Ship Class: Excelsior-class cruiser. Modified. Shaken, not stirred.
Crew complement: 632, 24% human, 62% Andorian, remainder consisting of assorted Federation species.
Crew:
--Commanding Officer: Lieutenant Commander Jason Leyton
Growing up in the shadow of a Starfleet admiral is never an easy thing, not when you want to make a name for yourself. It becomes less so when that admiral is unable or unwilling to play the patronage game. All of that goes triple, however, for the only son of Vice Admiral James Leyton, the architect of an attempted coup d'etat against the government of the Federation. A less stubborn man would have given up on Starfleet long ago. Jason Leyton is not that man. Slogging up through the ranks against a stiff headwind caused by his father's treason, the younger Leyton would most likely have ended his career in obscurity but for the Borg invasion rendering peacetime Fleet politics and promotion boards a thing of the past.
When the initial attacks took place, the very stigma that had so long hampered his career saved his life. Assigned as the executive officer to a nearly-unarmed science ship assigned to routine survey missions, he was spared the initial holocaust of the Borg offensive. The ship's commanding officer was assigned there for much the same reason as Leyton; the distrust and scorn of the Admiralty. In Commander Vargas' case, however, it was far more warranted; Leyton unilaterally seized command of the ship after it became clear to him that indecision was simply not an acceptable response to the crisis.
Given the lack of combat capability represented in the survey vessel, Leyton ordered the ship to the nearest Starfleet reserve yard, which happened to be in the Andor system. Running the warp drives to the redline and beyond, the Marie Curie was able to beat the Borg offensive there. A brief survey of the mothballed vessels returned dismaying results; the most combat-capable starship present (at least by this point, the reserves had already been raided more than once) was an aging Excelsior-class, one that had received only a partial set of the Dominion War-era upgrades before being sent back into mothballs again.
Anything would serve better in the coming apocalypse than the Marie Curie four phaser banks and light deflectors, however. Leyton ordered the science vessel stripped down to the frame, part of the work done even as the ship was en route to Andor, the rest taking place as the ship drifted alongside the dormant Scylla. Even as crew and supplies and equipment were beamed and shuttled onto the ship, he contacted the mainly-Andorian engineering crews aboard the reserve yards and offered them a simple choice: accept transport down to the surface of Andor in advance of the Borg incursion, or start shifting maintenance supplies and stripped components from other mothballed ships to the Scylla in exchange for a berth when it departed. Unsurprisingly, the caretaker crews and engineering teams overwhelmingly opted to depart on the Scylla rather than wait around in unarmed, unarmored dockyards for the Borg advance.
The Scylla departed Andor packed to the deckheads with components stripped from other ships of all descriptions, plentiful fuel for the various salvaged reactors and numerous purloined engineers, but precious few munitions; the yards' stocks of torpedoes had been largely emptied by previous visitors.
A stock Excelsior, low on torpedoes and with an inexperienced, ad hoc crew, would be no match for even the smaller ships that had been reported accompanying the Borg advance. Accordingly, Leyton ordered his brand new and very unofficial command into a nearby nebula, there to allow the crew time to train according to a grueling schedule and the wildly over-sized engineering complement time to refit the ship into something approaching combat capability. By the time Leyton's command emerged from the communication and sensor blackout of the nebula, the Federation was in flames, Starfleet was splintered, and realistically, only two options were left open: Run and never look back, a task for which the oversupplied, long-legged refit was uniquely suited for, or fight back and try to save as many lives as possible.
