of the real Indian self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan – head over to his Wikipedia page for a truly epic tale: - Srinivasa_Ramanujan . We don't know how Starfleet caught wind of her, nor what she'll do with her life after this. Maybe she'll get discovered and bring about a scientific revolution on her planet. Maybe she'll die in childbirth. Oh, and Chekov might think that teaching local children to read and write is not a world changing endeavor in itself, but we know better.

This story was born when I was chatting with DelJewell about Federation ethics – and she was also kind enough to beta-read it for me, so this is all thanks to her.

What did you think? And if you didn't like Kirk's solution (there are certainly many possible objections) – then what do you propose instead?