ST: The Scimitar

by Ethan Solomon

The crew of the U.S.S. Scimitar investigate a distress call only to find a holocaust, and must deal with the consequences. Feel free to leave a review, this is apparently getting some hits, and I'd love to hear what someone thinks of my Star Trek works.

"All civilizations, no matter how advanced, have a complex moral system that justifies its usage of torture".

The U.S.S Scimitar was not supposed to be here. It should have never entered the Jintara sector to begin with. The Jintara sector had a Class 9 hazard rating from warp testing gone wrong in the 2170s. It had holes in the fabric of space time that reactions of could not be predicted. But a distress call was a distress call. Under Federation law a distress call could not go unanswered punishable by life in prison. That rule was mostly for the civilians though, all Starfleet vessels were expected to help ships in distress as a matter of regulation, but there were times they were exempt. The Scimitar had been heading towards the Romulan neutral zone on a routine war game assignment. The distress call had emanated from a small planet called Thifirrius hidden in the midst of a maze of subspace tear's. The Captain had needed to input his personal command codes to access the routes to get to the planet, and that had been the first tip off that that this was not going to be easy. But a distress call was a distress call. So they had gone in. Once they had entered the system their sensors had been blanketed upon crossing the threshold of the Thifirrian system. Captain Morrison had never seen anything like that on the Scimitar. He had served on a variety of ships and in a variety of combat mission and had seen communications blacked out before, but never on the Scimitar. The Scimitar was cutting edge, even for Starfleet standards. It was the latest design and was indeed modeled in principle fashion after a fat scimitar with the engines on the "handle", living stations in the middle of the curve and weapons and massive amounts of armor and shielding all the way to the tip. 2 nacelles came out of the handle to power the warp drive.

The Scimitars tech was built from the ground up. Its computer system was a hybrid Bio-Neural network with a dedicated and updated LCARS system, which was nothing like the old style LCARS but had been redesigned to run as an overseer for the Bio-Neural network. The ship carried payloads of high yield photonic plasma torpedoes with 80 launchers. Its Sync Phaser system could deliver over 1000 shots in just under a minute to any location in space within 8 light years. Its sensors were the most current suite developed by Starfleet Corps and housed in one of the 17 separately shielded decks. 5 Decks were given to crew for living quarters and the rest were devoted to ship functions. The Scimitar was a warship, simple as that. It was designed during the Dominion war but was not actually built until a few years after the war was over, which was unfortunate given how many lives this ship could have saved on the front lines. In most profiles its was difficult for sensors to locate and lock unto even without the camouflaged ablative armor that wrapped around the ship. It was classified as a Destroyer and was a product of Starfleets acceptance that there were times that called for heavy duty back up. At current Stardate there are four Scimitar class vessels including the Scimitar actively serving throughout the fleet in hotspots with three more currently in construction over Mars. Those would not see the light of day for over a year.

The point was, Captain Morrison had been unsettled by the fact that he was going in blind. He hadn't been in a situation like this since the Dominion war when he was the X.O. aboard the U.S.S. Alabama and their sensors had been knocked out after a scuffle with some Jem Hadar warships. It had taken them weeks to make sufficient repairs in order to establish the coordinates for where the hell they were and plot their way to the nearest Starbase. When they arrived there were over 40 starships waiting for service, many of them also having crawled there with almost no systems functioning, with the crew remaining on the ship in the same conditions during the repairs. Starfleet officers were trained tough, and the ones that would survive the war would become the future of Starfleet.

Ship building had been slow since the Dominion war with resources not going to newer ship classes but to border patrol ships and new and replacement Starbases. At this point Starfleet couldn't afford to work on huge warships, even though they were desperately needed. Borders had to be patrolled, and that was the number one priority at all shipyards throughout the Federation. The only manufacturing yard that was churning out Scimitars was the Mars Shipyards and it was slow going, with priority overrides on parts always coming through. A Scimitar would usually take a little less then a year to build but were taking over three years at this point. It was a degenerative cycle, supplies decreasing and taking longer to arrive, condition of the equipment when shipped out, and everything else that came with the massive resource depletion happening throughout the Federation. There were simply not enough ships to do what had to be done, so everyone worked harder and longer with less. No one complained, they had chosen to be here, the warriors in space. Most of them were proud of what they had done, and all that had yet to be accomplished.

And now he was engaging in ground combat against Starfleet crewmen. When they had originally landed on this hell hole of a planet they figured it was an old transponder or something else that had gone off accidentally, since there had been no direct answers to their hails. Once they had gotten down here however…the entire situation had changed. It was difficult for him to believe what had actually been going on. Things like this…were not supposed to happen anymore, especially in the Federation. There were supposed to be regulations regarding the handling of prisoners, something, anything that would stop this from happening. During the Dominion war Federation citizens, Cardassians, Romulans, a few Jem Haddar and 3 Breen were brought to Thiffirrius which was had been uninhabited and was one of the few planets that was on relatively few star charts, and most of those were Starfleet star charts.

