Flashback - Diane Carey [35]
"It would seem," she said, "that Captain Sulu decided not to enter that journey into his official log. It's full of carefully worded entries and evasive remarks. The day's entry makes some cryptic remark about his ship's being damaged in a gaseous anomaly and needing repairs. Nothing else. He just didn't want anyone to know about what he was doing."
Kim stared at her in his innocent way. "You mean, he falsified his logs?"
Janeway found herself much more forgiving toward Sulu than she ever expected anyone to be toward her.
"It was a very different time, Mr. Kim. Captain Sulu . . . Captain Kirk . . . Dr. McCoy-they all belonged to a different breed of Starfleet officer. I've been reading through their files, and some of the things I found were almost unbelievable."
"They tell stories about Kirk and the Enterprise at the Academy," Kim said. "I always thought they were just a bunch of tall tales."
Janeway tilted him a glance. "Haven't you ever heard that truth is stranger than fiction? James Kirk was once held captive by an alien race, and he called
the Enterprise and ordered them to destroy the entire planet unless he was released within twelve hours."
"You're kidding!"
"And he succeeded. Not only was he released, but he stopped a three-hundred-year-old war that was killing millions. He made a judgment and he stuck with it. Do you know his first officer, doctor, and engineer stuck with him all the way to the end of their careers? And his junior officers were always floating in his periphery. Even when Captain Sulu got his own command, he was always there to back Kirk up."
Kim shook his head. "I can't believe Starfleet let him get away with that."
"It's hard to argue with success, or punish a hero."
"Times sure have changed."
Janeway leaned back against her desk and gazed out at the blue nebula that was giving her such headaches, entertaining unbidden thoughts about the Wild West and the Final Frontier.
"Have you ever read the journals of Captain Christopher Pike or the logs of the U.S.S. Horizon and the Federation's first experiences in deep space? They're eye-opening. And they do make you think the past was more exciting than the present. Imagine the era they lived in-the Alpha Quadrant still largely unexplored, humanity on the verge of war with the Klingons, Romulans hiding behind every nebula . . . even the technology we take for granted was still in its early stages. No plasma weapons, no
multiphasic shields, their ships were half as fast. . ."
"No replicators," Kim said, "no holodecks . . . you know, ever since I took Starfleet History at the Academy, I always wondered what it would be like to live in those days."
Maybe he was being truthful, or maybe he was throwing the bone back at her, trying to make her feel less alone in this particular series of troubles, but Janeway didn't quite buy the idea that Harry Kim ever really wanted to live in a rougher, tougher time. Chakotay maybe, Tom Paris maybe, but not Kim.
She gazed out the viewport at the open space-scape.
"Space must've seemed a whole lot bigger back then," she quietly mused. "It's not surprising they had to bend the rules a little. They were a little slower to invoke the Prime Directive and a little quicker to pull their phasers."
She found herself smiling into the bejeweled view of space. She understood both those brands of action, being out here so far, virtually alone but for hostile or perplexing presences, going as boldly as she must into places no Federation deciding factor had gone before.
"Of course," she added, clinging to her role in front of Kim, "the whole bunch of them would be booted out of Starfleet today. But I have to admit, I would've loved to ride shotgun at least once with a group of officers like that. The mission is still the
same-seek out new life, new civilizations. We're doing a little more of that than we bargained for. We're the legacy of Kirk and Sulu. Sometimes I look out these viewports and realize we're the first human beings