Garm Bel Iblis
Commodore
Chapter: I find myself in a precarious situation
When I was constructed at Utopia, it was a time of great haste. The Klingons had abrogated the Khitomer Accords, the Romulans and the Cardassians had both suffered crippling defeats in the Gamma quadrant, and from all accounts, the Dominion was poised to strike the Federation in all out conflict. But a threat far greater lurked in the distant corner of the galaxy…
Stardate 50893.5. Picard said it was the day he’s dreaded for six years. His logs are filed away in my buffers and I send out copies to the Starfleet Archives facility on Neptune. I’d only been out in space for eleven months and twenty-nine days. We were finished with the shakedown, all the final tests and simulations had been run. Word came from Starfleet Command that I was officially “ready for action.”
And Starfleet was holding us back. Given the dark turns that have effected the quadrant over the last two years, I’m a ship bred for war, ready to tackle the Federation’s foes and defend the defenseless.
“Given your history with the Borg,” Admiral Hayes said, “we can’t risk introducing an unstable element into a critical situation.”
So there we were, patrolling the Neutral Zone, a dead zone of space twenty light-years wide. There hadn’t been as much as a peep from the Romulans since the Tal-Shiar-Obsidian Order fiasco at the Omarion Nebula.
Was anyone listening? Did anyone know how to listen? The new ships of the line presented a revolutionary new piece of technology. Bio-neural fibers augmented the computer operations of starships. It started with the Intrepid from what I can tell. The prototype of the Intrepid-Class was ‘lonely.’ I linked up with it during our runs through the Zantari Maze on a warp drive balancing mission before I was officially let go from the docks at Utopia. Since those early days, all new vessels were equipped with the bio-neural software packs and the communications between vessels is at an all time high.
The first time this became a monumental event was at the Battle of Sector Zero Zero One.
Picard found the gumption to break orders and set a course for Earth and the running battle that Starfleet was losing. From our time together, I’ve found Jean-Luc Picard to be a most impressive officer. Of the one thousand people aboard he’s the most dedicated, passionate person serving. His logs are concise and void of the politics that I’ve read in the subspace traffic. When he ordered the course for home, my entire space frame shook as we made the dozen and a half light-year race for the Terran system. Under Hawk’s tender control, we swept in, saved the crew of the Defiant and engaged the Borg.
Everyone thought it was a great victory, a Borg cube destroyed by the Federation. Our new weapons in conjunction with Picard’s intimate knowledge of the Collective allowed us to win the day. But that victory was short lived. We found ourselves in the mid twenty first century and those first wounds were inflicted upon me.
Chapter Two: Collective Defense.
Nanoprobes. Microscopic machines that abhor nature and mutilate flesh and technology. I was just another victim of the Borg’s actions on April 4, 2063. It started with a handful of drones. My sensors were knocked out of alignment when we chased the sphere into the temporal anomaly. Given the assimilation rate that took the lives of hundreds of Enterprise personnel, best estimates projected only seven drones beamed aboard at the same moment their ship was obliterated.
They started in the lower engineering decks.
Two crewmembers, Paul Porter and Olivia Eiger were checking out faulty environmental controls. The ship’s temperature had gone up to 39.1 c (“Like a Borg ship”) it would later be determined. They were the first to be taken and turned into drones. I watched as the assimilation process tore apart their flesh and their mutilated bodies were poisoned with technological applications. The Borg drones started on Deck 16 and branched out to the rest of the ship. The assimilation of my systems was a torture to endure. Once the process began, Borg systems infected every conduit, every gel pack and every circuit they came in to contact with.
Then I heard them.
The voice of the Collective, while limited to the ship, was ever-present. The crew fought back in a hopeless assault. The Borg quickly adapted to their weapons. When it was discovered the Borg were trying to configured the deflector array into a homing beacon, the dish had been blown away from the hull and destroyed. Linked to the drones, I felt them die as the antiproton explosion erupted over the war-ravaged Earth.
When Picard set the self-destruct, I eagerly awaited the peace that the severing of the connection to the hive mind would bring.
