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Post the dirty, sinful details of your crews here, that all may gaze upon them and despair.

Ship Name: USS Scylla, NCC-2417
Ship Class: Excelsior-class cruiser. Modified. Shaken, not stirred.
Crew complement: 601, 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's 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 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 Sabine Westlake-Uriah (Human Female))
After the loss of Scylla's previous chief engineer and in the extreme chaos that followed, Lieutenant Commander Westlake-Uriah took over the duties of chief engineer despite being several steps back in seniority compared to other, available candidates. It is a testament to both her personal charisma (a quality that her predecessor lacked to an almost comical degree) and organizational skills that not only did this raise no complaints at the time, but later questioning revealed that none of the other engineering staff even realized it until she came forward after the crisis had reached a more manageable magnitude. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that feat, she was confirmed as permanent chief engineer afterwards. While lacking the engineering brilliance of her late predecessor, she is far, far more capable of actually running her department than ch'Tel ever was.

--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 by 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.

Four torpedo tubes (two fore, two aft)

Current magazine: 40 photon torpedoes, unspecified but alarming number of looted tricobalt torpedoes.

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.

Captain: Kadon zantai Khemera

Race: Imperial Klingon

Background: Tall, lean, and broad shouldered, Kadon zantai Khemera has by Klingon standards, a fencer's build. His hair and beard and kept short and neat. Kaden was a cadet during the Dominion War and rapidly rose in rank during the war and in post war skirmishes on the borders thereafter. A long standing feud with his older brother lead to him founding his own line when he was given command of the Riskadh.

Then the Borg came and the Empire burned. Kadon fought bloody battle after bloody battle, winning Pyrrhic victories and retreating from crippling defeats. Kadon fights on. Perhaps the last strategist left in a race notable more for tactical skill than strategic brilliance, Kadon fights on. There is too much klin in him to fall to despair.

Ship: IKV Riskadh, Vor'cha Class Attack Cruiser

Crew Composition: Over ninety percent Klingons. The remainder are non Klingon citizens of the Komerex Klingon (Klingon Empire).

Crew Notes: Junior officers and crew rescued from the dying IKV Koloth have brought the Riskadh to just over normal crew strength for the first time in years.

Marines: Force Leader Menmoth commands a full contingent of heavily armed Klingon Marines.

Ship Notes: The Riskadh was built after the Dominion War and, as typical with post War designs, includes upgrades and modifications in line with the lessons learned from the conflict and the technological improvements of the era.

Special Weapons and Upgrades

Enhanced Capacitors: The Riskadh, as a late model Vor'cha, can devote larger amounts of power to its disruptor array and handle overcharge with only a small chance of blow out.

Impact Shielding: The Dominion War taught some ugly lessons about the effectiveness of ramming. Tying in navigational deflectors and tractor emitters to main shields allows the Riskadh to have a good chance of deflecting ramming attacks by smaller ships instead of suffering a direct impact.

Tricobalt Torpedoes: The Riskadh, in addition to its standard load out of high yield photon torpedoes, retains a store of highly destructive multistage tricobalt warheads. There are currently 2522 tricobalt torpedoes on board.


Ship Weaknesses

Light superstructure and armour damage: Lacking down time in a major dockyard, stress damage to the superstructure from high speed maneuvers is beginning to accumulate and cruiser's tough armour has been weakened in several places.

Weak flank shields: Power conduits and shield generators have been stripped and rerouted to repair and replace damage to forward and aft shield systems. As a result, port and starboard shields can muster just over sixty percent of standard strength.

Notable crew Biography

Force Leader Menmoth sutai Vorbash: Of average height but built like a stormwalker, Menmoth has lead his men in countless engagements against Cardassians, Jem Hadar, and the Borg and has a staggering amount of scars to prove it. Ruthless, relentless, and almost fearless the Marine commander has a veteran's swagger. He favors high powered disruptors and projectile weapons as personal weapons and nerve gas for clearing Borg ships.

Executive Officer Arikel "Resh" sutai Labarga: The executive is known for her almost Vulcan like calm and her mastery of physics, leading to a few jokes about her being a Vulcan fusion despite being clearly a member of the Imperial race.

Chief Engineer Trakka Seragal: A squat reptilian barely a meter and a half tall, Seragal is a Shelvanian, a member of a species that joined the Klingon Empire almost a hundred years ago when Klingon intervention on the side of one their world's nation states made them masters of their world. Seragal isn't a fighter, but he's a damn good engineer. As a citizen of the Empire's periphery, he hopes that many of his species made it off world before the Borg arrived.

Weapon Master Kallor vestai Robash: In another age, Kallor would be looking for a position that would allow him a chance of dying in battle. Now there are no shortage of opportunities for an elderly Klingon to die. His skill and knowledge are tremendous assets and he seeks to pass them on to his juniors while he still lives. He spends much of his time maintaining and repairing the ship's combat systems as his specialized engineering knowledge is formidable.

Operations Leader Morizan sutai Suhlash: A friend of Kadon's from childhood, Morizan is responsible for hanging the nickname "Thought Captain" on him. Morizan is deceptively jovial and good natured for a Klingon, making it is easy for many of the Riskadh's officers forget that he rose to high rank in Imperial Intelligence. There is no tactic, strategum, or manipulation Morizan will not consider and his preferred weapons are the people he uses as tools.

Lieutenant Khedira vestai Labarga: A young woman approaching her thirtieth year (Klinzhai standard, slightly longer than Federation standard), Khedira is from a long standing family that is one of the components of the Labarga line. She is, by the standards of the Imperial Race, slender and on the shorter side of average. Her reflexes are superb, rivaling those of her captain and her mastery of the helm is unequaled on the ship.

Lieutenant Aaveroke tai Rostev: An almost painfully young officer who has somehow not lost the young cadet shine despite surviving the destruction of the Komerex Klingon. A surprisingly unmartial Klingon officer, he is the ship's unofficial mascot. A long running joke is that he is actually Starfleet and got lost in a paper work shuffle. He is extremely intelligent and his technical skills are intimidating in one so young, attributes that have earned him a place on the Riskadh's bridge.

Service history to Date: The Riskadh was commissioned just before the Borg invasion began as the latest and most formidable upgrade of the fearsome Vor'cha class attack cruiser and incorporated several advances that were product of the Dominion War. The first six months of Kadon's command consisted mostly of showing the flag in the empire's border areas. Then the Borg came.

What followed was even by Klingon standards a long, waking nightmare of war. The Riskadh was redeployed to the main lines after the initial invasion and fought battle after battle. A year's worth of fighting left the Riskadh with a fearsome array of wounds and the ship retreated to the Navy base at Moscatal for refit and rearming. Then the Riskadh plunged back into the fight. The Riskadh claimed kill after kill but it was not enough. The Empire was dying.

Kadon was made Squadron Leader and given a squadron of three and he lead his ships. It didn't last. The Borg advanced was slowed but never stopped. Losses were titanic. The Empire fell and the Riskadh was one of the survivors that made it to Federation space where the ship continued to fight. Too far away to participate in the Battle of Earth, prevented from reaching there by the Federation's own scorched subspace tactics, the Riskadh learned of the planet's death by subspace radio. The losses they have suffered and the death of the khomerex have taken their toll on the captain and the crew, but the klin still fills them. They fight on.

Captain: Commander Galan Cretak

Race: Romulan

Background: The Cretak family was an influential family with ties to the Tal Shiar. Galan was the third of his parents children and the oldest male child. He attended the Imperial War College where he graduated near the top of his class. Upon his graduation, he served as a sublieutenant aboard the D'Deredix class warbird IRW Terix. He participated in this capacity during the Dominion War, climbing the ranks steadily through a combination of competence, leadership and political maneuverings in the home front by members of his family. When his aunt Kimara was charged with treason, his career was almost ended.

By the end of the Dominion War, he had attained the rank of subcommander and seemed in line for command of his own D'Deridex class warbird. He was instead approached by elements of the Tal Shiar who indicated that his name had been moved to the top of the list regarding a command position aboard the Empire's latest warship class. He received the sixteenth warbird that was produced and was immediately tasked with patroling the borders between the Federation and the Romulan Empire.

Ship: IRW S'harien, Valdore Class Warbird

Dimensions: Length: 604 meters, Width: 900 meters, Decks: 24

Crew Composition: 700 crew (80% Romulan, 15% Reman, 5% Vulcan.)

Weapon Systems:
6x Type 20 Disruptor Banks
4x Type 16 Disruptor Cannons
4x Plasma Torpedo Launchers (240 plasma torpedoes)
4x Tractor Beam Emitters

Weapon Breakdown

Type 20 Disruptor Banks: The Type 20 disruptor bank is the core of the Warbirds armament. Each bank is capable of firing in either a beam or pulse mode. The beam mode offers performance similar to a phaser, increasing accuracy at the expense of damage. The pulse mode, fires a devastating burst of energy that is effective at shorter ranges. These massive weapons are located in the center of the vessel near the beak and underneath the wings and can angle their fire enough to cover the entire frontal arc of the S'harien.

Type 16 Disruptor Cannons: The four surviving type 16 disruptor cannons are located in two spread out pairs. Two cannons are located on top of the S'harien in locations near the junction points near the wings. The final two cannons are located in the bottom of the S'harien in a similar position. Each cannon can rotate up to 180 degrees allowing for relatively wide coverage. Their location does not grant perfect coverage when facing forward or aft. The S'harien possesses a small blind spot extending the length of its spine.

Plasma Torpedo Launchers: Three of the torpedo launchers are placed to cover the forward arc. One of these weapons is placed near the center of the vessel by the beak, while each wing incorporates one launcher. The final launcher is placed to cover the aft of the vessel. The torpedo launchers incorporate the latest advancements and can fire up to four torpedoes in short succession.

Tractor Beam Emitters: Two tractor beams are placed to cover the forward arc while the remaining two cover the rear arc. These tractor beams are utilized both offensively attempting to snare smaller ships in their grasp in order to facilitate their destruction as well as defensively, modulating tractor beam pulses are capable of negatively impacting the strength of direct fire weapons and may deflect or hinder incoming projectiles.

Weapon Arc Breakdown
Fore: 6x Type 20 (full coverage), 4x Type 16 (limited coverage), 3x Torpedo, 2x Tractor Beams
Port: 2x Type 16 (full coverage)
Starboard: 2x Type 16 (full coverage)
Aft: 4x Type 16 (limited coverage), 1x Torpedo, 2x Tractor Beams

Auxiliary Craft: 7/8 Shuttles, 6/6 Scorpions.

Crew Notes: A slight majority (51%) of the S'harien crew are survivors from its original crew at this time. Thirty percent of the original crew was killed in a single engagement when the S'harien entangled itself with a damaged Borg Cube and was nearly assimilated. The Vulcan crew members are with a handful of exceptions low ranking members of the crew given an opportunity to avenge the losses of their families and homes against the Borg. One Vulcan has earned the right to rise to prominence the ship's medical officer.

Ship Notes: The IRW S'harien was the sixteenth ship of its type and was completed in the waning days of the Dominion War. It incorporated all the design modifications and upgrades that were taught by the harsh lessons of the Dominion War. By the time that the ship had left space dock, the battle of Cardassia had taken place and the Dominion War was over. Eleven months prior to the Borg attack that would devastate the Romulan Star Empire, the ship was brought in to a Tal Shiar facility and received its final refit. This refit incorporated all the modifications to bring it in line with the current generation of Valdore type warbirds.

Special Weapons and Upgrades

Borg Enhanced Quantum Singularity: Shortly after the Battle for Earth, the S'harien stumbled upon a damaged Borg Cube. It was one of the few times that Galan Cretak lost control of his emotions and made a mistake. Still bitter over the loss of Romulus, still keenly aware of the defeat in the battle of Earth, he chose to take his ship into direct conflict with the Borg Cube and remove it from existance. At first, the damage to the Borg Cube appeared to be overwhelming. Its shields were down, its communication systems were down and it had suffered significant hull damage. Most importantly its weapon systems appeared to be completely without power.

Galan believed that a sudden and overwhelming strike would quickly destroy the Cube. The S'harien decloaked, its type 20 disruptor banks rending deep gashes into the borg Cube while its plasma torpedoes bathed internal systems awash in plasma fires that consumed hundreds of drones. The Cube seemed to reel underneath the powerful impacts and then its holding beams lashed out. Within the span of five minutes, the Borg Cube was nearly destroyed but the S'harien itself had taken a pounding. It was then boarded by borg drones who promptly began to fight and assimilate their way towards Engineering. With their cube crippled, it was the Borg's apparent intention to take over the S'harien in its entirety in order to make their way back to Borg lines.

The battle for the S'harien took over thirty eight hours and took a dreadful toll both in personnel and equipment. The recapture of the S'harien was only possible due to the supplies and equipment that Romulans had been given by the federation in preparation for the defense of Earth. The kinetic weapons provided by Starfleet proved their weight in latinum, allowing for the liberation of the S'harien at the cost of thirty percent of its crew killed or assimilated. Ultimately, it was the shuttles of the Warbird that launched and whose plasma torpedoes finished the crippled Borg Cube.

After any surviving drones had been found and destroyed, it became readily apparent that the entire engineering deck had been assimilated by the Borg. The artificial quantum singularity had been heavily modified with Borg technology. It was the estimation of the Romulan Science officer that it had been improved in order to be moved from the S'harien into the wounded Borg Cube at some point. The enhanced artificial quantum singularity generates an enormous amount of power. Current estimates by the science officers aboard the S'harien suggest that it is capable of generating roughly ten times more power than the original. In the words of the chief science officer of the S'harien "with the enhancement we now have an ocean of power to draw from, even if our power conduits will only let us effectively utilize a stream."

Aside from its massive energy generation ability, the enhanced singularity core had another advantage. It was able to be turned off on the field. The exact science behind this ability is beyond the scope of existing Romulan science but allows the S'harien to service its precious power core in the field. The crew of the S'harien have made extended efforts in an attempt to harness the ocean of energy that this new core provides with mixed successes. The power conduits of the S'harien were never intended to handle such an enormous amount of power, and were limited to a roughly thirty percent overcharge before permanent damage or catastrophic failure occurred. Engineering teams are currently trying to replicate the material science of the Borg assimilated parts of the S'harien in order to try and harness this new energy source with little success so far.

Currently, through the rewiring of the Borg infected Engineering deck a compromise has been reached which allows the S'harien to more effectively tap into its new power core. The S'harien can channel up to 40% more energy than the theoretical maximum of an unmodified Valdore into one or any of its four primary systems. By filtering this energy through the Borg provided power conduits, a single system may receive a 20% improvement with no chance of adverse effects. A 30% improvement is possible with some chance of adverse effects, a 40% improvement is possible for only small amounts of time. Commander Galan typically channels 20% of this power into the weapon systems and 20% into the S'harien's engines.

Transwarp Conduit Generator: As the borg subsumed the S'harien's engineering deck in order to modify its artificial quantum singularity they transferred the transwarp coil from the borg vessel into the S'harien itself. When the Borg were pushed out of the S'harien and the borg cube destroyed, the transwarp coil remained. The coil was in excellent condition and the science behind its utilization was well known and understood. Tal Shiar agents had managed to get their hands on rather complete logs from the Federation starship Voyager and had even managed to get their hands on information provided to the Federation by one Seven of Nine.

It was through the careful study of this information as well as through extrapolation from state of the art Romulan science in the fields of astrometrics and the generation of subspace fields that allowed the S'harien to expand the scope of its transwarp drive. Through the addition of two other borg transwarp coils and integration with its existing coil, and the implementation of the "Velal principle" a transwarp conduit could be generated that mimicked in many respects existing Borg conduits. The creation of this conduit allowed for several ships without transwarp to "piggyback" on the transwarp travel of the S'harien.

The creation of such a wide transwarp conduit requires an enormous amount of energy and is only possible due to the Borg's energy conduits linking the S'harien's power core to its original transwarp coil. The two additional transwarp coils exist in order to automatically shunt the strain into all three coils instead of one. The creation of a wide transwarp counduit requires a two hour charge time. During this time, the enhanced core generates an enormous amount of power. This energy signature is massive enough to make cloaking useless as the energy signature would easily pierce through even a state of the art Romulan cloak. After the two hour charge time, the energy is released and the conduit is formed. Any ship within a five kilometer radius of the S'harien is pulled into the Conduit along with S'harien. After it has been activated, the wide transwarp conduit cannot be re-utilized for anywhere from 8-12 hours due to the strain that it places on the S'harien's transwarp coils. If the S'harien chooses to utilize transwarp for itself, it merely has to accelerate to warp 2.3 and activate a single transwarp coil to enable the creation of a narrow transwarp conduit. This method of travel does not put a signifcant amount of strain on the system and may be used multiple times.

The Sword of S'task: As the conflict with the Borg progressed it became increasingly apparent that improved firepower was solely needed to stem the seemingly never ending tides of Borg Cubes. The S'harien was already one of the most heavily armed warships in the quadrant, like her sister ships. Still, when faced with the massive size and mass of a Borg Cube this truth was a small comfort. After the battle of Earth, it became readily apparent that unless bold action was taken the races of the alpha and beta quadrants were doomed to extinction or assimilation.

Commander Galan Cretak studied the battle of Earth as well as all existing data on his data banks regarding conflicts with the Borg seeking a solution. With the Romulan Star Empire broken and its worlds assimilated, he lacked the resources and the technical knowledge to create a super weapon. He struggled with the developing a system that would significantly improve the chances of his Warbird to survive in the days to come while increasing their lethality. Ultimately, fate intervened. In a scavenging mission seeking a Tal Shiar weapons depot in order to raid its stores of plasma torpedos the S'harien stumbled on the drifting hulk of the IRW Dominus. The Dominus was a Veldore-class warbird like the S'harien and was relatively intact aside from missing its entire engine section.

