"Anatomy of a War" - Alt-Trekverse Fic

[darthdavid]

good stuff

[Steve]

Actually, the Cardassian had a point about paper. In a spacecraft (except maybe a very big one) space is likely to be at something of a premium, and computers store information at a much, much higher density than paper.

Well, keep in mind that Akel was quoting a rumor. Though it's actually true in some cases. Paper copies are kept of everything.... in planet-based archives. PDAs are probably widely used for a lot of paperwork on the smaller ships - only the space installations or very large ships might actually use papers in paperwork.

But the ultimate point was an attack on the Trek mentality of "newer and flashier is better".

[Zed Snardbody]

Will you be producing any peices or a continued time line that details first contact and or the establishment of the alliance enclave?

[Steve]

Will you be producing any peices or a continued time line that details first contact and or the establishment of the alliance enclave?

Already have. I'll have to post it.

[Steve]

First Contact and the Settlement of New Liberty


When the extra-universal exploration vessel DNS Daniel Boone first made contact with the Federation on 12 June 2152 AST, reactions in the Federation mostly consisted of shock. Federation scientists had long postulated the possibility of traveling between alternate timelines. It was not impossible, to them, that such civilizations could exist, and controlled inter-universal travel had already been postulated due to the infamous Helkan incident in the 23rd Century.
The real cause for shock was because the contact came during the height of the Borg scare, and as a result the Federation's reaction tended to caution over all else. Starfleet immediately called in every ship in range to guard the Boone. The Federation Security Council's first session about the Alliance, later on the 12th, was dedicated, solely, to determing if the Boone's arrival was not some kind of Borg trick. Their fears were alleviated only after a detailed briefing from several senior engineers and analysts on the noticable differences between the Boone and the Borg ships previously encountered; even then Starfleet went to the trouble of sending out one of the new Galaxy-class ships, the Odyssey, to meet the Boone even though the Odyssey was still undergoing final shakedown trials.

The Alliance Government's reaction was not quite so immediate. On the 12th of June, President Jennifer Verdes was informed of the contact by Harold Mayfield, the Secretary for the Foreign Ministry's Department of Initial Contact (DIC). The first high-level meeting concerning the contact was not until the 15th, when Foreign Minister Rachel MacKenzie and Defense Minister Garrett Montgomery held a Cabinent-level proceeding to prepare a report to President Verdes and Chancellor Nicolas Mamamtas (for distribution to the Council).
The 15th was the same day that the Boone arrived in orbit over Earth. The ship's approach was hushed up until the last minute, and Federation state press was not released to announce the contact until Federation President Maralo Tevala had already met with the captain and DIC contact specialist from the Boone. This meeting was followed on the 19th by a formal meeting between President Tevala and Secretary Mayfield, including a brief conversation between Tevala and Verdes over inter-universal radio, that set the foundation for official ties between the two nations.
As had been common in these contact situations, the Alliance asked for territory in which to set itself up. Hard currency was offered for a "colonial zone" in which the Alliance could settle. The Federation had several regions it wanted to be rid of, and it chose New Liberty.

New Liberty was named by several idealistic Federation settlers who had colonized the Earth-like planet to provide a home to displaced Bajoran refugees. The settlers had little love for the Federation central government, and as of yet there were no vital resources that New Liberty or it's surrounding worlds could offer. The Federation turned the sector over to the Alliance for $900 billion in currency, materials, and foodstuffs, to be paid in installments after the first jump gate assembly was finished.
The Boone arrived at New Liberty on the 1st of July, accompanied by transports carrying a pre-fabricated jump gate and power system. The 2nd was chosen for the official signover. New Liberty was declared a protectorate territory of the Alliance Government at that time; the local settlers and Bajorans were granted a charter for self-rule in their settlements and a voice in the provisional government to be established after the initial settlements of Alliance colonists was completed. Deliberations as to which nations would be granted initial colonization continued into the middle of July; it was on the 19th that the Council agreed to grant the initial colonization rights to Britain of Universe SE-1 and two new Alliance members, the Kingdom of Iran and the League of East Africa in Universe FHI-8. A provisional government was set up, with Iran picking the President and the East Africans and settlers selecting the officers of government, to be followed by general elections in time with the main Alliance elections in November 2153.
The settling of New Liberty and ten nearby inhabitable systems came quickly, as thousands of entrepreneurs moved in to have a part in the money to be had from expanding into the new market. By October New Liberty alone had gone from a population of 200 thousand to 40 million. At New Year's, the entire Colonial Zone had a population of over half a billion.

There was a complicating factor in the settlement of New Liberty; the sector that the Federation ceded was still partially occupied by the Cardassian Union. The Federation had sold it's claim to the occupied systems to the Alliance; the Alliance, in turn, offered to Cardassia $100 billion to evacuate the five occupied systems. The Cardassians refused; they insisted the systems had been Cardassian before their war with the Federation and that they had the stronger claim. The Cardassians undoubtedly felt they had the strategic advantage on the new Alliance Colonial Zone. Nearly two-thirds of the Alliance's border was with Cardassia or with the Cardassians' local satellite race, the Keloans. Though not all contemporary Cardassian records were saved from destruction during the fall of Cardassia Prime in 2161, there were a number of scattered reports that survived that indicated the potential for a Cardassian attack on the Alliance at this phase. The Alliance Defense Ministry was concerned enough with the possibility that they immediately posted an entire Corps, including substantial anti-starship artillery assets, to New Liberty; an aerospace naval bomber group joined them soon afterward.

The situation of the Cardassians at this point was probably unknown in either Paris or Washington. The Federation felt the Cardassians were still strong enough to continue the war; the Alliance, new to the universe, were still involved in establishing diplomatic contact and relations with the Alpha Quadrant's star-faring nations. The conception that the Cardassians were able to maintain the war was false, probably aided by Cardassian propaganda distributed through anti-war movements in the Federation. The Cardassian military was nearly out of it's reserves. Large portions of it's fleet had been lost against technologically-superior Federation ships and defenses. Their armies were busy suppressing revolts across their empire, especially in Bajor. Cardassia needed time to recover her strength, hence their reason for suing for peace in the first place. The risk of attack, in the end, was negligable.

The Alliance never gave up on trying to find a peaceful solution (a fact later ignored by anti-Alliance pacifist groups in the Federation). Negotiations were held on ST-3 Earth with the enthusiastic support of the Federation. State visits came next. On the 17th of August the President of the ST-3 Colonial Zone, Mitra Bakhtavar, hosted Cardassian Minister of External Affairs Dukor Turas on New Liberty. Bakhtavar and Turas signed a joint statement calling for "continued peace and cordial discussion" between the Alliance and Cardassia. That October, Foreign Minister Rachel MacKenzie traveled to Cardassia for high-level meetings with the Cardassian Detepa Council (the Alliance was still unaware how powerless the Council was in Cardassian politics) and again Cardassia pledged to find a peaceful solution to their rival claims. The peaceful discussions continued up into the next year, when the Federation granted the Cardassians the right to occupy and inspect Bajoran camps in Federation territory, prompting a flood of frantic, terrified Bajorans into the Colonial Zone and exposing to the Alliance press the first hints of how brutal the Cardassians were. A planned state visit by President Mamatmas to Cardassia in June 2153 (originally scheduled for President Verdes before her resignation) was canceled after the Alliance intervened in the Keloan Civil War (to be discussed in Chapter 5); by that point, the Alliance Foreign Ministry was under Boris Umachov, who was more hard-edged and aggressive than MacKenzie. The brief detente between Cardassia and the Alliance would be dead before summer of 2153.

Alliance-Federation relations were better off. In October 2152 Minister MacKenzie visited Earth after her trip to Cardassia and met with President Tevala. The discussions focused on the normalization of trade and on establishing full diplomatic relations. A week later Iason Parmika was appointed by the Alliance Council as the first Ambassador to the Federation.
The early issue of contention was access to the Inter-Universal Jump Gate Network. The Federation asked the Alliance for the technology to build their own and offered compensation. The Alliance was a signatory to the Treaty of New Brasilia and could not grant the request. Ambassador Parmika told Tevala and his administration to approach the Oversight Committee of the IUCEC (Inter-Universal Commerce and Exploration Commission). Tevala dispatched a diplomatic team to negotiate with the IUCEC and brought the Treaty of New Brasilia before the Federation Council. He encouraged passage. The Idealogues, however, blocked it. They insisted the Federation, as a multi-racial body focused on peaceful exploration, be excused from some of the provisions of the treaty, including the IUCEC's right to collect a quarter of the profits from gate fees. One Council Representative, Tabitha Hallworth of Alpha Centauri, went as far as to denounce the IUCEC and the Alliance for assigning fees and regulations to the use of the Gate Network, claiming that it was "the right of all sentient species" to explore and travel across the Multiverse without limit.

Tevala persisted. He addressed the Council in early December 2152 AST and explained to them that the Federation was not above the law. If it wanted to join the Multiversal community, it had to obey it's rules. The Idealogues tried and failed to filibuster a follow-up vote and the Council approved the Treaty, but with a fatal exception; they insisted on being given as many seats on the Oversight Committee as the Alliance had.
The Oversight Committee was over a hundred years old at this point, and predated the Alliance by ninety-seven years. When the Alliance was formed, their seats were not merged into one; their individual member governments maintained their seats and their control of them. The Alliance Government was finally granted it's own seat on the Committee in 2151, after it was obviously clear that the Government had little influence in the appointment of it's constituent nations' commissioners. The Federation Council and it's related advisors probably failed to understand just how little the Alliance Government could influence the commissioners of it's constituents. When the Commission refused the Federation term in February, the Federation Council immediately retracted acceptance of the New Brasilia Treaty. This would have negative ramifications for the Federation later on. As it is, the IUCEC decided to outright reject the Federation petition in April 2153 after the Federation expanded it's Basic Necessities Act to include it's defense industry and related businesses. The decision was defended as protecting the critical Gate technology from being stolen by Federation nationalization practices upon Federation entry into the IUCEC. The Federation's economic practices were already driving wedges between it and the megaversal community as a whole.

[Zed Snardbody]

Will you be producing any peices or a continued time line that details first contact and or the establishment of the alliance enclave?

Already have. I'll have to post it.

That explains a great deal. Thank you.

[Steve]

Kellerman, Rymorta, The Sphere
16:30 GST


The planet Rymorta, in the system of the same name, was a neutral colony of "The Sphere", established by the Treaty of Berkeley. Signed over thirty years ago, the Treaty specified the "eternal neutrality" of a rough sphere of worlds - simply called The Sphere - between the Cardassian Union, the Federation, the Keloan Kingdom, the Tzenkethi Imperium, the Breen Confederacy, and now the Alliance, though it had not yet signed the treaty due to disagreements over some if's terms. Rymorta was a world primarily founded by Human colonists from the Federation, though the Keloans and Cardassians had established small colonies elsewhere on the planet.
The booming trade city of Kellerman functioned as a center of commerce for the planet's Human sector. Kellerman Spaceport serviced dozens of ships a day and was under constant expansion. A second spaceport in nearby Ushiba was necessary just to handle the load.
Aside from their booming commerce, both Ushiba and Kellerman had darker sides. Given the sheer number of powerful polities in the area, intrigue was a constant and all of the local powers kept a sizable contingent of intel people in the area. Freelancers worked for the highest bidder as mercenary-spies, while crime syndicates fought over turf. Drugs, piracy, kidnapping rings, prostitution, it all happened, right under the noses of the usually-corrupt police.
In an apartment near Kellerman Spaceport, H'daen tr'Gurrwhi looked out of the window at the Spaceport and saw his ship at it's berth, being loaded with goods for a shipment back to Romulan space. He closed the window, locked it, and for extra measure activated it's defense screen. A flip of a switch on the device sitting on the nightstand turned on the scrambling field that would silence most known covert recording devices.
H'daen reached into one of his packs and brought out the data chip that Gedys had handed him. After a few moments he heard a knock at the door. Setting it down on the night stand, he checked the door peephole and then allowed the woman on the other side in. She was Human, attractive though modestly dressed with an elbow-length blue blouse and calf-length green skirt. The clothes had been meant to keep her from garnering too much attention. "Hello, Zara."
Zara smiled at him. It wasn't her real name, of course, but H'daen didn't know the real one. He only knew who she worked for. People who were willing to pay quite a bit of money to get good intel out of Cardassia. "Hello H'daen. Looking as young as ever."
"Ha! While we Rihannsu age more gracefully than Humans, I am still over a hundred and sixty Human years old. I'm hardly young anymore." H'daen smiled at her. "But you certainly look lovely today, Zara."
She had noticed the lust in his eyes and giggled seductively. "H'daen, dear, say what you will about your age, but you're still young enough to be one of my best."
"You flatter me."
"Not really." Zara walked up to him. "In fact, under other circumstances..." She kissed him warmly, letting him know the end of the sentence.
H'daen felt his blood boil. Though Humans and Rihannsu shared different ideals of beauty, and Zara wasn't very attractive facially to him on that level, he knew that Zara's.... qualities as a lover more than made up for her lack of strong features. It'd been a while since he had any woman and Zara was particularly inviting. But H'daen was a businessman and any thought about trying to talk Zara into bed was just that: thought. They were paying handsomely anyway so he could always wait until next time and hopefully find a better room, perhaps with a glass of some fine wine from one of the Two Worlds and a larger, more comfortable bed on which to satisfy their lusts. H'daen's hand reached down and gripped the data chip that Gedys had given him back on Cardassia. "Here, Zara. Everything my contact had to give, at substantial risk I might add."
"I hope you pay her a good fraction of what we give you," Zara said, accepting the chip into her hand.
"My contact does not want money, and financial reward would be dangerous in of itself. No, my contact has, how shall I say, more personal reasons for this." H'daen accepted from Zara an encrypted PADD, built and programmed in one of the Federation's more reasonable charter colonies. He looked over the transfer funds and pressed his thumb to accept them. "Two million Alliance dollars. You and your friends have a lot of money. Wealthy clients, I'm sure."
"You can think as you wish. But it's safer not to talk."
"Of course." H'daen kissed her on the cheek. "Go then, Zara. Next time we meet, I hope to have a better room to receive you in, with good wine and fine hlai, and you in something far more... appealing."
"Doesn't matter what I wear, though, since I'd be taking it off anyway," Zara teased him. "Take care, H'daen."
"I will." H'daen watched Zara leave and went to work packing. It would be time to go soon enough.