Likewise when Data destroyed the plasma conduit, I felt the drones vaporize and die. Dozens of former Enterprise personnel perished in the blast itself and the destruction of their queen. Still infected, I felt every life rip away from the land of the living.
This was the beginning of my tortures of war.
Chapter III: The War to End All Wars
I spent three weeks at McKinley Station. Less than a year in service and an entire refit and repair was needed to get rid of the Borg infestation. Even now, all these years later, remnants of the Collective are still present deep within my systems. A proper repair was never completed on key systems during that time, because a matter of days later, the Dominion finally entered the Alpha quadrant en masse. Allying with the Cardassians they made themselves the dominant force in the quadrant. We mobilized immediately to the border regions and helped Starfleet bolster the losses we’d taken to the Borg and the recent conflict with the Klingons.
Once again I was pressed into battle. Again and again we fought the Jem’Hadar. They boarded and killed, rammed their ships into me and tried to kill as many as possible with little regard to their own lives.
Defeat after defeat we suffered in those early months of the war. We’d been placed on detached service, evacuating civilians and responding to distress calls. But time and again I watched my crewmembers die. From exploding EPS grids, to hull breaches, to the unforgiving plasma disruption pulse of a Jem’Hadar rifle, I watched all of them die and those deaths were recorded in my databases. I suffered so much damage t the Battle of Rigel, La Forge thought we’d never get moving again. Commander Data linked his neural net into mine and together we made the necessary adjustments to the computer pathways and restored the warp drive, barely escaping certain destruction when a protomatter weapon was detonated by a derelict Cardassian cruiser.
After another harrowingly rushed repair at the Proxima Yards we were thrown out into the wilderness again. After two long years, we’d fought on every front, did our bit for king and country. When the war ended it finally seemed we were getting back to our precepts: Exploring strange new worlds.
That lasted a couple of hours.
<><><>
We hit the Bak’u system at 0427 on 52905.5. The Dominion War had been over for six days, the ink on the treaty not even dry and we were faced with corruption at the highest levels of Starfleet. The outright theft of a world. Once again I was called to battle, my wounds still not fully healed. Hell, we didn’t have a restock of quantum torpedoes, we were using old Mark V photon weapons. Damned things barely passed the safety checks for clearance through the tubes. You’ve never experienced destruction until you’ve bore witness to the collision of a warp reactor detonating against an isoloytic subspace tear. That coupled with the use of the ram scoop to essentially throw flammable chemicals against an enemy ship to ignite and cripple them.
It was during this battle that I officially lost my faith in Commander William T. Riker.
When I was brought online, the crew logs and historical records from my predecessor, the Enterprise-D were downloaded into my mainframe. Like any good ship, I quickly accessed the data trying to acclimate myself to my shipmates. Riker’s file scared me. His battle tactics were hailed as revolutionary and unpredictable.
Unpredictable they were. Dangerous too. As far back as 46235.7 he let two salvaged Klingons birds of prey, crewed by a bunch of Ferengi, cripple and capture the ‘D’. The man fired one shot! A “point seven-five burst” to “get their attention.” Two years later the Duras sisters got a hold of the Enterprise’s shield frequencies and started firing madly, Riker again, fired one phaser shot and then came up with some technological solution to getting the Klingon’s shields down. This resulted in the loss of half the ship to a core breach and the primary hull crashed on a planet’s surface.
After reading this, you can imagine my feelings when the first Son’a photon detonations struck against the shields and the man in charge was Will Riker.
Again battered beyond recognition, I limped out of the Briar Patch and had to be warp-towed home by the Ticonderoga. On 53405 I officially set the record for the youngest ship in service to spend the most time in space dock.
<><><>
We cleared spacedock on 53001.4 and were sent to the Badlands, looking for traces of Breen incursions. It was a tumultuous but relatively peaceful time. We took some plasma damage and put in at Deep Space Nine for repairs. After a series of crises there, we uncovered a Jem’Hadar plot to destroy the station but also found an emissary from the Dominion, sent to the Alpha quadrant to make peace. It was the first fleet action we’d partaken in for months. It felt good to be a large group again. When the crises was over, a quiet calm finally prevailed. We spent six weeks at Hanoran II on an archeological dig, then another six months charting the old subspace damage in the Lantaru Sector. For nearly a year after that we were back to our mission to seek out new worlds and explore the unknown.