The S'harien scanned and eventually boarded the Dominus. There were no survivors and data taken from the striken ship's logs indicated that four cubes had plowed through the system as the ship approached the hidden Tal Shiar depot. Unable to cloak and aware that they were doomed, the IRW Dominus charged weapons and flew away from the depot at top speed. It was eventually caught and destroyed. The Borg took little interest in the ship as the few survivors abandoned the vessel. The S`harien downloaded all the data that was possible from the Dominus data banks and then tractored beam the ship into a new location. Once in this location, it assessed what systems or weapons were still of use.

Galan was thrilled to determine that the Dominus primary weapon systems, its array of three type 20 disruptor banks were relatively intact as well as its stores of plasma torpedoes. It was with this knowledge that Galan ordered the type 20 disruptor banks to be appropriated from the Dominus and incorporated into the S'harien. Even with the improved power core, the Romulan based energy conduits would not be able to power the newly recovered weapons systems without the risk of overloading key junctions and blacking out whole systems. As a result, the S'harien sacrificed all but four of its original twelve type 16 disruptor cannons. The loss of these secondary disruptors allowed for the power conduits that fed these weapons to be redirected to power its new weapon systems.

By doubling its primary weapon systems from three to six type 20 disruptor banks, the S'harien gained the ability to devastate targets in its forward arc at the cost of severely reducing its capability against smaller and more nimble targets. The Borg however were not known for utilizing small craft and the other races in the alpha and beta quadrants were no longer his predominant concern. The array of six forward firing Disruptor banks was named "The Sword of S`task".

Ship Weaknesses

Weakened Superstructure: The S'harien has not been to a Romulan or similar space dock in years. Due to this, its internal superstructure has begun to experience a series of micro-fractures beneath the strain of wartime maneuvers and lack of specialized maintenance. Once the shields are breached, the armor and internal structure of the S'harien is not as adept at absorbing and redirecting damage. These problems have been kept from deteriorating by increasing power to internal structure reinforcement fields but is a short term solution.

Power Conduit Problems: The S'harien has been almost completely rewired. Its power conduits were altered and modified by the Borg and arguably improved in some areas, while they have deteriorated in others. Attempts to harness more energy from the seemingly limitless energy supply from the new power core has led to dozens if not hundreds of additional wiring to take place within the ship. The removal of its secondary disruptor cannons to feed the Sword of S`task complicated matters. Finally, the presence of six planetary grade batteries which are plugged into the grid akin to giant inverters has not improved the situation. Upon taking damage, the chance of power conduit damage and complications is significantly higher in the S'harien than any other Warbird of her class at this point in time.

Partly Assimilated: The entire engineering deck was at one point assimilated by the Borg. This assimilation made it possible for the S'harien to continue being effective in the battlefield and has been harnessed as a strength by its crew but it stands as a grisly reminder of their ultimate fate. It is a testament to their enemy, an ever present reminder to their most likely future. Furthermore, should the S'harien have the misfortune of being boarded by drones in the future, they will have a readily available location to attempt to secure and utilize as a beach head. The engineering deck is an uncomfortable place, and is regularly monitored and patrolled by the S'harien's Reman contingent.

Borg Hunter: The Sword of S`task modification turned the S'harien into a specialized design to deal with enemies of over 200 meters in length. The removal of two thirds of its smaller type 16 disruptors makes it less capable of dealing with smaller threats.

Notable crew Biography

Riov Galan Cretak: Commander Galan Cretak is a relatively new commander. The S'harien was his first true command as the rare combination of natural leadership capabilities and political contacts manifested. During the golden years of the Alpha and Beta quadrant, he earned an impressive record of victories against a wide array of sub-standard adversaries. His professionalism was well known and respected, and while he served the Empire he longed for conflict against a foe that was equal to him in terms of might and capability. The occasional skirmish or face down against the emboldened forces of the Federation could not adequately satisfy his hunger.

He would eventually have an opportunity to combat a worthy adversary although the circumstances that led to such a conflict were not at all what he had imagined. The week of hell struck and he missed the first forty eight hours of the ensuing havoc due to positioning at the far edge of Romulan space. By the time that he had made it to the rapidly advancing Borg lines, the Empire was reeling and withdrawing to reorganize itself amongst over half a dozen fronts. The first exchange in which he participated against the Borg incursions went poorly. the S'harien assisted in the destruction of three separate Borg cubes and laid the finishing blows on two others before being forced to withdraw. Thirty seven Warbirds of various types took part in that engagement and only fifteen made it out. Of these, ten were D`deridex class and the other five were Valdores. No Warbird was without damage and some would withdraw for the reminder of the conflict.

The following day was not much better and fell along the familiar routine of massed conflicts where the Borg simply held a numerical and technological advantage. Always a pragmatic commander, Galan always played the odds. He was no Klingon to fight hopeless odds and die with Honor. He like many of his peers understood that the Romulan Star Empire was doomed and that it would exist only as long as it had soldiers and warships to protect it. The final days of the Empire was one long retreat where entire worlds where ceded to the Borg because their forces could simply not be stopped. He prided himself on pushing the envelope and he and others took great pains to make sure that as many civilian vessels could claw into space and into the relative safety of the warp as the Borg entered a system. Many brave men and women died during those delaying actions.

Currently, Galan has struggled to maintain in touch with as many concentrations of Romulans as possible. He sees this as his duty, even if every ragged ship holding its precious cargo of Romulan ships is another blow against his heart. Galan's people are suffering, and survival can no longer simply be taken for granted. He has devoted time for his ship to run aid from one convoy to another, has sold the services of his vessel to the Cardassians and Bajorans to allow refuge to Romulans in need as well as to secure medical services. He has become tender to his people and vicious towards his enemies. The Orion syndicate in particular has earned his enmity and the S'harien wastes no opportunity to destroy a vessel or base belonging to the organization. When it comes to the Federation Galan is torn. The Federation has struck out to his very family but it is the sole organization in the quadrant left with any sort of tangible power base. Galan has nurtured a neutral relationship with Starfleet, using it to his own ends for the betterment of his people. It is perhaps the last game that he allows himself to play.

Erei'riov Hanaj Dar: Hanaj is an experienced officer having served in four separate warbirds before being assigned to the S'harien. Originally, he was assigned to the S'harien in order to monitor Galan and make certain that unlike his aunt he held the Romulan Star Empire close to his heart. Over the years of serving alongside Galan, he came to respect the commander and has now become a loyal member of his inner circle. Hanaj is the traditional Romulan officer, taciturn with a keen eye and a dry wit. Hanaj supported Galan's decision to stand by the Reman commando crew after the fallout from the assassination of the Romulan senate. A move that earned the admiration and respect of the S'harien's commandos.

While Galan struggled with the decisions to be selective in their engagements against the Borg Hanaj felt no such dilemmas. He felt that there would come a time when the Empire and Romulan people would require the presence of every Warbird in the fleet. To throw away priceless warships in a fool's errand was the height of stupidity. Still, a day does not goes by that the subcommander does not mourn the loss of his wife and children in Romulus.

Riov Sindari N`vek: The highest rank survivor of the Tal Shiar contingenet abord the S'harien Sindari is a bitter woman. Keenly aware of the machinations of her people and her order, aware of the sacrifices both of herself and her people all for naught. The Tal Shiar inflicted both pain and fear on the citizens of the Empire with the promise that the future would be brighter because of it. Those unspoken promises are now nothing more than ash and Sindari has struggled to overcome the loss of the Empire and all its ambitions.

Sindari is a capable and motivated intelligence officer who once had nurtured a web of agents that spanned the alpha and beta quadrants ready to offer her a veritable flood of information. Most of that network was shattered with the Borg invasion, but enough of her agents and those that owed her favors survived to make her one of the best informed individuals in the quadrant. Sindari's information has been crucial to the continued success and existance of the S'harien. Her background with the Tal Shiar allowed her access to information regarding its hidden depots and agents. Sindari has harnessed her bitterness and channeled it along with her rage into her job. While all Romulan and Remans aboard the S'harien grieve the loss of the Empire, she has become aware of the commander's own emotional instability. She is still considering what part if any she will play in addressing this new found strength and weakness.

Arrain Arrenhe Velal: Arrenhe Velal has always been a brilliant mind. Her family was low born and lacked any political connections but Arrenhe still attended the Imperial War College when her theories in astrometics and subspace caught the attention of an influential senator in Romulus. Arrenhe graduated at the top of her class and was immediately posted on the D'Deridex class Warbird IRW Terix where she served for the duration of the Dominion War. When Galan Cretak was secured his own command, he offered her a position aboard his vessel. Curious about the new Warbird class, she agreed to join him as the chief science officer of the S'harien.

The "Velal" principle is the theory that allowed the S'harien to develop its transwarp conduit system. Arrenhe was also in charge of rewiring the S'harien in order to harness existing Borg technology in the ship and utilize for their ends. Arrenhe is an invaluable addition to S'harien and arguably the most competent living Romulan engineer in the quadrant.

Service history to Date:

Golden Years

During the golden years of the alpha and beta quadrants the S'harien was predominantly tasked with the patrol of Romulan territory between the Empire and the Federation. While the Federation were ostensibly allies, the Romulan senate felt that showing the flag on these areas would deter the likelyhood of trouble along the neutral zone. There are three events that transpired during this time that were relatively noteworthy.

a) The USS Magellan incident: The S'harien assisted the USS Magellan when the Federation Galaxy class ship inexplicably lost power and drifted into a nebula on the Federation side of the neutral zone. The S'harien was the first allied ship to reach the Magellan and assisted the Federation vessel with the repelling of half a dozen Orion ships. The S'harien Reman contingent boarded the Magellan and assisted in the repelling of Orion slavers aboard the Federation ship.

b) Escort of Senate Members to Earth: The S'harien along with three other Valdore type warbirds escorted a single D'deridex class warbird carrying four high ranking members of the senate to Starfleet Headquarters on Earth. The S'harien remained in orbit over Earth for the duration of the talks. Commander Galan Cretak himself visited the Federation homeworld.

c) Operation Lamari: A Tal Shiar operation, the S'harien was tasked with tracking Section 31 forces to a system held in the periphery of the Breen confederacy. Section 31 forces were accused of meddling with the internal affairs of the Empire. Furthermore, information provided by the Tal Shiar suggested that Kimara Cretak had fallen afoul of Section 31 agents. The section 31 forces had gathered in a hidden asteroid belt and were protected by a series of minefields and a series of converted ships. The S'harien engaged these forces and utilized photon torpedos as well as modified Disruptors attuned to seem like Breen weapons. All Section 31 forces vessels were destroyed and the asteroid base was obliterated.

The Fall of Romulus/Borg War

The S'harien was like the rest of the Romulan Star Empire caught unaware by the massive incursion of Borg forces. The Romulan Empire had never dreamed that its reign would be ended in a week's time. By the time that the S'harien had moved into position from the periphery of the Empire, the Star Empire was in its death throes. The S'harien participated in over two dozen engagements against the Borg each more desperate than the last. When it became abundantly clear that the Empire was dying and that no amount of wishing would change that fact the S'harien withdrew. The choice to live and continue to serve the surviving Romulans rather than fight and die a senseless death was not a hard one for Commander Galan to make. His duty to his people far outstripped his pride.

a) The Battle of the Chaltok system: The sole victory of Romulan forces during the fall of the Empire, if a temporary one. The Battle of Chaltok was punctuated by the first truly organized resistance by the naval forces of the Empire. At the loss of over sixty Warbirds, three borg Cubes and supporting craft were destroyed. The victory was a momentary one as within six hours, Eight Borg cubes were on their way to the system. Romulan forces retreated from the system and sought to rendezvous with more forces in a nearby system.

b) The battle of Unroth: The battle of Unroth broke the back of the Romulan Navy and made it abundantly clear that the naval forces of the Empire could not realistically protect its citizens. Of the four hundred and thirty seven ships that took part in this engagement less than fifty made it out. The batte of Unroth is stated as being the point in time where the Romulan Empire seized to exist as a unified power in the quadrant. Surviving Romulan ships scattered and left the remains of the Empire to its Borg conquerors.

c) The battle for Earth: The S'harien participated in the battle for earth the definitive engagement against the Borg. After the battle of Unroth, the S`harien settled on attempting to assist Romulan survivors flee the Empire. When Starfleet made its call for assistance, the S'harien made haste and arrived over a week before Borg forces arrived on the Sol system. The S'harien claimed no less than eight separate kills during the week long exchanges until it was battered and forced to withdraw near Saturn. As the S'harien limped back towards Earth, it became known that the USS Enterprise and her entire task force were presumed destroyed. By the time that the S'harien reached Earth, the loss of Earth was the only apparent logical conclusion to the battle. In a fevered pitch, the S'harien managed to repair its cloaking device mere minutes before Borg forces breached the defenses around Mars. The S'harien was one of the last ships to leave the Sol system.

d) The Massacre at Argelius: Argelius became a stronghold for the Orion syndicate when the local Federation outpost was evacuated pending the expected arrival of Borg forces. When the Borg arrived they found nothing worth assimilating and press onward, the Orion syndicate quietly moved into the system. Argelius became a primary node of activity and it was quietly reinforced as a transfer point for the Orions slave trade. The S'harien became involved when lone Romulan refugee ships began to vanish. The S'harien tracked these disappearances and eventually discovered the Argelius system. The Orions were keenly aware of Romulan weakness and had developed a taste for Romulan flesh. The exotic nature of his people made them desirable in the black markets. Incensed, Commander Galan ordered his eight shuttles to depart under cloak down to the planet and his Reman contingent in conjunction with select Romulan crew hit the Orion facility at night.

As the Remans and Romulan forces began their assault on the planet, the S'harien dropped its cloak behind the largest Orion vessel in the system, a cruiser that crumpled beneath the withering assault of the sword of S'task. Stunned by the destruction that had been brought down upon them, the surviving four Orion frigates were ill equipped to fight the S'harien and quickly joined its larger brethren in destruction. Orion attempts to negotiate were met with silence. Their pleas to surrender went unanswered and while eighteen percent of the captured Romulans were killed by the Orions the facility was captured.

The S'harien then entered cloak and waited as its Reman and Officers led by Colonel Sindari went to work. The Orion leaders were broken and in less than six hours, were persuaded to send out a distress message to other nearby Orion forces. A single Orion frigate responded first, thirteen hours after the message was sent out and was quickly destroyed. A second frigate arrived three hours after the first and it too was reduced to stardust. No other forces came. After three days of waiting, Commander Galan ordered for all Orions to be killed and left as a warning to others. The Orions were left mutilated, with terrible disruptor burns throughout their bodies. The forces of the S'harien and the Romulan survivors returned to the S'harien and the Warbird left the system.

Captain's Name: Hizir Alpharius Rais

Captain's Species: Human

Captain's Background: Hizir Rais was born on one of the many worlds on the Federation/Cardassian border and ended up spending the first part of his life as a human under the rule of Cardassians. When he turned 16 he left home to join the Maquis where his charisma and natural abilities showed themselves to their full extent. When the Maquis were destroyed as a military force only a few years later, Hizir was one of the few survivors. Refusing to join the Federation, he soon found another group who was interested in hiring him, the Orion Syndicate.

Hizir rose through the ranks fairly quickly, both due to his own talents as well as the occasional assist from an Orion woman named Danava. Eventually he was given his own command and served the syndicate for many years as a captain until in 2390 he was caught by the Federation and put under arrest. The trial was fairly quick for though Hizir had not managed to make much of a name for himself, the evidence was fairly irrefutable. Just a few weeks later, the Borg War began. While the Romulans were still being destroyed by the Borg, Hizir was on his way to his prison on a ship filled with other prisoners. Danava, commanding his old ship, mounted a daring rescue during which Hizir was able to turn the tables on his captors and gain control of the prison ship with relatively minimal loss of life.

Rather than return to the Syndicate, Hizir felt an opportunity in the interstellar breeze and charted a course for Romulan territory, much to the confusion of his crew. When they finally arrived, they found a graveyard of massive proportions, as well as a Borg Sphere that was in the process of towing in a D'deridex for assimilation. Without a second thought, Hizir charged the Borg Sphere and launched an attack with his two ships. It was not much of a fight and soon enough both the prison ship and his ship were heavily damaged, though hey had managed to injure the Borg Sphere. Ordering the prisoners to escape pods and his crew to teleport to the downed D'deridex, Hizir teleported from the prison ship just moments before it went into warp, slamming into the sphere and destroying both ships.

Hizir now found himself in charge of a Romulan ship that was barely functioning and was filled with the bodies of dead Romulans. Collecting the prisoners, Hizir scavenged his old ship for the parts he needed to get the D'deridex running again and quickly fled Romulan territory. From there he spent more time fixing up the ship as well as launching surprise raids deep into Borg held territory. Action he continues to this day.

Ship Name: The Barbarossa (Was The IRW Gannius )

Ship Class: D'deridex Class

Crew composition: 300 Romulans, 200 Orion, 200 Human, 200 various races. 200 Romulan Marines, 100 Orion Pirates

Ship Features
Though she looks dented and bruised, the Barbarossa still looks as regal and powerful as ever. Her most distinctive feature is the intricate red paint job that has been applied to the "head" of the ship. A feature which immediately identifies her.

Special Systems and other Acquisitions:
Subspace Communication Blocker- It happened almost completely by accident during a more hair-raising encounter with the Borg that their Science officer discovered that at the right frequency and power they could cut a group of borg off from receiving information from the rest of the Collective. The more scientifically minded among the crew immediately set to work to ready a program which would allow them to do this quickly within the confines of the ship. When it works, it blocks invading Borg off from the rest of the collective, making them much easier to deal with when the ship is boarded. Work on a more mobile device is still pending.

Cutting Beams- Two heavily modified mining lasers were strapped to the front of the ship in what might at first look like a rather poor attempt at grafting a weapon onto the ship. They are weapons, but the placement was meticulous. Though they take five seconds to spin up and several minutes to cool down and recharge after firing, for ten seconds they are as the very fists of God. If any escort were caught under the full brunt of these weapons they would suffer immense damage. Any Borg cube caught under the full power of this weapon would either have their shields drained by quite a bit or be missing a large chunk of their ship. Being fixed weapons, it is very hard for The Barbarossa to hit anything smaller than a Cruiser for long periods of time.