Thirty minutes and eight miles later, Zara was walking into an exotic club in one of the more respectable areas of the city. "The Gentleman's Retreat" was a favored spot for wealthy locals, diplomats, criminals, and wealthy tourists looking to spend their money for carnal pleasure. Though it looked classy and good, Zara knew that it was as bad as the slummiest dive in the Port area. Drugs in the back, and each dancer had a private room should a visitor pay enough for a more private lap dance.
Slipping into a booth where a young, brown-haired man was watching the teenage Vulcan girl on the stage bare her breasts, Zara shed her false identity and again became Kristin Ignacian, "consultant" for Security Concept Enterprises, a front for Alliance Intelligence. The young man, Zack Carrey, was about her age. He turned to her. "Hello, Miss."
"Free to talk here?"
"I just gave Bruno his monthly bribe and swept the place. We don't have to worry about anyone."
Kristin handed the agent the chip H'daen had provided. "It cost two mill."
"Three million has already been deposited into your account." Zack watched the Vulcan girl start to give a portly Cardassian merchant a lapdance. "How old do you think she is? If she were Human"
"I dunno. Fifteen?"
"She's actually about twenty-three. Which is about fourteen for a Vulcan. Ran away from her adopted Human parents two years ago after a Federation court ordered she be turned over to her Vulcan mother's family back on Vulcan. About four months later, some yakuza thugs picked her up when she stowed away on one of their ships running the New Kyushu-Orion line. Sold her to Orion slavers. Who, in turn, sold her back to the yakuza, a family running things here in The Sphere. They shipped her over and put her to work in one of their dives before Bruno paid to get her." Zack kept his hands on the table, watching the Cardassian fondle the girl lustfully. "She was an innocent girl. Now she's lost that forever, all because of the Federation and it's 'racial morality'."
"I come from the Federation, you know. I'm well aware of the hypocrisy."
"Oh?"
"I had a girlfriend in high school, Lisa Parker." Kristin placed her hands on the table. "She joined Starfleet after her big brother died in the Tzenkethi War. Ended up on a ship fighting the Cardassians. She spent the last six months of the war a POW. Next time I saw her was when I was a junior nurse at a rehab hospital for POWs. She was one of my patients. She had half the body weight she'd been when I'd last seen her. First day I walked into her room, she put her arms around me and broke out crying." Kristin closed her eyes. "They tortured her just to make her sign a statement denouncing the Federation's war with Cardassia. Then they sent her to a forced labor camp. The guards whipped her every day for not working fast enough. Sometimes they would even sodomize her. She told me every detail."
"And then...?"
"And then some bastard from PAPAL had the gall to call her and all the others a liar. She received hate mail by the basket, demanding that she denounce the government, that she stop trying to provoke another war! All she'd done was tell the truth about what was done, she didn't want any more war." Kristin's hands trembled and a few tears ran down her face. "I was never violent, but... one day one of those bitches walked in and started berating Lisa, and I slapped her so hard she fell flat on her ass. PAPAL didn't like that. The politicos didn't like that. So I was called before a review board and terminated from Starfleet."
"And Lisa?"
"She hung herself three days later. When that happened, I decided the Federation didn't deserve my loyalty, so I left."
"And came here." Zack nodded. "Somewhere that you could put your skills to use helping people."
"Nursing skills aren't at a premium here," Kristin said. "But I'm smart, I have a pretty face, a nice body, a healthy libido, and I'm okay with alien men."
"You're not the only one in this work. Though you should count yourself lucky that you're still in it for good reasons, even if your employers aren't." Zack watched the Vulcan girl return to the stage, slinking against a pole. "We work in some very dark places and with some very bad people. You have to have an anchor, I've found. Something that tells you why you're risking yourself, why you're allowing such bad things to happen. Sometimes, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few or the one. It's just how things have to work."
"Yeah."
"So, where is your boss anyway?"
"She's... settling a debt."



Ushiba


Norihisa Sanda was one of the most feared men in The Sphere. The yakuza captain was ruthless and brutal, running the local affairs of the Dragon Claws - one of the richest of the yakuza clans that dominated illicit Human commerce in The Sphere. Because of his importance, he always kept with him a half-dozen bodyguards, even when in territory that the Dragon Claws controlled.
He had just finished lunch at a favorite bistro, in which he had taken the time to order the slaying of a runaway prostitute who had been bound to the Claws, and returned to the warehouse near Ushiba Spaceport that he conducted his business from.
As Sanda walked toward the door, surrounded by his men, he heard one scream and turned in time to see a blue disruptor beam vaporize the bodyguard. Sanda was pulled in by two of his men, the three survivors spreading out to hunt down and kill - brutally if possible - whoever had dared fire on Sanda.
The warehouse was dark and empty. Sanda turned to one of his men and barked an order to turn on the lights. The man took a handful of steps before he suddenly hit the ground, a sickening gurgling sound coming from his throat. Sanda pulled out his gun, as his guard did and the two opened fire at the nearest footfall, illuminating for a brief moment a figure all in black. As the figure moved through the diminishing light, both phaser blasts missing him, there was a quick flash of light, like a glint off of a blade. Sanda heard his other man gurgle and fall. "Show yourself!" Sanda demanded in English. He fired at another sound, but nothing was there. Not even the figure.
Suddenly he felt a rush of wind beside him. He turned and fired, missing but again illuminating the figure, which was rather useless given that his assailant's foot crashed into Sanda's right hand, kicking his phaser free. Sanda lashed out and grabbed something on the assailant which pulled free as he rolled away. Tossing the object aside, Sanda looked around desperately for his phaser.
A few moments later, the lights in the warehouse finally flipped on. Sanda whirled about to face his attacker, just in time to see three phaser power cells tossed to his feet. He looked back up and his jaw dropped in surprise.
His attacker was a woman.
It had been impossible to notice it before, but now the lights made clear the curves of her body showing through the tight black suit she was wearing. All that was missing was her head covering, which explained why her red hair was out and flowing down to her shoulders. Cold blue eyes glared hate at Sanda. Her skin color was light, so she was obviously Caucasian. "You are Sanda Norihisa, hai?" the woman asked in flawless Japanese.
"You would be the so-called Red Dragon," Sanda said. "Apparently the reports of your death were wrong, Sakata Jane."
Jane lifted the top of her suit to bare her belly. A short bit below her left breast, Sanda could make out the scar of tissue healed after a degraded disruptor beam had hit. "My husband died so that I would live."
"I had wanted him dead anyway, but now I see I will have to kill the man I sent. He was supposed to insure your death too." Sanda laughed. "Your sniper is not going to live much longer. My bodyguards are the best, and any moment they will come through that door."
"Do not be so sure, Sanda. I have Gervada Delor."
Sanda had to be impressed now. Gervada Delor, "The Ghost Mates", were a husband and wife pair of famed Cardassian military snipers who had, rather inexplacably, deserted the Cardassian military and gone into mercenary work in the Sphere. They were reported to be the best sniper team in the entire Alpha Quadrant. "I see. So what now? I have the power cells for those phasers, so unless you have a gun."
"The Claws had my sensei, my father-in-law and adopted, murdered, and now you have also claimed my beloved. This is about more than vengeance for me as a widow. This is about the vengeance of the Sakata line, noble blood that you bandits have extinguished." Jane smiled wickledly. "I get very little good opportunities to fight these days. You have a slight reputation with a katana."
"I have won ten duels to the death in the past year alone," Sanda bragged. "I have studied swordfighting since I first joined the Claws."
"I have found that those who have done the least brag the most about their accomplishments." Jane took a sword and scabbard she'd placed against the wall, near the light switch, and tossed it to Sanda. She then adopted a defensive stance, a hand near the ruby-encrusted hilt of her own sword. She didn't remove it from the elaborate, expensive-looking jeweled scabbard. "If you defeat me and kill me, obviously I cannot kill you, and Gervada Delor will let you live. Otherwise, you will die."
"I do not intend to kill you now." Sanda's very words oozed hate. "I will make you suffer before I give you the pleasure of death." He pulled the sword he'd been given free, tossed the scabbard aside, and ran toward Jane, screaming angrily as he brought the sword up. If he could, he intended to merely wound her so he could torment her for as long as he desired before letting her die.
Sanda closed the distance quickly and brought the sword down, being emboldened by the fact that Jane had not brought her own sword out to defend herself. But the sword hit nothing but air. Jane had moved immediately before he came into range with a deft movement borne of years of rigorous training. Her own katana emerged from it's scabbard at that moment. Jane didn't bother stopped the movement she made, instead pulling off a flawless cut through Sanda's right belly and back that partially nicked his spine and cut through intestine and flesh with ease. Blood erupted from the deep cut and Sanda fell over onto his back, only minutes left to live. He stared at her wide-eyed, still not quite believing she had struck the fatal blow so quickly and so suddenly. "If you must know, Sanda..." Jane put the tip of her sword to his throat. "I am a champion of the Matano line itself. Sakata Noburo, the Grand Master of the Matano Kendo Dojo of Nagamo, was my sensei as well as my father-in-law. He began my training when I was still a child and proclaimed me to be the greatest student he'd ever had. I was the first woman to win the Matano Tournament, and it's youngest champion, winning it when I was eighteen. I won the last five tournaments before the planetary government banned fighting tournaments on Earth, and I have since won thirty sword-fighting tournaments across the Alpha Quadrant. My sword - my gift and burden as the champion of Matano, is worth more than all of your assets in the yakuza, forged a thousand years ago by the greatest blacksmiths of Japan from ore and metal found in a meteorite fragment." She noticed Sanda was nearly dead. "So don't feel bad, Sanda, that you were killed by a mere woman. And feel free to berate your failed assassin when you meet him in the bowels of Hell itself."
With that final comment, Jane cleanly sliced Sanda's head off.

[Steve]

And now for a continued explaination, I will post two more chapters from the "history" analytical work I've been doing as fluff.

[Steve]