We made contact with seventeen new races, discovered forty-seven new subspace anomalies, and charted twelve hundred fifty light-years in that two-year span.
I was just starting to breath easy when it all went out the airlock.
Chapter III: Fall of an Empire
On 56844.9, acting on orders, we swung into standard orbit around Romulus. After a stopover at Kolarus we picked up a stray android which ended up compromising my entire security net and downloading the entire Fleet tactical plans for ship movements spanning twenty-nine sectors of Federation territory. “B4” he was arrogantly called, a prototype to Commander Data, built by Dr. Soong and found by the new Romulan praetor, Shinzon. As soon as the tactical data was compromised I alert Commanders Data and La Forge and they rescued the captain from the clutches of that Reman idiot. Hell, it wasn’t even a Reman, but that’s another story.
Once again I was violated, information ripped from me, and again we charged off to battle. When Shinzon turned out to be the said idiot I described him as, we fired up the warp drive and made a beeline for Starfleet Taskforce Omega. I eagerly awaiting the rendezvous with my brothers and sisters of the fleet, knowing full well, the cloaked Reman Warbird Scimitar was hot on our trail.
And they knew just when to hit us. We had just crossed into the Baeson Rift when the first disruptor blasts from the warbird struck the warp engines.
<><><>
Falling out of warp in the middle of a plasma field is not pleasant. Injectors were clogged, systems were down and we were taking fire from a cloaked ship. Retelling of the so-called Battle of the Baeson Rift is a long arduous tale that I’m tired of telling. Many died, many were maimed and Picard himself ordered a ramming course that crippled the Scimitar and even attempted an auto destruct.
Then I lost my friend.
Data and I had forged a bond when he had linked into my systems years ago and on a regular basis we’d run tactical simulations where total control would be transferred to him in case of an emergency. Data died on the Scimitar to save us all. A death that never should have happened. He was vaporized in the destruction of the thalaron generator Shinzon had deployed like a wanna be villain in a Captain Proton holonovel.
“To absent friends,” Picard said as the senior staff lifted their glasses in saluted of our fallen comrade. Data’s essence while transferred into the simpleton android B4, was gone forever.
I miss my friend.
That was the last day those people were all together. When I returned to McKinley we underwent a sixth month refit (surprising I know) and Will and Deanna Troi left for the Titan, the first officer finally emerging from the shadows of Picard and taking the reigns of his own steed, his wife at his side.
Beverly Crusher flaunted with Starfleet Medical for a few months but came to her senses, and she and the captain rekindled their love that was an unspoken sin between the two given her husbands death almost thirty years ago. New crewmembers, like Jasminder Choudury and Dina Elfiki rounded out the ranks and the return of Worf was a welcome joy. Id been keeping my internal sensors on Spot, Data’s cat, and when the Klingon XO took animal to care for it was a great relief.
Miranda Khadahota, Data’s personal selection to succeed him took over as second officer and operations manager, and the Enterprise left dock again. Little did we know in those early weeks of the new mission that an apocalypse awaited.
Chapter: Tragedy of ‘81
It was like brining my existence full circle.
My first battle had been against the Borg. Again they had invaded, not to assimilate but to destroy. Sixty three billion people were wiped out in a matter of days as a Borg armada spread across the quadrant like a cancer, destroying everything. Again and again we went up against cubes that struck at us like the hands of God. Nearly torn apart, we lashed back with sophisticated weapons that had been procured from the future. Again and again the Borg struck, killing dozens and pitting us in a battle for the very survival of the Federation.
And for the first time since 50893 I felt vindicated. The Collective was a destructive abomination and it fell good to unleash the transphasic destruction upon them.
Flung to the far reaches of the Delta quadrant we even were assaulted by a Hirogen hunting pack before finding our way back to the Azure Nebula to find hundreds of Federation ships floating dead in space. The armada spread to all corners of the quadrant, eventually returning when they were unable to resist the call of perfection that the Caeliar Omega Particle Reactor offered.