Ship's Weakness:
"How is this ship still running?"- Against most reason and logic, Hizir and his crew managed to get the heavily damaged engines of the ship once again in working condition. But they still aren't working perfectly. The ships maximum speed is Warp 8. Additionally, it can only move at a maximum of half impulse and has some trouble with turning.

"I think she's making fun of me."- Although a third of the crew is Romulan, two-thirds of the crew is not, and even with seven years of experience their Romulan is a little rusty, and the ship only speaks Romulan.

Service history to-date: The Gannius was completed part way into the Dominion War and served with distinction and honor in the final stages of the bloody war. When the war was finally over, she was returned to Romulan space and was given the honor of serving in the home fleet which defended none other than Romulus and Remus. The Gannius was stationed there until the first days of the Borg War when she suddenly found herself on the front lines of a battle no one had expected. She fought hard, and she fought valiantly and in the end she stayed behind, trying desperately to buy her people just a few more precious minutes to escape with. Her crew died, her planet died, she was on the verge of death.

That is when she was found by Hizir and saved from a fate worse than destruction. As Hizir drove his prison ship into the Borg Sphere, destroying it, she was given a second chance at life. Through more luck than skill, her mighty engines flickered to life once again and she managed to limp away from the battle long enough to be repaired.

Once repairs had been completed, she was given a new name, an old name that had once long ago been enough to make it's enemies shiver and cower at their imminent demise. Then she was sent right back into the fray, but not in the way way her original builders had expected her to be used. Hizir used her as an ambusher. Sneaking up on lone Borg scouts and crushing them under the mighty firepower that she possesses. Slowing down the invasion of the Borg by just a tiny fraction, one that was enough to save thousands sometimes. As the war grew and spread, the Barbarossa's fame grew. Appearing just as all hope had failed, one of the last of the mighty Romulan Warbirds. She never directly fought the Borg though, distracted them, picked away at their edges, never striking full head-on, always hitting from an unexpected angle. Hizir proved he had a nearly infinite patience.

Eventually, ships began to flock to the banner of the Barbarossa and a small guerrilla fleet was born, stalking and ambushing the outriders of the Borg fleet. He could not hold back the tide however, and eventually it crashed on Earth. The Barbarossa and her small fleet of 20 ships of various and much smaller designs helped to hold the line as best they could, but it could not last forever. Before the Battle for Earth there had been roughly 20 D'deridex left. After that battle there were barely enough left to count on one hand. Beaten and bloodied, and having lost it's entire rag-tag fleet, but somehow still alive, the Barbarossa fled.

She was not beaten however, after what repairs could be made were made, she returned to her old tricks of ambushing lone Borg, but even that was getting harder as the Borg continued to learn. The Barbarossa has not been in friendly space in a year and a half, but with news that there will be one last do or die fight on their hands, the last of the mighty Warbirds is on it's way.

Notable Crew:
Danava, First Officer, Orion Female: Danava is the self-proclaimed "Most dangerous woman in the galaxy". Those that have met her say that if she's not right she isn't far off. Unlike so many other Orion women, Danava does not rely on her good looks and pheromones to win the day. She is a vicious, ruthless, and highly skilled fighter both in personal engagements and in ship fights. She has been Hizir's right hand for over a decade now and it is no secret that the pair have been in a physical relationship. But the question is what kind of relationship it is, as they both shift between seeming indifference and strong devotion at times. There is a running pot among the crew as to how close Danava and Reis are, with a fat paycheck for whoever ends up correct.

Khoal Mliessan Othan, Tactical Officer, Romulan Male: Khoal was an up-and-coming Romulan commander before the Borg war. His tactics were sound, as were his decisions in the heat of battle. He was not the best, there were several who could defeat him regularly, but he was a good solid commander all around. When the war started, Khoal found himself moving from fleet to fleet as the mounting casualties forced the fleets to combine to serve as a buffer against the Borg tide. Eventually it became clear that the cause was lost and Khoal and his ship drifted through the galaxy without a purpose until he heard rumors of a Romulan Warbird that was fighting the Borg on its own. Khoal was one of the first to join Hizir's fight, and became a trusted lieutenant. After the Battle of Earth, when his own ship had been destroyed by the fighting, Khoal had survived and moved to the Barbarossa where he continues to serve Hizir as the Tactical Officer. He and Davana occasionally get into fights as he believes he should be the First Officer.

Eriess Lareth, Navigation Officer, Romulan Female: Some say she is a Romulan diety made flesh. The reason for this is simple, the woman seems to be immortal. Eveiss is the only surviving crew member of the Gannius. She was badly hurt and not even the best of medical treatment could have fixed everything, but she did not get the best of treatment. She is missing her left leg from the mid-thigh down, large portions of muscle on her right arm are missing, she has scars criss-crossing most of her body, both from her injuries and from surgeries. A metal plate in her head serves where parts of her skull are now missing, and she can barely move her mouth, let alone smile or frown. She is still a hell of a pilot though, and has a burning hatred towards all things Borg. Ereiss refuses to tell anyone what her second name is, saying that she will not speak it until Romulus is free.

Erib, Science Officer, Andorian Male: Erib is a more recent addition to the crew of the Barbarossa. After the Battle for Earth he had been the Science Officer on a starfleet ship turned refugee ship that was making its way to an outlying colony world when a Borg sphere caught up to them and attacked. That was when the Barbarossa decloaked and fired everything it had at the sphere. Between the two ships they were victorious, though Erib's ship had been heavily damaged and could no longer achieve warp. The refugees and crew were then taken on by the Barbarossa and shuttled to their new colony. Erib decided to stay with the ship however. Feeling he could do more there. He spends most of his time in his office, working towards the latest scientific breakthrough that he hopes can be used against the Borg.

Delvok, Medical Officer, Vulcan Male: Another survivor from Barbarossa's fleet, Delvok's commander was a human that had been a Maquis and, knowing Hizir, had joined his fleet. At the Battle for Earth the ship was among many that were destroyed, though Delvok and some of the crew had been transported to the Barbarossa just before the ship exploded. Delvok adjusted rather quickly to life aboard the Barbarossa and has spent a great deal of time with Eveiss, doing what he can to ease her pain.

Adrek, Pel, and Zek, Chief Engineers, Ferengi Males: These three Ferengi brothers are well known ship scavengers, taking the juicy parts off of wrecks for a hefty profit. They met Hizir on the prison ship after being arrested for illegally salvaging a Starfleet ship. When Hizir hired them on as engineers to run the ship their superb talents shined through and half the reason the ship still runs at all is the brothers' ability to make pieces that have no business fitting together fit nearly perfectly. The brothers have first rights to any new salvage found and every once in awhile Hizir sends down a bottle of good Romulan Ale to keep them happy.

Romulan Ale, Bottled in 2375, Ship's Counselor: Searching the ruins of the Romulan Empire, the Barbarossa came across a huge stockpile of genuine Romulan ale. It was immediately brought on board and druing a drunken revelry the ale was declared to be the Ship's Counselor and given a battlefield promotion. Since then the ale has served dutifully as the Ship's Counselor, helping the crew get through the worst of times. Most of the time the crew drinks replicated ale, so as to save the good stuff for celebrations or mourning. It's rumored among the crew that Hizir has a bottle of 2273, generally regarded as the best year for Romulan ale, that he is saving for the end of the war.

(Acting Captain) Eoife Kirk
XO: Lt. Serin
Captain's Species: Human/Colonial
Captain's Background: Despite the name, Eoife is not a (grand)child of the Hero of the Federation. She is his niece, through his one surviving relative, the Terran Diplomat Peter Kirk. The teasing she got from her family ties haunted her in the Academy made her nearly change her name, and the high expectations from some teachers in the Academy nearly had her quit. Sheer stubbornness got her through, not realizing that was one of the traits that make the Kirk lineage so admired.

She was assigned to the USS Spector after graduation with the class of 2370, and unlike the Great Capt. Kirk she did not have a fast rise in rank, although her record would show her diligent and focused. The outbreak of the Dominion War changed that, and as the Spector served proudly at Chin'tocka, Cardassia, and by the Prometheus Incident she was serving First Watch on the Battle Bridge, coordinating fighter attacks.

The Borg Invasion and the destruction of the Federation was a hard blow. The Spector was involved in several of the first battles, with heavy cost to their fighter complement. The Battle of Earth was their last large fight, and the Spector lost nearly half her fighters that day, as well as the majority of her senior officers. A Borg Phaser sheered through the shields and scored a glancing hit to the Main Bridge. The blow out-right killed the XO and many bridge crew; Captain George Ellison and few survivors managed to escape to the turbolift, but not to safety. As the hull gave way, the turbolift lost power and dropped multiple decks before the safeties caught it and also contained the hull breech. Capt. Ellison has been on medical life-support ever since, fading in and out of a coma.

Lt Commander Eoife, being the ranking officer on the Battle Bridge, was raised to Acting Captain, and with the battle lost she called in the Spector's remaining fighters and retreated to Warp. The last few years had been the hardest test of any officer.

As Acting Captain of a damaged fleeing ship, Eoife has had to make hard choices, with only occasional input from the injured Capt. Ellison. With the fighter complement decimated, she chose to turn two of the fighter bays into replicator bays, scavenging asteroid fields and former battlefields for the parts to keep her torpedo bays full and her remaining fighters operational. She's taken a nearly maternal view of her ship and crew, not wanting to risk 'her babies' (the fighters) to any stand-up battles. So far, Capt Ellison has understood and supported her when lucid. However, he finally succomed to his wounds just as the Spectre met up with remnants of the Federation and Klingon fleets.

But now the call to Bajor has come, and Eoife Kirk and the Spector must join the others on their way to their last stand.

Lt Serin, XO
Serin was actually an adopted child of mixed heritage. He looks like a green-haired human, due to Orion and possible Romulan/Vulcanoid genetics in his lineage. His adoption by Vulcan parents has been explained as exactingly logical, as was his own personal adherance to the philosophy of Logic. He does not recall his birth parents, although he knows they were both at the Vulcan Science Academy, and that he has distant relatives who work in various scientific and mathematic fields. Serin was encouraged to follow his birth family's inclinations towards scientific study. His decision to join Starfleet was met by no surprise from his adopted parents, who found it logically followed his interests.

Ship Name: USS Spector (NCC-65549)
Ship Class: Akira
Length: 464.6 meters
Width: 316.7 meters
Height: 87.4 meters
Mass: 3,055,000 metric tons
Decks: 26 decks
Crew: 500/4500 personnel evacuation limit
Speed: Cruise: Wp 6
Max. Cruise: Wp 9.2
Max. Emergency: Wp 9.8
Armaments: 6(4) Phaser arrays, 15 Torpedo tubes
Defences: Ablative armor, Deflector Shields
Auxiliary craft (Remaining): 10(3) Work bees, 40(20) Fighters, 10(4) Shuttlecraft, 5(4) Shuttlepods

Crew composition: Out of the standard crew composition, the Spector has only the junior officers from the Battle Bridge left, as well as the Chief Medical Officer and Engineer. Out of the 500 normal crew, only 2/3 remain, with many non--military family members attempting to cover the missing shifts.
At this point, only 15 fully trained fighter pilots remain.


Special Systems and other Acquisitions:
Fighter Complement: 20 fighters, of which only 12-15 at a time are flyable. Each fighter has 3 torpedo launchers and 2 phaser emitters, as well as deflector shields.
Using scavenged equipment, 4 of the fighters have been turned into cloaked bombers, at the cost of the phasers and all warp capability. These silent bombers are meant for sudden surprise flanking attacks, dropping a brace of torpedoes before vanishing into cloaked evasive maneuvers.


Ship's Weakness:
1. No senior officers, and just an Acting Captain. Eoife Kirk is young and unsure of herself, haunted by the weight and expectations of her last name.

2. Main Bridge inoperable due to unrepairable hull damage. Crude repairs have been attempted so the shields do protect the wound, but any shots to that section of hull have a greater chance of destroying the ship.

3. Weakened Fighter Complement. (see above)

4. One Flight Bay. The others are now replicator bays to keep the fighters armed, as well as the Spector's own torpedo launchers

Captain: Francis "Frank" Shirazi

Race: Human

A former Maquis, Frank Shirazi was paroled from his rehabilitative term during the Dominion War, during which he served as the helmsman on a colony transport that carried supplies to the war zones and evacuated refugees from besieged planets. At the conclusion of the conflict, he was offered full reinstatement at his old rank (Lieutenant Commander) but declined as the moral disagreement he'd held with Starfleet policies had not changed in the intervening time. He then retired to Holdara, a new colony in the former Cardassian DMZ that was a joint Federation-Klingon venture. There he spent most of his time divided between fishing, orbital skydiving, and poker games with a motley collection of ex-Starfleet and ex-Klingon military types. In the meantime, retirement service in the System Defense Force (two weekends a month and two weeks a year) familiarized him with the system's lone vessel, an antiquated D-12 Bird of Prey rightfully considered to be a museum piece by the Imperial Navy. The cloak coils leaked emission and the warp drive was lucky to make warp seven on a good day, but the Meh'Ta was faithfully maintained by the small crew of regulars and the weekenders.

When the Borg invasion broke out Holdara and many other minor colonies were ignored in favor of prioritizing defense for the larger population/industrial centers of the Alpha Quadrant. Local merchants and other vessels were cobbled together not as a combat force, but as a refugee fleet. (Fifty thousand survivors... looking for a home... but not Earth.)

Rather than keeping a consolidated fleet that would make for a simple target, the colonial refugees split up with the design of spreading small, self-sustaining pockets of life among the debris of space. Asteroids and other space debris have become the refuge of choice, with communities anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred hiding in the scattered rocks of the deep void between stars. The Meh'Ta acted as a liaison between these microcolonies until it was called upon to defend a colony that had somehow been discovered by the Borg. Badly damaged, the senior crew dead, Shirazi assumed command during what seemed to be the vessel's last moments. To the surprise of everyone, particularly the Borg fighters moving in for the kill, a trio of Romulan Warbirds decloaked and made short work of the Borg incursion. Seeing the refugees off as they moved in hope of finding a more secure hiding place, the Warbirds towed the nearly-dead Meh'Ta back to their hidden base, a cloaked Tal Shiar research facility developing new weapons and equipment for use against the invasion. While many of the structural and engine limitations of the antique vessel were beyond upgrading by a limited facility, the cloaking system was enhanced and a new prototype weapon system was installed.

With a crew reconstituted from a polygot of former civilian spacers drawn from both the colonies and refugees aboard the Tal Shiar station, the Meh'Ta has resumed its patrols of the Stellar Wastes. Moreover, Shirazi has made contact with other former Maquis and deployed the vessel to several raids staging from the Badlands to strike at targets of opportunity.

First Officer: Lieutenant M'Lara daughter of Noggra, of the House of Tarqel. A former Klingon Imperial Marine, M'Lara served with distinction during the Dominion War. A veteran of the Battle of Cardassia, when her platoon successfully boarded a Gem'Hadar battleship, she was forced into early retirement due to a multitude of injuries. Over three quarters of her face is prosthetic, the consequence of a plasma leak in the engineering space of the battleship. As well she has three prosthetic limbs from previous injuries, and multiple internal organs including one heart have been replaced by mechanical equivalents. Nevertheless she remains a daunting figure and maintains strict discipline throughout the vessel, her remaining organic eye threatening to burn holes through any crewmember who isn't performing to her elevated standards.

Intelligence officer: Yhrea tr'Ledetham, official liaison from the Tal Shiar station Nveid. A man of dubious past and more dubious morals. He is a scrupulously effective intelligence officer who delights in field work, taking every opportunity to get out and personally gather information. Yhea is the first to volunteer for any away team, and while some on the crew may question his methods, none can question his effectiveness. Has a surprisingly cordial relationship with Lieutenant M'Lara and is the only member of the crew who can match her drink for drink.

Communications officer: Zarv Gleck, former systems engineer for the Halacha Design Conglomerate, a research consortium that primarily focused on R&D for Federation subspace communications networks. Gleck earned advanced degrees from four major universities, including Cambridge on Earth. Also notable for his involvement in amateur theater, including a turn as Hamlet (in the original Klingon) at Cambridge. Gleck is belligerently brilliant and possesses a deeply sarcastic wit that occasionally complicates his shipboard duties.

Chief Medical Officer: Alenis Meru. Meru had barely received her accreditation as a medical doctor at the tail-end of the Cardassian Occupation. Like most Bajoran families, the Occupation left its mark- one older sibling was killed in service of the Bajoran resistance, as were several cousins. More appallingly, one uncle was revealed to have been a collaborator after the Cardassian withdrawal, who may well have had a hand in more than one loss in the family. Having grown up in what was essentially a resistance family, Meru was drawn by relatives into the Maquis cause. Her aid station was discovered by a Federation starship shortly before the Jem'Hadar purge of the Maquis, and she was returned with the other Bajorans at the station to face a penal sentence on Bajor.

Marine Detachment Commander: Barim Cratel is something of an enigma. Volunteering for service with Star Fleet's ground combatant branch, he distinguished himself during the brief Federation/Klingon conflict, and later during the Dominion War. Generally tight-lipped and solitary by nature, Cratel tends to remain focused on training his personnel to a sharp edge.

Chief Helmsman: Jason Lee came to the Meh'Ta by means of an emergency recruitment after the vessel was savaged at the hands of a Borg vessel. His past career is highly ambiguous, apparently involving merchant vessels and other less-savory operations outside the boundaries of Federation space. He is, however, a naturally talented and highly-experienced helmsman.

Engineer Technician: Ellen Tolbert comes from a band of wanderers who took to the spacelanes shortly after Cochrane opened the stars to the human race. The wanderers have plied the space lanes since that time, until the arrival of the Borg made their lives and lifestyles too perilous. Recruited at one of the independent interstellar colonies, her intimate knowledge of shipboard life and systems has made her a unique asset to the crew.