5. The Keloan Crisis


Not long after Wolf 359, the Alliance waged it's first low-level conflict in the Alpha Quadrant. It was the first of a number of early low-level interventions that would increase tensions with the Federation while expanding the Alliance's spheres of influence. These interventions - Kelos, Thallon, Orion, Eloh - would provide the Alliance with future client allies.
Kelos was a newcomer to the galactic stage, having achieved warp capability a mere eighty years beforehand, in 2287. The Keloans managed to settle twenty star systems and claim roughly ten thousand cubic light years of space before being boxed in by the Cardassians, Tsen'kethi, and Federation. The Keloans were under the rule of a semi-autocratic monarchy, it's Kings possessing near-unrivaled political power from their dual role as heads of state and chief priests of the majority Keloan monotheist religion. Before the unification of Kelos under the Royal Family - the J'Keloiioa - the Keloans had a number of other governments, mostly principalities or oligarchies with one island nation that had a form of government with basic structural similarities to the Roman Republic. These divisions were serve as points of tension, as well as the economic consequences of the Royal Government's aggressive colonial program.
Over the course of the 24th Century, the Keloans drifted toward the Federation and Cardassians, suspicious of Tsen'kethi attempts to claim their frontier. In the 2340s, the Keloan Royal Family shifted to the Cardassians' camp in reaction to Jirvshk's undermining of conservative factions in the Federation, particularly the Betazoid royals and the varying surviving monarchies in the founding races' colonies. Jirvshk used the FSF to raise an opposition from the remnants of the old principalities and republic. As Kelos had a federated planetary legislature, though of limited power, there were varying parties. Jirvshk's infiltrators worked with local Keloan radicals to form a popular front amongst Kelos' minority nationalities and anti-monarchist factions. The popular front was made of many different parties - Socialists, Anti-Federalists, Nationalists, Republicans - but the non-radical parties were seeded with spies and agents of the party Jirvshk personally ordered the creation of: the Keloan Peoples' League. The KPL's first leader, Donsa Gemalra'ta, personally met with Jirvshk just two months before Jirvshk's death and promised to foment a revolution within the year. Jirvshk's death delayed that. Miller cut funding to the KPL and used FSF support for it as a reason to sack Mishkin and Sandoval, citing it as a violation of the Prime Directive.
As a result, during the 2350s the KPL was forced to mostly work on it's own. Mishkin still aided them when possible with Section 31 providing what supplies and aid it could. Donsa was unseated by his Party's leadership in 2353, after an agent denounced him as planning to make Kelos a puppet of the Federation - an accusation that was likely true - and he was replaced by Heltk K'meyla'ra. Heltk, unlike Donsa, had actually spent some if his youth in the Federation, studying on Earth in the University of Trier. He personally wrote translations of the works of Karl Marx and other early Earth Communists, as well as the Andorian Communist Horvik Taragk. Heltk believed that Kelos was ripe for the Revolution, as the current ruling King, Litav IX, was unpopular in non-monarchist circles. The KPL alone didn't have the popularity to take over, but the popular front could, and the KPL could use it to gain power and then, when it was secured, purge the "useful fools" from the government.
Heltk also tried to turn military officers while establishing the framework for his own paramilitary force, the Red Marchers. The Marchers were recruited from the youngest Keloans. Those conscripted into the Royal Federal Army and the military were especially desired by Heltk. With forces dedicated to the KPL and not the popular front or the government, he could consolidate his hold on the government. Heltk also recruited Keloan youth who would enter other government services and serve as spies to alert the KPL of whatever the government was planning.
The KPL finally had their chance at revolution during the war between the Cardassian and the Federation. The King allowed Cardassian troops and ships to station in Keloan space to fight the Federation, a technical violation of Keloan neutrality, and the popular front brought the issue into the forefront with a new ally, the enraged isolationist anti-alien faction. In late 2359, there was an incident at one of the Cardassian ground facilities in the former island republic of Quel'ta in which a Keloan girl was found raped and murdered. Cardassian DNA was found on the body (quite possibly planted by the KPL or Section 31) and the publication of the news, despite the efforts of the Royal Government, prompted anti-government demonstrations in Quel'ta. The attempts by the Royal Government to quell the demonstrations made them turn violent. The Cardassians feared that the Keloan popular front might prevail if they remained to enflame the situation, so the Cardassians pulled out.
This had the opposite effect. Emboldened by the departure of the powerful Cardassians, the popular front sparked a widepsread rebellion in every nation on Kelos and most of the colonies. Though some key cities, regions, and a handful of entire planets remained loyal to the King, the defections were crippling, especially those in the military. Even units that remained loyal were filled with officers and enlisted men who were acting as spies for the popular front. All throughout Kelos there was a general disgust with the monarchy for the previous decades of misrule. Rebellion finally reached J'Kelitao, the home nation of the Royal Family which they had ruled for over a millennium. Rebelling Army and Home Guard units took key cities and encircled the royal capital of J'Keloa, in which popular front provocateurs - mostly Red Marchers - were inciting riots and causing general chaos. Finally the legislature acted, asking King Litav to abdicate in the favor of his infant granddaughter and allow the popular front forces into the city in exchange for letting him go into exile with his family. Litav accepted and abdicated on the 24th of January 2360.
But the Red Marchers didn't care for the agreement. When the Royal Guards departed the palace a group of Red Marchers attacked it and ransacked it. The youth dragged Litav and his sons and son-in-law out before a crowd from the city's poor regions at the banks of the J'Keloa River. There, with the full backing of Heltk, the Red Marchers held a show trial in which King Litav and his family were accused of "treason against the Keloan People". Attempts by Litav and the others to calm the crowd were shouted down by the screaming and chanting of the Red Marchers. Litav, his sons Heltk and Maygat, and his son-in-law Dutayl had their throats slit to the roaring cheers, after which their corpses were tossed into the river. Litav's ailing wife Miyla was disconnected from the life support systems keeping her alive and left to suffocate before being tossed into the river. Litav's daughter Keylo was dragged before the crowd and thrown into it - having a reputation as a debutante and pampered brat by the people, Keylo was beaten to death by the mob and thrown into the J'Keloa with the rest of her family.
Litav's other daughter, Orea, had tried to sneak out of the palace with her infant daughter Miyla, but a spy for the KPL betrayed her to the Red Marchers, who shot Orea as she tried to escape. Her infant Miyla was not spared the brutality of the Mob. Taken to the riverfront, the assembled mob cheered wildly as the local brigade commander of the Red Marchers threw the squealing infant into the J'Keloa and proclaimed the end of the Royal Family. The Palace was then burned down and all monarchist symbols and statues defaced or destroyed, as was the Temple of the King, in which the priests and priestesses were also put to death by the triumphant revolutionaries.
Heltk then came before the legislature. The Monarchy was dead and it was time for new leadership. All identified monarchists in the Federal Assembly were required to denounce the Royal Family's "crimes" and leave their posts; those who refused were shot. With the popular front in sole control now, Heltk and his peers declared the birth of the Keloan People's Republic.
The brutality of the fall of the J'Keloiioa damaged the credibility of the new Republic from the start. Some began to call it "the Great Shame", horrified at the excessive cruelty shown against the royal family, long a symbol of stability on Kelos. There were also growing accounts of the killings of innocent Keloans. A college student from Quel'ta was executed by the Red Marchers for criticizing their actions. In J'Keloa City, there was the case of a poor old Keloan grandmother who at the killing of the Royal Family tried to take the infant princess Miyla out of the river and was shot dead with her entire family by the Marchers for the attempt. One particularly embarrassing report for the new government was the raping of several city-dwellers by the Red Marchers, including a priestess of the Temple (an act of sacrilege that horrified rural, conservative Keloans). The other popular front parties suffered the most, as they had let the "uncivilized radicals" perform such shameful deeds, with many switching their loyalties to the monarchists.
The remaining monarchist forces immediately began to launch a counter-revolution, centered around the fact that despite their claims the Marchers had missed one member of the family; Litav's grandson Morav, who had been sent to New Anglia in the Federation in case of the worst happening. The KPL tried to assassinate Morav on four occasions in the next seven years and each attempt failed.
The new Republic had to deal with the still-raging war between Cardassia and the Federation. The Cardassians and Federation both denounced the slaughtering of the Royal Family. The Cardassians attempted a military intervention, mostly to place their own collaborationist elements into the Keloan leadership to begin the outright annexation of Keloan territory, but were defeated by the Keloan Navy at Dey'goa, mostly by their incompetent leadership but with the Keloans utilizing several Federation-designed systems bought off the black market (likely from the Red Guards) The Cardassians decided not to try again and made peace with the new Republic.
Several of Kelos' colonies now began to revolt as word of the Great Shame spread. The new Republic found it could not control the loyalty of the military, as even the loyal populists questioned the brutality of the occupation of J'Keloa. Heltk decided it wasn't time to consolidate power. Rather, measures should be taken to restore stability. The Red Marchers were disbanded and some of those responsible for the brutalities in J'Keloa were put to death. This did not placate many Keloans, but it did serve to calm the situation and allow the new government to come together. Heltk was not initially tapped for the new High Minister position and was given the leadership of the Ministry of Security by the influence of the KPL. Heltk used the following year to attack and destroy his peers in the popular front one by one. His agents in their parties hierarchies provided most of the ammunition. Finally, in 2363, the Keloan Reformer's Party was purged from the government and it's lead members shot for reportedly spying for the Federation. Heltk was made High Minister and began moving key members of the Party into various positions, intending to seize power by 2370. In the interim he nationalized a number of failing industries, blaming the economy, and attempted to force local national and municipal governments to accept complete KPL control.
Heltk was still unable to completely suppress the monarchists. They held several areas on Kelos and in the colonies in which the government had no influence or control whatsoever. Each attempt to kill the Crown Prince Morav emboldened the monarchists. Finally, in 2367 Morav reached the legal age to assume the throne. The monarchists proclaimed him King Morav XI and increased their attacks while their ranks swelled from dissidents and others. The Keloan Civil War re-ignited after seven years of low-scale guerrila war.

The Cardassians saw their chance to take advantage of the situation. Agents were used to begin selling arms and equipment to both sides, in the hopes that the Keloans would wear each other out and the winner would be beholden to Cardassia. Because his communications with the monarchist revolt was limited, Morav never actually approved of the decision to accept Cardassian aid and desired to align Kelos with another power to protect his people from Cardassian designs. He approached the Federation and was rebuffed. Tevala and then Gao invoked the Prime Directive and refused to intervene. There was even a small patrol of Starfleet ships on the Federation-Keloan border to prevent attempts to smuggle arms in.
Finally, in February 2153 AST, Morav changed strategy and went to the ADN. He first went to Britain of Universe SE-1 to get their support in bringing his case before the Alliance Government. President Mamatmas and the Security Committee debated the issue. Aside from Foreign Minister MacKenzie, who believed the Alliance should remain neutral in all Alpha Quadrant affairs, the Committee urged the President to act.
In the months leading up to this, the Navy and the Marine Corps had drawn up an operational plan, Operation: Starlight, to intervene in the Keloan Civil War. With a growing refugee problem in the Colonial Zone - for a short time the Keloan refugees would outnumber the more popularly-known Bajoran refugees - they believed the Alliance could not remain neutral. They had appropriately planned for forces to be deployed to all worlds as peace-keepers. The young King supporting them
Mamatmas decided to bring the matter to the Alliance Council in a closed session. He found only two opponents to intervention, Pax Party Representatives Johann Tetzel and Zhang Li-Ling, but the greatest obstacle was that there was a sizable contingent from both sides of the aisle that opposed restoring Morav. French (AR-12) Representative Madeleine Toussiand rallied the "republican" sentiment in the Council, insisting that the Alliance must maintain a proper Republic on Kelos instead of returning rule to a monarchy that was so clearly unpopular as to be overthrown. The Republican sentiments were strong enough to kill the first attempt to vote when Mamatmas refused to alter the resolution to rule out a restoration of the J'Keloiioa. It took the combined influence of Mamatmans, Montesque, and British (SE-1) Representative Sir Kevin Maxwell-Fyfe to win the second vote by precisely one vote. The Council approved Operation: Starlight on the 20th of February 2152 AST. The Navy and Marine Corps said it could have troops ready to deploy in one week, the matter complicated by a desire to not give visible preparations in the Alpha Quadrant itself.
Morav returned to New Liberty, from which he gave several addresses on subspace radio to the Keloans, asking them to cease fighting and negotiate to restore their nation. His calls for reconciliation served as a code to many republicans and groups not with the KPL that a restored monarchy would not persecute them.
Heltk's response was to jam the transmissions and to order the KPL's militant branch to attempt another assassination of Morav, if need be with Cardassian help. He also put the Navy on higher alert, probably suspecting that Morav was getting ADN support of some kind.
In the mean time the Alliance quietly sent out orders to various Army divisions that would be used to reinforce the Marines and prepared for the diplomatic backlash. On the 28th of February, President Mamatmas gave the final go-ahead and the Alliance forces made their way into local Gates. The first warning in the Alpha Quadrant that the Alliance's military was on the move was the halt of traffic through New Liberty's Gate Assembly as it was used to move the ships into position. It was after midnight GST on March 1st that the Alliance naval forces crossed the border into Kelos; the Council Resolution authorizing intervention "with the support of the legitimate ruler of Kelos" was announced only an hour before, and it was only as they crossed the border that Morav sent another subspace broadcast from the command center of the DNS Freedom, the invasion fleet's flagship, calling on Keloans to rally to his banner and end the radical government to bring peace. The Alliance had achieved complete tactical surprise.
Immediately Heltk's Navy moved to intercept the Alliance naval squadrons. The Enterprise CVBG was engaged at Delkai, a small-scale naval battle that was the first instance of Alliance starfighters fighting Alpha Quadrant forces. It was virtually ignored because the Keloan squadron retreated after the first bombing run nearly crippled the squadron's cruiser-leader. A couple hours later, a more classical naval skirmish happened at Kelos itself, where the core of the Keloan fleet engaged the Akagi CVBG and the 2nd Battle Squadron. This was the first time that the Alliance's new Freedom-class superdreadnought had come under fire, though the Keloans found their weapons weren't up to penetrating it's thick shielding and armored hull. The battle was not much of a test anyway. Unlike the squadron that attacked the Enterprise at Delkai, the squadron Kelos was not under the command of KPL-member officers and only fired a few times for the honor of the Service before offering to stand down. At this the Marines began landing, often without firing shot due to the widespread monarchist attacks that managed to consolidate several cities.
By this time, J'Keloa City was under siege from forces answering the young King's call. Heltk gave a public broadcast to the people, asking them to "fight for our Republic" against "the exploiters come to restore tyranny", but Heltk had as little success against the revolts as his rivals had during his own. Heltk did make one final attempt to hold onto power by ordering the disbanded Red Marchers to rise up again and attack. This slowed progress, though Heltk found many of the former Marchers had become disenchanted after he had disbanded them and would not return, but on the 5th of March a Marine mechanized battalion in the 92nd Division entered J'Keloa City in the company of the King's Honored, a monarchist regiment that had re-assembled upon Morav's call to arms.
Years later it was learned that Heltk had tried to persuade his neighbors to intervene against his enemies. He appealed to Gao to "save Kelos from the counter-revolutionaries", but Gao was too busy dealing with re-armament to even consider Heltk's request. Heltk also made appeals to the Tsen'kethi and Cardassians, but their asking prices were too high. Heltk did eventually agree to the Cardassians' terms, but by that time it was too late and Cardassia was unwilling to go to war against the Alliance with Kelos having fallen and all of Cardassia's troops and ships shifted to use against the Federation (this was the buildup that was most famously thwarted by the actions of the USS Phoenix under Starfleet Captain Benjamin Maxwell). Heltk was out of options and chose to not outlive his short-lived revolution. When the Republic surrendered, Heltk barricaded himself in his office and killed himself before the Keloans could enter.
Morav entered J'Keloa City to cheering throngs and he immediately gave a speech from the same place that his family had been murdered years before. Morav's sentiments won him international accolades as he called upon Keloans to "heal our divisions and stand together again as a united people, made strong by our traditions and faith and made free by our will." His youth and energy - and the ideals he had absorbed from the Windsors and Anglian society - invigorated Keloan society. On the 16th of March 2153 Morav was coronated in a grand ceremony and the Kingdom of Kelos again proclaimed. Morav immediately called for elections to elect a Constitutional Congress that would decide upon a Royal Constitution for the Keloan people. Basing it off of English and Keloan common law and French republicanism, the Keloan Constitution was praised as the most practical the Keloans had ever possessed as a united government. It was officially accepted in March of 2154 after an acceptance plebiscite in January of '54 - the date chosen was the first anniversary of Morav's ascension to the throne - and elections held which brought to power a broad coalition of populist and religious parties.
In the interim Kelos became an ally of the Alliance. The interim government of Morav signed a mutual-defense and trade treaty with the Alliance in April of 2153, binding the Alliance to Kelos' defense for a period of three years while the Keloans rebuilt and re-established their military. Alliance military advisors were used to train the restored Royal Federal Army and Keloan companies, released from government control, bought licenses from Alliance companies to produce military equipment while establishing their own designs. A treaty of alliance would be signed over two years later which is still maintained.