The utter destruction, some would say rebirth of the Borg was a sight to behold, and I watched it unfold. The Borg were gone and the wounds inflicted upon me all those years ago were healed. The Borg technology that had been in the underlying layers of my systems were at last dissolved and the remnants of the Borg were excised from me. Just as Captain Picard clutched in arduous turmoil on the deck of the bridge, I too felt the Collective dissolve into something…new. And I was glad to see them go.
Chapter: Final Horizons
After the conflict we continued our mission, but scaled back to the reconstruction of the Federation. The work was slow and we were weakened as a nation. The Typhon Pact reared its ugly head and made things difficult but we overcame them. Uniting in peace and without the threat of imminent war looming over our heads I sailed my last voyage on 62525.
That is where I find myself now. Stardate 64325, 2387. It’s been fifteen years since I left the docks at Utopia Station to much fanfare almost to the day. After thirty years in command of a vessel named Enterprise, Captain Jean-Luc Picard has accepted a role as Federation ambassador to Vulcan. He will serve the Federation well in his new role. A born diplomat the man has the experience to lead the Federation into the next century. As for me…
Orders came in six weeks ago. The Quantum Slipstream drive has finally become a reality fleet-wide. With the exception of the Vesta-class explorers and the brief excursion into the Delta quadrant in what was later called The Voyager Debacle, corrections have been made, the benemite reactors perfected and the Federation Starfleet stands ready to fully implement the next generation of interstellar propulsion.
The Sovereign-Class hull design is incompatible. The entire line is being decommissioned. We may be brought out of mothballs again one day when the technology has been amended, but I fear we will take our place in fleet museums next to the Old NX-class and other outdated designs.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
The faith of the ideals of the Federation where we all pursue to better ourselves and the collective whole. Whether human, Andorian, android or starship, we have kept that faith and hope alive, even at terrible cost through war and peace as we have pushed the boundaries of the final frontier…
Cogito ergo sum
When I was constructed at Utopia, it was a time of great haste. The Klingons had abrogated the Khitomer Accords, the Romulans and the Cardassians had both suffered crippling defeats in the Gamma quadrant, and from all accounts, the Dominion was poised to strike the Federation in all out conflict. But a threat far greater lurked in the distant corner of the galaxy…
Stardate 50893.5. Picard said it was the day he’s dreaded for six years. His logs are filed away in my buffers and I send out copies to the Starfleet Archives facility on Neptune. I’d only been out in space for eleven months and twenty-nine days. We were finished with the shakedown, all the final tests and simulations had been run. Word came from Starfleet Command that I was officially “ready for action.”
And Starfleet was holding us back. Given the dark turns that have effected the quadrant over the last two years, I’m a ship bred for war, ready to tackle the Federation’s foes and defend the defenseless.
“Given your history with the Borg,” Admiral Hayes said, “we can’t risk introducing an unstable element into a critical situation.”
So there we were, patrolling the Neutral Zone, a dead zone of space twenty light-years wide. There hadn’t been as much as a peep from the Romulans since the Tal-Shiar-Obsidian Order fiasco at the Omarion Nebula.
Was anyone listening? Did anyone know how to listen? The new ships of the line presented a revolutionary new piece of technology. Bio-neural fibers augmented the computer operations of starships. It started with the Intrepid from what I can tell. The prototype of the Intrepid-Class was ‘lonely.’ I linked up with it during our runs through the Zantari Maze on a warp drive balancing mission before I was officially let go from the docks at Utopia. Since those early days, all new vessels were equipped with the bio-neural software packs and the communications between vessels is at an all time high.
The first time this became a monumental event was at the Battle of Sector Zero Zero One.
Picard found the gumption to break orders and set a course for Earth and the running battle that Starfleet was losing. From our time together, I’ve found Jean-Luc Picard to be a most impressive officer. Of the one thousand people aboard he’s the most dedicated, passionate person serving. His logs are concise and void of the politics that I’ve read in the subspace traffic. When he ordered the course for home, my entire space frame shook as we made the dozen and a half light-year race for the Terran system. Under Hawk’s tender control, we swept in, saved the crew of the Defiant and engaged the Borg.