Systems Technician: Kolar of the House of Motun served for over three decades in the Imperial Navy while never garnering a single promotion, a truly impressive feat. A traveling aesthete, he is almost as well-known for his singing voice and the steel guitar of mysterious provenance ('spoils of war') as he is for his skill at keeping ship functions running smoothly. He died.

Marine: Peenostinga, or 'Grandma Stinga' is getting on in years. Long before feminism finally arrived on Ferengar, Grandma Stinga had taken to the spacelanes, putting her lobes to use in affiliation with various pirate bands and mercenary units, though most Ferengi pirates avoided her due to her gender and reputed insanity. Undeterred, she plied her violent and illicit trade on dozens of worlds, before retiring with a horde of gold-pressed latinum that would be the envy of most Ferengi men. When the Borg arrived, all the latinum in the galaxy could not purchase safety and Grandma Stinga was forced to take up arms once more. She has a strong relationship with M'Lara and Cratel and is often included in their planning sessions to take advantage of her experience and broad knowledge of the species of the Alpha Quadrant.

Cloaking Systems Technician: Hexce tr'Valdran was brilliant once, and perhaps still is. Somewhere along the way, the pressures of a galaxy turned upside down at him, until he found the solace of chemical companionship. In times of peace, tr'Valdran's penchant for chemical experimentation would've seen him punished harshly in the Romulan Star Empire. However, as one of the few surviving experts on cloaking systems, tr'Valdran's contribution to the design and implementation of highly experimental phase cloaking systems made him too valuable to waste, while his addiction made him too troublesome to keep close. As such, when a technician was required to maintain and study the practical usage of the phase cloak, tr'Valdran was summarily 'exiled' to the Meh'Ta, a posting that to tr'Valdran's mind was better than being cooped up on the Nveid waiting for the Borg to discover them. When he's lucid or only mildly stoned, his mind is still highly sharp and insightful. However, as he descends further down the spiral of his various addictions, those periods become further and further apart.

Meh'Ta- Undesignated independent vessel.

Crew: 38 (25 vessel crew, 13-being 'Marine' detachment led by lieutenant M'Lara and Betazed sergeant Jenzar.)
7 Humans
5 Klingons
2 Romulans
1 Bajoran
2 Binars
1 Betazed
Assorted others to be revealed when dramatically convenient.

The D-12s were the earliest Bird of Prey design from the time of the ancient Klingon/Romulan Alliance. Effective in their time, the flaws in the D-12 cloaking systems led to the class becoming quickly obsolete in the face of upgraded sensor technology. Superseded by the more modern B'rel class, D-12s were recycled to interior garrison roles and escort duty before finally being retired by the IKV altogether.

The Meh'Ta is a venerable warhorse, a hodgepodge of century-old technology combined with some cutting edge Romulan equipment. Crewed by a motley assortment of sentients, the spectrum of talent available to the crew has served to get them out of many a precarious situation.

Advantages

They don't build 'em like that anymore: The Meh'Ta is a tried-and-true vessel, built to rugged specifications. While the engines are in dire need of an overhaul, primary ship systems are remarkably durable and low-maintenance. The simplicity of repair makes replication of parts much easier. The relative primitiveness of the ship is often a liability in combat situations, but the reliability of the vessel has been a blessing to the crew.

One good punch and then I'm all yours, buddy: The prototype boring torpedo system designed by the Tal Shiar allows for a devastating initial barrage of fire. Designed around the principle of a highly-focused disruptor shot trailed by a rapid-fire stream of torpedoes, the system is designed to penetrate an opposing vessel's hull and then allow for torpedo detonation inside the hull for maximum effect. The downside of the system is that the capacitor bank for the disruptor allows two to three solid shots before being completely discharged, while the forward torpedo magazine likewise can sustain three salvos before exhausting the forward magazine. In a feat of shipbuilding brilliance, the auxiliary torpedo storage is located to the aft and torpedo transfer takes upwards of fifteen minutes, while capacitor recharge takes approximately ten minutes if the ship is sitting dead still and uncloaked, or over an hour if the ship is accelerating under cloak.

We'll take 'em all, you betcha: The positive side is that the torpedo system has been modified to accommodate the torpedo designs of multiple species with minimal alteration. As such resupply issues are greatly diminished.

Kitty Pryde, maaaaan: A motherfuckin' PHASE CLOAK. Which is pretty awesome in theory, but in practice the USS Pegasus showed that it's not all it's cracked up to be. Also the system is massively power-intensive, dropping top speed down to Warp 4.

Drawbacks:

Would it help if I got out and pushed?: The engines, they've seen better days. The Binar engineers (the Bobsy Twins) have set up a shrine to invoke the Warp Gods to coax more power out of the engines. Some days, it works.

Well we done shot our wad: Once the main weapons system is depleted, the vessel has to rely on a trio of underpowered disruptors to communicate its aggression to passerby. Needless the say the Borg are typically unimpressed.

Now you see me, now you don... fuck, they see us: Despite the tender ministrations of Vrih t'Mas, another Tal Shiar liaison, the primary cloaking device is a rather quirky beast. Some days it does just fine. Some days they might as well be shining a flashlight in the eyes of everyone within a light year.

I'd kill for a good sandwich right now: Another casualty of the Borg Invasion was the ship's food replicator system. As such, the vessel must carry its own rations, a major drain on space leading to spare ration cases being stored in personnel quarters and every other free space. Worse yet the rations are typically Romulan infantry rations, universally reviled and theorized to be the byproduct of Breen suit excretory filtering systems.

Captain's Name: Captain Matthias Solheim
Captain's Species: Human
Captain's Background: Joining Starfleet at 18 years old, Solheim was hand-picked for the Elite Force program two years after graduation, receiving and completing many difficult assignments during his four years there. Shortly after that, he was drafted by Section 31, serving as black ops. During this time, he took part in some terrible things, ostensibly for the greater good of Starfleet and life in the galaxy, though as time went on, he began to have doubts.

He became Captain of the Gilgamesh after the previous bridge crew (all but the science officer and head engineer) were all killed during the initial Borg attack on the science base where this particular prototype was being shaken down in final trials. He and the skeleton testing crew of engineers hastily freed the nearly-finished ship from dock, and managed to escape the Borg despite the lack of cloaking device at the time.

Captain Solheim sees his time now as a way of redemption for some of the things he's done during his time with Section 31, which later on led to his rescue of the remaining crew of the derelict d'Deridex Vampaja, and integrate them into his crew to take advantage of their expertise. As a result, his crew has grown in cohesion swiftly, growing close together as a family over the years. This has become true to the point where he and his XO consider themselves engaged to be married through a small ceremony observed by the crew a year ago. This has had the result of others in his crew doing the same, and the former crew of the Vampaja fully considering themselves members of the Gilgamesh's crew, and the small ship their home.

Other Crew of Note (Optional):
- First Officer Commander Samara Inzeti: She commanded Romulan cruisers for 27 years prior to this, and chose to stay behind on the ship Vampaja, a storied d'Deridex that she'd captained for six years, rather than leave as the Borg tore it apart. She was known for keeping impartial and fair even with Tal-Shiar or those with connections, though it resulted in her being promoted more slowly, and left out of the greater Romulan military political circles as a result. Despite this, she was known as an efficient and exceptional Commander, resulting in her falling into a political grey area despite her successes.

Found half-starved and injured but alive aboard the derelict D'deridex Vampaja along with a platoon of Romulan marines guarding her, Commander Inzeti and Captain Solheim spoke for a time. Once she and her marines got over their initial mistrust, they integrated quickly into the ship's crew. She quickly found a kindred spirit in Captain Solheim, and frequently plays games of chess with him. Her sharp mind, keen intuition for spaceborne tactics, and long experience in the Romulan Star Empire's military make her an invaluable asset.

- Chief Engineer Lt. Commander Lilith Dawson: The only bridge member to survive the original attack by the Borg, Chief Dawson keeps her "baby girl" working with rare grace and ingenuity, though at times creative solutions for ship issues were the beginnings of some rather interesting adventures over the years. Known to croon and talk to the innards of the ship as she works, as well as having a severe weakness for true alcoholic beverages of any type, having a nearly pathological loathing of synthahol. She and the engineering crews under her direction are single-handedly responsible for keeping the Gilgamesh fully operational for six years away from a spacedock.

- Tactical Officer Lieutenant Mechle Adranis: Once the commanding officer for a group of Romulan special operatives in the Tal'Shiar, he had been expelled from the Tal'Shiar and put into the regular Romulan military after a Senator he was guarding was assassinated. Though he was considered "above suspicion" for the incident, and therefore not executed, he found himself landing the job as chief of security aboard the Vampaja. A short time later, during the Borg attack, he found himself pressed into defending his ship's commanding officer against all comers aboard the wreck of the Vampaja as they awaited rescue by the very man who caused his career to end - a fact that has carried from an adversarial relationship with Captain Solheim, into a semi-friendly adversarial relationship with the man - mostly due to that fact that despite all events that happened, he finds himself forced to grant Captain Solheim a certain measure of respect. Now serving as tactical officer of the Gilgamesh, he's in charge of ship's weapons' firing solutions, and with planning of away team missions.

- Navigator/Pilot Lt. Commander Arichu Nevola: Working on the Vampaja as ship's navigator and pilot, Lieutenant Nevola found herself working in the same role aboard the Gilgamesh after her rescue from the derelict that once was the first ship she served on, to her glee. Once having served as pilot aboard the Vampaja by her family pulling the strings to get her a "safe assignment," but fell utterly in love with the Gilgamesh the very first time she piloted it. This incident also mandated five-point seat restraints on the bridge, as not even Federation-make inertial dampeners could quite make up for the stresses placed on the ship and crew by her flying. A keen student of geometry and navigation both, Lieutenant Nevola's disquieting skill as a pilot and navigator, as well as her sharp tongue have quickly earned her the nickname "Swift."

- Chief Medical Officer Lieutenant Shoshannah Melisande: Known as a heavy drinker and chain smoker (and making no apologies whatsoever for any of it), Doctor Melisande is a remarkably skilled surgeon, doctor, and researcher, even if her demeanor would make one utterly incredulous about the fact. She was once the squad medic serving alongside Captain Solheim back in the Section 31 days, and having fully qualified in multiple medical disciplines, she is now a well-qualified doctor, who has not lost some of her perspective from black ops. She has on more than one occasion played drinking games while on duty (taking a shot whenever a patient went into cardiac arrest) - but even with all of this, the only people who've entered her sickbay that she has been unable to save were the bridge crew killed during the initial attack. All others are healthy, and well-cared for - though some of them (such as Commander Inzeti) are less voluntary about it than others.

- Chief Science Officer Lieutenant Sekele M'erevek: Once the second in command of the Vampaja's astrometrics labs, Lieutenant M'erevek adjusted into the role of Chief Science Offifer of the much smaller Gilgamesh. The tradeoff though, he had to admit, was far more sensor power packed into a much smaller space - the Gilgamesh actually has finer sensors than the much larger Vampaja did, as a d'Deridex. He directs a small science team to various tasks, all forced to have multiple specialties - but able to perform in a far more exploratory role than he ever did in the Romulan Empire - then again, the Borg had a way of changing what one considers reasonable, he often muses to himself. He found himself deciding to become a Starfleet officer along with the others, after hearing the many debates on the subject between Captain Solheim and Commander Inzeti, and Commander Inzeti herself deciding to put on the Starfleet red uniform of command, instead of the spiked green of the Romulan Empire. So far, Lieutenant M'erevek has not once regretted this choice he's made, not even with future prospects.

- Assistant Engineer Kavan, son of Kesh, of the House of Martok: Found and rescued from Nivoch IV, Kavan was once in charge of the Klingon task force brought together to bring down the Vampaja. Now, he's the assistant engineer for the Gilgamesh, a task he relishes - polishing the destroyer's fangs and claws, as he puts it, is a task he takes great enjoyment with, and even more when they're used to annihilate Borg.




Ship Name: U.S.S. Gilgamesh
Ship Class: Valiant (variant of Defiant-class)
Ship Type: Destroyer
Ship Dimensions: Length: 175 meters, Beam: 97 meters, Height: 28 meters
Crew composition: 35 officers & crew. Maximum capacity is an additional 150 people.
Special Systems and other Acquisitions:
- "Cometfall" Mass Accelerator Siege Platform:
The main reason for the ship's different design, this weapon runs the entire keel of the ship, firing a solid iridium slug at significant fractions of the speed of light. It is designed explicitly to crack heavy armor open like an egg.

This weapon has its own drawbacks, due to the experimental nature of its design. First, simply due to space concerns, wherein facilities to process and manufacture each slug are required on the ship as well, the Gilgamesh simply doesn't have the physical space to store more than 30 shots at a time.

While the ship is capable of manufacturing new slugs from nearly any combination of heavy elements, limited storage for them is always a concern. Secondly, the tremendous energy this weapon needs to fire each shot requires nearly all power from the ship (including shields & weapons, but not life support or sensors) be diverted to the Cometfall system for the duration of the firing sequence, which takes ten seconds total. The ship must remain motionless for the full ten seconds, though it can immediately use the ship's power for other purposes after the shell is fired.

The designers also offered this sage advice in regards to firing this system within an atmosphere: "Don't if you like living."


Ship's Weakness: No ablative armor coating on the ship's hull. Unlike other Defiant-class ships, due to the Gilgamesh not being completed when the Borg came, the ablative armor hull coating was never added.


Service history to-date: Matthias Solheim may hold the Starfleet rank equivalent of Captain, but had no prior experience with a ship or crew prior to the massacre of the shipyard where he and the remaining crew aboard the Gilgamesh made their escape. It seemed that despite this, luck carried him and the ship to the right place, at the right time.

Since the cloaking device was never added to the Gilgamesh prior to its hasty departure from spacedock, the crew decided to head to the system of the Romulan homeworld, hoping to glean a cloaking device from one of the wrecks in that system. They certainly didn't expect to find a crippled d'Deridex barely hanging onto life, the corpses of numerous Borg ships a testament to the d'Deridex's crew that they would not go quietly into the night.

An away team went to the ship, and a tense situation immediately occurred when their presence was noticed. There were many delicate moments during the first hour in which it would have been very easy and very justifiable for one side or another to simply begin shooting - tempers were running hot, and the Romulans aboard were less than excited by the prospect of their rescuers wearing Starfleet uniforms. This was especially true because the still-living chief of security for this d'Deridex remembered Captain Solheim very well from his Section 31 days, and without a single modicum of fondness.

However, Solheim found himself doing just that, deciding to calm things down as best he could instead of reaching for his phaser. To his surprise, it worked, and it granted him an audience with the injured, though still-living Commander of the vessel, Commander Inzeti. The two talked for quite a time, and ultimately, Solheim got far more than he wanted - the Gilgamesh would now have a full crew instead of a skeleton crew (though half of them would grumble often about Starfleet's design practices), a proper cloaking device (along with engineers who know exactly how it works), and a cache of heavy plasma torpedoes. Moreover, it also got him qualified officers, even though those officers were significantly less than thrilled at the idea of even considering Starfleet jumpsuits.

Even so, while there were many political and diplomatic issues that arose from the combined crew at first, it didn't take them more than two weeks and another engagement with the Borg before they began to work together as an old and reliable machine might. Adranis, the Romulan Chief of Security who remembered Solheim very well, ultimately became weapons officer. The pilot for the massive d'Deridex Vampaja truly found her calling as the pilot of the Gilgamesh (much to her family's concern), and most of all, the former d'Deridex Commander Inzeti served as the Gilgamesh's XO, quietly helping Captain Solheim learn the subtleties of being a ship captain.

Since then, the Gilgamesh has operated as a ship of guerilla warfare against Borg interests, such as they are. It was only with meeting several other ships completely by accident that the crew is now entertaining serious thoughts beyond immediate survival. If there is one thing the entire crew of the Gilgamesh has learned, it is how to survive.

Now, with allies, a chance appears to win, not just survive. This is a chance that the crew of the Gilgamesh will take gladly, even if their ship's crew roster would give most diplomatic officials bad migraines.

Captain: Gabriel Ethan Anderson

Species: Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Human)

Background: Captain Anderson joined up during the Dominion War and rose through the ranks during and in the aftermath. As a result of his experiences he became a part of the Militant faction of Starfleet. His service record and his membership in a powerful faction within Starfleet gave him a command of an Akira class starship (USS Thunderchild), at the end of the 5 year mission, he was promoted to command of a Sovereign B-1 class ship. Then the Borg appeared. In the fighting since then he and his ship have suffered a number of wounds and scars. He has lost his left forearm and hand. His right lung and his left eye and ear and left leg. His missing limbs and organs replaced by cybernetics, which at time seem to make him part Borg give him a grim and foreboding look. It also brings a sense of security to the crew, who have started to believe in a Supernatural relationship between Captain and ship, some on the lower decks even claiming that as long as one live, the other cannot be slain but will be summon back to life. Others claim the Borg don't kill him because they believe he is one of them. Lastly others believe the Captain to simply be to stubborn for Death to claim.

Ship Name: Immortal
Ship Class Sovereign B-1
Length: 685 meters
Decks: 26
Crew Assignment: 855
Current Crew: 781
Speed: Warp 9.985
Armament: 12 phaser arrays
1 forward quantum launcher*
3 forward photon launcher*
4 aft photon launchers*

*Canon wise the armament was 1 quantum launcher and 3 photon launchers forward and 6 aft photon launchers. A discussion between the GM and the player agreed that was a retarded design and switched them. A standard Sovereign would then have 6 forward launchers as well as 16 phaser arrays. Due to the NRA's space and power requirements however, the B1 stays at 12 phaser arrays and 4 forward and 4 aft launchers.

Special Systems:

Nuclear Rail Accelerator Stripping out two forward photon torpedo launchers, created the room for this system. Mounted within the lower decks of the saucer section this weapon fires metallic hollow slugs. Within the slug, sheltered by Inertial dampers and small shield systems is a high yield megaton nuclear fusion device. The shell buries itself within a Borg Cube and the nuclear event burns and rips it to pieces from the inside out. Only 54 shells remain, the ship lacks the ability to create more as they are highly complex and complicated weapons and cannot simply be replicated en mass.