The Alliance's intervention sparked protest from the Federation and Cardassia. The two governments condemned the "interference in the affairs of the Keloan race" and demanded the Alliance withdraw from Kelos. President Mamatmas' reply to the two governments would have exchanged Alliance withdrawal in 18 months for the demilitarization of their borders with Kelos and a treaty binding Cardassia, the Federation, and the Alliance to defending Kelos from attack, but it was dismissed out of hand.
On the 25th of March, the Federation Council voted to impose sanctions on the Alliance, forbidding the sale of Federation electronics or other potential military equipment to entities inside the Alliance. The sanctions were symbolic and meaningless as the Alliance did not import Federation electronics or any such equipment. Plans to expand the sanctions and forbid imported Alliance goods were quashed by the Idealogue Party's Central Committee, who desired continued access to materials from the Alliance to help with rearmament.
Aside from government actions, PAPAL staged a number of anti-Alliance demonstrations across the Federation Core Worlds. Miller personally led one outside of the new Alliance Embassy on Earth, demanding Alliance withdrawal from Kelos and the removal of the Alliance Marine guard at the Embassy. None of the demonstrations became violent, although four of Miller's people had to be dragged away by Starfleet Security when they tried to breach the wall of the Alliance Embassy.
By April, Gao decided that the Alliance accomplishment at Kelos had to be accepted. At least this kept Kelos out of Cardassian hands and gave Cardassia something else to be worried about. He convinced the Federation Council to officially recognize Morav's government and restore diplomatic relations. There was hope amongst the Idealogues that their party on Kelos might yet win the government. Eventually the Keloan Social Enlightenment Party would end up as one of the populist parties in the ruling coalition, winning roughly six percent of the vote. Nevertheless their influence declined afterward and the Federation never got close to having their supporters on Kelos taking the government, a setback that would coincide with the increasing of tensions between the Alliance and Federation.
Cardassia's response was more quiet. After initial condemnations, the Cardassians finally acquiesed to recognizing Morav's government in June. By then the Cardassians had taken a very important decision for the near and far future. After some deliberation, the Central Command decided against early plans to withdraw from Bajor. With Kelos clearly moving into Alliance orbit, the Cardassians needed Bajor as a position to threaten the Federation's flank in any future war. It was reinforced and new measures were taken to try and quell the resistance movements on Bajor, measures that would directly lead to the hostilities to erupt at the end of the year.
The Central Command also began crafting a war plan for attacking the Alliance. The general goal was to occupy enough of the Alliance's Colonial Zone that disputes could be settled in Cardassia's favor. More optimistic hopes were for such a complete victory that the Alliance may very well withdraw from the Quadrant. A few high-ranking Guls spoke of what it could mean for Cardassia if they managed to seize the Alliance's Gate Assembly intact.
Ultimately the Keloan Crisis, while short-lived and considered low-scale to the Alliance public, was important. It established to the governments of the Alpha Quadrant the Alliance's willingness to use military intervention to handle a crisis. It was also the first step that set the Alliance and the Federation on a course toward political hostility. The Keloan Intervention was such a gross violation of the Federation's moral beliefs in non-interventionism - no matter what their own government did on occasion - that it provoked a great deal of controversy and created the first stirrings of anti-Alliance sentiment that would explode in later years. Additionally, the Cardassian reaction over Kelos - particularly their decision not to withdraw from their occupation of Bajor - had a profound effect upon events to come.

[Steve]

6. The Bajoran Problem


The great issue of 2153 was Bajor. Kelos was the forerunner to this greater, more vicious argument amongst the powers, particularly the Alliance and Cardassia. Eventually the pressing questions of the issue - Bajoran resistance fighters or "terrorists" as the Federation and Cardassians claimed them, Alliance support for Bajoran refugees, the fate of Bajor itself - would lead to open war between the Alliance and Cardassia.
Bajor had never been a willing part of the Cardassian Union. The Bajorans' culture and society was millennia old. There is evidence that they were capable of interstellar travel as far back as eight centuries, Bajor's potential being limited by their cultural preference for stability and order in which to perfect themselves spiritually. After centuries of interstellar exploration the Bajorans only occupied roughly thirty solar systems around Bajor. As such, Bajor had a great deal of material wealth that was untapped. The Cardassians, in need of resources, quickly took over Bajor not too long after their government was overthrown by the military around 2318 Local.
Aside from occasional fights between villages and towns, Bajor had been peacefully unified for centuries by a theocratic form of government that relied upon the input of the Kai. They had no military with which to resist Cardassian invasion. The Cardassians began putting the Bajorans to work almost right away, forming forced labor camps at mines and other important resource areas in which the Bajorans were treated abysmally and often were killed by accidents or guard mistreatment. As the 24th Century wound onward, the Bajorans eventually began fighting back. They used whatever weapons they could get - stolen Cardassian weapons, weapons purchased off the black market - and tried to disrupt the Cardassian occupation. The Cardassians responded brutally, implementing harsh reprisal measures and reinforcing their troops on Bajor.
The Cardassians did not really care for altering Bajoran society. But as the rebellion wound on they took steps in that direction. Vedeks were carefully screened for sympathies to the Resistance and the Kai was forced to answer to the Cardassian Prefect on many matters to ensure the Bajoran religious hierarchy was not fomenting revolt. Certain works were outlawed and libraries were carefully screened of material, as well as certain forms of cultural expression being banned or tightly controlled so that they could not be used to stir up anti-Cardassian feeling. Some propaganda efforts were made to convince modern Bajorans that their ways were backward and should be abandoned; the Cardassians were the "wave of the future", trying only to help modernize the Bajoran race. The propaganda efforts backfired and the Cardassians ceased trying to justify their occupation.

Life on occupied Bajor was harsh. The Cardassians applied totalitarian methods to force total obedience from the Bajorans. The Obsidian Order and the military abducted whom they wanted whenever they wanted for any reason, ranging from suspected collusion with the Resistance to being disrespectful to Cardassian soldiers. The conscripts among the Cardassians were brutally treated by their superiors and took that out on the hapless Bajorans. By the time of Alliance First Contact in the Alpha Quadrant, Cardassian conscripts had become notorious on Bajor for their rapine, brutal actions. A study by the Cardassian government found that newer conscripts were often mistreated by the older ones and referred to as "children" until they'd taken the crucial step of forcing a Bajoran girl into sex, either by rape or other forms of coercion. Cardassian sexual mores could be quite conservative, especially considering the disgust engendered by the possible offspring of interspecies mating - the revelation that former Prefect Gul Dukat fathered a half-Bajoran daughter destroyed his career - and Cardassian attitudes about their racial purity, but this engendered an interest in Cardassian soldiers (particularly males) as to aliens. This was even justified at times as the inherently superior Cardassian forcing pleasure from inferior aliens, a notion that appealed to Cardassian "might makes right" attitudes of the time.

At the same time that revolt spread across Bajor, other Bajorans fled, mostly to the Federation. The first refugee camps came into existance in the 2320s. By the 2340s, the refugee population was well into the millions. Jirvshk used the local population to his own advantage, finding a handful of Bajoran radicals to form the Bajoran Peoples' Liberation Front. The BPLF was more terrorist than the other resistance forces and often brutal in it's attacks on the Cardassians - it was also loyal to Jirvshk, who intended for the BPLF to be the leaders of a Communist Bajor in the future, after the Federation was strong enough to strike at the Cardassians.
Jirvshk's death took the wind out of the BPLF's sails. At first the new Federation government was friendly to the Bajorans. But the Cardassian war quickly changed the Federation's attitude. To the Federation State Press and other Millerites looking to undermine the war effort, the Bajorans were perfect patsies. It began in 2359 with an article by PAPAL writer Mina Summer entitled The Unseen Hand, in which Summer charged that the Bajorans living in the Federation had "provoked" the Cardassians into attacking the Federation. The popularity of the article in the Core Worlds - where people had mostly never seen the Bajorans - made further attacks possible. In January 2360 Miller made a public call at a peace rally to arrest Bajoran leaders for "provoking this unjust war". Bajorans were quickly pilloried as religious fanatics who were bent on regaining their planet at all costs, no matter how many had to die for it.
The Federation State Press' political goals, made easier by the villification of Bajorans, led them to begin accepting Cardassian propaganda, and the earliest examples of uncritical acceptance of Cardassian sources was directed against Bajorans. Cardassian statistics and reports were used to claim that most Bajoran deaths in the Occupation were at the hands of other Bajorans, not Cardassians. Claims of the Cardassian abduction of Bajoran girls for sexual services were all lies fabricated by Bajoran provocateurs. Holovid star and senior PAPAL member Jenny Hamilton returned from a visit to Bajor - sanctioned and allowed by the Cardassian government - and claimed that the Bajorans were a "savage, primitive people" who "were bound fanatically to their outdated religion". "Parents encouraged their children to kill Cardassian schoolchildren in their playgrounds," Hamilton told a PAPAL rally on Alpha Centauri two months after her visit. The Federation Council bowed to PAPAL pressure and cut some of it's funding to Bajoran settlements, making the restoration of full funding conditional upon "inspections" to prove the Bajorans were not supporting the insurgency.

By the end of the war, polls showed that anti-Bajoran sentiment in the Federation Core Worlds was at sixty percent, as opposed to pro-Bajoran sentiment having been at seventy-five percent pre-war. Many in the Core Worlds had never met a Bajoran and were swift to accept what the press and PAPAL were claiming of their conduct. The charter colonies were more critical of Cardassian reports, but growing government control of the media - in the guise of the pro-PAPAL State Press - made their views difficult to spread Federation-wide.
The pressure did not relent post-war. After the POW controversy erupted, Miller declared to a crowd of PAPAL supporters in San Francisco that the Bajorans were "in league" with the militarists who were "encouraging" Federation POWS to lie about being abused by the Cardassians and that there was a conspiracy between Starfleet Command, the Bajorans, and the Klingon Empire to restart the war with Cardassia. When asked by a Bajoran spokesman, Kerpa Torys, about what the Bajorans needed to do to prove they were not trying to provoke another war, Miller declared that they should all accept Cardassian rule of their race and stop trying to resist it, to Kerpa's disgust and the cheers of PAPAL.
PAPAL's anti-Bajoran propaganda terrified the Bajoran settlers and refugees in the Federation. There were increasing fears that the Federation would abandon them to the Cardassians if the Cardassians made it a term of peace. Because of this, within weeks of the Alliance purchase of New Liberty and it's region being made official, thousands of Bajorans were moving into Alliance space.

Those Bajorans who initially fled into the Alliance ended up being right. In April 2153 AST, a meeting of the Cardassian Central Command decided that in order to stabilize Bajor, the Bajorans in the Federation had to be brought to heel. This would, in their view, demonstrate to the Resistance that they had nowhere to hide. The Bajoran people would soon come to understand that Cardassia's grip was absolute and unyielding. Their approach was to ask the Federation to allow Cardassian security forces to "inspect in force" the Bajoran camps and settlements in the Federation. Suspected Resistance fighters and supporters would be identified and taken by Cardassia for interrogation and trial. The request ended up sounding like a demand; the Cardassian terms made clear that the Cardassians would regard refusal as tacit Federation support for the Bajoran liberation movement.
Gao wished to negotiate the terms, identifying that they were very injurious to Federation sovereignty and would likely embolden the Cardassians. But the Cardassians prevented him from silently seeking better terms. They publicly announced the terms and why they were seeking them. The Core Worlders immediately took to the media polls and demanded that Gao agree. PAPAL demonstrated outside Gao's office in Paris and blockaded the Bajoran Relief Center in Amsterdam, pelting it's employees with objects and vandalizing the premises. "No more war for Bajor!" was the rallying cry of a Miller speech at Berkeley. Gao bowed to the pressure and asked the Federation Council to agree to the terms. It did so, it's Idealogue majority having been bullied into it by the Central Committee. The remaining Social Progressives walked out in protest.
Word had spread to the Bajorans living near the Cardassian border. Even before the Council officially agreed, panic had erupted in the settlements. A number of camps on lesser-developed worlds decided to go to ground. Many others opted to move into the Alliance. Some of these settlements' occupants sold everything they had and indebted themselves heavily to get space on a ship heading for New Liberty. They arrived in Alliance territory impoverished and in severe debt. Unscrupulous groups took advantage. The Orion Syndicate, Ferengi trade companies, everyone got into the action and many acted unethically, taking advantage of the Bajorans' terror to cheat them. There were worse cases; a number of Bajorans never made to New Liberty. They were either turned over to the Cardassians by captains working for the Obsidian Order or were sold into Orion slavery.

