Star Trek Federation: The First 150 Years

by David A. Goodman

  “When I came home,” Henry Archer related in the interview, “I walked into the kitchen to find my son and the world’s most famous man working on the innards of the ice maker. Cochrane turned to me and said, ‘Hi, when I’m done with this, I want to talk to you about building your engine.’”

  ABOVE: Henry Archer and his eight-year-old son Jonathan.

  Once Henry Archer was on board, Cochrane put him in charge of a development team that immediately began crunching the numbers to bring Archer’s plan to fruition. They estimated the engine would take twenty-five years to build. Cochrane then brought the plan to the United Earth Government, and, as he predicted, they immediately supported it. “They weren’t going to say no to me,” he said.

  The twenty-five-year plan commenced with a slow but steady stream of help from the Vulcans. But this changed when the Vulcan High Command became aware of Cochrane’s plan, the substance of which was a cause of great concern.

  Minister V’Las, a rising star in the High Command, made a compelling case supported by logical arguments that they were facing a very different problem than the one they faced when they discovered Earth. “When we first came upon them,” V’Las said in a secret speech to the High Command, “we were preventing a savage race from unnaturally launching themselves to the center of galactic affairs. Now we are faced with the possibilities that the Earthlings will be adversaries.”

  Indeed, in less than one hundred years, the Human race had solved the problems that took 1,500 years for Vulcan to conquer. “If Earth succeeds in outpacing Vulcan technologically,” V’Las continued, “we might find ourselves dominated by an inferior race.” This argument found adherents; although Vulcans do their best to bury it, they can feel fear.

  ABOVE: Minister V’Las, a rising star in the Vulcan High Command, who would eventually become its administrator.

  ABOVE: Zebulon Carter was a twenty-first-century Earthling who pulled off one of the greatest feats in the history of spycraft: he passed himself off as a Vulcan. In 2073, the American government, worried that the Vulcans had secret plans for conquest over Earth, had Carter undergo surgery; he was given passage on the E.C.S. North Star, on a trade route that took it to Vulcan. Once on the planet, Carter slipped off the ship and began his life as a Vulcan. His mission was to discover what ulterior motives the Vulcans had. He never reported back. His journal was found on Vulcan in 2252 and returned to Earth. These are selected passages from his journal, which indicate he found employment as a janitor in the High Command. The passages suggest that Carter may have “gone native,” and the journal appears a microcosm for the civilizing effect the Vulcans had on the Human race in general.

  Solkar, still the ambassador to Earth, did not agree with V’Las’s assessment. He found the slow and steady progress the Humans were making agreeable and appropriate, and thought there was no need to change policy, but the High Command overruled him. They voted on a plan to slow down to a trickle any further help to the Humans on their Warp 5 project, but to do so without seriously jeopardizing Human-Vulcan relations. It was a delicate line to walk, and the High Command decided to replace Solkar with a new ambassador to Earth to oversee this change in policy.

  The choice was a member of the Vulcan Diplomatic Corps named Soval. He was specifically chosen because he had begun his career in military intelligence, serving as part of the occupation force on Weytahn, a planetoid on the border between the Andorian and Vulcan systems that was the source of a long dispute. The Andorians had terraformed and colonized Weytahn, and the Vulcans tried to occupy it due to concerns that it was a secret base for a planned military action against them. Soval became an authority on the Andorians and had a hand in the territorial compromise that brought peace to Weytahn. When he transferred to the diplomatic corps, he became a vital resource in Vulcan dealings with Andoria.

  When V’Las approached Soval about the assignment to Earth, he drew connections between the violent, arrogant Andorians and the citizens of Earth. “Minister V’Las drew many parallels between Andoria and Earth,” Soval wrote to his wife, informing her of his occupation change. “I have seen many comrades die at the hands of the Andorians. It is agreeable to me that I might help prevent another species from having that kind of destructive influence in the galaxy.”