Given that a large portion of the Scylla's crew was made up of engineers who had already fled the Borg once, the outcome seemed a foregone conclusion. Leyton's opposition to that philosophy subsequently made a mutiny seem a foregone conclusion. It was at this point that Leyton truly proved that whatever else he may not have inherited from his father, the elder Leyton's personal charisma was not one of them. Standing alone on the bridge of his own ship against a band of his own crew intent on seizing helm control (and with the ship's intercom system discreetly activated), Jason Leyton was able to turn perhaps judicious cowardice into a seething, righteous wrath that fueled a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Borg. The Scylla was a ghost, almost never seen by either side of the war, always rumored to be in the area whenever something vital and expensive-looking exploded unexpectedly. The call to arms, the Fleet's last attempt to rally at Bajor, finally drew the Scylla out of the night. For the first time since she was mothballed years earlier, she would fight alongside the rest of Starfleet.
--First officer: Commander Lesschey zh'Rethen (Andorian Zhen (Female-analogue)
Despite outranking the substantially older Leyton, Commander zh'Rethen has never contested the lieutenant commander's claim to the Scylla's captaincy. Initially, this was out of gratitude for the rescue of the teams aboard the Andor reserve yards, of which she was the commanding officer. As time went by, however, her reasoning evolved into genuine loyalty and belief that Leyton really was simply far more qualified for the command than she was. zh'Rethan was and is an engineer first and a commander second, and the same could easily be said for the majority of the crews taken from the reserve yards. The majority of the crew of the Marie Curie were science officers of some stripe or another. Leyton, as a result, was not only the officer who stepped up and took command to begin with, but also ended up as one of a small handful of tactical officers aboard his new command.
zh'Rethan accordingly serves in a peculiar role, less a conventional executive officer in the in the tactical sense (although she handles an XO's duties administratively) and more the a senior engineer on the bridge, one able to work seamlessly with Leyton and the rest of the small tactical staff. Given the Scylla's reliance on unconventional warfare, that has proven an essential post more than once.
--Chief Engineer: Lt. Commander Rennthek ch'Tel (Andorian Chan, male analogue)
While not senior to several of the engineers who work under him, ch'Tel displayed a positive brilliance for improvisation and unconventional thinking that prompted Leyton to assign him the post midway through the Scylla's refit. Unlike Leyton, however, ch'Tel's personal charisma is quite lacking, he is blunt to a fault and has little patience for bruised egos and drama. Given the frankly bizarre mix of subsystems interwoven throughout the Scylla, however, sheer skill and knowledge trumps social graces any day of the week, for all that ch'Tel keeps both zh'Rethan and Leyton himself busy soothing ruffled feathers in his wake.
--Chief Science Officer: Lieutenant Commander Adrian Houston (Human Male)
The head of one of the few well-staffed departments aboard the Scylla, the rest of the crew suffers under the aegis of Houston's obsession with his namesake and 'Texan History.' Going by Tex when off-duty, Houston has inflicted late twentieth century country and western music upon the crew more than once, to the point that Leyton has been forced to ban him from use of the ship's intercom system completely. The cowboy hat...just pretend it's not there. Please. The fact remains, however, that despite his...questionable taste in music and dubious grasp on present society, Houston was one of the best electronic warfare specialists in Starfleet, back when Starfleet was an entity that could actually track that. As Starfleet was never terribly concerned with electronic warfare or stealth, and as he annoyed the hell out of his prior COs, he ended up shuffled off into the beyond aboard a little science ship called the Marie Curie.
Starfleet's loss, Leyton's -- and later the Scylla's -- gain. Houston is singlehandedly responsible for the early survival of the Scylla managing effective sensor damping out of hardware never intended for it, and the team he's drawn from the science department have continued that legacy. They themselves are the reason that if you see the Scylla at all, it's quite likely far closer than you expected.
--Chief Medical Officer: Lieutenant Cynthia Bates (Human Female)
The less said about the Scylla's sickbay staffing, the better. A light science vessel has little need for a fully-staffed medical bay, and a reserve dockyard has even less. As such, Bates fills both the roles of Chief Medical Officer and Chief Surgeon herself, and with a critical lack of help. Over the long guerrilla war against the Borg, she's developed an unfortunate addiction to artificial stims simply due to the workload of keeping a crew the size of the Scylla's alive with a relatively miniscule staff. Whatever experience and skills she may have lacked in her previous post as the Marie Curie's doctor have been more than remedied by the pressures of her job; by now she'd be fully capable of teaching combat medicine at Starfleet Academy. If it existed anymore.
