"GOLDEN, CHRISTIE - THE LAST ROUND-UP" - читать интересную книгу автора (Golden Christie)

expression he had never seen on visages that were more accustomed to not
revealing their emotions at all, lest they suffer for it.

"It will not be in my lifetime. Nor in hers," he said, pointing to an
infant in her mother's arms. "Nor in her child's. But one day, I
promise, it will happen.

"I swear to you by the beauty of the Great Stone--one day, we will go
home."

Chapter One.

It was a dead world.

It had never supported life of its own. The planet known in Federation
records as Polluxara IV had no intelligent life that might interfere
with the Prime Directive. It sported not so much as a microbe, but
within its lifeless, rocky exterior had once flowed a rich vein of what
was then one of the most precious substances in the universe--dilithium.

It was this deposit that had led Earth, almost a hundred and fifty years
ago, to establish a colony in order to mine the mineral.

But now, once again, Polluxara IV was lifeless, save for the
twenty-seven souls that stood safely encased in environmental suits on
its still-radioactive exterior.

Captain James Tiberius Kirk, once Admiral Kirk, and earlier and since
captain of the U. S.S. Enterprise, was one of the twenty-seven. The
others were much younger and, at this moment, were quieter than he had
ever heard them.

Kirk wasn't surprised. Standing at the site of a great tragedy had that
effect.

Towering above them were the ruins of what had once been a colony of
vital importance to a pre-Federation Earth. There remained only sharp
shards of metal and other materials, warped, melted, twisted, and
pulverized. The bodies were long gone, of course. What the Earth forces
could come and retrieve to honor with a hero's burial had been so
gathered, decades past. But there hadn't been enough remains to bury of
most of them; hadn't been enough to find.

Kirk didn't speak immediately after they materialized. He let the cadets
look around and absorb what they saw for themselves.

The wide-eyed solemnity he saw in their faces--a mixture of species that
would have stunned those who had died here a century ago--made him nod
slightly in approval.