Chapter 18

USS Valkyrie, Transporter Room Two

Janja Rad entered the transporter room to find Etana Mazan and a team of six MACOs checking their phaser carbines while the two members of his engineering team were checking their tricorders and equipment. He'd been awakened from a restless sleep, his mind busy working on Gemma's puzzling command to travel with her to the Alliance Earth surface for an excursion of some kind. As he struggled to pull on his field jacket, Janja, still somewhat frazzled about what a Klingon female would consider an 'excursion,' asked, "Will somebody please tell me where we're going?"

First Sergeant Madden responded to Rad with a smirk and said, "Montana. Now, would you please step onto the transporter pad, sir?"

Once Rad had joined them on the pads, Etana turned to Transporter Chief Green and said, "Energize."

In the meantime, a grumpy Rad continued his diatribe. "Montana? Isn't that one of your ancient nation states, Sergeant Madden? If so, that really doesn't provide a proper answer. Why are we –"

His words were cut off by the transporter effect as they dematerialized from the room.

#

Bozeman, Montana, 2200, Local Time

As the Valkyrie's party began to materialize in the dead of night on the vast, rolling plains of Montana, Rad finished the question he'd begun to ask aboard the starship's transporter room, "—going to Montana?"

"Welcome to the party, people." Salayna Rex called out while she separated herself from the shadows, alongside Ensign Droxanne. "We're all here to find out if the silo below us contains the warp ship designed by the Zephram Cochrane of this Earth."

A stunned Rad simply blinked twice in disbelief before he muttered, "Oh."

"Sir," Droxanne snapped as she stared down at her tricorder, "I have the silo. Bearing three one zero…distance…one hundred fifty meters."

Mazan then barked, "Got it! Skon, take point. Let's move!"

The landing party sprinted in a skirmish line advancing toward a heavy set of doors partially covered by dirt. After the engineering team and some of the MACOs had swept away most of the soil, they found the doors that were built to withstand a nuclear blast had nevertheless been badly charred and damaged by the airburst that had occurred all those years ago. Evidence of the blast in the form of several large craters could be seen by the lantern beams of light the landing party swept around the perimeter.

Mazan tried to activate a small panel of controls beside the doors but received no joy. "It's sealed."

"Let me at that," Rad said.

The engineer removed the panel and scanned the controls with his tricorder. "Hmm, just what I thought…no power," he murmured. He flipped open the battery compartment for his tricorder and connected the power wires from the control to his battery terminals. Then he quickly programmed a virtual switch and toggled it to activate. Moments later, the pair of doors shrieked in their tracks right before they began to rumble apart.

Mazan now switched her lantern to high beam and ordered, "Skon and Thompson, stay here and guard the entrance. Continuously run scans with your tricorders and keep anyone from sneaking up on us. First Sergeant, Rodriguez, Topell, and S'Tall, you're with me on point. Everyone else follow five meters behind us." She paused for a moment to catch her breath then said, "Let's go."

They entered a large alcove which led to a set of concrete stairs going down underground. As they cautiously advanced, Janja snapped out. "Mazan! Hold up for a minute." Then he glanced down at his tricorder and said, "I'm having trouble scanning below us. There's a lot of radiation leaking from something."

"It's probably from the nuclear warhead," Salayna reasoned. "If this Cochrane had designed his ship along the lines of our Cochrane's Phoenix, he was planning to use the warhead to initiate the warp core." Rex then drew a hypospray out of her field pack and gave everyone an injection. "This will protect us from the radiation."

After that, the party climbed down the stairs and reached an access hatch. Rad examined the control panel beside it and grimaced. "This isn't a simple door mechanism. It has an alphanumeric lock. We need the password to get in…"

In response, Mazan gently reached out and pulled the engineer behind her. "Don't worry, Janja…I've got the password right here."

She dialed up the settings on her phaser carbine and everyone, realizing what she was about to do, stepped back. Then she aimed and fired at the hatch, blowing it open. As smoke wafted up into the still cool air of the old missile complex from the collapsed door, Madden shined his light through the opening to reveal a ladder that led down into the darkness.

"Follow me," Etana said as she stepped through the portal and began to climb down the ladder.

A few minutes later, the landing party found itself standing inside an underground room filled with mid-twenty-first century equipment, consoles and flat screen monitors. As their beams illuminated the room, they discovered that one entire wall was dominated by a huge metal blast door that was closed shut. Looking up, Janja noticed that the ceiling had partially collapsed. Chunks of concrete and several fallen beams had destroyed some of the equipment. Of course, none of the consoles were active.