Rotating Frequency Shields The shields rotate frequency at random intervals and random frequencies in order to make the Borg's life more difficult. At least in theory.

Genesis Torpedoes During the battle for Vulcan, the Captain realized the planet would fall and lead an away mission to the doomed planet. He grabbed from an Imperial Depot a batch of weaponized Genesis Devices, Genesis Torpedoes. He lost his left leg that day. He liked that leg.

Weakness: The USS Immortal has seen combat across the Beta and Alpha Quadrants. As such it has collected a number of wounds and scars.

I: Fluctuating Gravity in the Engineering section, it changes from 2 Gs to .2 Gs without warning, to fix it would require a major refit.

II: Deck 17, No lights.

III Deck 20, No heat.

IV Secondary Med bay destroyed.

V: Structural Integrity Field weak on Saucer rear. Not able to stand up to weapons fire without shields.

VI: Shuttle Bay Open to Void: All work must be conducted in suits

VII: Transporter system is a total lost. During a boarding action 2 years ago, the primary transporter system had to be... detonated. In addition the secondary transporters rooms were fried during fire fights and use of anti-personal explosives. The only working transporters on the ship are on the shuttlecraft... In the shuttle bay... With no atmosphere.


Service History: One of the last Sovereigns commissioned before the Borg, it saw service primary against them. It fought in the Rihannsu Imperialium, the Komerex, the Gorn Hegemony, the Ferengi worlds and lastly the Federation. It has been holed, it has been burned, rammed, shot up, fried and worse but always survived with Captain Anderson at the Con. It's last stay at a major dock was to long ago but the ship paces on. Only 45% of the crew are members of the assigned roster, the remaining 55% being "irregular volunteers serving for the duration" Of those IVSD's many are from outside the Federation, ranging to Gorn, Ferengi, a small group of Breen, Edo, and Horta.

Crew Personale: First Officer Shran Tak. One of the few known surviving Andorians. Shran would never admits it but believes his species to be doomed and fated for extinction even if a miracle happens and the Borg are defeated. His one hope is to save some part of the Federation so his people can live on, even if only as memories. He is aggressive to that end and a firm with the crew. Strangely enough he is a regular at Rog's card games and even drinks with the Ferengi. It's a friendship no one can figure out.

Chief Medical Officer Danzen Rei. A joined Trill who joined Starfleet only when the Borg invaded Rihannsu space. He's been a medical officer through the entire Borg war. Despite his loses and the pain he must feel at the fall of Trill, he's a serene man, almost appearing Zen. He's been acting not only as the doctor but as the private confessor of most of the bridge crew at this point, as the ship's consulor shot himself a long time ago. No one knows what happened to the symboints when Trill fell, but he is confident that they were not destroyed.

Chief Science Officer Cerezi. Unjoined Trill, she's served with the Captain before the Immotral and knows him best out of the crew. Along with Danzen she ends up as his voice of reason, it also helps that she's saved his life at least twice that everyone knows of. She's one of the few people that the Captain spends leisure time with as he usually prefers to maintain a distance between him and the crew. She's also something of a moral officer, keeping activates going to keep the crew busy and away from having to much time to think of their situation.

Geneticists in chief Rog. A Ferengi that was picked up during the fighting in the Ferengi worlds. Rog has a crew of 12 other Ferengi including strangely enough 3 female research assistants. While he would harass them via a varity of sexist and crude comments, he never laid a hand on them. Explaining once to the Captain “They're more profitable if I keep my pants on.” The Captain put a stop to the verbal sexual harassment regardless however. Rog's goal and project has been collecting genetic samples of every sapient species the ship encounters and of all of crew. His goal is simple. When the Borg are defeated (no profit in despair) he'll be the saviour of dozens of species through the miracle of cloning and so forth. As saviour of these species he will of course be owed a small percentage of these Species GNP for the rest of his life. He runs a weekly card game for senior officers.

Tssszzzz, First Office of a Gorn ship that was part of the Immotral's task force and senior officer of the Gorn continent on the ship (there are 78 Gorn on board). The Gorn serve as a heavy weapons team for the ship and Tssszzz is their representive. Also a regular of the card game, he has also become a friend of both Cerezi and the Captain. The Captain has a weakness for a Gorn game Tazzkrk! A game played on a hexagonal board with 8 pieces a player. Tsssszzzz considers the Captain to be lucky, supernaturally so and encourages this belief across the ship.

Chief of Security Malack. Malack is a male Horta who became chief of security after the Immortal saved and evaced his colony. There is a small group of Horta on the ship (about 30). His assistat a Betazed named Broshan serves has his hands, they even play as a team at cards. Malack has proven to be very good at telling when humanoids are bluffing. He also enjoies the sport of dodge ball, even though his only role in the game is to dodge.

Chief Engineer Mary Higgins. In another time and place Mary could have supported herself on her looks and done quiet well for herself.. Tall, blonde and well built, in the 24th century she became a Starfleet Engineer and is damn good at her job. Born on Alpha Centuri she joined after the Dominion War and shot up through the ranks on a combination of ability and sheer blood single mindness determined to be Chief Engineer before she was 30. Since the Borg war she's had to master the systems of a dozen races and nations. She's also become a master at jury rigging, not that she likes being a master of jury rigging. She's a bright, disciplined and ambitious lady and runs a tight engineering department. When Lt. Summers was picked up she wasn't to keen on the man, but he managed to impressed her and they've... Kept Company ever since.

Mak Than, Breen pirate turned resistance fighter turned dirty tricks specialist. Mak Than was a pirate who had an attack of morality and joined the war to defend the Federation. His ship was blown out from under him but the Immortal picked up the survivors. Mak Than declared his loyality for the Captain and has served as directors of Special Operations for the ship working with Malack and Tssszzzz. While deicated to defeating the Borg, he's not the most moral person on the ship and often suggests the low road, acting as the Captain's shoulder demon. His loyalty to the Captain is feudal in nature. He is the led of the 23 Breen remaining on the ship. Cerezi doesn't like him at all, Malack has struck up an odd friendship with him however. No, we haven't seen him under the suit.

Lt. Ricky "The Hatchet" Summers, Rickey was a young boy living on a colony when the Dominion War. When the Jemhadar invaded, it was Starfleet troops that protected them. In fact a young officer saved his life when he was caught in a firefight. From that point on Summers was determined to be part of Starfleet's ground arm. He usually get's what he sets his mind on. After the Dominion War Starfleet began a deciated training program for Away Teams and ground troops and their officers. Ricky was practically a poster boy. He was assigned to roving battalion as trouble shooting troops and enjoyed the work, until the Borg came. When the Immortal found him shortly after the Komerex campaign, leading the surviving platoon out of his battalion, on a hollowed out asteroid, where a Borg Sphere and it's drones had taken an interest. Summers had fought a brutal hall to hall battle with them doing his level best to win via attrition. During this campaign he had been cut off from his troops and was low on ammo when he found a colonization kit and a mono-molecular edged hatchet. He was more then happy to use it, picking up the nickname. Strangely enough for a man known for manic axe work he's well read and according to some ridiculously soft spoken unless riled up. Commander Higgins caught his eye when he was rescued and he practically started courting her from his sick bed, it took a while but he managed to impress her enough to get his shot. It was pretty much all he needed.

Captain's Name: Tlorn Vladstok
Captain's Species: Vulcan Male
Captain's Background: Captain Tlorn Vladstok was born on Vulcan in earth year 2345, and went through training in the Vulcan Science Academy where he studied high energy physics (graduating class of 2365), and later the Starfleet Academy (graduating class of 2370). He was later posted to the Olympic Class Science Vessel(2370-2373), USS Maxwell, where he served as an Science Officer. He went through the ranks quickly, with a creative mind and a flair for creating solutions where none seemed possible. Eventually he was assigned as captain of his own ship. The USS Humboldt (2373-present).

First officer: Commander Alan Forsythe (Human Male)
Commander Forsythe has been with the Humboldt since 2384, having not exactly had the opportunity to rise through the ranks and get his own ship once the war started. He is an extremely capable first officer, which by necessity means Executive officer. He keeps the crew disciplined, and on the ball—often serving as the deontological conscience for the starkly utilitarian Vladstok.

Chief Engineer: Lt. Commander T'Ran Vagel(Vulcan Female)
While many of the other vulcan crewmen are suffering from a deep unfathomable sadness that they dare not allow to upset their judgement, Lt. Commander Vagel channels her sadness and rage into creative genius, and is largely responsible for the “Updated Technical Specifications” of the Humoldt

Chief Medical Officer: Doctor Sabin Genetris (Betazoid Male)
Dr. Genetris is a full Betazoid, one of the last of his kind. He is not only responsible for attending to the physical health of the crew, but upon the suicide of the human Councilor, the phychological health as well. Needless to say, he is overworked, underpaid (in fact, not actually paid), and he has to keep blocks up in order to avoid the seething chauldron of vulcan emotions from reaching his mind. Still, despite all that, he tries to be up-beat, and has adjusted well.

The rest of the crew (Individuals to be detailed as they come up) is full of some of the last surviving Vulcans in the alpha quadrant. Contrary to popular belief, Vulcans are in fact a very passionate people. However, because of the catastrophic consequences of allowing their emotions to rule them, they control their emotions very stringently through meditative techniques and discipline drilled into them from childhood. The complete annihilation of their homeworld and the hardships of the past seven years have taken its toll on the crew. Some minor eccentricities are beginning to show through, such as the ship's nickname—ALSV or Angrly Little Science Vessel. The seven years have imposed another danger. Pon Far. Captain Vladstok has had to institute periodic paired matings in order to avoid this. Grief has been facilitated by daily meditation sessions, facing the ruins of Vulcan, the meditation reminds them of their culture and how important it is to maintain discipline, or lose even the memory of their home. The personal chambers of the now dead counsilor have been converted into a small holodeck as well. So far, it has worked, but the crew could still go Lord of the Flies on everyone.

Ship Name: USS Humboldt NCC-1845
Ship Class: Heavily Modified Nebula Class Science Vessel
Technical Classification:Medium Cruiser
Crew composition: Vulcan Compliment 748, 1 human, 1 Betazoid, numerous refugees, mostly children, with a handful of civilians.



Technical Specifications
Length:442 meters
Width:318 meters
Beam:130 meters
Mass:3.3 megatonnes
Max Warp:9.97(retrofitted during dominion war)
Max Cruising Warp: 9.6
Cruising Warp Speed:6

Auxiliary Craft:1 Worker Bee, 3 Delta Flier class shuttlecraft. 1 Danube class runabout

Sensors: Carries the long range high-resolution sensors that one has come to expect from a federation science vessel, upgraded to keep current up until the outbreak of the Quadratic War.

Probes: Carries a full compliment of sensor and communications probes, with more able to be manufactured out of the now superfluous torpedoes.

Main Armament:
4 Type XII Phaser arrays on primary hull (1 main dorsal/ventral saucer, 2 small arrays flanking shuttlebay)
4 Type XII Phaser arrays on secondary hull (One on each nacelle pylon, 1 aft, one forward/ventral)
2 Quantum torpedo launchers 1 forward/1 aft (Defunct)

Secondary Armament: Special Weapons

--Heavy Ion Cannons, one dorsal, one ventral.
Turret mounted, these weapons can each fire forward, aft, port and starboard, but only one can fire on either the dorsal and ventral arcs. These weapons fire a beam containing pulses of hypervelocity electrons at the target. They do however require reaction mass, which is either taken from replicator mass, or stored from what can be collected from the ram scoops. This does allow a certain variability of fire, over and above the variability possible in the pulses.

--Horrible things from the Deflector Array:
The main deflector has been...modified. In addition to serving its primary function, there are several modifications that have been made. Namely, the space that used to house the loading and launch mechanisms of the forward torpedo tubes have been converted (after those mechanisms were irreparably damaged) into an area that houses all the hard-wired component and circuitry modifications required to produce some fairy impressive effects from said same deflector array. These can be toggled from the bridge.

Phased Poleron Cannon: The crew managed to recover and reverse engineer the main armaments of a Jem' Hadar attack ship during the dominion war. They passed on the data to starfleet intelligence, but the technology was never utilized. The crew however kept copies and figured out how to modify their deflector array during the borg war of annihilation. The main deflector fires series of bolts comprised of phased polerons. This permits the ship to deliver powerful short ranged attacks, even after a borg vessel has modulated its shields to combat other weapons.

Anti-Graviton Beam: The crew engaged and destroyed a damaged borg sphere, and managed to recover and reverse engineer one of the anti-graviton emitters. As a result, the main deflector can be toggled to emit one of these beams, draining shields and then dumping the acquired energy into the shield grid of the Humboldt. However, it cannot bring the shield grid to greater than 100% capacity, and can only replenish an already drained grid.

--Shield Energy Transfer: Shields on federation ships are arranged into Fore, aft, starboard, port, dorsal and ventral arcs. On most ships, the power systems powering each arc are independent. The crew of the USS Humboldt have connected them, allowing taxed shield facings to be reinforced with power from the other arcs on a continuous basis, without having to rely on emergency or auxiliary power to reinforce a particular arc. In effect, to bring down one section of the shields, an attacker has to deal with the whole thing. These links can however be severed from the bridge in order to avoid the whole shield grid being overwhelmed.

--Surge Protection and Weapon Recharge: When a shield is hit, power surges course through into the power grid of most ships, causing the plasma conduits in control surfaces to overload. Often violently. This is not the case on the Humboldt. Instead the energy overload is transferred into the capacitor banks in what used to be the shuttle bays and aft torpedo mechanisms, allowing them to recharge some of the energy they have expended without having to take it from main power. This energy is part of the auxiliary power supply, and can be redirected wherever it is needed, including the shield grid, phasers, deflector array, or ion cannons.

Weaknesses
Jury Rigged All To Hell:The modifications to so many of the ship's systems have required the engineers to do interesting things to the ship in order for it to work and not explode. Half the shuttle bays and the aft torpedo mechanisms have been converted into a capacitor bank and reaction mass store. They have a set amount of power they can draw from, and have to recharge from energy surplus from the reactor core. The ship also has issues keeping in good repair—especially repairing combat damage, even moreso than the other ships--as one would expect from a ship so extensively rewired. The components are modular, but it is still a maintenance hell-pit. She cannot run silent, ever, and has to hide behind an object the size of a multi-kilometer asteroid or planetoid in order to avoid being detected.

Damn The Torpedoes The ship's torpedo tubes have also been sacrificed to the void. They were hit in the defense of earth and damaged beyond the capacity to repair them without a major refit. The crew managed to repair the hull itself, and fit deflector modification components and capacitors in there.

Service History
The USS Humboldt was commissioned in 2372, and completed in early 2373. This was during the Dominion War, and while only a small number of Nova Class ships were constructed during this time, those that were were somewhat up-gunned compared to the original version originally designed in the previous decade. She had the latest in phaser arrays, and a warp core capable of powering her--and in fact, a ship somewhat larger than her thanks to some advancements made when designing the Defiant class--to warp 9.75. Even then, the large number of the crew were Vulcans--though then not the majority. During the war, her primary role was reconnisance and fleet support--her crew became very good at shooting down torpedoes, a skill they have maintained to this day. Her sensors and class nine probes were the ones that collected the intelligence for the battle over the Chin'Toka system, an engagement in which she acquitted herself well.

After the Dominion War, The Humboldt was assigned to a series of five year exploration missions in the uncharted regions of the Alpha Quadrant. When the Borg invaded, it took several years to get ahead of the devastation and arrive at Earth in time to defend it. It was a nightmare. The crew sustained massive casualties when a pair of plasma torpedoes penetrated the shields and obliterated torpedo arming mechanisms, missing the magazines by bare meters thanks to rapidly sealing bulkheads and forcefields.

Then came Vulcan. The Vulcans understood game theory, knew they could not win, and thus decided to maximize the cost to the Borg, while minimizing their own loss. The loss of Vulcan was a foregone conclusion, the loss of most of its people a foregone conclusion. The loss of their ships was not. Nor was the horrendous loss of their cultural and biological heritage--that would not, at least not entirely--adapt to service the Borg. One Vulcan minister was quoted as saying "To use a human expression: 'Fuck That'" in a somewhat sardonic tone when it was clear that the Borg were waging a full scale war on the Alpha Quadrant. This was met with fairly wide affirmation from the rest of the ministers, and the plan was launched. Every cultural artifact that could be moved was looted from the planet, the genetics database cataloging the genetic diversity of every single described species on their planet was copied and loaded into the computer systems of as many D'kyrs as could be spared--ones under orders to avoid fighting if at all possible. The civilian population drew lots to board evacuation transports utilizing Quantum Singularity cores (to enable them to use anything lighter than iron as fuel. I will note that Vulcan transport ships... are structurally very similar to a D'deridex), scatter in armed convoys, and meet at a rendezvous point known only to the ship's commanding officer (who was instructed to suicide if the Borg took the ship), and then make the long haul to a location in the near Gamma Quadrant, to be determined.

The crew of the Humbolt stayed behind to help with the second phase of the plan. Her new weapon's systems jury rigged after the siege of earth, and crew replenished from both the population and some of the survivors from earth, the Humboldt and her crew took part in the defense of Vulcan itself. This was not to be an actual battle, but a series of fighting retreats designed to inflict casualties on the Borg with every super-weapon any Vulcan could get their hands on the schematics for and every dirty trick that could be played--while minimizing their own casualties. Unmanned shuttlecraft used as warp torpedoes, illegal subspace weapons, cloaked antimatter mines the size of buildings. That madness, all of it, designed simply to annoy the Borg. The civilian population gathered in the major cities, and there awaited their fate. After a certain saturation number of Borg landed to assimilate the population, fusion bombs rigged from the reaction masses of every single municipal and industrial reactor on the planet exploded, vaporizing every city. Billions died instantly. While the planet was not literally glassed, there was not a living thing left in any major city or industrial center, and it was hoped that the Borg would then leave the rest of the planetary ecology alone. To go on as if sentient life had never lived there--and hopefully, one day, another sentient species would one day inherit the world, and the vast banks of historical, biological, and cultural, and philosophical data that the Vulcans left behind in hidden caches. Their legacy, should none of them survive to pass it down directly.

