Star Trek by Michael Jan Friedman

Author:Michael Jan Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 1999-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Dulmer is short and spare with blunt features, thinning blond hair, and a perpetual scowl. He looks suspicious of everything. Lucsly is tall and dour, with a long face, dark hair combed back off his forehead, and a narrow, aristocratic nose. He has a padd in his hand. “You’re the reporter,” Dulmer notes, squinting as the wind blows some sparkling mineral dust at him. I do my best to look friendly. “That’s right.”

Before I can offer the man my hand, he heads for a cleft in the jumble of blue and purple crags that surrounds us. Lucsly waits until I fall in behind Dulmer. Then he follows as well.

“I hope you don’t take this lightly,” he says in a cultured voice.

I glance at him over my shoulder. “As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

“Good,” says Lucsly, jotting something down on his padd. “We hate it when people take temporal phenomena lightly.”

A moment later, we emerge from the rocky cleft and I see a sprawling array of ancient gray ruins. Broken columns, cracked arches, and time-worn blocks of stone cover the landscape all the way to the horizon.

In the middle of them, dominating them, stands a rough-hewn, irregularly shaped stone doughnut about three meters in diameter. Even without a tricorder, I can feel it pulsating with power … just the way I was told I would.

I turn to Dulmer. “The Guardian?”

“The Guardian,” he confirms gravely.

Five years ago, when the Federation Council declassified them, I began an in-depth study of the logs of Captain James T. Kirk.

Kirk, who commanded the U.S.S. Enterprise on and off for nearly thirty years in the latter half of the twenty-third century, was one of my boyhood heroes. I couldn’t wait to hear his adventures on other worlds described in his own words.

To my disappointment, I found that the logs made available to me had some holes in them. When I inquired, I was told that they had been purged of “security-sensitive” data. What was left was interesting, certainly, but hardly the deep insight into Kirk that I was looking for.

It occurred to me that Kirk’s colleagues might have had a few interesting things to say about him. I examined their logs as well, but ran into the same problem—gaps in the really good stuff. Again, I was told that information had been withheld for the sake of Federation security.

Could I petition to have this data restored? I asked. The council told me I could ask for certain pieces of information to be declassified—but my success would depend on the specificity of my request.

Typical bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, I thought. Before I could be allowed to learn about something, I would have to have some knowledge of it.

Nonetheless, I delved into the logs all over again, Kirk’s as well as his officers’, hoping for a shred of information that would give me an excuse to ask for more. To my surprise and delight, I found something.

It wasn’t much—just a passing reference in one of Hikaru Sulu’s personal logs.

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