"Lt. Mazan!" Topell, the Andorian MACO Staff Sergeant barked. "Over here!"

Everyone moved toward the soldier's voice to find the skeletal remains of a human body pinned beneath some rubble.

Rex, in a hushed voice, asked, "Could this be Cochrane's remains?"

"Perhaps a DNA test could tell us the answer to that question, Commander," Mazan observed.

Somewhat rattled by the signs of death, Rad crept carefully toward the immense blast door. Before he began to scan what was behind the door, he glanced at a nearby desk that was littered with debris and vinyl schematics. There was also an image carefully preserved behind some glass that showed a man who looked like the Zephram Cochrane of Federation Earth standing next to what appeared to have been his warp ship.

Still struggling to come to grips with the fact that the man who'd designed the first warp ship for humanity on his side of the galaxy had a doppelganger on Alliance Earth who'd done the same, Janja quietly buried his discomfort and said, "The blast door here was designed to protect the control room when the missile was launched."

"There should be some kind of manual release for it, right?" Rex asked.

Janja examined the hatch closely before he began to run his hand along the edge of the blast door. Suddenly, when he touched a small box, a satisfied smile dawned on his face. "Got it, Salayna," he murmured. He peeked at a tiny label that stated 'emergency use only' on a box that had several pneumatic tubes and a hydraulic lever attached to it. The engineer then pulled down the lever.

Surprisingly, there was a hissing sound shortly before the blast door slowly slid down into the floor, revealing the missile silo itself to the entire landing party.

Moments later, Rad, Rex, Droxanne and Mazan stepped onto the catwalk, which circled the silo walls. Standing virtually untouched by the ravages of time was the warp ship, almost an exact duplicate of the ship every Federation elementary school child had been introduced to in the first grade.

"The Phoenix," Salayna, Droxanne and Jonja breathed simultaneously.

They stood there for several moments trying to accept what they were seeing with their very own eyes. Then Rad, the most practical of them all, shook himself out of his stupor first. "We need to lock down that radiation leak before we can bring the captain down here to see this. Simmons! Merkel! You're with me!" he shouted to his engineering team.

Minutes later, after he and his team had climbed down the ladders toward the rocket engines, he called for Rex, Mazan and Droxanne to join him.

Once they had reached him, he said, "Cochrane was going to use this solid rocket booster to lift the ship into orbit. Everything depended on these old chemical engines to work before he could initiate the warp drive." He paused for a brief moment before he continued his explanation. "Now here's the problem..."

He then showed them a point on the fuselage where they saw a large section of the spaceframe had been damaged, revealing broken conduit lines and wires that now led to nothing.

"Those conduits carried the graphite that was used to control the nuclear reaction of the core he had taken from the nuclear warhead. Since it's just sitting here in this silo and won't be flying anywhere, I've had Simmons and Merkel remove the warhead. They'll take it from here on one of our shuttles and simply dump it in a trajectory that will take it into the sun."

"That's good news, Janja," Rex said. "I know you haven't had much time to study this ship but based on what you've seen so far, do you think it would have worked?"

He nodded fervently. "Without a doubt. My scans have shown that this ship would have worked exactly like the Phoenix did on our side of the galaxy. Of course, it isn't an exact duplicate of our Phoenix. These people never discovered transparent aluminum, so they used very thick fused silica glass for the windshield. They also decided to use titanium shutters to cover the windshield before the ship entered warp and would rely on their cameras to provide them an outside view. Even so, Salayna, Alliance Earth should have had warp propulsion years ago."

Rex sighed heavily in response. "Well, then…I think we've stumbled onto the scene of a crime that had occurred a long time ago. Apparently, a powerful alien race had wanted to make certain that the humans on this side of the galaxy wouldn't develop a means of space propulsion that disrupted the old order, a race that had no qualms about killing to stop Cochrane in his tracks."

"Then, in that case, we'd better make sure our security is as tight as can be," Mazan suggested as she gripped her phaser carbine tightly.

#

February 2, 2248

Missile Control Room, Bozeman, Montana, 0130, Local Time

"Captain! Welcome to the silo! Although I'm sure you received an inoculation for radiation, the scrubbers Janja brought down from the ship have already cleared the contamination."

Tynen's grin matched Rex's. "Thank you, Commander."

As the Trill officer approached him, she asked, "V'Lar didn't come down with you?"

He shook his head. "With both you and me off the ship, she didn't want to leave her without one of the senior officers on board. Besides, she knew this would have more of an emotional tie for me than it would for her."

"I understand, sir."