After that, there was only one thing left to do. Find a way to exterminate the Borg. There was no meaningful federation anymore. The Alpha and Beta Quadrants had been devastated. The notion of command and government and regulations. They were all notional. Maintained out of sheer habit and the need to have some sort of organization. It was within that organization that The Humboldt began testing new and improved subspace weapons, and other horrors from the most twisted imaginations of the ranks of Section 31. It was only when those failed to stop the Borg that the Humboldt and her crew were sent to rendezvous with the fleet at Bajor.

USS Empryean

Class: Modified Luna-Class Recon Science Vessel

Crew Complement: 350 (70% Human, 10% Bajoran, 5% Vulcan, 15% Mixed, including Trill, Betazoid, Andorian, Bolian, etc.) 330 crew are holographic representations, 20 are physical life forms.

Dimensions: 450m

Weapons Systems: 5 Beam Arrays, 3 Torpedo Tubes

Auxiliary Craft: Four Type-9 Shuttlecraft (Normal Complement is Six), Captain’s Skiff

Design Notes: The Luna Class was designed for long distance scientific survey and study into the Gamma Quadrant. Though the project was sidelined by the Dominion War, upon its conclusion exploration of the Gamma Quadrant with Luna Class vessels leading the way. The first of its class, the USS Titan, was commanded by William T. Riker, former first officer of the USS Enterprise-D. Designed to operate for long periods of time without resupply or support, the Luna Class is capable of handling itself in a fight if pressed, but is designed for research. Building on the advanced computer systems of the Intrepid Class, the much larger Luna Class contains some of the most advanced computer systems ever installed on a starship.

Combat Profile

Total Weaponry: 5 Beam Arrays, 3 Torpedo Tubes

Arc Breakdown:
Fore: 3 Beam, 2 Torpedo
Flank: 5 Beam
Aft: 2 Beam, 1 Torpedo

Supplementary Systems

Sensors:
The Empyrean has been fitted with some of the most powerful sensors on board any Federation ship. It possess greatly increased range and resolution compared to the sensors of most other ships, which can further be increased by launching sensor drones, linking to other ships, or a combination of the two. It has been theorized that under the right circumstances, it is possible that with enough power to the sensors and an appropriate linkage to ships or sensor nets, that cloaks could be defeated, but doing so would make the Empyrean vulnerable due to the power requirements.

Electronic Warfare Suite:

Electronic Warfare is one of the Luna-Class’s primary functions in a fleet action, and can be achieved by channeling power from weapons and shields to the ship’s sensors and deflectors. The effectiveness of the defensive bonuses granted by ECM increases the further one is from the target, and appropriately decreases the closer one is. Each function requires more and more power to operate (with the limit to be set by the GM for how much power it takes from weapons and shields and how many functions can be allowable at once).

ECM Functions:

Jam Communications: This mode is capable of brute-force jamming communications of given area, preventing enemies from coordinating properly.

Degrade Sensors: This mode is capable of reducing the effectiveness of enemy sensors within the zone, reducing the accuracy of enemy weapons.

Spoof Attack: This mode attempts to focus defense on a single target, greatly increasing its survivability, particularly against missiles and torpedoes.

Counter ECM: This basic ECCM mode allows for the Luna-Class to level the field against one hostile ECM function at a time.

Reduce Hostile ECM Range: This mode reduces the range of all enemy ECM functions, limiting the utility of hostile ECM.

Ship Enhancements

Computer Assisted Control/Holographic Crew: Under normal operations, the ship is able to react with increased speed due to the enhanced automation on board the ship. Additionally, the ship is resistant to boarding actions due to the holographic nature of the crew.

Salvaged Polaron Beams: Salvaged technology, these beam weapons do not seem to be affected by Borg frequency adaption technology, meaning that they can be used effectively in extended engagements, though their overall damage output is somewhat less than Federation Standard Issue Phaser Arrays.

Quantum Torpedoes: The Empyrean has a full complement of 116 Quantum Torpedoes.

Borg Matrix Incursion System: Through extensive study of the Borg Matrix, the Empyrean can perform several operations to compromise the Borg Matrix in the local area, including isolating small groups of Borg ships from the Collective, masking itself and other ships with Borg signatures, and so on.

The two most common functions include linking to other ships within 100 km of the Empyrean in order to have each ship within the link transmit signals that report the ships as assimilated and under Borg control, including mimicking Borg life signs and technology. The cover is not perfect and will not stand to scrutiny at closer ranges.

The second most common function involves isolating the communications of Borg ships from the Collective. The range on this mode is greater than the Borg masking systems, but requires that the targeted Borg ships remain within standard combat ranges (Roughly 20,000 km). It is capable under normal operations of subverting communications from the Borg ships and the Collective, sending false signals to each, allowing the destruction of Borg ships without the immediate knowledge of the Collective.

Normally, these functions are mutually exclusive from each other. However, by draining virtually all power from shields and weapons, a limited version of each can be run simultaneously. The range of the Borg Masking Function is reduced to 50 km, and the Collective Subversion Function will only be able to subvert the signal of the local Borg ships to the Collective, not the signal of the Collective itself to the local Borg ships.

Ship Weaknesses

Ghost Ship: The Empyrean has only 20 living crew members. The remainder of the ship is crewed by holographic recreations of the original crew. When the ship needs to perform any extensive diagnostic, use its Borg Matrix Incursion System, or is compromised in any significant way, the ship’s computer system must shut down the crew’s holographic matrices, leaving the ship with only the living crew. Additionally, any benefits of Computer Assisted Control are lost, as the ship’s automation system is now simply attempting to compensate for the lack of crew. The holographic crew are unable to leave the ship, and if the holoemitters in a section of the ship are destroyed, they are unable to manifest there.

Heavy Modifications: In order to remain operational, the Empyrean has had to make several major modifications to nearly every aspect of the ship. As a result, the ship is prone to several glitches, often at the worst possible times. The ship itself must undergo low-level diagnostics fairly frequently, and high-level diagnostics more often than normal.

Crew

Holographic Crew: Unlike Voyager’s notable EMH “The Doctor”, the holographic crew on board the Empyrean are not programs, but rather living beings that have had their brains recorded into the ship’s computer system and given form through the ship’s holoemitters. The crew does not commonly discuss what happened before their existence as holographic life forms, preferring to rather focus on the present and possible future.

Living Crew: Very few of the original crew survived the terrible event that resulted in the loss of over 90% of the souls on board the Empyrean. These are the only members of the ship that can leave its confines for away missions.

Command Staff

Commanding Officer

Captain Marcellus C. DuBios (L): (Human Male)
Captain DuBois has held several positions in Starfleet, finally rising into his own as a Captain after many years. DuBois has always had the ability to make difficult decisions even under terrible circumstances, traits he has demonstrated during his service in the conflicts that have raged through the Alpha Quadrant since his graduation from Starfleet Academy in 2351. While many of his postings have been on scientific vessels, studying phenomena instead of engaging in wars or battles, he has seen his share of action.

During the periods of Ferengi Aggression in the 2360’s, DuBois served as the First Officer on board the Oberth-Class USS Waverider, and was instrumental in protecting the ship from the rogue Ferengi ship that harassed the Waverider, waiting until it was vulnerable and then striking. In the final conflict, then-Commander DuBois had been expecting the return of the Ferengi, and so was prepared to offer them a deal. In return for their immediate surrender, he would let them return to Ferengi space unharmed. With no signs of Federation support, the clearly underarmed Oberth seemed in no position to make demands, which caused the Ferengi to blindly rush into a carefully designed trap crafted by DuBois. The spatial anomaly the Waverider had been studying had shown curious properties that DuBois used to detain the Ferengi ship and force their compliance.

Promoted to Captain in 2372, DuBois was given the command of the Nebula-Class USS Nexus, with his initial mission being one of exploration, using the re-purposed sensor array to study anomalies in deep space. However, not long into his tour, the Dominion War disrupted the Alpha Quadrant, and orders from Starfleet Command brought him into the conflict. In one of the final conflicts of the war, the USS Nexus suffered catastrophic damage. Ordering the surviving crew to evacuate, DuBois set the ship on a collision course with a weapons platform. Seconds before the ship was lost, he beamed out to one of the escape pods, watching the battle rage around him. He watched as escape pod after escape pod was picked off by Dominion fire, until finally the firing stopped.

For the four years after the Dominion War, Captain DuBois took a desk position within Starfleet, working on new projects, including getting involved in the Luna Program and diplomatic efforts in the Gamma Quadrant as well as teaching a few courses at Starfleet Academy. After a trip to Deep Space Nine, meeting with Bajorans interested in exploring the Gamma Quadrant, he put in an application for the new line of Luna Class Science Ships.


First Officer

Commander Joshua Stone (H): (Human Male)
Commander Joshua Stone is the grandson of Admiral Aaron Stone, who once held Courts Martial of James T. Kirk. After the encounter, Stone’s grandfather developed a working relationship and respect for the man. Growing up to stories of the great James T. Kirk combined with cautionary tales of men who would go too far, Joshua was instilled with a strong moral center and a sense of duty.

Stone’s first posting after his graduation from Starfleet was as the tactical officer on board the Excelsior-Class USS Bastion in 2371, a ship that served with distinction during both the Klingon-Federation War and the Dominion War. Stone received several field promotions and commendations for his actions during these conflicts, as well as several new commissions due to the high attrition rates of the battles. Despite his aptitude for battle, innovative tactics, and a cool head under fire, he requested transfer to an exploration vessel after his promotion to Commander late in 2378. When he was told of a position on board the USS Empyrean, he jumped at the chance, seeing the ship’s mandate as a chance to learn more about the Dominion and the other races in the Gamma Quadrant, to better understand the reasons behind the devastating wars he had found himself in.


Chief Engineer

Lt. Commander Reginald Barclay (H): (Human Male)
Reginald Barclay has a long and colorful history with Starfleet. A complex individual, Barclay has dealt with severe social and interpersonal issues his entire life, despite being a very capable engineer and a brilliant individual. After his assignment on board the Enterprise, he used his expertise with holographic programming to assist in the creation of a series of Emergency Medical Holograms, and later still used his engineering and programming knowledge to help establish contact with the long-stranded USS Voyager. Upon the return of the Voyager to the Alpha Quadrant, Barclay was promoted for his efforts in its return, and decided to once more take to the stars and put in a commission to the USS Empyrean to explore the Gamma Quadrant.


Tactical Officer

Lieutenant Maren Rahl (L): (Bajoran Female)
Maren Rahl joined Starfleet shortly after the arrival of Benjamin Sisko to Deep Space 9. Despite the urging of her family, she left Bajor and began her training. When she graduated from Starfleet in 2373, she was thrust into the Dominion War. Having a personal stake in the conflict, she applied for a position as a Fighter Pilot and engaged the Dominion in Operation Return. Her ship was very nearly destroyed in the battle as she focused so heavily on Cardassian ships that a Dominion Attack Craft was able to get a weapons lock on her ship. Before she could react, Klingon reinforcements destroyed the ship before it could fire a fatal shot into her unshielded aft.

After the Dominion War, Maren Rahl was determined to do her part in the revival of her people’s culture through the Federation, and when the initiative to explore the Gamma Quadrant through the wormhole was announced, she was in a singular position to take advantage of the situation and did so without hesitation.


Medical Officer

Commander Dian Vares (L): (Betazoid Male)
Doctor Vares is a talented physician and surgeon from Betazed who felt the calling of the stars. With his empathic capabilities, he often received high marks for his bedside manner, though this was tempered with an often unexpected frankness that takes many people by surprise. The vast wealth of interpersonal experiences with alien races was one of the major reasons for Doctor Vares joining Starfleet in the first place, and the draw of the Gamma Quadrant was undeniable. Despite the oddities of new experiences, he seems more at home with aliens than his own kind at times.


Science Officer

Lt. Commander Dunok (L): (Vulcan Male)
To serve upon a science vessel and explore the Gamma Quadrant was only logical for Dunok. A brilliant scientific mind, Dunok has studied many different subjects over the years, but rather than focus on one, his objective was to become fluent in as many scientific disciplines as he could, so that when he served on board a starship he could more efficiently managed his science teams and process their findings. Humans, he had found, were quite adept at making new leaps in advancement, but were commonly poor examples of efficient communication and time management. He had published several papers on the subject based on observations he had made from both the Vulcan Science Academy and Starfleet Academy. When the posting on board the USS Empyrean was made available, he posted his necessary paperwork for transfer, post-dated for when the posting was made available several months in advance of when even Captain DuBois had been named as the commanding officer.


Security Chief

Lieutenant Fenas (L): (Andorian Female)
Fenas has served with Captain DuBois during the Dominion War on board the USS Nexus, and was in fact the officer that ensured he had the ability to beam out at the last second. She joined Starfleet shortly after the first encounter with the Borg, and her focus throughout her time at Starfleet Academy has been martial in nature. The ideals of the Federation were, to her, fine concepts that needed actual force to uphold and maintain. In her own way, she sees herself as the defender of the greatest idealists in the federation, the scientists and engineers.


Ship Counselor

Lieutenant Dirrina Kam (L): (Joined Trill Female)
The Kam symbiote is, itself, hundreds of years old. The host, Dirrina, is much younger. Having only graduated (again) from Starfleet Academy a year before the USS Empyrean went into service. Both idealistic and wise, the Trill is well experienced with a multitude of races and the complexities of their various mental and social issues. The natural wanderlust of the pair lead to a desire for a posting on one of the ships set to explore the Gamma Quadrant, which led her to the USS Empyrean.



Notable Crew

Lieuntenant Jowra (H): (Bolian Female) File loading, please wait...

Lieutenant Karl Forest (L): (Human Male) File loading, please wait...

Service History of the USS Empyrean

The USS Empyrean was commissioned in 2379, and after a brief shakedown cruise was sent on its mission to the Gamma Quadrant.

Descriptive writing is my weak spot, and as usual when I'm doing roughs on the fly I just sort of neglect it altogether.

SO!

Without further ado, here are the human or human-ish members of the crew.



Shirazi



Meru (Just crinkle the nose and add the Bajoran earring.)



Cratel



Lee


Hantle (Yes, he was happily sitting around smoking joints until Shirazi dragged him out of retirement.)



Tolbert

Captain's Name: Lt. Commander Jess Shepard
Captain's Species: Human
Captain's Background: Shepard bleeds Starfleet. Born on a starship, Shepard was the daughter of two lifers in Starfleet. Before she enrolled in Starfleet academy, the longest she spent dirtside was two months, visiting her grandparents on a colony world while her mother's ship was in drydock. Jess was just the next in a long line of loyal Fleeters. Her mother was a Senior Chief, her father a 'Mustang' Lt. Commander.

She was seen as a good cadet in the Academy, choosing the command path, but she was never meant for the big leagues, the Sovereigns and Galaxies, of running a flying city, of being a headliner. And that suited her, too much paper work. Four years after the Academy, she was already an XO. Of an old Miranda-class doing Customs work. And then a few years after that, she would get her own command. And so, it was with a great amount of pride that she was given the newly commisioned USS Samuel B. Roberts, a Defiant Class.


Executive Officer: Lt. Bill Lee
Lee was born on Earth, enlisting in Starfleet at 18. He served for many years, rising to the rank of Senior Chief before earning his commision. Always ready to tell the crew when they're doing something wrong, ready to teach them how to do it better. When on the bridge with Shepard, Lee is at the Ops station.

Chief Engineer: Lt. Nicholas Stewart
An engineer of the best sort. Jess Shepard would swear on a stack of bibles or any other holy text someone offered that Stewart was born with tricorder in one hand, a wrench in the other, oil for blood and hte burning desire to tinker until the engines of the Sammy were running better than any other Defiant in the fleet.

Tactical: Lt. JG. Thy'lek Shraf
A young starfleet Andorian, Shraf is responsible for the weapon systems of the ship. Stand-offish, he runs a tight department, not putting up with much slacking or goofing off.

Sensors: Lt. JG. Megan Kreiger
Fresh out of the academy when posted to the Sammy, Kreiger has done well adjusting to life on a small, tough ship.

Helm: Lt. JG. Kevin Guisti
Like all good pilots, this Mars native would say he's the best helmsman in the fleet. Certainly not lacking for confidence, either in his piloting skills or his skills with women.

Medical: Lt. Jim Matthews
Matthews, along with a nurse and trio of corpsmen, is responsible for the health and well-being of the crew.

The Chief: Senior Chief Petty Officer Alexander Sachs
Probably the meanest, toughtest old salt in the entire Starfleet. The younger crewmen like to joke he was the Chief on the Enterprise. The first one. With two volume settings, loud and louder, Senior Chief seemingly never sleeps, prowling the corridors of the ship, looking for crewmembers slacking off. And yet, despite the tough old bastard exterior, he's like a father to the enlisted crew, always remembering brithdays, family names, wether or not a crewman has had a letter from home lately.

Further crew to be added as needed.


SHIP NAME: USS Samuel B. Roberts
Class: Defiant
Variant: Block 3
Type: Destroyer
Crew: 54 Officers and Crew
Special Systems: Extra torpedoes, in storage and launcher space. two rotary turrets, one dorsal, one ventral.

ECM/EW Suites: Designed to mask the Sammy B. from sensors, allowing time to prepare a full volley of torpedoes.
Weakness: No ablative armor: due to battle damage, the armor coating has long since been blown off.

No shuttle bay due to room taken for torpedo storage.

Ship's history: "The Destroyer Escort that fought like a Battleship."