  By the time Soval made it to Earth, however, Cochrane had already managed to get his project under way. Although the Warp 5 project would take five years longer than the original twenty-five-year plan had predicted, the change in Vulcan policy would not prevent its completion. Within two years of meeting Henry Archer, the ground was broken on the Warp 5 complex—on the same site as the missile complex where the Phoenix was built. The building would eventually house 20,000 employees—all working on this one massive undertaking.

  But, as Cochrane predicted, he did not see his dream realized. The stress of the undertaking had further deteriorated his health. He believed his time had come, and did not seek the aid of doctors. Instead, one night, he took a small warp ship his company had designed (but never marketed) and left Earth, never to be seen again. Suddenly, the engine that would put Humankind in the center of the Galaxy was in the hands of a young academic, and, eventually, the academic’s son—the boy who told Zefram Cochrane to fix the refrigerator.

  ABOVE: The opening page of the treaty between Vulcan and Earth. Although the preamble seems to imply two parties on an equal footing, the key phrase “counsel on the internal affairs of the receiving party” guaranteed that Vulcan would have influence over Earth’s internal affairs.

  ABOVE: Nathan Samuels speaking at the first meeting of what would become the Coalition of Planets.

  CHAPTER I

  * * *

  FIRST STEPS

  * * *

  2120-2155

  * * *

  “Up until about a hundred years ago … there was one question that burned in every Human: ‘Are we alone?’ Our generation is privileged to know the answer to that question.”

  —Jonathan Archer, speech to the delegates of the Coalition of Planets, 2154

  On Earth, the decades following the ground-breaking on the Warp 5 project would be prosperous and relatively uneventful. Humanity’s initial rush of desire to get into space went largely unfulfilled; though ships populated by families plied the trade routes and a few other Humans traded places with friendly alien species through exchange programs, such as the Inter-Species Medical Exchange, the limits that technology placed on space exploration kept most Humans at home.

  But the Warp 5 engine was set to change all that. It was ironic, then, that just a few weeks from the scheduled launch of the ship that was to open up the Galaxy, an unforeseen incident put Earth at the center of interstellar affairs. It led to a completely unexpected chain of events that would—over the course of only a few years—conclude with Humanity itself founding the Coalition of Planets, the forerunner of the Federation.

  BROKEN BOW

  As he would relate in countless interviews with media outlets, Richard Moore did not expect to make history as he sat at his kitchen table the morning of April 1, 2151, eating his breakfast of biscuits and gravy. “I’m a corn farmer,” he said, “the only thing on my mind was corn.”

  His breakfast was suddenly interrupted by the sound of a crash. “I ran outside, saw the smoke and these flashes in the distance, and I think, ‘I’m bein’ invaded.” Though it had been almost a century since alien beings first made contact with Earth, Moore was among the great majority of Humans who had never seen one in person. He had more than once thought about joining Terra Prime, a group that advocated an alien-free Earth, but he didn’t think of himself as being political. His only worry that morning was his family farm. “I got my plasma rifle. Those monsters weren’t goin’ to use their brain-sucking weapons on me and take my land.”

  Moore related that he was about fifty feet away when the farm’s methane storage tank exploded. When he reached the rubble, there it was. “It was a monster…” he said, “but it also kinda looked lik
e a guy. It had long hair and these weird ridges on its forehead, and it shouted at me. I couldn’t understand what in heck it was saying, but I could tell it was angry.”

  Moore tried to warn it off, but the creature kept coming, so Moore aimed his rifle and fired. “First time I ever shot anything besides crows or rats,” Moore said. The plasma bolt hit the alien dead in the chest, and it flew back into the corn stalks. Thus, a Human encountered a Klingon for the first time. It was not unlike the many future engagements the two species would have.

  The Klingon’s name was Klaang, and he was a member of a species considered one of the most dangerous in the Alpha Quadrant. The Klingons referred to themselves as a “warrior race,” and, like Surak did for the Vulcans, one Klingon had set the tone for their philosophy. An ancient warrior, Kahless, united a disparate people by emphasizing a unique code of honor, including a complex mythology surrounding war and death.