He panned the room and saw that it was a far cry in its current state from the description of it being the proverbial crypt the landing party had told him earlier. Now the consoles that had survived were humming with power and the place was well lit. "Rex, were you able to bring their computer systems back on-line?

"Aye, Captain. They made their machines pretty sturdy back then. And although their trinary language is pretty archaic, I believe we have a good handle on it now."

"Good," he said as he stepped through the open blast door into the silo proper where the Phoenix and her launch vehicle had stood quietly as a sentinel for nearly two centuries.

"Remarkable," he whispered as he studied the warp test ship. She almost appeared as if she was ready to launch at a moment's notice except for the fact that the fifty foot long panels of titanium had been removed to reveal the primitive warp nacelles tucked inside the craft. Once in space, the nacelles would slowly extend outward from their alcoves on either side of the ship right before the warp core was activated to create the subspace bubble to propel the ship at superluminal speeds.

He continued to stare at the doppelganger of the starship everyone in the Federation had seen countless times in the annals of history. "Rex, what about the skeleton you'd found?"

"We've sent the remains to the Dehner. They'll work with Earth Force to see if this Cochrane had any surviving family members to run a DNA comparison against them."

Tynen simply nodded as he continued to stare at the Phoenix.

"Captain," Rex asked softly, "is there something on your mind?"

He sighed. "I think finding this ship at this time with all that's going on involving the Minbari and our preparations to fight them could make our lives a whole lot more difficult, Salayna. V'Lar used the ship's computer to analyze the data that Commodore Acaltha and his little fleet had taken from the Minbari ships they'd captured. The readings you'd taken of the bombardment that had wiped out Bozeman matched the heavy weapons signature of a Vorlon heavy cruiser according to the Minbari database."

"Jason," she said, her voice low, "who or what are the Vorlons?"

"We don't know much about them. Even so, we probably know more about them than the Alliance Earth people. They are an elder race probably along the lines of the Melkotians or the Medusans, so they have a corporeal form unlike the Organians. They have apparently taken the Minbari as a client race. Our contacts with the other races that have long had relations with Alliance Earth have also confirmed the Vorlons have been known to interfere in the development of some of the other races on this side of the galaxy. And it seems they probably have interfered in the development of Alliance Earth considering the portion of the unknown life form you found during your scan of Prescott and the attack on this facility nearly two centuries ago. It seems plain on its face that the Vorlons wanted the races under their influence to use technology that meets their criteria of what is 'proper.' And any technology that is an anathema to their world view, they squash it quickly and ruthlessly."

"Do you think if they discovered what we've found here, they'd come back and try to finish the job?"

He carefully considered her question for several moments before he shook his head. "No. That genie is out of the bottle now. With all of the Alpha Quadrant starships in Alliance Earth space, there'd be no way for the Vorlons to know whether Alliance Earth, or any of the other races, had traded with the Klingons or us to obtain the schematics for a warp drive. That said, it always pays to be cautious. Rex, I want you to install a planetary shield generator near here. I'll also order the Corps of Engineers to install a planetary phaser battery along with a photon torpedo battery in the vicinity to help discourage a return visit from the Vorlons." Then he drew a deep breath and said, "The harder decision is whether we should tell Earth Alliance about what we've found here and the proper way to do that."

"Jason," Rex said, "I don't see that we have much of a choice. The Prime Directive doesn't apply here. Their own Cochrane developed this technology separate from us."

"I know, Salayna. However, who actually owns this Cochrane's technology? We probably should have one of our JAG officers analyze Alliance Earth law to figure that out. Would ownership pass to his family? Or would Alliance Earth simply confiscate the technology? Although the decision is way above our paygrades, I know the Federation would try and do the right thing. Another consideration we need to keep in mind is should we tell the Klingons about this? Again, that's another decision above our paygrades."

"True," Rex admitted. "Even so, I'd suspect you'd advise the brass we should tell the Klingons about it."

"You're right, Salayna. If we're allies and we have to trust each other to survive then we should come clean. If the Vorlons do get riled up because we found this Phoenix and attack the Klingons as well as us, I'd be quite upset if I were the Klingons and weren't told about it."

"Maybe we should just bury this entire place, walk away, and forget we'd ever found it."

He gave her a small smile and gently gripped her left shoulder with his right hand. "Rex, we're Starfleet. We're don't turn our backs on our mandate of exploration and the expansion of knowledge for all members of the Federation. That's what it means to boldly go where no one has gone before. Sometimes, that's the difficult thing to do. However, it's always the right thing to do."

Then he blinked twice and brooded for a moment before he softly repeated the word, "Always."

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