(note: this story takes place immediately before the events of the Voyager two-part episode "Future's End")
Henry Starling had done it. He had successfully buttressed the Western hemisphere from the awful effects of the Eugenics Wars, and he owed it all to a starship that had crashed in his backyard, a starship that hailed from the far future, and given him an edge in the budding wars of the future, the wars of the mind, of technology...
In the Asian lands there had been a man named Khan, and he had dominated the power struggles there in ways the modern world had not been prepared for, the product of genetic engineering that made him stronger and smarter than any man who had ever lived. And he had not been the only one. There had also been a man named Vlad, who had done much the same throughout the Baltics, and had designs for...elsewhere. This was to say nothing of the African theater, where the worst of...everything, had occurred.
But Starling had at last won. He had designed the ship that sent the survivors of these...men, into space. Banished. Forever.
It was Vlad who had considered himself Starling's rival. In the United States of that time, its presidents had emerged from the Cold War with the chilling knowledge that they were equally forced to confront these supermen, and only one of them, the one called Vlad, had set his sights directly on them. He scoffed at the presidents. He saw them come and go, small men who depended on elections to gain power, and who were so easily undermined in the courts of public opinion. But he saw Starling as different, obviously. He saw Starling as having true power.
Starling, who had ushered in new ages of innovation for decades, who had significantly aided the NASA programs and their successes, not a single failure! in an endless procession of missions into space. Vlad had seen this as the new frontier, and that for all their power his brethren held no sway in that realm. They played checkers while Starling played chess. And so he positioned himself against Starling.
What Vlad couldn't know was that Starling spent much of his time obsessing over someone else entirely, a man named Braxton, the pilot of the starship that had created his technological empire, who had gone missing, and had never been found, off the grid, even Starling's. And Starling could not allow this to continue forever, for a Braxton left to his own devices would surely one day pose his own threat, one far deadlier than any superman...
It was this distracted Starling who blinked as Vlad set the world on the brink, set a course for invasion, the spark that would light the fire of another world war, while the latest president struggled to come up with a response. Vlad even proposed a fight, an actual, physical fight, not against the president, but Starling, one he knew beyond question he would win. No one, in the real world, need possess physical prowess anymore, not to enjoy power, and this Vlad had realized before even Khan, had so frustrated him, and he saw the laughable prospect of a fight with Henry Starling as exactly the image that would win him the world...
But Starling, his eye on a man who in all likelihood was currently living the life of a homeless bum, separated from all his advantages, had already developed the only weapon he needed, a new ship, a ship that could place all the supermen in stasis and then off into the deep reaches of space, and then...He turned his eye toward the world, the mundane, ordinary world, long enough to catch the crisis unfolding on the news, and the challenge issued by Vlad against him.
And he accepted!
So of course he cheated. Shamelessly. Vlad never saw it coming. Starling pulled a gadget out of his pocket, casually, and unexpectedly fried the life right out of Vlad, in an instant. Starling hadn't meant to kill him, just as the warlords in Africa hadn't meant to starve out their superman, along with everyone else, but that's how it turned out. Starling didn't understand all the technology, even decades later, that he'd stumbled upon, modified, exploited, developed over the years, inventing the modern world.
Which, very soon after he'd won, sent the last of them into space...the future caught up with him. And then, a few years after that, another world war did happen. But, in a missile silo, in Montana, a man had tinkered with his own vision just long enough to invent humanity's quantum leap, the warp engine, the one thing that always eluded Henry Starling, and...