  Kahless’s teachings created a very unified but aggressive society that, when it finally made it into space, saw other races as inferior. This was a convenient philosophy because the Klingon Empire required resources to expand. At the time of Klaang’s crash, the Klingons were much further advanced technologically than Humanity. Had it not been for the Vulcan stewardship, Earth quickly would have been added to the Empire.

  Species like the Klingons were one of many reasons Vulcan Ambassador Soval had kept a strong hand in Human affairs, holding them back from fully becoming part of the galactic community for as long as he could. “It was known to anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the Klingons,” Soval said, in his report to his superiors about the encounter, “that they didn’t just accept death, but glorified it, especially when that Klingon had died doing his duty.” Conversely, being spared by an enemy was dishonorable.

  When Klaang crashed in Moore’s cornfield, he had been carrying secret information back to the High Council, the Klingons’ ruling body. (The information, it would turn out, proved that outsiders were fomenting a civil war within the Empire.) Though Klaang’s wounds were treatable, Soval and the Vulcans knew enough about Klingon culture to understand that it would be better to let him die and take his body back to Qo’noS (pronounced “Kronos”), the Klingon Homeworld, as the Empire demanded.

  “If this situation is mishandled,” Soval said to his superiors, “Humans and Klingons could be in conflict for generations.” Soval strongly suggested to the United Earth Government that the Vulcans take over the disposition of Klaang’s body. Soval also hoped that his management of the situation with Klaang would provide him another opportunity to hold Humans back a little longer (the slowing of the Vulcan’s initial help had only managed to extend the Warp 5 project for an extra five years). He was trying to protect them from a race of people that he felt they weren’t ready to understand. But his warnings went unheeded; the Humans had grown impatient and Vulcan’s influence was waning. Humanity could now do what it wanted; it was about to have its own Warp 5 ship.

  ABOVE: Traditional Klingon clothing and weaponry, circa 2150.

  THE NX PROJECT AND STARFLEET COMMAND

  “In its infancy, the Warp 5 project faced two almost-crushing setbacks,” wrote Kotaro Tasaki, the director of the project for most of its thirty years. “When Cochrane disappeared,” Tasaki said in the official history of the project, “I figured we were done, but Henry said we could continue. So we did, and then Henry got sick.”

  In the first year of the project, Archer developed Clarke’s disease, a degenerative condition of the brain. Archer deteriorated into hallucinations quickly and died within a few years of being diagnosed.

  “I was left in charge,” Tasaki said. “I didn’t think I was up to it, and I wanted to just go home. I was nothing compared to these great men. But they had left detailed plans, and I felt I couldn’t let them down.”

  Along with the development of the technologies to build the engine and the first Warp 5 ship (called the NX program), the projects mission also included the training of crews to pilot the ship. Cochrane and Archer’s plan was to build a succession of engines, testing them in actual space travel. The United Earth Government would then have the ability to commission ships using these intermediate engines, and the data collected from the practical application of these experimental engines would then be fed back into the program for the next step. United Earth would be dependent on the program to provide personnel to operate the ships, and Cochrane and Archer had planned to formalize the crews under a military structure.

  Thus, Starfleet Command was born. It was an institution that would oversee Humankind’s exploration of the Galaxy. But Starfleet was unlike previous military organizations. Given the limited amount of space aboard starships, the crews would need to have overlapping areas of knowledge in order to provide the necessary support in critical situations.

  “A crew member’s area of knowledge,” Henry Archer wrote in his detailed explanation of Starfleet, “could not begin and end with how to fire a gun.” As a result, Starfleet crew members were given exceptional educations. This had the unintended consequence that the people on the ships of Earth had an unusual intellectual openness, which was fortunate given what was to become the first mission of the first Warp 5 ship, the Enterprise NX-01. Including its commander Jonathan Archer.