Those were the words used to describe the Sammy B.'s namesake. Named for a Destroyer Escort that sailed during Earth's World War 2. The original Samuel B. Roberts fought in the Battle Off Samar, where a small task force, Taffy 3, consiting of light ships and escort carriers faced off against a powerful Japanese fleet that included the mighty Yamato, the largest battleship ever to sail, a ship so large it weighed more than the entire American Task Force combined. A battle that by all rights should have been over before it began, with American ships sinking to the bottom of the sea, lasted for two hours. The small American ships, destroyers and destroyer escorts, ships known as Tin Cans for their lack of armor, engaged in a literal David vs Goliath fight. With guts and determination, the Samuel B. Roberts, along with the other screening ships of Taffy 3, made bold torpedo runs, raked the enemy ships with naval gunfire and stopped the advancing enemy fleet. But for all her gallantry, the Samuel B. Roberts was sunk.

Starfleet had honored hte little ship with a Miranda-class vessel that served just as proudly, fighting in the final offensive of the Dominion War. Due to battle damage, the first Samuel B. Roberts was decomissioned, and it's replacement would be a Defiant-class, a fitting choice, for the name of a vessel that had once upon a time closed with and engaged in a naval gun battle with a heavy cruiser that out-massed and out-gunned it.


The USS Samuel B. Roberts is a Block III Defiant. Started during the Domion War, she was built as a pure warship, with no frills, no whistles, no bells. Also, no turbolifts, no shuttlebay, no labs, a medical bay barely worth the name. The crew quarters were smaller, with only the XO and Skipper getting private quarters. To save on power, the replicators were removed from the quarters, with only the mess hall having a full replicator suite, a few smaller stations scattered throughout the ship to provide life sustaining coffee. Hardly a ship of luxury like a Galaxy-class. The Block IIIs were made to tag along with hte big ships, to operate as part of a wolfpack with other Defiants. With Federation-engineered rotary launchers copied from the Cardassian designed Deep Space 9, she was made to punch far above her weight. The torpedoes made the Block IIIs, just like the destroyers of Earth's past, a true threat to bigger ships. And before she was finished, before she could put to the vacuum, Peace was declared. The breakneck pace to replace ships destroyed or too damaged was slowed and Defiant-Class Hull No. 47 was placed on hold, the need for exploratory and multi-role ships rising. Eventually though, it was decided that the ship was close enough to spaceworthy that it should be finished. And so to a mild ceremony, the USS Samuel B. Roberts was commissioned and given to a new skipper, a young Lt. Commander, becoming one of only a handful of Block IIIs ever to put to vacuum.

And thus it came to pass, a vessel meant for war, struggled in peace. The Sammy B. seemed to be destined to a life of boring work, perhaps providing system defense, or running pickets along one of the DMZs. Seemingly boring work for a ship that had been destined to thrive in an environment where the metal meets the meat. The years ticked on, the Sammy B. showing her skills in a minor brush war, of chasing raiders back across DMZs, the most excitement they ever saw. Shepard was offered an XO spot on an Ambassador-class, a chance to climb higher in the ranks, maybe even have a shot one day at the Chair of a big ship. But she couldn't do it. Something in her heart told her to stay, to stick with the little gut-puncher that had become her home. She had fallen in love with her ship. Not everyone had though. Some of the officers rotated off, including the original XO. Morale was low. The crew felt there was no future for them, the bigger ships always seemed to look down on them. Most crewmen wanted to serve their tour and transfer to a ship that at least had a holodeck. After all, who cared if you were on a Defiant. They were practically useless, people would say, an unwanted reminder of a time when Starfleet had to bleed and die. And then the Mustang known as Lee came aboard, and dragged his friend Senior Chief Sachs with him. They whipped the crew into shape, making them proud to serve on the fine little warship. So what if their names wouldn't shine in the news reports back home, like the Enterprise or the Novas and Intrepids that were pushing the bounds of what was known, flying deep into the uncharted reaches of space? They were the crew of the USS Samuel B. Roberts! A ship name that had proven you didn't need to be big and famous to make all the difference in the world. The men and women, officers and enlisted of the Sammy B. would ensure they did that name proud!

And then the Borg came. Shepard still had nightmares of the bloodbath that was Earth. Of her ship crammed with as many men, women and children could fill the corridors. Including a dozen or so of the crew's surviving family. The rest were lost, perished on Earth, trying to get to the transports that would carry them to, if not safety, another day free of the Borg. Shepard remembered. Remembered the crying and screaming and gnashing of teeth as they fled. Her father died at Earth, ramming his crippled ship into a Borg Sphere, distracting it long enough for three fully loaded evacuation transports to flee to warp. Shepard's mother managed to be blessed enough to have been stationed at Deep Space Nine during the war.

And now, the Samuel B. Roberts faces odds just like her namesake did. A fight against a seemingly unstoppable foe. After unloading the evacuees, replenishing what stocks she could, Shepard joined up with the rest of the fleet, sending a shipwide announcement to her crew. It wasn't original. They weren't even her words. But like another Lieutenant Commander, hundreds of years ago, she would tell the truth to her crew. She wouldn't lie. In the words of then Lt. Commander Copeland: “This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.”

Warship Khanjar

Motto: None are beyond my reach. None are above my wrath.


(Different angle)


Class: Vor'kang Battlecruiser
Rated Crew: 900 personnel, up to 1100 infantry
Current Crew: 1100 personnel (73% Rihannsu, 27% Klingon), 900 infantry (56% Klingon, 44% Havrannssu)

Class Description: Started in the mid-2380s, the Vor'kang was originally intended to be an incremental upgrade on the highly successful and effective Vor'cha class. The original drafts were basic technological updates with no outward change to attack cruiser's lines. Included among them were sensor, computer, and avionics updates, enhanced capacitors and power conduits, impact shielding, improved armour plating, and minor internal design alternations. The Vor'cha production lines adopted the updated design, and a number of the changes were refitted into existing ships as they came in for scheduled overhauls.

The Vor'kang was born when the design team began to work on improving the hull structure. A fortuitous combination of ambition, talent, and political connections among them resulted in an entirely new class that sought to implement the lessons learned from the Vor'cha's two decades of service history. To start the hull lines were smoothed out to improve firing arcs and structural integrity. Then the modular bow section was dispensed with as unnecessary and largely useless, since the promised flexibility never materialized, and very few Vor'chas ever changed the module they were built with.

In making the new bow section, the design team began to take the ship in a new direction. While the Vor'cha had proven itself a lethally efficient cruiser killer, its performance against other large capital ships stood to be improved. First they replaced the single heavy disruptor beam with slightly smaller twin heavy disruptors fed by independent power capacitors and conduits, providing redundancy to the ship's main armament while enhancing its punch. When they began rearranging and expanding the secondary armament and shielding, they finally ran against the limits of the hull, forcing the team to enlarge it and increase the ship's mass. The final Vor'kang is a brawnier than its predecessor, with somewhat diminished manoeuvrability, and somewhat increased durability and firepower.

While the designers had always intended their work to replace the Vor'cha, the final product was enough of a departure from the original's design principles that the two ships proved complementary rather than redundant. In the view of Klingon High Command, the Vor'kang was perfectly suited to anchor a three ship hunter-killer team with a pair of Vor'chas; serving as the anvil to the attack cruiser's hammer. In light of that the Vor'kang was designated a battle cruiser and put into production with the intent of eventually reaching a 1-2 ratio with the Vor'cha class. Unfortunately, because of the Borg Invasion it was never fielded in adequate numbers.

Weapon Systems:

Twin Heavy Disruptor Cannons - The ship's main armament, with individual energy outputs equal to four regular disruptor cannons, and together amounting to 45% of the forward quadrant's dedicated power. They provide devastating fire against anything foolish enough to fly in their sights. One of the pair was damaged beyond repair, and had to be replaced with a heavily modified Rihannsu Type 20 Disruptor, part of the Valdore's main armament. The mismatched twins work about as well as the original pair ever did, and both can be set to beam mode for accuracy and precision at range, or pulse mode for raw power close in.

20 Disruptor Cannons - Modern Klingon and Rihannsu disruptors arranged throughout the ship to provide all round fire. There are 10 covering the forward quadrant, 14 covering the port and starboard quadrants, 12 covering the dorsal and ventral quadrants, and 8 covering the aft quadrant.

54 Missile Launchers - The ship's torpedo tubes have been replaced by a vertical launch missile system provided by the Mirak Star League. The missiles cold launch from their tubes and ignite outside the ship, rapidly accelerating in whichever direction the firing solution directs them. They are very fast and agile, with antimatter-triggered metastable metallic hydrogen warheads, three of which are roughly equal to one standard photon torpedo. The launch tubes are arranged triangularly into cells of three, with six cells forming a hexagonal 18 tube module. Two modules are installed ventrally just aft of the ship's neck, with a third on the back of the upper superstructure above the engines. Each module contains an internal integrated reloading system, with the forward magazine having a capacity of 360 missiles, and the aft magazine 180 missiles.

Special Systems and other Acquisitions:

Elite Shock Troops: What the Khanjar's infantry contingent lacks in quantity in comparison to other battlecruisers, it more than makes up in quality. The Klingons are lead by a several dozen Dahar Masters drawn to General Denkara's service over the course of the war. Having lost everything save their honor, they live only to maim, gut, and dismember the Borg. Similarly the Havrannssu commandos are among the best their race has to offer, and driven by fanatical loyalty to Charvanek they fight like demons on her behalf. Together they make for a brutally efficient and highly lethal fighting force.

Impact Shielding: The Dominion War taught some ugly lessons about the effectiveness of ramming. Tying in navigational deflectors and tractor emitters to main shields allows the Khanjar to have a good chance of deflecting ramming attacks by smaller ships instead of suffering a direct impact.

Munitions Plant: Salvaged industrial machinery has been installed in one of the ship's cargo bays. It is primarily tooled for ammunition manufacture, making everything from the bullets used to defend against boarders to the missiles fired by Khanjar. It can also produce some starship parts that are too large or complicated for the on board machine shop, but is less efficient at it and must reduce other production to do so. If focused solely on munitions manufacture, it can produce up to 54 missiles per day.

Enhanced Cloaking Device: Salvaged from the Imperatrix Ael t'Rllaillieu, Rihannsu cloaking systems may very well be the best in the galaxy, and the ones installed aboard their newest designs are always state of the art. The addition of the Imperatrix's forced quantum singularity ensures the cloak operates optimally, and so Khanjar enjoys cloaking capabilities superior to those of other Klingon ships. Furthermore, the cloak being designed for a larger vessel left enough spare capacity for the Chief Engineer to make experimental modifications allowing Khanjar to cloak with shields up. However, cloaking efficiency drops in proportion to shield power, and begins to fail entirely if shields exceed 50%.

Ship's Weakness:

Frankenstein's Monster: The Khanjar is an abomination cobbled together from parts of three different ships, belonging to three different races. Forget about different standardization practices, the crew had to make three entire technological bases somehow play well with each other under the stresses of combat. The fact that it works at all is impressive, that it manages to work well is nothing short of a miracle, but not even a miracle can make the jury-rigged systems work seamlessly. Minor failures are a routine part of every day, and parts of the ship threaten to burn if you look at them funny. Yet for all its inconveniences the crew manages to avoid major failures or cascading systems crashes even under fire. What they cannot avoid is an increased susceptibility to power draining weapons, meaning they lose power faster and take longer to restart affected systems. Additionally, Khanjar requires oversized engineering and operations departments to keep everything running, which means it cannot carry as many infantry.

Unprotected Forward Magazine: The ventral missile launchers were installed over the broken ruins of the Khanjar's forward torpedo tubes, so that section of the ship is lightly armoured at best. A direct hit on the launchers from an enemy torpedo would likely penetrate right to the magazine, setting off the fuel and munitions stored in there, and burning out the ship's guts. Consequently the Commander is understandably reluctant to expose her ventral shield in combat, and tries to keep it away from enemy fire.

Notable Personnel:

Commanding Officer: khre'Riov Ishtar i-Nalim Charvanek (Rihannsu)



Poised, well bred, and soft spoken, she is a remarkably attractive woman with long auburn hair, deep blue eyes, medium height, and an athlete's build. Many men and women have found themselves enthralled by her glittering gaze and seductive smile. Ishtar is the daughter of Head of Rihannsu Security Liviana Charvanek and Praetor Devoras Narviat, grand-niece of both Imperatrix Ael and Imperator Shiarkiek through her mother, cousin to Shiarkiek's successor by her marriage, and to the Cretaks by her younger brother's.

Born and raised as part of the Rihannsu ruling elite, Ishtar was taught and trained by some of the best minds of the Empire. She proved herself an intelligent and quick witted girl, with a talent for manipulating people and bending them to her will. Her parents and tutors would help refine, hone, and sharpen this talent until Ishtar grew to use it with tremendous skill, guile, and ruthlessness. Yet it is not ambition that drove the young woman to join the Grand Fleet, but a powerful and overriding sense of duty. A duty to protect the Star Road of the People against both its enemies, and the petty machinations of her peers. To that end, by the time she earned her first commission, Ishtar had already cultivated a network of social and political contacts that she would effectively leverage to advance her own career.

Due to her internal political focus, Ishtar was little known outside the Empire. Within it her considerable skill at seduction in all its forms - social, sexual, emotional, intellectual - quickly earned her influence and renown, as well as a reputation as something of a vamp. She was a woman in the know, and this lead her to develop contacts with the Tal Shiar, Tal Diann, and Rihannsu Security. Perhaps most impressively, Ishtar Charvanek successfully created a myth of being estranged from her own family, attracting both friends and enemies of the regime.

Consequently, Ishtar and her small power base survived the Six Year's Crisis (2374-2380) that started with the assassination of Imperator Shiarkiek and Praetor Narviat, the internal exile Liviana Charvanek, and similar fates for many other members of her family. She had by then attained a command of her own, the ChR Triumphus, carefully crewed with skilled individuals loyal to her. She fought well in the Dominion War, garnering valuable combat experience and battle merits.

After the Dominion War, Ishtar kept close to home, rooting out and turning foreign agents, whose foul influence she believed responsible for the political instability plaguing her people. It was perhaps on account of this shadow war, waged and won by many like her, that Starfleet was completely blind sided by Shinzon's coup. Ishtar successfully weathered the Mad Praetor's short reign, and once his co-conspirator and successor Ta'Aura had been assassinated, the Crisis ended. The Charvanek family returned to prominence, with Liviana coming back from exile and elevated to the new Continuing Committee.

After being given command of the Valdore-class Warbird Imperatrix Ael t'Rllaillieu, Ishtar went on to witnessed a golden era. Over the next decade, the Latasam Stelai Rom'lnz expanded its frontiers, absorbing new worlds and new civilizations, boldly scheming where no Rihannsu had schemed before. With it steadily advanced Ishtar Charvanek's clout and ambition, slowly growing with all the care and ruthlessness that had long served her well. Then the Borg came, and it all crashed down around her, burnt to ash and crushed to nothing under the weight of their drones.

Two actions stand out during those early days of apocalyptic war. The first was the evacuation of the industrial world Hephaestus, one of the largest Havrannsu colonies. As a large Borg task force approached the planet, its evacuation focused primarily on the planet's small Rihannsu population. Despite her personal distaste for her race's twisted offshoots, Charvanek personally redirected evacuation efforts towards the Havrannssu population, even drawing ships away from small Rihannsu colonies, and forcing compliance with her directives at gunpoint. Thanks to her efforts a great many Havrannsu were saved who would have otherwise been left to perish. This act of noblesse oblige was not well regarded among her peers, but word of it yet spreads among the surviving Havrannssu. The second was her gallant and daring rescue of a retreating Artefactor-class fleet tender by taking an ad-hoc warbird squadron and charging it back into the teeth of the Borg.

Beyond that there is little else to say. Time and time again Ishtar proved herself a survivor, emerging from doomed battle after doomed battle practically unscathed. She fights tenaciously but carefully, wearing down her prey like a wolf wears down a moose, and retreating as soon as the odds turn too far against her. While competent in her own right, Ishtar's success lies in her knack for finding talented officers and making them work well together. She can thus avail herself of the her retainers' skills to make up for any shortcomings in her own.

In the seventh year of the war, khre'Riov Ishtar i-Nalim Charvanek finds herself a relatively obscure officer, bereft of the society that gave her renown, power, and influence. She is more notable for the famous starship she commands than for her own deeds. Nevertheless, she commands a powerful ship, a solid and competent crew, and the drive to fight the Borg to the bitter end. The seed of greatness is still there, and in time perhaps, her name shall once more shine like the stars.


Executive Officer: Captain Mirai of House Makok (Klingon)

Originally the captain of General Denkara's flagship Khanjar, she became first officer after the General lost her task force at the Battle of Earth. Though Mirai opposed Denkara's suicidal final orders, she did nothing to stop her, and feels guilty for failing her duty as second in command in not removing an unstable commanding officer. It is on account of this that Mirai refused to take charge of Khanjar, and threw her full support behind Charvanek as soon as it was honourable to do so. In Mirai's mind only the khre'Riov is worthy of leading them. Charvanek, in turn, refused to allow Mirai to resign as first officer, finding her administrative acumen and command skills too valuable to lose. Mirai is a workaholic, and the reports of her having any hobbies besides the ship appear to be greatly exaggerated.


Chief Engineer: erei'Riov Velentr ir-Närke tr'Vitege (Rihannsu)

Older Rihannsu man, tall and lanky, who is more machine than man, with cybernetic eyes, limbs, and seemingly everything else. tr'Vitege accumulated his many implants through a multitude of injuries arising from an enthusiastically hands on approach to solving engineering problems, as well as a tendency to attack any enemy who dare come close to his reactor. Despite the man's eccentric behaviour, and a sense of humour that tends toward irreverent and disturbing, he is a brilliant engineer and a wizard at systems integration. The crew would probably appreciate him more if only he'd stop joking that he's the only one aboard who requires no assimilation. A small mercy then that tr'Vitege's implants look nothing like the Borg's, eschewing matte black for gold-trimmed shiny and chrome.