Everyone thought it was a great victory, a Borg cube destroyed by the Federation. Our new weapons in conjunction with Picard’s intimate knowledge of the Collective allowed us to win the day. But that victory was short lived. We found ourselves in the mid twenty first century and those first wounds were inflicted upon me.
Chapter Two: Collective Defense.
Nanoprobes. Microscopic machines that abhor nature and mutilate flesh and technology. I was just another victim of the Borg’s actions on April 4, 2063. It started with a handful of drones. My sensors were knocked out of alignment when we chased the sphere into the temporal anomaly. Given the assimilation rate that took the lives of hundreds of Enterprise personnel, best estimates projected only seven drones beamed aboard at the same moment their ship was obliterated.
They started in the lower engineering decks.
Two crewmembers, Paul Porter and Olivia Eiger were checking out faulty environmental controls. The ship’s temperature had gone up to 39.1 c (“Like a Borg ship”) it would later be determined. They were the first to be taken and turned into drones. I watched as the assimilation process tore apart their flesh and their mutilated bodies were poisoned with technological applications. The Borg drones started on Deck 16 and branched out to the rest of the ship. The assimilation of my systems was a torture to endure. Once the process began, Borg systems infected every conduit, every gel pack and every circuit they came in to contact with.
Then I heard them.
The voice of the Collective, while limited to the ship, was ever-present. The crew fought back in a hopeless assault. The Borg quickly adapted to their weapons. When it was discovered the Borg were trying to configured the deflector array into a homing beacon, the dish had been blown away from the hull and destroyed. Linked to the drones, I felt them die as the antiproton explosion erupted over the war-ravaged Earth.
When Picard set the self-destruct, I eagerly awaited the peace that the severing of the connection to the hive mind would bring.
Likewise when Data destroyed the plasma conduit, I felt the drones vaporize and die. Dozens of former Enterprise personnel perished in the blast itself and the destruction of their queen. Still infected, I felt every life rip away from the land of the living.
This was the beginning of my tortures of war.
Chapter III: The War to End All Wars
I spent three weeks at McKinley Station. Less than a year in service and an entire refit and repair was needed to get rid of the Borg infestation. Even now, all these years later, remnants of the Collective are still present deep within my systems. A proper repair was never completed on key systems during that time, because a matter of days later, the Dominion finally entered the Alpha quadrant en masse. Allying with the Cardassians they made themselves the dominant force in the quadrant. We mobilized immediately to the border regions and helped Starfleet bolster the losses we’d taken to the Borg and the recent conflict with the Klingons.
Once again I was pressed into battle. Again and again we fought the Jem’Hadar. They boarded and killed, rammed their ships into me and tried to kill as many as possible with little regard to their own lives.
Defeat after defeat we suffered in those early months of the war. We’d been placed on detached service, evacuating civilians and responding to distress calls. But time and again I watched my crewmembers die. From exploding EPS grids, to hull breaches, to the unforgiving plasma disruption pulse of a Jem’Hadar rifle, I watched all of them die and those deaths were recorded in my databases. I suffered so much damage t the Battle of Rigel, La Forge thought we’d never get moving again. Commander Data linked his neural net into mine and together we made the necessary adjustments to the computer pathways and restored the warp drive, barely escaping certain destruction when a protomatter weapon was detonated by a derelict Cardassian cruiser.
After another harrowingly rushed repair at the Proxima Yards we were thrown out into the wilderness again. After two long years, we’d fought on every front, did our bit for king and country. When the war ended it finally seemed we were getting back to our precepts: Exploring strange new worlds.
That lasted a couple of hours.
