Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [143]
The assembled officers sat in silence for more than a minute. Then, just as some of them were beginning to shift in their seats, Leach arrived with Eliopoulos in tow.
“Commander Eliopoulos,” said Ruhalter, “may I present my command staff.” He reeled off their names. “Naturally, they’re all most eager to learn why we’ve made this trip.”
“I’m not surprised,” the bearded man responded.
Leach indicated a chair and Eliopoulos sat down. Then the first officer took a seat next to him and said, “Go ahead, sir.”
Eliopoulos looked around the table. “No doubt,” he said, “you noticed a strange-looking ship as you approached the base. It arrived here seven days ago. There were only two people aboard—a man named Guard Daniels and a woman named Serenity Santana.”
“Humans?” asked Werber, a stocky, balding man with piercing blue eyes and a dense walrus mustache.
“From all appearances,” Eliopoulos confirmed. “But from what they told us, they weren’t just any humans. They were descendants of the crew of the S.S. Valiant…the ship that went through the galactic barrier nearly three hundred years ago.”
The remark hung in the air for a moment as its significance sank in around the room. Picard, who was more excited by history than most, felt his pulse begin to race.
Three hundred years…
It was then that he realized where he had seen the strange-looking ship before. Or rather, not the ship itself, but elements of it.
Back at the Academy, one of his professors had showed him a picture of the S.S. Valiant. He recalled its wide, dark body and its abundance of small, curiously placed nacelles. The vessel hanging in space alongside the starbase could easily have evolved from that primitive design.
Then something occurred to Picard—something that seemed to preclude the claim made by Eliopoulos’s visitors. “Wasn’t the Valiant destroyed by order of her captain?”
Ruhalter nodded. “That was my understanding as well.”
The second officer knew the story. For that matter, everyone did. James Kirk, the last captain of the original Starship Enterprise, had embarked for the galactic barrier on a research mission in 2265. Just shy of his destination, he encountered an antique message buoy—a warning sent out by the captain of the Valiant two centuries earlier, chronicling his experiences after penetrating the barrier.
Though the details provided by the buoy were sketchy, it seemed one of the Valiant’s crewmen had become a threat to his colleagues…and to Earth as well, if he lived to return to her. To eliminate that possibility, the Valiant’s captain was forced to blow up his ship.
That seemed like a good reason to turn back. And as far as most people in Kirk’s time knew, that was exactly what he had done.
But he hadn’t turned back. He had braved the barrier despite the warning. And in doing so, he had shed some light on the fate of the Valiant…albeit at a terrible price.
The man who paid it was Kirk’s navigator, Gary Mitchell, in whom exposure to the barrier had touched off a gradual but startling transformation. Mitchell became a superman, a being capable of increasingly improbable feats of mental and physical prowess…telepathy and telekinesis among them.
Unfortunately, Mitchell’s perspective began to change as well. He came to see his crewmates as insects, hardly worthy of his notice…much less his compassion. In the end, Kirk was compelled to kill him.
Had he hesitated, he might have found himself in the same predicament as the captain of the Valiant, who had likely been confronted with a superman of his own—or so Mitchell’s transformation seemed to indicate. Then Kirk too might have been forced to destroy his vessel as a last resort.
“But Daniels and Santana,” Ruhalter continued, “are saying the Valiant wasn’t destroyed after all?”
“They agree that it was destroyed,” Eliopoulos replied. “However, they maintain that a portion of the Valiant’s crew survived her destruction…then found an M-Class planet and settled there.”
“Hard to believe,” said Simenon, his speech harsh and sibilant. “Hundreds of