His second in command, khre'Arrain Herva t'Alvitr is the one who actually manages most of the day-to-day administration of the engineering department. tr'Vitege lauds her as the best engineer he's ever met, and openly admits that his department would be a disorganized mess without her. If not for the war, it's likely he would be retired to a research post, and she Chief Engineer in his stead. She doesn't seem bothered by this, and there are hints t'Alvitr may have feelings for her boss.


Weapons Officer: Riov Menhit il-Aeron t'Keres (Rihannsu)

A physically unremarkable exemplar of her race, seemingly average in all respects, but sharp and dexterous of mind and limb. A childhood friend of Charvanek's and her former executive, she came up the ranks as a gunnery officer and is a gifted and exemplary tactician. Her particular skill at directing weapons fire at just the right place and moment makes her well suited for her commanding officer's hit and fade tactics. t'Keres had beforehand been on the fast track to get her own command, and is not happy about her demotion to weapons officer, but understands that under the present exigences that's where she is needed. On the plus side, Ishtar continues to enjoy Menhit's company, and they share much of their off-duty time.


Operations Officer: Commander Fulla Sigrun (Klingon)

Commoner Klingon elevated into the officer ranks via battlefield commission during the brief Klingon-Federation War of 2372-73. She's a taciturn no-nonsense officer on duty, and a jovial raconteur off duty. Efficient and easy to get along with, her service record is practically spotless and full of consistent, if mild, praise. Somehow pretty by both Klingon and Rihannsu standards, she has gently rebuffed the advances of multiple other members of the crew. The Commander was the second most strident voice for executing Charvanek, but has warmed up to her in the intervening time period. Fulla has a beautiful singing voice that compliments Ishtar's well, and they make a charming duet.


Helm and Navigation: Junior Lieutenant Danica and Senior Lieutenant Vecernja, both of House Zorya (Klingon)

A deceptively small woman, Danica possesses frighteningly fast reflexes and the muscle memory to use them with deadly effectiveness. Even blind drunk, pregnant, and squatting down to piss, she could still disembowel four men before the first hit the floor. None know the Khanjar's manoeuvring characteristics quite like she does. Danica was too busy piloting the ship to notice Denkara's murder initially, and her professionalism kept her from doing anything until the ship was out of danger. Once the argument over the matter started, she was the strongest voice for executing khre'Riov Charvanek. Danica is still bitter about it, but her pride demands she continue to do her utmost at her post. Her more intellectual and less violent cousin, Senior Lieutenant Vecernja, is the ship's navigator. They like painting astral phenomena together.

Legion Captain: erei'Riov Erlik Kyzaghan (Havrannssu)

Hardened infantry officer with an intellectual and philosophical side.

Intelligence Officer: khre'Arrain Moros i-Nyx Erebos (Rihannsu)

A sinister looking man with a scarred face, Moros Erebos is the Tal Diann officer assigned to the Imperatrix Ael t'Rllaillieu in order to keep an eye on Ishtar Charvanek, the Tal Shiar agent infiltrated into the Tal Diann so as to keep an eye on Ishtar Charvanek, and the House Charvanek retainer hidden inside the Tal Shiar to blind the eyes kept on Ishtar Charvanek.


Ship's Advisor: Dahar Master Murugan the Dour (Klingon)

Considered "first among equals" of the Dahar Masters aboard Khanjar, Murugan is an old giant of a man who never seems pleased about anything. He rarely drinks, and all his stories are as magnificent as they are tragic. Nevertheless his prowess in battle is well known and respected, as is his wisdom and sound judgement. With no formal posting on the ship, Murugan prefers to fight with the Khanjar's infantry contingent, but on occasion appears on the bridge to dispense tactical and strategic advice. When Murugan speaks, all listen. He is quite impressed by Charvanek's exceptional discipline and focus, and unhesitatingly provides her with much needed support. Murugan posses an ill-disguised passion for dancing, and rumours of something resembling a smile spread whenever someone catches him in the act.

The Twins: Nerio and Attis (Rihannsu)

A girl and boy picked up by khre'Riov Charvanek from a refugee convoy in the first year of the war. She refuses to discuss the circumstances behind their coming aboard the Imperatrix. Ishtar simply beamed back aboard with the two of them in tow, brought them to the Havrannsu commanding officer, and left him with the twins and simple instructions, "These two will be bunking here. Make a warrior out of the girl, and let no harm come to the boy."

Two Rihannsu youths left in the care of Havrannsu could normally not expect the kindest of treatments, but the Havrannsu's loyalty to Charvanek ensured that they did not stray too far from the letter and spirit of her instructions. Five years later, Nerio had indeed grown into a fearsome warrior: tall, broad, and heavily muscled, with short bleached-white hair, and dark eyes that burn like coal embers. On the eve of the Battle of Earth, Ishtar made Nerio her personal guard and assistant. The young woman has since only strayed from the Riov's side to train with the Dahar Masters.

The brother, Attis, is his sister's polar opposite. Small and lithe in build, almost fragile, with long dark hair, and light soft eyes. Where Nerio is agressive and assertive, Attis is meek and pliant, where she seems to thrive on conflict, he shies away from it. It is no surprise, then, that his sister is highly protective of him. Charvanek, in contrast, holds him in undisguised contempt, only acknowledging his exitence to express her belief that he'll never amount to anything. He still bunks with the Havrannsu, serving as an orderly to their officers.


Ship History:

Khanjar, the curved blade that tears the heavens, is a venerable old name in the Komerex Klingon, with a storied history stretching back three thousand years. It's modern renown, however, is inextricably linked with that of its most famous commanding officer: Denkara of the House of Kazbek. The seeds of this fame lie with the Klingon Civil War, at which time the name was worn by a relatively modern Bird-of-Prey, on which Denkara was a junior officer. The Khanjar's captain was among the first to throw his support behind Chancellor Gowron, and Denkara served him with distinction. After the end of the war, Gowron cleared the government and military of Duras supporters, and rewarded his own supporters by promoting them to the now vacant positions. With the officers above her promoted off the ship, young Denkara was left in command.

The next four years were not quiet for the new commanding officer, she showed remarkable courage and cunning, and her name and that of her ship kept coming up associated with bold and daring acts of heroism. A reputation started to build around Denkara and her ship, which only grew during the Klingon-Cardassian War. Her calculated aggressiveness and cool under fire allowed the Bird of Prey to punch well above its weight. Khanjar became a feared raider among the Cardassians, and its captain a respected warrior amongst the Klingons. Then the Dominion came, and the events of that war would emblazon them both unto the pages of history.

Promoted and given command of a Bird of Prey squadron, Denkara continued patrol behind enemy lines, ruthlessly attacking enemy shipping and infrastructure. Khanjar and the other Birds of Prey under her command were among the most successful in terms of enemy tonnage destroyed during the war. As they began to face increasingly better protected convoys, Denkara innovated the convoy attack from astern by joining the flank escort line, a tactic that was rapidly emulated by other Bird of Prey commanders. She also acquired a reputation as an escort killer for her habit of boldly attacking at close range the very ships meant to hunt her and her squadron down, when most others simply fled to look for easier prey.

One of Denkara's most notable accomplishments is her solo attack on a munitions and fuel convoy totalling more than 30 ships. In an exceptional feat of brilliant deduction and bold tracking, she located the mother-lode of targets hiding in the atmosphere of a gas giant. Braving minefields, weather hazards, and other conditions that compromised its cloak, the Khanjar successfully ambushed the convoy, damaging or destroying nearly a dozen ships and causing much mayhem and confusion. Denkara then successfully retreated from the riled enemy escorts, pushing her ship's reactor to 150% overload to escape the gantlet of fire.

The Bird of Prey Khanjar's last combat patrol occurred in the waning days of the Dominion War. Denkara's unit was set upon by a number of Cardassian, Breen, and Dominion warships, fighting with all the savagery of corned beasts. Outnumbered and outgunned, her squadron accounted well for themselves, but were badly mauled in the encounter, and Denkara lost her ship but not her life. In reward for her valiant and gallant service, a new Vor'cha class attack cruiser nearing completion at the Qo'nos shipyards was renamed Khanjar, with Denkara appointed commanding officer, and all the survivors from her squadron assigned to her new command.

The new ship commissioned after the end of the war, and in the 15 years of relative peace that followed its fame and that if its Captain only grew. By the time the Borg came, Khanjar was surpassed only by Enterprise in renown, and Denkara's name was spoken of in the same tones of reverence and respect as that of Kirk or Picard. Commensurate to that reputation, Commodore Denkara and her squadron were the first Klingon ships to rush to the aid of the Rihanssu, doing so on her own initiative before orders to the effect were even issued.

What followed was the same story that would replay itself over and over across the Alpha Quadrant in the next seven years: hard fought holding actions, desperate last stands, and retreat after bitter retreat. If anything, though, Denkara's heroism shone all the brighter against the bleakness of the unstoppable Borg tide. Her actions became legend at the Battle of Tannhauser Gate, where beams glittered across space for weeks as an entire Borg fleet battered itself to scrap against grimly determined Klingon defenders. Denkara seemed to be everywhere at once, fighting with such ruthless cunning and ferocity that her ship and squadron counted for many times their number.

The attack cruiser Khanjar was lost at Tannhauser, shortly before the Klingon defences collapsed completely. Denkara once again survived her ship, and once again another nearing completion was renamed and given to her. The new Khanjar is a Vor'kang class battlecruiser, a fairly new ship Denkara herself helped design, but had yet to command out of loyalty for her old girl. She continued to fight and to lead, a hero among heroes in the war against the inexhaustible might of the Borg.

At the Battle of Earth, now General Denkara took charge of a mixed Klingon-Rihannsu task force. Along with Admiral Picard's own task force, it was one of the corner stones of the defences arrayed throughout the system. Confidence ran high, with Khanjar and Enterprise standing shoulder to shoulder, living legends arrayed against the titanic threat, many thought that victory was assured. They were proven dead wrong over the weeks of fierce battle that followed, and Denkara saw the brave and gallant ships under her command crippled and destroyed one by one.

By the time the General finally retreated from the Sol System, all that was left of her command were two heavily damaged ships: Khanjar and the Valdore class Warbird Imperatrix Ael t'Rllaillieu under khre'Riov Ishtar Charvanek. Most of the rest were destroyed or assimilated, with but a few managing to retreat on their own. The two starships were joined by three Mirak cruisers in a long flight to the Mirak Star League, far from the front lines.

The damage to all five ships was dire, and by the time they arrived at a Mirak shipyard the Khanjar's main reactor was losing containment and had to be ejected. The ship was a frightful mess: hull banged and scorched, many secondary weapons destroyed, multiple sensor systems disabled, malfunctioning shield emitters, burnt-out cloaking system, failing computer core, one impulse engine simply gone, and a ragged hole where the forward torpedo tubes should have been. The crew had also taken terrible casualties from battle damage, intensive Borg boarding attempts, and the General's use of nerve agents, reactor coolant, and even warp plasma to clear the infestation.

The Imperatrix's crew survived with miraculously lighter casualties, but their ship was in worse shape. She suffered extensive damage, with few external systems escaping devastation of some sort or another: entire hull shot full of holes, one wing nearly blown off when its nacelle failed explosively on dropping out of warp, navigational deflector only working while overloaded and starting to melt from the strain, main armament burnt out, few of the secondary batteries still operational, sensor systems wrecked, all the shield emitters at diminished capacity, and two shield facings damaged beyond repair.

The three Mirak cruisers were not doing much better, and the strain of years of total mobilization had worn down the shipyard's machinery and left it short of spare parts. It took several days for the ship's and yard's engineering teams to fully appraise the damage to the ships. The Borg were projected to take 5-8 months to reach the star system, allowing time for extensive repairs, but in the face of the devastating damage it did not seem like enough.

Over the course of this, General Denkara and khre'Riov Charvanek coordinated their efforts efficiently, and began to work closely together in determining the fates of their ships. In comparing notes and discussing the matter with the senior officers and engineers, it became clear that Khanjar and Imperatrix had complementary problems. The battlecruiser had a relatively intact hull, but lacked the main reactor and cloaking device, was short on crew, and had suffered significant internal damage. The warbird was the opposite, with severely damaged hull, but relatively intact reactor, internals, cloak, and crew.

The Mirak engineers had determined Imperatrix and one of their cruisers to be total write-offs, while Khanjar would be permanently crippled. Working together, Denkara, Charvanek, and their officers came up with an alternate solution: they would salvage what they could from the Valdore, repair the Vor'kang back to full combat readiness, and take it back into battle with both ship's crews. Under normal circumstances it would have taken a full year to conduct an overhaul of that magnitude, and possibly another to fully integrate the disparate technology bases. They gave themselves six months.

Even working round the clock with the unreserved help of the Mirak shipyard's crews, it took the Rihannsu and Klingons seven months to make the battlecruiser fit for combat. By then, they had installed on Khanjar the Imperatrix Ael t'Rllaillieu's forced quantum singularity, damn near the entirety of her engineering section's innards, her computer core, cloaking device, all working disruptor cannons, one of the impulse engines, and innumerable other things large and small. Additionally, rather than attempting to repair and move the warbird's damaged torpedo launchers, it was decided to instead adapt the missile racks and targeting system from the abandoned Mirak cruiser.

General Denkara and khre'Riov Charvanek became very close friends while working together in making Khanjar battle worthy once more. Their distinct personalities, one bold and aggressive, the other cautious and calculating, seemed to compliment each other well, and before long neither would make a major decision without conferring with the other.. When the crews of both their ships were integrated, Denkara assigned Charvanek as her aide-de-camp, but the khre'Riov functionally became her co-captain.

Surprisingly, the Borg were obliging enough to take nine months to reach the system. This allowed time enough to work out some kinks in the overhaul, patch the armour, apply a new layer of protective coating, and even re-dedicate the ship with the Imperatrix's motto. By the time the Borg showed up, Khanjar was a neon and dark blue abomination of a Klingon-Rihannsu-Mirak battlecruiser, crewed by the survivors of its and the Imperatrix's complements. They worked on her until the last possible moment, and left the dock guns firing.

They had promised the Mirak that they would do their utmost to protect their worlds in exchange for their help. Khanjar and her crew did their best, but the Borg had let the Star League stand intact too long, and they attacked everywhere at once, in overwhelming numbers. What remained of the Star League's fleets fought with all they had, and Khanjar with them, but in no time at all the Mirak were all but extinct. All sense of victory and accomplishment that had come from repairing the ship was instantly dashed in the face of such overwhelming destruction.

General Denkara took her ship back into Federation space, trying to find some sort of front line where there was still resistance against the Borg. Running from Borg patrols, she and her crew beheld such devastation as to drive anyone to despair. They got scattered reports, the Breen under heavy assault and falling, small parts of the Federation still holding on despite everything, the Cardassian Union and Tholian Assembly waiting hand to mouth for the Borg to finally turn their attention to them. Somewhere in the blasted ruins of what used to be the United Federation of Planets, Denkara's resolve suddenly and unexpectedly broke. She decided there was no hope left, no sense in prolonging the useless struggle, and the only thing remaining was to seek death in battle. And so, the next time her crew encountered a Borg task force, she ordered them to engage.

None objected, none would raise voice against their beloved captain, none had the courage to stand up to someone whose heroism was legendary even among those who knew her. None, that is, save for khre'Riov Charvanek, by now Denkara's closest friend and lover. She first tried to dissuade the General with logic, then emotional appeals, and in final desperation resorted to pleading, something none still alive had ever witnessed her do before. Denkara wavered for a moment, then she steeled herself, "I'm sorry Ishtar, but this how it must be, even if you deny it. Come my dear, take courage and let us face death together." Charvanek embraced her friend with one hand, and plunged a knife with the other, "I'm sorry too Denka."

The was such shock among the bridge officers that none thought to shoot Charvanek. For a moment all was quiet, then she was yelling at the helmsman to get them the hell out of there. Khanjar entered warp just as her shields failed, thereby escaping any permanent damage. The Borg chased of course, but hunting down a cloaking ship that doesn't want to fight or be found is an always difficult proposition. It did not take long to lose the chase, and then the recriminations started.

The Klingon half of the bridge crew wanted to arrest Charvanek, a few calling for her summary execution. The Rihannsu stood by their Riov and refused to hand her over. As the argument began to spiral out of control, and the exchange of words threatened to escalate into an exchange of gunfire, the Dahar Master Murugan strode unto the bridge, in answer to Charvanek's summons. Captain Mirai - General Denkara's first officer - seized the chance to calm her compatriots, while Ishtar did much the same for her own.

Tense silence fell on the bridge as Murugan simply took in the scene quietly. Finally, Ishtar said that given Murugan commanded the respect of everyone aboard Khanjar, if he would pass judgement on the matter, she would stand by it. Captain Mirai quickly agreed on behalf of the Klingons present. Murugan nodded and asked that the two ranking officers tell him what had occurred, even though he had already guessed.

After listening to two mostly congruent accounts, the Dahar Master's judgement was brief: "There is no honour to be had in charging alone against the storm, for the wind does not respect a fool. Khaless himself taught us this, it is a pity that it took a Romulan to remember it. You who call yourself Klingons, know that her klin runs stronger than yours." Murugan said no more and awaited no response, he simply left the bridge, his duty done.

Silence resumed as the tension flowed out of the bridge. Citing the chain of command, Riov Charvanek suggested Captain Mirai take charge of the Khanjar. Immediately, Mirai refused, declaring that by Murugan's words and the khre'Riov's own actions, she had shown herself the only one worthy of taking General Denkara's place. The chastised Klingons grudgingly agreed, and pledged loyalty to their new commanding officer.

Later, at Denkara's funeral, it was once again Murugan who had the most poignant words: "Of all the souls I've met in my long life, the klin burned brightest in hers. General Denkara had klin enough for a dozen heroes, and she burned so bright for so long, that I thought all would be blinded by her brilliance, even the Borg. Alas the fire the burns fiercest is the first to burn out. So then, let us remember our comrade not for how she died, but for how she lived."

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