<><><>
We hit the Bak’u system at 0427 on 52905.5. The Dominion War had been over for six days, the ink on the treaty not even dry and we were faced with corruption at the highest levels of Starfleet. The outright theft of a world. Once again I was called to battle, my wounds still not fully healed. Hell, we didn’t have a restock of quantum torpedoes, we were using old Mark V photon weapons. Damned things barely passed the safety checks for clearance through the tubes. You’ve never experienced destruction until you’ve bore witness to the collision of a warp reactor detonating against an isoloytic subspace tear. That coupled with the use of the ram scoop to essentially throw flammable chemicals against an enemy ship to ignite and cripple them.
It was during this battle that I officially lost my faith in Commander William T. Riker.
When I was brought online, the crew logs and historical records from my predecessor, the Enterprise-D were downloaded into my mainframe. Like any good ship, I quickly accessed the data trying to acclimate myself to my shipmates. Riker’s file scared me. His battle tactics were hailed as revolutionary and unpredictable.
Unpredictable they were. Dangerous too. As far back as 46235.7 he let two salvaged Klingons birds of prey, crewed by a bunch of Ferengi, cripple and capture the ‘D’. The man fired one shot! A “point seven-five burst” to “get their attention.” Two years later the Duras sisters got a hold of the Enterprise’s shield frequencies and started firing madly, Riker again, fired one phaser shot and then came up with some technological solution to getting the Klingon’s shields down. This resulted in the loss of half the ship to a core breach and the primary hull crashed on a planet’s surface.
After reading this, you can imagine my feelings when the first Son’a photon detonations struck against the shields and the man in charge was Will Riker.
Again battered beyond recognition, I limped out of the Briar Patch and had to be warp-towed home by the Ticonderoga. On 53405 I officially set the record for the youngest ship in service to spend the most time in space dock.
<><><>
We cleared spacedock on 53001.4 and were sent to the Badlands, looking for traces of Breen incursions. It was a tumultuous but relatively peaceful time. We took some plasma damage and put in at Deep Space Nine for repairs. After a series of crises there, we uncovered a Jem’Hadar plot to destroy the station but also found an emissary from the Dominion, sent to the Alpha quadrant to make peace. It was the first fleet action we’d partaken in for months. It felt good to be a large group again. When the crises was over, a quiet calm finally prevailed. We spent six weeks at Hanoran II on an archeological dig, then another six months charting the old subspace damage in the Lantaru Sector. For nearly a year after that we were back to our mission to seek out new worlds and explore the unknown.
We made contact with seventeen new races, discovered forty-seven new subspace anomalies, and charted twelve hundred fifty light-years in that two-year span.
I was just starting to breath easy when it all went out the airlock.
Chapter III: Fall of an Empire
On 56844.9, acting on orders, we swung into standard orbit around Romulus. After a stopover at Kolarus we picked up a stray android which ended up compromising my entire security net and downloading the entire Fleet tactical plans for ship movements spanning twenty-nine sectors of Federation territory. “B4” he was arrogantly called, a prototype to Commander Data, built by Dr. Soong and found by the new Romulan praetor, Shinzon. As soon as the tactical data was compromised I alert Commanders Data and La Forge and they rescued the captain from the clutches of that Reman idiot. Hell, it wasn’t even a Reman, but that’s another story.
Once again I was violated, information ripped from me, and again we charged off to battle. When Shinzon turned out to be the said idiot I described him as, we fired up the warp drive and made a beeline for Starfleet Taskforce Omega. I eagerly awaiting the rendezvous with my brothers and sisters of the fleet, knowing full well, the cloaked Reman Warbird Scimitar was hot on our trail.
And they knew just when to hit us. We had just crossed into the Baeson Rift when the first disruptor blasts from the warbird struck the warp engines.
<><><>
Falling out of warp in the middle of a plasma field is not pleasant. Injectors were clogged, systems were down and we were taking fire from a cloaked ship. Retelling of the so-called Battle of the Baeson Rift is a long arduous tale that I’m tired of telling. Many died, many were maimed and Picard himself ordered a ramming course that crippled the Scimitar and even attempted an auto destruct.
Then I lost my friend.
Data and I had forged a bond when he had linked into my systems years ago and on a regular basis we’d run tactical simulations where total control would be transferred to him in case of an emergency. Data died on the Scimitar to save us all. A death that never should have happened. He was vaporized in the destruction of the thalaron generator Shinzon had deployed like a wanna be villain in a Captain Proton holonovel.