--Helmsman: Acting Ensign Scylla (Upgraded and heavily modified Starfleet computer core and custom operating system, female?)
The Scylla is a complicated beast to pilot, largely because it can't see the ass end of the Starfleet Design Bureau past the blizzard of design modification blueprints. It gets even worse given that the modifications are ongoing, changing the performance envelope of the hodgepodge ship on a weekly basis. Fortunately, one of those very modifications has provided what will hopefully be a solution. The Scylla's original layout is a relic of an earlier era, an era with, notably in this case, far more primitive computing technology. Accordingly, the internal space allocated to the ship's computer core is proportionally much larger than it would be on a more modern ship.
A ship full of engineers and scientists were bound to take advantage of that fact.
With nothing else to do with the excess computer hardware stripped from numerous newer hulls and salvaged from wrecked ships, much of it ended up integrated together into an over-sized cluster of smaller cores running in parallel, giving the Scylla ridiculous amounts of processing power to work with. After a series of near-disasters stemming from the overcomplexity and variability of the ship's modifications, Project Helmsman was born. Lacking the Emergency Medical Hologram support hardware of newer ships (something the ship's minuscule medical staff would have killed for), a fully holographic officer was out of the question.
After a lengthy development cycle and a simulated time-accelerated training program that ran both the computer systems and the entire tactical staff ragged trying to keep pace, Acting Ensign Scylla was ready for duty. Given a provisional commission by Leyton, a crash-course in combat maneuvering by what tactical staff the Scylla hosts, and a full, realtime link to every internal structural sensor and damage control reporting system the ship has, the Scylla finally had a helmsman who could push the ship to her treacherously-variable limits. There was some discussion of turning over weapons control to the AI, but Leyton vetoed the idea on the grounds that no Acting Ensign in Starfleet history had ever simultaneously held the posts of helmsman and tactical officer at the same time, and this wasn't the time to change that.
When asked about the AI's gender, one of the science officers responsible just shrugged and said, "Ships are female, and who ever heard of a man named 'Scylla' anyway?"
--Additional Crew: The lion's share of the crew is made up of Andorian engineers, with a few belonging to the medical branch who were also stationed at the Reserves. The balance of other species come primarily from the Marie Curie's crew, and are equally biased towards the sciences. By now, many on both sides of the divide have received a crash course in space combat tactics simply out of necessity; the Scylla's tactical section is woefully understaffed. While the ship's crew numbers few representatives of Starfleet Security, Leyton recognized the danger of Borg boarding operations. Long drills in tactics and mandatory firing-range time have proven their wisdom more than once in the ship's long, quiet war against the Borg.
Technical Specifications
Length: 467 meters
Width: 182 meters
Beam: 78 meters
Max Warp: 9.0
Cruising Warp Speed: 8.5
Standard Armaments
12 Phaser banks of mixed marks, none state of the art
9 arced evenly around the forward 270 degrees of the saucer section, mounted on the edge. One on the tail end of the fuselage, one each on the trailing tip of each nacelle. All twelve are capable of bearing into the dorsal or ventral arcs. Phasers have been slightly modified to allow for a higher fire-rate mode at the expense of per-shot power, to serve as point defense. This mode is optional.
40 photon torpedoes, four torpedo tubes (two fore, two aft)
Special Systems and other Acquisitions:
Redundant, heavy-capacity cargo transporters
Stripped from the yard itself and several of the salvaged ships there, the Scylla possesses a number of high-capacity bulk transporters capable of moving large amounts of people or matter remotely. These are often employed for rapid salvaging, explosive emplacement, and in general whatever depraved scheme the tactical-trained engineering staff can dream up this week.