Many of those who were indebted did not remain so. As the refugees flooded into the Alliance Colonial Zone, charity groups and organizations rose to the occasion, paying off the Bajorans' debts while helping them find places to live. Billionaire philanthropist Marvin Edwards went to the extent of establishing an entirely new group - the Bajoran Relief and Education Fund - dedicated to helping the Bajoran refugees settle and to properly educate them so they could sustain themselves. On several worlds the Alliance colonists actively helped the Bajorans build their own small towns and communities - some of which still stand today and are still occupied by the refugees or their children - and voted in their local governments to raise funds to educate and train the Bajorans. While they had been villified in the Federation press, the Alliance's press agencies were often sympathetic and were being used to encourage donations and charity. Many Bajorans found the contrast remarkable.
The pace of refugees quickened as the Cardassians began their security operations. Dozens of Bajorans were seized. Even Federation citizens staying in the camps, mostly relief workers or spouses of Bajorans, were taken. Their fates were usually the same; they were tortured into confessions, often false, and either executed or sentenced to service in forced labor camps on or around Bajor. The Cardassians ranged everywhere in nearby Federation space, drawing complaints from Starfleet that they were not being properly notified as to Cardassian plans to launch an inspection.
The Cardassians soon began interdicting the refugee ships. Ships leaving worlds with Bajoran settlements were intercepted and forced to allow inspection, in which the Cardassians would seize those they declared suspect. The Cardassians initially limited themselves to vessels flagged in the Federation or other minor races and states; in June, they for the first time boarded an Alliance-flagged liner and carted off a Bajoran suspected of being a financier for the Resistance. The Alliance Government protested angrily to both the Federation and the Cardassians. They demanded the Federation fulfill it's duties and protect shipping in their own space. When Gao's government meekly responded that they were bound by their agreement to giving the Cardassians unfettered access for inspections, the Alliance announced they would begin sending their own naval warships to escort Alliance merchant convoys in the region. The first such convoy was done in July 2153, multiple liners and freighters making a business run into Federation space under escort from the carrier DNS Ticonderoga and her battle group. The Cardassians sent a handful of ships to demand they be allowed to inspect the civilian ships - a number of Bajorans had come aboard - and were rebuffed by the commanding Line Captain of the task force. Cardassia protested to the Alliance Government and accused them of supporting the Resistance.
The accusation would soon prove true. Following increasing Cardassian hostility from the Kelos intervention and Cardassian attempts to forcefully inspect Alliance civilian ships, President Mamatmas was given the view that the Cardassians had been made arrogant by how easily they had dealt with the Federation diplomatically. They were going to try the same thing with the Alliance as a natural consequence, eventually causing some kind of miscalculation that would lead to war. The opinions given were that the Alliance should prepare for war with Cardassia as a near-certainty instead of a mere possibility. A logical conclusion of this change of approach was that the Alliance should begin covertly aiding the Bajoran Resistance. After a second Security Committee meeting on the issue on June 27th, Mamatmas gave the go-ahead. The Alliance Security Agency would direct the operation, entitled Project Prometheus for security purposes, with input from Alliance Intelligence and the Defense Ministry. A budget was set aside for operational expenses and weapons procurement.
The question of how to aid the Bajoran Resistance was answered by the Alliance Marine Corps. Starting in 2150, they had recruited trainers from US Marine Force Recon, Russian Spetsnaz, and British SBS and SAS to form their own special forces unit that would be for long-term operations in enemy territory, including prisoner rescue and covert aid to resistance organizations and guerillas. The unit was designated the Special Tactics Regiment, which in turn was acronymed into STAR; the members of the unit became known as "Star" Marines, popularized today by holovid games and programs like "One Man Army".
The first STAR team was inserted via drop pod into Bajor by a Valiant-class vessel on July 20th. The vessel also jettisoned drop pods filled with equipment. Contact was pre-arranged and made with the Shakaar Resistance cell. The Marines re-armed the Bajorans with older Russian AK-90 assault rifles, utilizing a portable solar-powered replicator system to fabricate ammunition from raw supplies. The AK-90, favored by Spetsnaz even after newer rifles came into use by the Russian Army, was known as very reliable and resilient against damage. Furthermore, it's 10.4mm rounds were powerful even for a chemically-propelled round and would prove deadly to the Cardassians despite their favored field and uniform armor.

At the same time that the Alliance began it's first covert actions to support the Bajoran Resistance, the Strategic Planning Staff began to examine it's war plans. They presented the Security Committee with a plan that was defensive in nature. If possible, concentrated strikes would be used to eliminate Cardassian bases on the Alliance - and if necessary, Keloan - border. New Liberty would be reinforced and a limited border offensive to seize the disputed systems would be mounted after about twenty-four days. Mamatmas was unhappy with the idea of sitting still for three weeks, which he regarded as too much time for the Cardassians to mobilize reserves.
One of the officers on the SPS, Admiral Piotr Ogilev, had a different idea. In a briefing for the President in early July, he noted that going by records of the recent Cardassian war with the Federation, the Cardassians put a lot of emphasis on using intelligence sources to locate their opponents' best forces and to avoid them. It had become known recently that the Cardassians were creating HUMINT sources inside the Alliance to alert them of new ship movements, with a focus on the Alliance's battle line. Ogilev had the idea that the Cardassians would concentrate too highly on the movements of the Alliance's battleships due to the anti-fighter biases of the ST-3 militaries. He told Mamatmas and Defense Minister Rathbone that the Alliance could use it's carrier forces to launch a pre-emptive strike. Deployments of carriers could be hidden by far more visible positioning of battle squadrons toward Bajor.
Ogilev's plan required precise timing and good intelligence. Using ELINT capabilities - stealth ships operating in and out of the Badlands to bypass Cardassian sensor posts - the Alliance could be ready for a Cardassian redeployment of major fleet resources against New Liberty. The Cardassians would want to bring the ships into port to rearm them for blasting through Alliance system defense, creating a window of opportunity for a devastating first strike using carriers and cloaked attack ships. The Chairman of the SPS, Army Field Marshal Theodore Pollack, dismissed the idea as too risky and reliant upon ELINT. It would be better to prepare for a defensive war. Rathbone backed Pollack but Ogilev had his own crucial support, having contacted Admiral Dale on Strana Mechty - whom Mamatmas respected and considered a friend - and having received Dale's support. Mamatmas decided Ogilev's concept deserved support. He had the SPS draw up a second war plan to put it into action.

There was some resistance to the idea of opposing the Cardassians head on. Rachel MacKenzie, now running for Chancellor, charged publicly that the government was taking too many risks. The Alliance wasn't ready for full-scale interstellar war and it should not be courting it by provoking Cardassia. Though MacKenzie stopped short of the appeasement policies supported by the Pax Party, she did support the idea of thoroughly investing the Bajoran refugees and making sure that they didn't have ties to "terrorism". Gao and Federation leaders often mis-interpreted MacKenzie's remarks on the matter and assumed she was anti-war, which explains their positive reaction to her electoral victory later in the year.
The true motivation behind MacKenzie's positions, and her split with the Mamatmas Administration, was her opposition to Mamatmas' foreign policy ideas. With President Verdes, MacKenzie had led the "Passive" school of thought, which assumed it was better to keep the ADN strongly neutral in local affairs in other universes and to only intervene when directly necessary, thus reducing the likelihood of the Alliance getting dragged into minor conflicts while ensuring they maintained good relations with most of the present powers.
Mamatmas, on the other hand, was in agreement with "Active" policy. The Alliance would establish itself with regional allies through which joint interests could be protected and Alliance power could be projected, thus dissuading attacks on Alliance citizens and shipping. Mamatmas believed strongly that the Passivist policies would merely leave the Alliance alone and without friends, while MacKenzie felt Activist policy was dangerous in the long-term. This Active/Passive split is still strong today.
The Cardassians knew the potential for war was increasing. Their desire to intimidate the Bajoran race into submission was impossible so long as the Bajorans had safe haven in the Alliance. From the point of view of Cardassian strategists, the Alliance would eventually attack Cardassia to free Bajor or from the obvious perception that Cardassia intended to attack the Alliance. In late June 1st Rank Gul Relim Torcet - Senior member of the Central Command's Military Strategy Staff - recommended to the Cardassian chiefs that Cardassia re-orient it's forces to face the Alliance, not the Federation. He feared that if the forces weren't already there when Cardassia was ready, the Alliance would detect a re-deployment and launch a pre-emptive strike. Relim's concerns were ignored; the Central Command desired to have those forces on the Federation border to pressure the Federation in the coming peace negotiations. They acceeded to moving more sensor posts toward the Alliance border and to establishing plans for the reserves to reinforce the border upon the outbreak of war. The Central Command also approached the Obsidian Order about keeping close watch on the Alliance's forces.
Though many Obsidian Order records have been lost, after the fall of Cardassia in the Dominion War a number of their records were recovered. Among them were documents written in the time period of July to August 2153 indicating Obsidian Order plans in relation to the Alliance. They were far more ambitious than originally perceived and would probably have sparked fear and disagreement from the Central Command for their audacity. The Obsidian Order planned to begin waging a terrorist campaign against the Alliance in 2154. Senior officials and military commanders would be targeted for assassination and Alliance military posts would be attacked. Kelos would also come under attack and King Morav targeted for assassination. One particularly ambitious plan was to assassinate President Mamatmas if he ever made a state visit. The Cardassians planned on implicating Bajoran xenophobe groups, hoping to provoke anti-Bajoran sentiment in the Alliance as propaganda had done in the Federation.
The potential success of such a campaign is widely debated. Preparations didn't go as fast as desired by proponents due to the reservations of some Order officials, who feared they might squander what HUMINT sources they had managed to establish in the Alliance. While some believe it may have very well worked, or at least done severe damage, there is also evidence that the Obsidian Order's goals were wildly unrealistic and their estimates of Alliance counter-intelligence overly optimistic. One surviving document - a letter written by a well-connected field chief and spymaster who oversaw operations in a region that included the Alliance Colonial Zone - blasted senior leadership for their "gross underestimation" of the Alliance. The chief pointed out that six of his agents had been compromised to Alliance security since operations began and that the sector's spy handler had apparently come under suspicion. Another incident came in August of 2153 when the Cardassians got wind that an Alliance agent has successfully hacked into a military base's computers and downloaded operational plans. The Obsidian Order purged the local security chief and had the base commander and his executive officer assassinated.
Alliance Intelligence inherited two fledgling networks established by British MI6 and East African ESI (External Security and Intelligence) thanks to the passing of the Cooperative Intelligence Act. They didn't consolidate the networks, fearing the process would jeopardize operations, but they did use them to good effect. Though ELINT would be the key in the conflict to come, HUMINT warned AID of Cardassian intentions as early as late July, when agents reported the movement of Cardassian reserves to positions that could threaten the Alliance's territory. HUMINT also played a role in the discovery of the "Madred Villages" and led to the identification of a number of forced labor camps where Federation nationals and Bajorans were being held - the liberations of those camps months later would be a serious blow to the Federation's image and would improve the Alliance's standing in the Alpha Quadrant.

The Federation could only stand by and watch. Gao was practical-minded and believed it was in the Federation's best interests to leave Cardassia and the Alliance to fight. He opposed efforts to directly involve the Federation in the growing tensions and did only what he was needed to in the agreement with Cardassia.
Some members of Starfleet were supportive of the idea of an Alliance victory over Cardassia. In a memo, Admiral Nechayev told the Commissioner of Starfleet Operations that "the Alliance is a preferable neighbor to Cardassia, and it would be to our advantage for the Alliance to win any future conflict. They are less likely to become aggressive against the Federation in the future than Cardassia is." Starfleet Command echoed the sentiment in a joint meaning with Gao and senior members of the Central Committee. Cardassia was less likely to be adventurous or aggressive if it suffered a setback against the Alliance.
Anti-Alliance sentiment remained focused with PAPAL. It had not forgiven the Alliance for it's intervention on Kelos. Nor could it accept the Alliance's tolerance toward Bajorans. Barely a week would go by between PAPAL demonstrations at the Alliance Embassy and the State Press was filled with propaganda attempting to claim the Alliance Government was backing Bajoran terrorism. PAPAL became effectively pro-Cardassian now and would continue to serve as a mouthpiece for Cardassian propaganda.
The escalating tensions finally came to a head. On the 12th of August, four Cardassian warships operating in Federation space tried to force a convoy from the Alliance to allow inspections for Bajorans on their wanted list. The Alliance convoy, under the protection of a division of cruisers and destroyers, refused. The Cardassians decided to try and intimidate the convoy with a close fly-by with weapons armed. The Alliance commanders responded by locking weapons on the Cardassians, which panicked one of the Cardassian commanders, who opened fire. Several shots were exchanged and ships on both sides were damaged.
Reaction in the Alliance was immediate. The next day, at a session of the Council, Rep. Elijah Weisbaum called for a declaration of war on the Cardassian Union, citing the clearly unprovoked Cardassian attack on Alliance vessels in neutral space. Weisbaum's resolution was rejected out of hand, but not decisively. The media was making such a stir of the incident that calls for war were starting to be heard from the public, which was now thorougly pro-Bajoran and anti-Cardassian due to the increasing press stories of Cardassian atrocities against Bajoran civilians. President Mamatmas called for an emergency meeting of the Security Committee and promised to address the Council on the 14th. In addition, Alliance forces in ST-3 were ordered to DefCon 2 and reinforcements mandated in the war plan ordered into the Colonial Zone. In the Committee meeting, Mamatmas asked for opinions; Foreign Minister Umachov led the miltiary chiefs in urging the President to ask the Council for a declaration of war. But Mamatmas was convinced to take a less aggressive route by Security Advisor Omiko Takahara; a call for sanctions, demands for reparations, and Cardassian promises of negotiation to settle "the Bajoran Question".