  ABOVE: The main hall of the Klingon High Council on Qo’noS.

  ABOVE: The final approved design of the first Warp 5 starship, the Enterprise NX-01.

  JONATHAN ARCHER

  There were plenty of circumstances in his life that led Jonathan Archer into space. His father, Henry Archer, designed warp engines, and as a child Jonathan had met Zefram Cochrane, the world’s most famous astronaut, several times. And because of his father’s crucial role in the development of warp technology, young Jonathan developed many close relationships with the premier scientists of the day, including Emory Erickson, who would invent the first molecular transporter. All of these factors may have opened his mind to the idea of scientific exploration, but Archer’s many biographers agree that the tipping point was the death of his father: determination to connect with his lost parent drove Archer’s achievements.

  Emory Erickson’s daughter, in a book she wrote about her father, relayed a comment the revered scientist made about Archer. “Dad said Jonathan didn’t just want to be on the first ship with his father’s engine; he needed to be its captain.”

  Archer was also driven to prove that Humanity deserved its place in outer space. For many years, as a child and well into adulthood, Archer nursed a grudge against the Vulcans. “If the Vulcans hadn’t been so stingy,” Archer wrote in a letter to his mother, “Dad might have lived to see his dream come true.”

  Accepted at Starfleet and the NX program at the age of twenty, Archer proved himself to be a valuable resource. “This kid [Archer] just told me what was wrong with the reactor,” wrote Matthew Jefferies, an engineer on the project, in a memo to Archers superior officer, “and he was right. If he wants to come over to engineering, I’d love to have him.”

  But Archer wanted to be a pilot, and as the NX test program proceeded, he rose through the ranks, testing engines and test-flying ships, until he was one of the top four choices to command the Warp 5 ship. (The paradoxical nature of the NX program was that because the ship was more advanced than anything previously built, the best choices for the top spot of captain had served most of their duty on Earth or within the solar system.)

  Throughout his initial assignments, Archer was known as a by-the-book officer. He changed, however, after an accident with the intermediate engine that was set to break the Warp 2 barrier. The design of Henry Archer’s engine was initially blamed for the accident, and the NX program—many years in—was threatened with being sent back to the drawing board. Archer, with the assistance of another pilot, J. G. Robinson, stole a prototype ship and proved that his father’s engine design was sound. He also proved he knew how to take initiative.

  This incident transformed both his self-image and the i
mpression his superiors had of him, and over time helped create a different officer. “I no longer have concerns about Commander Archer,” his superior officer Admiral Maxwell Forrest wrote in his recommendation for Archer’s promotion to captain. “He is the best candidate to command Enterprise.”

  ABOVE: Emory Erickson owed the success of his invention, the molecular transporter, to many of the scientific breakthroughs that Cochrane made in inventing warp drive. Erickson would face personal tragedy later in his life when he lost his son in a transporter accident.

  Although Forrest no longer had concerns, Archer’s developing decisiveness worried the Vulcans. Soval openly lobbied for another candidate, Captain Gardner, whom Soval saw as “less impulsive.” And Soval believed his concerns were confirmed when Archer’s first act as the newly commissioned captain of the Enterprise was convincing Admiral Forrest to save Klaang’s life and let Enterprise return him to his homeworld. This would be the ship’s first mission.

  Soval, knowing that he was unable to stop the launch of Enterprise or its first mission, used his still considerable influence to place one of his subordinates, Subcommander T’Pol, on the ship. “Soval has given me instructions to specifically help temper Archer’s impulsiveness,” T’Pol wrote in her personal log on her first day on Enterprise. “After a few minutes with the captain I have doubts that I will succeed in this endeavor.” But she was wrong. T’Pol did in the end play a large role in helping Archer safely return Klaang to the Klingons without triggering an immediate conflict. (Archer’s future interactions with the Klingons would not be as “friendly”; more than once he would go up against them, to the point that he was branded a criminal by the Empire.)