Heavy, numerous tractor beams
Salvaged from a number of other ships, the Scylla's tractor beams are legion. They use stock components, so no one of them is any stronger than those found on other contemporary craft, but in concert, they can reliably hold and move much more massive objects than most other craft.
Does It Explode?
What do you get when you put a shipload of salvage, a vast quantity of engineers, and a mandate for war in the same package? Many, many things that go bang very enthusiastically. Jerry-rigged fusion bombs, warheads out of torpedos with defunct thrusters, salvaged spare warp cores, you name it, it's probably in the Scylla's bays somewhere. Aware of the danger that represents, those bays have been equipped with emergency jettison systems in the event of critical damage threatening them, as well as heavy force fields protecting them in combat situations. At least one cargo transporter array is maintained on hot standby if it becomes necessary to aid in the ejection of munitions should it become necessary.
Redundant Shield Generators
While the salvaged shield generators mounted in the Scylla can't be run simultaneously due to catastrophic interference, the skilled engineers aboard can and do bring them up in sequence, giving her extraordinary shield longevity, but without the spike damage protection of more modern shield generators.
Multiple Reactors
One thing the Scylla never lacks is power. Multiple matter/antimatter and fusion reactors power its systems, giving it phenomenal staying power. Ageing systems don't allow the throughput that that would suggest, but as a result the Scylla can sustain relatively high power outputs that would drain a similar ship for long periods of time. This especially manifests in its very high warp cruise velocity, although its somewhat antiquated warp drives do not allow a substantially higher sprint.
Refit Impulse Engines
The only true Starfleet-spec modification the Scylla received before being shoved back into mothballs was a set of bolt-on impulse engines. Set to either side of the original drive on the rear end of the saucer section, they provide the old ship with a surprising turn of speed and maneuverability for a ship its age.
More Engineers Than Even Makes Sense
When it comes to modification, refit, or damage control (especially damage control!), having two and a half slews of engineers comes in beyond handy.
Sensor Damping
Not anywhere close to a true cloaking device, the Scylla's skilled electronic warfare department, staffed partially from the science section and partially from Engineering, is generally effective at making the Scylla difficult to spot from long range. This, of course, does not function in any way when the ship's power rises to proper combat levels.
Ship's Weaknesses:
Starfleet Design Board's Nightmare
The Scylla is a bastardized abomination of subsystems from a dozen different ship classes spread across half that many decades. It absolutely requires a crack engineering team to make it work at all, which it has, but even then, failures do occur. Many of the systems operate with incompatible software, resulting in manual control being required for coordination between them. Battle damage and decompression are a constant threat, as a large number of critical systems can't be run remotely with anything even approaching reliability.
You Came In That Thing? You're Braver Than I Thought
Excelsiors are old. While redundant, the ship's shields are weak to the sheer output of modern weaponry. Her top FTL speed barely scrapes warp 9 on a good day. Her phaser banks are far from state-of-the-art, two of them actually dating all the way back to the original Kirk-era installations. She dates back to before Starfleet began armoring their ships, so her hull is thin and fragile. Leyton and his crew have done all they can to help the Scylla punch and survive above her weight, but nothing can change the fact that Excelsiors are bloody old.
You Would Defeat the Cybermen With Four Daleks?
The Scylla's tactical section is absolutely beyond understaffed. Talented engineers and science officers have been crosstrained somewhat, but that is not and will never be a replacement for a fully-trained and experienced Starfleet tactical department. As such, while they can generally get by decently enough under optimal conditions, the Scylla has a vanishingly-small margin for error where tactical causalities specifically are concerned. Her sickbay is understaffed by a similar, though slightly less critical margin; while her damage control teams can quickly return the ship to fighting trim, the same cannot be said for her crew.
*Andorian genders simplified because I'll be damned if I'm keeping four entire sets of gender pronouns straight in my head reliably.