The reaction on Cardassia was completely different. The Central Command began to panic; they weren't ready for war with the Alliance and were still orientated to fight other powers. Indeed, they didn't want to go to war again for another four years, needing time to rebuild their fleet and re-establish stockpiles of weapons and supplies. The Guls realized they had allowed tensions to go too far. It was time to step back from the edge. Within ten hours of news of the battle reaching Cardassia, the Cardassians dispatched a message to the Alliance through their embassy in the Federation that apologized for the "misunderstanding" and asked for negotiations. Mamatmas got the note early on the 14th and presented it to the Alliance Council: the Cardassians "have gone too far, and they know they have gone too far", he informed the Council. Negotiations were now a possibility, and Mamatmas wanted to take them up to have a chance to settle the problems over the Bajorans before they escalated into a full-scale war.
The Cardassians still had to save face, and this would destroy their opening. Seeking to look good for their internal enemies, the Guls who were to begin negotiations began with very firm terms little different from what the Federation had accepted. The two main terms were unrestrained Cardassian access to Bajoran camps in the Alliance and the right to detain and try those they suspected of terrorism without Alliance input. The Cardassians never intended for those terms to last, and their negotiator to the Alliance Embassy in San Francisco told Ambassador Parmika so in their first meeting.
There was a leak. The initial terms were not sent via the Alliance Embassy in the Federation but through the Federation to their Embassy in the Alliance. The Federation's Ambassador to the Alliance was Joseph Kranitz, a card-carrying member of PAPAL and part of the "Young Paxist" clique. His father was a member of the BLN Distribution Authority for the Eastern Seaboard and his grandfather had been a member of the Party Central Committee. These political connections brought Kranitz the appointment to Ambassador despite his youth and relative inexperience, an oversight that the Federation's Diplomatic Corps was now going to regret.
Kranitz, like many Paxists, placed a great deal of stock in PAPAL ideology and the belief that the common man was "inherently pacifist". Wars began because societies were either scared into them or were dragged into them by unjust government. By this logic, the best way to keep the Alliance from going to war was to make the stakes clear to the public and have them force their government into peace. Kranitz leaked the Cardassian message to the media, not realizing the Cardassians were merely grandstanding. The harsh terms and the language of the message - that Alliance refusal would force Cardassia to seek other means of satisfying their problem - provided fresh fodder for the media. Kranitz had intended for the media to act precisely as the Federation State Press did and circulate anti-war sentiments. Instead, most Alliance media outlets played up the threats and the terms of the Cardassian message. The public was already riled up over the skirmish on August 12th. This was the final straw; anti-Cardassian demonstrations were held on every single world of the Colonial Zone and in Washington on the 18th. Weisbaum personally led the rally in Washington and accused Cardassia of "bad faith" and trying to instigate a war. Kranitz held a meeting with President Mamatmas shortly after the press confirmed his involvement in the leak, seeking to "restart negotiations". Mamatmas turned him away and is said to have lamented that Kranitz had "made negotiations impossible". Kranitz was recalled and fired a week later.

Kranitz's ham-handed attempt to spur peace instead destroyed any hope of an agreement between Washington and Cardassia. Mamatmas had been planning to find some way to end the growing tensions by trying to convince Cardassia to willingly withdraw from Bajor in exchange for various economic packages and other possible terms. Now negotiation was politically impossible; it was an election year, and any attempt by Mamatmas to negotiate even a fair outcome with Cardassia could too easily be claimed as submission by opposition politicians. Mamatmas had to adopt the hard line, knowing it would eventually lead to war.

Though negotiations ultimately failed, the call for them did allow the two sides time to cool tensions. On the 15th Mamatmas restored the military alert level in ST-3 to DefCon 4, though he agreed with keeping the Aerospace Force's units on heightened rotation. After the Kranitz leak, he did not restore the alert level, hoping to at least buy time to delay any conflict until after the coming elections.
On Cardassia, the Guls who had promoted negotiation now found themselves marginalized. Four were re-assigned to minor bureaucratic posts. The "Expansionist" clique of leaders came into prominence and decided war was the only remaining option, though it was agreed that it would have to wait until Cardassia's reserves were fully replenished.
The entire root of the Bajoran Problem was the Cardassians' view that the Bajorans could not be given a safe haven. They had to be kept under constant threat and always in reach of Cardassian power. This decision led Cardassia to taking steps that would, in their view, fix them to a course concerning Bajor. Bajor itself was no longer as valuable as it had been. Losses to the increasing Resistance and the need for reprisals were becoming a cost that didn't mean the benefits of diminishing Bajoran resources. Bajor was simply not profitable any more. But now Cardassia had made the suppression of the Bajoran race itself as a priority. They had extracted an agreement from the Federation, costing political capital, and had invested national resources in the endeavor. Now they had already exchanged fire with the Alliance on the issue. The powers-that-be in the Central Command feared that if they were to pull back, the loss of face for Cardassia would be irrepairable. The Cardassian Empire was built on fear of indomitable Cardassian Will. Minorities and subjects had to understand that the Cardassians would not brook dissent or offense. You either obeyed or you were destroyed, no matter the cost to Cardassia. Backing down would jeopardize this image and endanger the Empire. So the Cardassians fixed themselves onto a course that could only end in war.
Just the same, there was no intristic value to Bajor for the Alliance. The Alliance was looking for the economic pluses of a new interstellar market, not for war with local powers. There were, to the minds of the Alliance's leadership, more pressing threats calling for Alliance resources. But 2153 was an election year and the Government could ill afford to look weak, since it could cost the DAP the Council elections. Furthermore, stability on Kelos required the Alliance to look strong and committed. Negotiations were only possible if they were fair and respectful. After the Kranitz Leak, the public perception was that the Cardassians were incapable of such negotiation. They demanded subjection and threatened war if it was refused. As such, they had to be dealt with strongly and with resolve. The Bajorans in the Alliance also proved a people easily sympathized with. Alliance media praised the Bajorans more than the Federation State Press villified them. To the public eye, they were hard workers, religiously devout, and generally friendly people who had been brutally conquered and oppressed by a militant, racist alien power. Stories and reports of Cardassian atrocities against Bajorans filled the media. It was hard for an Alliance citizen to be anti-Bajoran when the vid channels were filled with images of weeping Bajoran mothers remembering the callous killings of their children, or a young girl tearfully recalling what it was like to be gang-raped by Cardassian soldiers. By the time of August, the sentimentin the Alliance was that a war to free Bajor would be more like a moral crusade than a conventional war. Rather than try to cling to peace, there was a growing public perception that Cardassia had to be brought to heel; war with Cardassia was seen as an acceptable outcome to the Bajoran Problem.

The Federation remained on the sidelines during the crisis, unwilling and unable to do anything. Though PAPAL would continue it's traditional demands for peace, they were unheard in Cardassia and the Alliance. The entire mood of the time could be summed up by Federation News Reporter Harriet Williams in a public report on the 20th of August. "We continue to call for peace," Williams reported, "but nobody's hearing us. The war drums are too loud."

[CJvR]

Intresting display of how easy it is to lose track of the real mission objective.

[Junghalli]

Pretty interesting, although the timeline seems a tad convoluted. You might want to tighten the focus a little bit. Other than that I like it, even if it is infested with that awful, awful interspecies breeding brainbug (no offense, I guess Trekverse is already so infested with it you might as well put the little bastard to good use ).

[Steve]

Pretty interesting, although the timeline seems a tad convoluted. You might want to tighten the focus a little bit. Other than that I like it, even if it is infested with that awful, awful interspecies breeding brainbug (no offense, I guess Trekverse is already so infested with it you might as well put the little bastard to good use ).

Though I'll bend them into impossible, agonizingly-painful shapes, I won't break the basic conventions of Trek, like general tech behavior or the fact that two different sentient species can breed.

I will, however, take the POV that a lot of it requires genetic tinkering to some degrees, which is further extrapolated in my more.... flattering Trek work, "Timelines" (and a number of characters from Timelines will be making appearances in this universe as well). Klingons and Trill, for instance, seem to need this in order to breed. Of course, with the backgrounds of some of the characters (namely Sophia Razmara, a product of rape), I've made it impossible for this to be true in all cases.

I will finally add, however, that the character of Asako t'Prinn is not mine. Asako is purely the creation of Marina, the dreaded Duchess of Zeon. In another collaborative work, Marina made it where Asako became the neo-Stalinist ruler of a UFP remnant state. But we decided to have Asako be slightly more acceptable in this timeline - she's an old-school terrorist (political assassinations, mostly of racist politicians and figures, piracy, and bank robberies) committed to stamping out bigotry against multi-species individuals like herself. We also gave her the close friendship she has with Sophia Razmara, or rather, this timeline's incarnation of her.

Anyway, time to resume work on my, well, work.

[Junghalli]

Though I'll bend them into impossible, agonizingly-painful shapes, I won't break the basic conventions of Trek, like general tech behavior or the fact that two different sentient species can breed.

OK, I guess. My only real objection is your Cardassians seem to gotten a touch of Drakanitis (we shall crush them, and then we shall fuck them all to death! glory to the uber-race!). You should be careful not to overdo that, especially as Cardassians are IMO different-looking enough from humans and most Trek near-humans that the physical difference should render them repulsive to us and visa versa as far as that goes.
Eh, I just had a thought, LOL this brings whole new meanings to "your culture will adapt to service us"

I will finally add, however, that the character of Asako t'Prinn is not mine. Asako is purely the creation of Marina, the dreaded Duchess of Zeon. In another collaborative work, Marina made it where Asako became the neo-Stalinist ruler of a UFP remnant state.

Do you have a link to that? What is the title if not?

[Steve]

OK, I guess. My only real objection is your Cardassians seem to gotten a touch of Drakanitis (we shall crush them, and then we shall fuck them all to death! glory to the uber-race!). You should be careful not to overdo that, especially as Cardassians are IMO different-looking enough from humans and most Trek near-humans that the physical difference should render them repulsive to us and visa versa as far as that goes.

Well, "Drakanitis" is actually uber-Neitzschean "Triumph of the Will" mentality.

That is, those with the greater Will - strength - will lord over those with the lesser. There's a reason, I'll note, that the Nazis called their great propaganda masterpiece "Triumph of the Will".

The Cardassians have based their entire empire upon the impression of their Will being indomitable. I mentioned this in the fluff I posted earlier; you obey or you die. Hence why Cardassia is about to go to war over the "Bajoran Problem" even when Bajor is no longer worth it. They can't look weak, since it might shatter their entire Empire.

As for the issue of Cardassian... sexual mores, I've also noted in the fluff and implied in the fiction that the Cardassians are rather sexually conservative in their culture (remember that staff officer slapping his Bajoran mistress for whining about making her get an abortion?). Repressingly so, probably. Which means they're prone to having that repression release itself very unconstructively. And so the State's justification for it's power - being the Will and Strength of the Cardassian Nation - is used to justify certain improprieties taken with alien women. After all, given the natural breeding ability of Cardassians and Bajorans, they've obviouslly sexually compatible, and it's possible that even "minor" things like the Bajorans or Humans having more diverse hair colors and skin colors might make them "exotic" and thus physically appealing.

On top of that, odds are that the situation on Bajor has actually gotten worse as the Cardies circulate out "good" units and send in the misfits and dreg conscripts of their army, made out of the ones they don't really want, the sociopaths, etc. The type who are perfectly capable of becoming enraged by unrelated punishments or some slight by a Bajoran, real or imagined, and taking out those frustrations in very unfortunate ways.

Finally, history here on Earth is filled with the, um, rapine natures of many conquering armies. The Mongols were so feared for it that according to some reports, a large portion of the female population of an entire Chinese city committed suicide when the city surrendered because of the Mongols' reputation for gang-rape. There just seems to be something about combat and war that can bring out certain... behaviors that are highly unacceptable, socially or morally, their occurence depending upon the values of those involved and their approach to the situation.

And this will be taken up again. To let you know, I'm taking a general approach to the Cardassians of combining certain elements of Third World military dictatorships with sophisticated totalitarianism (Stalinist Soviets, for instance, as the Obsidian Order seems more comparable in scope to the KGB/NKVD than the half-assed intelligence services in shitholes like Ba'athist Iraq was) and the tattered remnants of the traditional Cardassian culture, much of which has been trodden under in the previous decades of strong, unquestioned totalitarianism.

Eh, I just had a thought, LOL this brings whole new meanings to "your culture will adapt to service us"

Hewers of wood, drawers of water, and a great many other things.

I will finally add, however, that the character of Asako t'Prinn is not mine. Asako is purely the creation of Marina, the dreaded Duchess of Zeon. In another collaborative work, Marina made it where Asako became the neo-Stalinist ruler of a UFP remnant state.

Do you have a link to that? What is the title if not?

It's over on SB, and it doesn't have a title or a link. It was the WYOIDC SD, which became the Great Game SD. It had an earlier, suckier incarnation of the ADN based on stuff I did about, oh, six-seven years ago, amongst other things.