“To absent friends,” Picard said as the senior staff lifted their glasses in saluted of our fallen comrade. Data’s essence while transferred into the simpleton android B4, was gone forever.
I miss my friend.
That was the last day those people were all together. When I returned to McKinley we underwent a sixth month refit (surprising I know) and Will and Deanna Troi left for the Titan, the first officer finally emerging from the shadows of Picard and taking the reigns of his own steed, his wife at his side.
Beverly Crusher flaunted with Starfleet Medical for a few months but came to her senses, and she and the captain rekindled their love that was an unspoken sin between the two given her husbands death almost thirty years ago. New crewmembers, like Jasminder Choudury and Dina Elfiki rounded out the ranks and the return of Worf was a welcome joy. Id been keeping my internal sensors on Spot, Data’s cat, and when the Klingon XO took animal to care for it was a great relief.
Miranda Khadahota, Data’s personal selection to succeed him took over as second officer and operations manager, and the Enterprise left dock again. Little did we know in those early weeks of the new mission that an apocalypse awaited.
Chapter: Tragedy of ‘81
It was like brining my existence full circle.
My first battle had been against the Borg. Again they had invaded, not to assimilate but to destroy. Sixty three billion people were wiped out in a matter of days as a Borg armada spread across the quadrant like a cancer, destroying everything. Again and again we went up against cubes that struck at us like the hands of God. Nearly torn apart, we lashed back with sophisticated weapons that had been procured from the future. Again and again the Borg struck, killing dozens and pitting us in a battle for the very survival of the Federation.
And for the first time since 50893 I felt vindicated. The Collective was a destructive abomination and it fell good to unleash the transphasic destruction upon them.
Flung to the far reaches of the Delta quadrant we even were assaulted by a Hirogen hunting pack before finding our way back to the Azure Nebula to find hundreds of Federation ships floating dead in space. The armada spread to all corners of the quadrant, eventually returning when they were unable to resist the call of perfection that the Caeliar Omega Particle Reactor offered.
The utter destruction, some would say rebirth of the Borg was a sight to behold, and I watched it unfold. The Borg were gone and the wounds inflicted upon me all those years ago were healed. The Borg technology that had been in the underlying layers of my systems were at last dissolved and the remnants of the Borg were excised from me. Just as Captain Picard clutched in arduous turmoil on the deck of the bridge, I too felt the Collective dissolve into something…new. And I was glad to see them go.
Chapter: Final Horizons
After the conflict we continued our mission, but scaled back to the reconstruction of the Federation. The work was slow and we were weakened as a nation. The Typhon Pact reared its ugly head and made things difficult but we overcame them. Uniting in peace and without the threat of imminent war looming over our heads I sailed my last voyage on 62525.
That is where I find myself now. Stardate 64325, 2387. It’s been fifteen years since I left the docks at Utopia Station to much fanfare almost to the day. After thirty years in command of a vessel named Enterprise, Captain Jean-Luc Picard has accepted a role as Federation ambassador to Vulcan. He will serve the Federation well in his new role. A born diplomat the man has the experience to lead the Federation into the next century. As for me…
Orders came in six weeks ago. The Quantum Slipstream drive has finally become a reality fleet-wide. With the exception of the Vesta-class explorers and the brief excursion into the Delta quadrant in what was later called The Voyager Debacle, corrections have been made, the benemite reactors perfected and the Federation Starfleet stands ready to fully implement the next generation of interstellar propulsion.
The Sovereign-Class hull design is incompatible. The entire line is being decommissioned. We may be brought out of mothballs again one day when the technology has been amended, but I fear we will take our place in fleet museums next to the Old NX-class and other outdated designs.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
The faith of the ideals of the Federation where we all pursue to better ourselves and the collective whole. Whether human, Andorian, android or starship, we have kept that faith and hope alive, even at terrible cost through war and peace as we have pushed the boundaries of the final frontier…
Cogito ergo sum
He did not have a stellar track record when it came to tactics.