[Steve]

Dervek Military Station, Dervek, Cardassian Union
18:00 GST


Standing beside the life sign monitors in Interrogation Room 5, 3rd Rank Glin Kircel noticed another blip on the generic bipedal display he was monitoring and heard an accompanying scream, weaker than the last he'd heard. "Jevil, I think you should stop now."
In the middle of the room, Glin Jevil swirled her right wrist around, a sinister hum coming from the six-bladed heat whip in her hand. More crude than their usual tools, the heat whip was favored as a tool of punishing prisoners more than extracting information. In front of her, Christine's back was covered with blisters, bruises, and burns, her wrists bound painfully tight to the ceiling above her head by a cord. Jevil smirked at Kircel. "I'll stop when I get another name from her." She brought the whip up and lashed it across Christine's back, focusing the strike on her posterior and lower back. Christine screeched from the blow, which transferred painful amounts of heat in the single moment of contact on top of the bruising caused by the mass of the flexible metallic blades.
"Jevil, we were supposed to have her ready for transport! And Horvem was satisfied with the names we got."
"She has to know of more people who spoke against Cardassia. Potential enemies of the state when we take their worlds. I want their names on record." Jevil lashed Christine again, this time over the middle of her back.
"Jevil, you've inflicted second-level burns on seventy-five percent of her rear torso's surface. First-level burns cover all but a few percent. She's already going to need medical attention. Horvem will not be happy."
"Oh, shush you fawning rat!" Jevil glared at him, contempt in those cold eyes. "You're a spineless worm. Completely unfit for this kind of work."
"I didn't want this kind of work. I was assigned here."
"Oh? Well, so was I. So maybe you should learn from me and begin to take a little joy in your work." Jevil struck Christine again. "Give me another name, girl!"
"Stop! Please!" Christine continued crying. "I... I gave you what you wanted! Everyone I know who doesn't like your people! Please, don't hurt me anymore!"
A wicked cackle came from Jevil's lungs. "As you can see, Kercil, Glin Horvem was right. Human women are like durba flowers." She walked around to face Christine from the front. Seeing the young woman crying, Jevil laughed in amusement and took a few steps away. "Even Bajorans make more sturdy prisoners."
"Jevil, I really don't think..."
Jevil's first lash to the front landed on Christine's belly and lower ribs, scorching flesh and making her scream. The second landed higher, striking Christine's armpits, neck, and upper chest. Christine cried out again, screaming, "Why are you hurting me?!"
"Because I can!"
The third lash struck higher on Christine's belly and across her chest. Jevil reached her arm back to give a fourth lash when the door to the room slid open. She turned and saluted Horvem, who entered with two 5th Rank Troopers. Horvem saw Christine hanging limply from the ceiling and looked at Jevil with an angry expression on his face. "Glin Jevil, this prisoner's interrogation was ended hours ago! She was supposed to be ready for transport by now!"
"Sir, I thought I could get a few more names out of her. For the Ministry of Justice."
"They have all the names they need!" Horvem's head snapped over and he glared at Kercel. "Glin Kercel, what about you?! Do you have any explaination for this? Don't lie to me, or I'll have you wishing you'd never been born."
Kercel's jaw clenched. "Sir, Glin Jevil ordered that the prisoner be interrogated again."
"I gave no such authorization, Glin."
"I... I didn't know, Sir. I was merely following my orders from Glin Jevil, who holds seniority."
"Glin Kercel, bring her down now."
Kercel pressed the button to bring the cord lower, allowing the two Troopers with Horvem to untie Christine. She collapsed into their arms crying. "Sir, she has many second-level burns," Kercel said. "She needs immediate medical attention."
"The Humans in the Village have medical supplies. I have no more time to waste. The assault's already been launched and we're supposed to send her down at the five minute mark. Trooper Farat, take the prisoner to Transporter Room 6."
The larger Cardassian lifted Christine up and carried her away. Horvem waited until they were gone before looking to Jevil. "I declared Prisoner Bennington's interrogation to be concluded, Glin. This was an unauthorized interrogation. Why did you? What was so important you forgot to inform me of?"
"Sir.... well...."
"Sir, I believe the Glin...."
Horvem whirled around toward Kercel. "Am I speaking to you, Glin Kercel? No! So shut up!" Horvem returned his focus to Jevil. "And you were going to say what, Glin Jevil?"
"Sir, I wasn't going to kill her. I thought I could get a few more names out of her..."
"Bottom-feeders! Wastes of time and resources to pursue! No." Horvem shook his head and got in Jevil's face. "You did this because you enjoyed her suffering, didn't you Glin Jevil?"
"Sir, I...."
"I saw your face earlier. I saw the glee in your eyes when I entered. You enjoyed the Human girl's pain."
"Of course, sir. Causing her that pain is part of my job, and I take pleasure in my work."
"Then you are a failure."
The look on Jevil's face was one of surprise. "Sir?!"
"You are a military interrogator, not a sadistic thug! You cannot take pleasure from the pain of your subjects!"
"But you said we should take pride in our work!"
"I said you should take pride in the service you are providing Cardassia!" Horvem thundered. "This is not a game! And when you start thinking of it as a game with your prisoners as your helpless toys and pawns, you will lose sight of the service you are supposed to provide."
"I... I see...."
"It's too late. You've been spoiled, Glin Jevil. I'm putting you in for re-assignment immediately. I don't want you on my interrogation team. Trooper, take the Glin to her room and confine her there until I can find her transportation to a new post." Horvem turned to Kercel. "As for you, Glin Kercel, you are on probation. As punishment, you are being given an extended leave at half-pay. Feel fortunate I do not re-assign you as I did Glin Jevil. That is all."



Madred Village 23, Dervek, Cardassian Union
18:07 GST


Taking up an area about the size of the Mall in Washington, Madred Village 23 was one of dozens of special installations in the Cardassian Union. Using criminals, hostages, and POWs from other races - particularly those that the Cardassian government "forgot" to release - each Village was themed for a different race in which the Cardassian military or intelligence could train. Some were simply faux-towns for training spies. Some were war-torn wastelands for training special forces in delicate anti-resistance operations.
Village 23 was assigned for training the Anti-Insurgency Forces, a branch of the Cardassian military. It was built as a small town - a few shops and restaurants, a small inn, a courthouse and town hall in the center, with some "farms" on the outskirts. Dervek had been chosen for the site because it was a bountiful world and because it was still relatively unpopulated, with the military having millions of square kilometers to choose from. In the Village itself, the Cardassians gave the Human occupants virtual freedom. Food was provided, replicated and sometimes discreetly bought from within the Federation (the Cardassians went as far as allowing the Humans to "buy" foods that they could have shipped in on the weekly "stipends" of funds permitted them), as was replicator-provided clothing and furnishing. In fact, the two thousand occupants of Village 23 lived rather nicely, some having been there for years and even having children.
Of course, they weren't free. The Cardassians let them grouse and vent anger all the time, since it did no harm and it added to the "natural" simulation they were creating, but the Village itself was surrounded by an anti-beaming field and with remote defenses controlled from over a hundred kilometers away to prevent the Humans from getting in or unauthorized persons from getting out. And nothing prevented the Cardassians from randomly beaming someone up for a myriad of purposes, from being guinea pigs in the training of military interrogators to punishing them for excessive behavior during a raid.
The raids were the great disruption to the locals' lives. Coming at random times, usually at least three a month (once as many as twenty in a month), they consisted of airmobile AIF troops attacking the town to extract or destroy a target, a pre-determined Human that the locals were only sometimes informed of. Sometimes there'd be no resistance. Sometimes, a select few would be told and armed with stun weapons, or even a large portion, depending on the kind of scenario the commanders wanted to set up for their troops.
One such raid was raging now on the northern side of the town, in one of the residential areas. A group of one and two-story suburban-like block houses lit up with phaser fire, where the non-combatants remained huddled in their houses while the Cardassian troops conducted a firefight with the Village occupants who were most often used as the "aggressor" force.
It was into this mess of chaos that Christine Bennington arrived. She beamed down wearing only a metallic restraint shackle that held her hands behind her back and an agonizer collar, flanked by two Cardassians who handed her off to the AIF troops. The commander, a 2nd Rank Glin, turned toward the house their "target" was in and brought up a bullhorn. "Edward Winfield, you will come out immediately or I will order this girl harmed." He brought the bullhorn down and looked toward the aged Senior Trooper beside him. "It's about damned time. They were supposed to beam her down during our arrival."
"Sir, she looks bad."
"One of those interrogators must have decided they weren't through with her. Farking interrogators. I tell you, Senior, there are only two kinds of Military Interrogators. The sadists and the ones who are just creepy." When his target didn't emerge from the house, the Glin took out a control and pressed the button. Christine doubled over and began screaming. "At this setting, this young woman will die in one minute. Perhaps less, she looks rather sick." He counted out the marks at five seconds. When he got to "thirty-five" seconds, a single figure walked out of the house. Wearing what was casual civilian wear for a human, Edward Winfield was a tall and handsome Anglian, a former FSF trooper who had been one of those unfortunate POWs the Cardassian government forgot tor return after the war. The blond-haired man raised his arms in the gesture of surrender and walked up to the Cardassian troops around his house, who brought him through the protective field that kept energy weapons from hitting the Glin and his staff. "Ah, Mister Winfield, I see we will have the pleasure of your company again."
"Charmed, I'm sure," was the reply, through gritted teeth. "So, Glin Sucel, will it be a heat whip this time or some other new thing?"
"No field interrogation for you this time. My troops will restrain you here, fly you off, and you'll be back here for dinner before the sun goes down." Sucel nodded to his men, who unlatched the girl. "You might want to have your medical people look at this one. I think Horvem had another failure."
"He has them."
"That he does. And I'm sure that failure will find the new assignment Horvem has in mind to be very unappealing." Sucel nodded to his men, who went to work restraining Edward. A couple of troops helped Christine to her knees. A sympathetic-looking soldier poured cold water on her back from his canteen before offering her a sip of it, which she accepted. Sucel noted the Trooper's name for future commendation. It was SOP for AIF to be generous when it could, since it helped undermine insurgencies. At least on some of the worlds - places like Bajor were lost causes.
A call for extraction was made and the Cardassians piled into their hover transports one-by-one, bringing with them their prisoner. They took off together and were soon shrinking against the velvet sky.
Christine didn't have to wait long. Three people came for her; a dark-haired woman, a larger red-haired one, and a large olive-skinned man. All were in civilian clothing. The man muttered something in a language Christine didn't understand. He then nodded to the redhead, who knelt over and picked Christine up. Christine was rather surprised how easily the woman shifted her on her shoulder, keeping Christine's blistered back away from painful contact.
She was brought into the house, which looked like any other suburban home she'd seen. They laid her out on the couch and gave her a pillow. The man came back from the other room and said, "Halina and Iggy are on their way."
"So, young lady, who are you?" The dark-haired woman knelt beside Christine, speaking with a clear Russian accent. "I am Kristina Ivanova. I'm from the world Novya Murmansk in Muscovy."
"Christine Bennington. I'm from Earth. Wellington, New Zealand."
"Is your hair colored? I don't think I've seen someone with your skin tone having red hair before."
"No. I got it from my dad's side. He's Caucasian, my mum is Maori." Christine closed her eyes. "Oh God, it hurts...."
"Da. They are second degree burns. That Cardie was trying to be nice, but the water wasn't any way to treat them. But do not worry. We have a doctor and she'll be here any time now." Kristina put a sympathetic hand on Christine's cheek. "These are my friends, Sharon Carter and Ersun Celicelik."
"Where are we? Why does it look...."
"This is Madred Village 23," Carter said. "A reasonable facsimilie of the average small Human town in the Federation. The kind of place where the AIF might have to go to fight insurgents. We're real-life sims for them to train against."
"But Cardassia's driven off all the Human colonists on the worlds they took, I thought?"
"Yes, but who's to say they won't get some in the peace treaty? Or that they won't invade us again and take more Federation worlds?" Carter laughed as she plopped into a seat. "That's how the Cardassians think, you see. They plan invasions years ahead of time. Just ask Father Ignazio when he gets here. They brought him here when you were probably in diapers."
"But.... We... we hadn't even gone to war back then."
Ersun shook his head and said, in an accent, "Didn't stop the Cardassians from raping Nova Savona, did it?"
"That, that didn't happen! That's just something Jirvshk made up."
"There are still two hundred Savonese here in Village 23 who will find that interesting to know." Carter crossed her arms over her belly, having discarded the Cardassian rifle she'd been carrying. "It's a lie, Christine. The State Press has been claiming that for years on both sides of the border, since it seems our own State Press has forgotten basic journalism rules when it comes to accepting Cardassian press releases."
"So, what was it with you? They get you over the Bajorans?"
"Yes. They... they claimed I helped Bajoran terrorists. Said I'd been named. Then they tortured me until I confessed. Then after my trial, they tortured me again to name people. I... I didn't even know who they were, not personally, but..." Christine teared up. "Oh no, they're going to be taken too! I gave them what they wanted! Those people are going to go through this because of me!"
As Christine began crying, Kristina brought her face closer. "Shhh.... it's okay, Christine."
"It's my fault! Oh God, it's my fault!"
"Christine, they would've gotten the names from someone else. You can't blame yourself for what you're forced to say during torture." Kristina's expression softened and some tears came to her eyes. "We've all been there, Christine. We all said things we didn't want to say, desperate to make them stop hurting us."
Christine buried her face in her pillow and didn't talk any more.


Fifteen minutes later, with Kristina having gone up to her room to shower, Carter and Esrun watched Halina Poniatowski speak softly and sweetly to Christine in her Polish accent while applying a replicated sterile bandage to Christine's entire back. Standing beside her, the light-skinned Father Ignazio was wearing a replicated priest's clothes, complete with collar. He asked Christine if she was a Christian, and Christine's reply was rather expected; she was atheist. Ignazio smiled at her and merely said, "Many people are these days."
Esrun walked up to Carter. "I'm returning home. Fatima is getting worried."
Carter nodded and smiled at him. "She's a trooper. I couldn't stand carrying a kid around for nine months. Especially here."
"Life is a blessing in of itself. Besides, I have faith."
"Faith?"
"Faith that one day Allah will see fit to free us, so that I can take Fatima and our children and live in peace." Esrun nodded at her, then the others. "Father Iggy, Halina, have a good day." He went to the door and left.
"How is she, Halina?"
"Lots of blisters from second-degree burns. Looks like someone was going wild with a heat whip." Halina unconsciously crossed herself, very clearly remembering a similar experience. "Christine, if you could move your leg, I'd like to check...."
Christine did so, then looked to Father Iggy. "You're a real Catholic priest?"
"Yes. Though, as you can see, I haven't been in communication with the Church for a long time."
"But you heard about what happened on Earth before...."
"Yes, I know about Jirvshk nullifying the Lateran Accords." Ignazio shook his head and let out a laugh. "The Church has been persecuted by far more brutal men than Jirvshk was. As always, we will perservere."
"My father had family ties in Dublin. He told me the last riot Earth ever had was in Dublin after the Pope was evicted by the FSF."
"I wouldn't know."
Christine couldn't look at Halina directly, but her eyes tried to. "You don't have to bother checking, Doctor. I was raped."
"We all were," was Halina's reply. "I wanted to see how fresh the bruising was."
Christine looked back to Carter. "So, you too?"
"Yes." Carter nodded slowly. "We've been through it all, Christine. Some of us recently, some, not so recently."
Christine's eyes closed. "I'm tired."
"Just a bit longer, Christine. I have to get a dermal regenerator pad and put it on your back so your burns will heal. Then you can go to bed."


Kristina had gotten out of the shower and was staring at herself in the mirror, looking over her young body. She was attractive, yes, but she didn't feel like it very often. She raised a hand to the scar on her cheek from where her interrogator from so long ago had cut while she was tied down and helpless. She could hear his sadistic laugh in her dreams and remember how much joy he took at her suffering. How he'd cackled while raping her, or the smirks on his face while she was electrocuted nearly to death.
Kristina dropped back onto the bed, sitting at it's edge and burying her face in her hands to sob. After a short time she felt two strong hands touch her bare shoulders. "How is Christine, Sharon?"
"Halina and Iggy are putting her to bed in the ground floor bedroom," Carter answered. She began to gently rub Kristina's shoulders. "She's got a regenerator pad on now."
"How badly did they hurt her?"
"Halina thinks she got the new, quickie package stuff they've been giving to the ones they're picking up just to go after bigwigs on the border worlds. Not like what they did to us. But I'm happy for that."
"Da." Kristina cleared the tears from her eyes and smiled thinly. "That poor girl suffered enough. What we went through? That would have shattered her soul beyond repair. I do not mean to insult what she suffered when I say that, you know."
"I know, Kristina, I know all too well. I think if I told her about the scrapers, she'd die of fright from the mere thought."
"Boushe Moi, Sharon, must you bring up the scrapers?!" Kristina felt Carter's hands come off her shoulders. "Shit, I hurt just thinking of those."
"Yes, Cardassian military interrogators can be really brutal when they want to."
Kristina moved her shoulders about. "I want to go home."
"I know." Carter's arms came back around Kristina, meeting at her belly. "If I had a way..."
Kristina nodded. She looked down and let out a giggle when Carter's hands began to massage her breasts. "Oooh..." She felt Carter's tongue lick her right ear. Kristina tilted her head back and let Carter lay her out on the bed. Carter was also in her birthday suit, which was appropriate as she straddled Kristina and looked down at her with a sexy grin on her face. The grin only disappeared when Carter's lips pressed against Kristina's "Isn't it a little early to make love?"
"Just means we have more time for it," Carter whispered before resuming the kiss.

[Trogdor]

Nice to see a fic author who actually decided to update rather than do a lame prank today (can you tell I really hate April Fool's day?).

I haven't commented on this yet, so I must say this is a really great fic. A powerful, democratic and capitalist state unleashed on the Trekverse is always worth a read. I like how the Alliance feels like something that might've actually evolved from today's society. No phasers and technobabble solutions to wars, AK-90s and supped up nukes instead. I must say you've done an excellent job at making the Cardies detestable. As if the torture and raping wasn't bad enough, you've also made them arrogant pricks who think the ADN will fold as quickly as the Feds do. I also like the anti-racist group you've got. It's not often noticed (outside this board anyway) but trek has become really racist ever since TOS. Please, keep it up.

[Junghalli]

Well, "Drakanitis" is actually uber-Neitzschean "Triumph of the Will" mentality.

I know that (actually I have a species in my own SF universe that's pretty close to having a true Neitzchian philosophy-they're not pleasant people by human standards as you'd probably guess). I'm just advising you to be cautious about making Cardassians sound too much like bad Nazi villains.

The Cardassians have based their entire empire upon the impression of their Will being indomitable. I mentioned this in the fluff I posted earlier; you obey or you die.

I always thought they were more of an opportunistic third-rate power than being really ideologically driven.

As for the issue of Cardassian... sexual mores, I've also noted in the fluff and implied in the fiction that the Cardassians are rather sexually conservative in their culture (remember that staff officer slapping his Bajoran mistress for whining about making her get an abortion?). Repressingly so, probably. Which means they're prone to having that repression release itself very unconstructively.

Well, it pretty much happens in every war I guess. I'd just tend to think the physical differences between Bajorans and Cardassians would tend to make it rather less than common. By that I mean I can't imagine that many humans (and Bajorans basically look human w/ weird nose thing) wanting to bonk a Cardassian female and you know the golden rule about alien appearance (you undoubtedly look just as shitty to them as they do to you).
BTW sexual conservatism wouldn't have much to do with it. The Draka are the kings (and queens) of the gang-bang in the SF world and they make the modern US look downright puritanical.

After all, given the natural breeding ability of Cardassians and Bajorans, they've obviouslly sexually compatible, and it's possible that even "minor" things like the Bajorans or Humans having more diverse hair colors and skin colors might make them "exotic" and thus physically appealing.

True, I guess Gul Dukat must not have gotten any dates for a long time!
As per the second part. Cardassians look like Nosferatu with plastic shit all over his face, and you remember the golden rule...

On top of that, odds are that the situation on Bajor has actually gotten worse as the Cardies circulate out "good" units and send in the misfits and dreg conscripts of their army, made out of the ones they don't really want, the sociopaths, etc.

That would tend to push the atrocity quotient up considerably.

Finally, history here on Earth is filled with the, um, rapine natures of many conquering armies.

Yeah, but remember that for all their cultural differences humans are the same species and... oh wait, Trek aliens are all the same species too. Can you tell I really hate the way Trek makes every species reproductively/sexually compatible?

Hewers of wood, drawers of water, and a great many other things.

I AM LOCUTUS OF BORG. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. YOUR EXISTENCE AS YOU KNOW IT IS OVER. YOUR CULTURE WILL ADAPT TO SERVICE US.
<Starfleet ensign drops to his knees>
<camera zooms in for close up of Locutus' face... long pause>
NOT THAT KIND OF SERVICE YOU FUCKING PERVERT.

[frigidmagi]

Junghalli we have instances showing both half Cardassian/Bajorian childern in DS9. In fact Gul Dakat himself fathered one and that Bajorian "comfort women" were used on DS9 during his commmand of that station. Don't worry Steve knows what he doing.

[darthdavid]

Good chapter.

[Steve]

Washington D.C., Earth, Alliance of Democratic Nations
Universe Designate HE-1
19:29 GST


The Strategic Command Amphitheater was a new addition to the centuries-old Pentagon, built several stories underground and connected to the military communications networks in the Alliance. It was the nerve center of the Alliance's central authority - from this position, updates on the progress of operations and the locations of individual units could be delivered to the highest authority.
On the upper level of the amphitheather, facing the highest portion of it's massive electronic digital display, Mamatmas and Chancellor Montesque were being treated to a briefing by senior military commanders. Admiral Piotr Ogilev, the junior admiral on the Strategic Planning Staff, was present with the four members of the Joint Command Staff - Chief Admiral of the Stellar Navy Sir Richard Hollingwood, Commandant of the Marine Corps Leslie Tokugawa, Marshal of the Aerospace Force Tabitha Longwell, and General of the Army Kevin Taggert. "Continued reconnassiance of Cardassian ship movements has indicated the large scale deployment of fleet assets to these systems," said Ogilev's aide Lt. Commander Jimenez, a rather attractive Filipina. "Naval Intelligence believes the combined Cardassian force numbers up to five to six hundred warships of varying tonnage, divided into about six concentrations at the major naval installations of Kemar, Akaral, Jemik, Verpar, Telkur, and Ubatal. Furthermore, the Cardassians have positioned what we believe to be a fast squadron of thirty warships to Chin'toka. As we have not yet broken their naval codes, we're not entirely sure why they are present. But recent history would suggest the following. One, that they are forward-deployed raiding force meant to attack Alliance shipping. Two, that they are intended to harrass naval forces in the region. Three, that they are to be used to attack planet-based targets, in the same way that we would turn to the Aerospace Force's Bomber Command."
"Marshal Longwell, what is the status of our defenses against such attacks?"
"The local governments' civil defense operations and centers have been activated. The Planetary Defense Wings in the Colonial Zone are ready and prepared, Mister President. Army anti-starship artillery assets are also in place. As are the national border services, though cutters can't be expected to last long against full-blown warships."
"Understood. Now, Commander Jimenez, please continue."
Jimenez nodded and did so. "As part of War Plan Obsidian Bravo, upon the raise of alert level to DefCon 2, the Navy ordered an additional five carrier task forces to the Colonial Zone to join Intrepid, which is already on station. All six planned-for carrier task forces will be in position to attack their targets by 14:30 hours GST tomorrow. Also in line with War Plan Obsidian Bravo, we have positioned 5th Fleet's Battle Task Forces along the border regions facing Bajor."
Montesque raised a hand. "Commander, Intrepid is assigned to protecting shipping in the Federation from Cardassia. What shall we do to replace her?"
"We have positioned the battle carriers James Doolittle and Shokaku and their divisions to replace the Intrepid. She will join the other five carriers - Enterprise, Lexington, Audacious, Akagi, and Kaga - by the designated hour." Jimenez pointed to the planned positions of the relevant carriers and their defensive task forces and to their targets. "Each carrier will strike at a single target, aided by the three Attack Squadrons on station. Chin'toka's naval forces will be attacked by naval bombers of the Aerospace Force's 3rd Defense Bomber Squadron stationed on Henderson. Pending approval, the operation details will be classified under the designation 'Operation: Santorini'."
"'Santorini', Commander?"
"An ancient volcano, Mister Chancellor," Jimenez explained. "There are some who believe it's eruption annihilated an entire civilization and was probably the basis for the infamous Egyptian plague of Darkness in the Bible. The rest of the staff decided that the image of the attack being like a volcanic eruption - swift, deadly, and without warning - was a good one."
"Carry on, Commander," Mamatmas said.
"Yes, Mister President. Our carriers will cross the border ten minutes after the 'go' order is given. We estimate it will take up to two hours for the forces to get into appropriate position, even at maximum warp flight."
"That's quite a long time to be inside Cardassian space, Commander."
"Yes, which is why the operation will coincide with the use of large-scale jamming across the border and clear movements by our distraction forces, which will really be moving into a position to provide contingency should the carrier strike run into unforseen trouble. We think we will be able to convince the Cardassians that we're going after their forces around Bajor."
"Which depends upon the Cardassians not seeing the carriers."
"Yes, Mister Chancellor." Ogilev spoke up for his aide now. "Intelligence sources say that the Cardassians' HUMINT is focused upon locating and watching our non-carrier forces. The recent deployment of two more superdreadnoughts drew far more attention and signals traffic than the carriers' deployment did. We believe the Cardassians have not yet identified carriers as a threat and, I will point out, ecrypted communications and other intel activies have given a very consistant foundation for this view."
"And what about Cardassian ELINT?"
"Given our analysis of comm traffic and sensor activity, the Cardassians don't seem to concern themselves too greatly with it. Analysts have seen a number of factors, such as the institutional predominance of HUMINT, to explain this underreliance on ELINT."
Mamatmas looked to his military chiefs. "Okay, ladies and gentlemen, Admiral Ogilev's alternative plan is here for consideration. Plan Alpha places the Alliance on the defensive after a few attacks to gain breathing space. The emphasis on defense until reinforcements arrive is sound, but it allows Cardassia to shift reserves to face us. The entire war would become a quagmire. This Plan Beta has greater risk but promises a quicker resolution. At the very least, the removal of the proverbial knife at our throat would allow us to focus on Bajor and take it before Cardassia can fully mobilize her reserves. We must now decide if this possibility is worth the risk. I'd like everyone's...." A sudden beeping disturbed everyone present. Mamatmas grabbed the phone clipped to his belt at the waist. "Hello?"

"Mister President, my apologies for disturbing the war plan briefing," was the reply, from Bronson. "I've just gone over the latest. We have our smoking gun, Mister President."
"Smoking gun?"
"Yes. We can prove that the Deyteliz beamed the nuke into Gytep."
Mamatmas nodded, drawing the attention of the others. "How quickly can you get a briefing on the new evidence prepared?"
"I can be at the Pentagon in an hour."
"Excellent. See you then." Mamatmas turned the signal off and put the phone away. He looked to the others. "That was Director Bronson. We have the smoking gun. Deyteliz beamed the nuclear device into Gytep. Gentlemen, with this new evidence, I can now safely inform you that by 15 Hours GST tomorrow, we will be at war with Cardassia. I want you to be as silent and swift as possible in getting preparations made. I don't want the press getting wind of this until I've gone to the Council for a formal resolution."
"Sir, which war plan will you be going for?"
Mamatmas considered Admiral Hollingwood's question for a moment. "Well, Admiral, you don't gain anything if you don't try anything. Tell your commanders that Santorini has the green light."
"Yes, Mister President."

[CJvR]

It seems as if the baloon is going up. Pity they found the smoking gun, war without a clear excuse is harder to sell.

[darthdavid]

The cardies are going down.

[fgalkin]

It seems as if the baloon is going up. Pity they found the smoking gun, war without a clear excuse is harder to sell.

But then again, the Cardies weren't really trying to hide it. They thought they were nuking a terrorist training camp.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Junghalli]

I haven't commented on this yet, so I must say this is a really great fic. A powerful, democratic and capitalist state unleashed on the Trekverse is always worth a read.

Indeed, especially when we get to see it take down Roddenberry's little communist utopia.

I like how the Alliance feels like something that might've actually evolved from today's society. No phasers and technobabble solutions to wars, AK-90s and supped up nukes instead.

Yes, I thought that was a nice touch. Intrauniversal travel aside the Alliance seems like a very realistic projection of what modern human society would eventually evolve into. It very much reminds me of the future humanity in my own universe (meh, I talk about that too much, must stop the shameless self-promotion... ).

As if the torture and raping wasn't bad enough, you've also made them arrogant pricks who think the ADN will fold as quickly as the Feds do.

Yeah, let's see the Alliance show them just what happens to xeno scum when they mess with REAL humans!
BTW how big is the Alliance anyway? How would their territory stack up to the other Trekverse powers if you add together all their holdings in the various universes they inhabit? Cause if they have hundreds of ships in ST-3 alone their total fleet will have to be truly huge.
Ah pity de Cardies who mess with real humans instead a dem Feddie pussies.