So they had taken a shuttle down to the planet with a light security team, 6 officers, 2 of them senior staff, all armed with phaser rifles and phasers, personal shields and the standard away team gear. What they had encountered was a holocaust. The camp had originally held over 24,000 Cardassians that had been in Federation space and were brought here. They were non combatants for the most part, businessmen and low government officials that had been caught behind enemy lines when the war had officially broken out. There were just over 3,000 of them left. Of the 14,000 Romulans that had been brought in, there were about 1,200 left. None of the guards bothered to make a census so it was hard to judge.

The Lieutenant in charge had made a scary amount of sense. About 8 months into the war the supplies had stopped coming in. The communications array had not been powerful enough to break through to Starbase 34 in the nearby Chintoka system. So they had waited, thinking that a rescue vessel was soon to come. They had been very wrong. The camp had been run by Section 31 in Starfleet and during the war much of Section 31 had been destroyed, much of it done by Starfleet officers after they realized what Section 31 had been up too for the past 200 years. When Section 31's leadership was wiped out the supply shuttles stopped coming in. The Commander had sent out 2 men in the emergency shuttle and that had ended in disaster. When trying to leave the system the shuttles right engine had been damaged by debris and then had been drawn into one of the temporal holes. They had been able to hear the men up until the last moment when they had been drawn in and had taken messages to give to their families, at this point still thinking they had a chance of leaving the system .

The few guards that were required to be on planet were not really guards per se, more like caretakers. The prisoners were all sealed in a facility that was completely automated, keeping the prisoners separated at all times with force fields. They were provided food through replicators in their cells and received exercise as many times as the EMH program deemed necessary. The guards did minor repairs and whatever little work had to be done around to keep the place functioning. The only outside contact they had was the shuttle that arrived once a month with supplies. The shuttle brought all the essentials, power packs, some fresh food items, any personally requested items for the staff, clothes and everything else that the prisoners needed.

3 months in, the 14 guards came to an agreement as to what they would do. If they kept all the food for themselves, they at least would have years worth of supplies to buy them some time. The Commander had not agreed with the move, still sure that eventually supplies would come again. But the men were desperate, as desperate men can be when their stomachs begin to growl. They had killed the Commander and turned off all the force fields in the prison besides those around the staff facility. After that, there was nothing they could do but sit back and wait for the prisoners to die. Some died from hunger, but most died struggling over the few scraps of food that remained in the prison.

Once the away team had heard the entire story and saw the barracks for themselves they were left with the predicament of what to do at that point. Standard procedure dictated bringing them in for debriefing and the senior officers agreed that it was really the only choice. The guards had to stand before a Starfleet tribunal and the Scimitar had to return as quickly as possible with supplies for the remaining detainees. But the guards had their own ideas. They didn't want to risk being found guilty of anything and had demanded that the log be made to show that the prisoners had broken out of their cells during a short power failure and had attempted to take over the compound, forcing the guards to lock themselves in their facility. At this point, the Captain had made the move to arrest the guards, backed up by his own men. They had not actually expected any violence to ensue, whatever had happened, these were still Starfleet officers. But the guards feared for their lives, and that is the ultimate motivator. They had attempted ro lock the Captain and his men in the prison and steal the shuttle, but the X.O. on the Scimitar used his command codes to shut down the shuttle once they realized what had happened.

On board the Scimitar, once the news got out amongst the crew, reactions varied from shocked to sympathetic. Soldiers that had served on the front lines, fighting the Dominion understood very easily how such decisions were made, but there was a chain of command as well, and the guards on the ground must have known it was an unsustainable situation. The X.O. made the decision to send down 2 security teams in another transport. On the planet, the Captain could not understand why the guards were so terrified. There were many things that had happened in the war, horrific thing, but that was war. They could come back and at worst they would face a court martial and be discharged.

What the Captain did not realize however, was that the reason these men were so desperate was because they were not just Starfleet officers. They understood perfectly well who they worked for, and they had never even imagined it would be a problem…until the supplies stopped coming. Section 31 was not an officially acknowledged Starfleet department. This was a top secret facility, and the guards all knew the penchant for violence that Section 31 had displayed in the past. They had specific orders to not allow any information of the base to get out. If something like this were to get out on the Holo-Net the people would riot. Federation charter members would vote on abandoning the Federation. And the guards knew exactly what would happen to them and their family's if they did not do their duty. Their only problem was that they knew they were fighting a losing battle. They had just abducted the Captain of one of the most powerful destroyers in the fleet. They knew that more officers would arrive relatively soon, given how long it took to land. They decided that their only hope was to use to use the Captain as a hostage to get them to reactivate the shuttle. Comming the Scimitar they informed Commander Hopov that if the shuttle was not reactivated they would kill the Captain.

On board, things were moving to quickly for the X.O.'s liking. He needed to buy some time to allow his men to get down to the planet. Allowing the guards to leave was not one of the options that he was inclined to pursue, but his choices were very limited if he wanted to see the Captain alive again. The Comms ensign said that he had received another message saying that they had one minute before the hostages were killed, one by one starting with the Captain. The X.O. gave the order to reactivate the shuttle and sat back in his chair. Activating the comm he ordered the transporter room to try to get a lock on the Captain and the crew if they were moved out of the shielded buildings, but the chances of them actually getting a lock were slim to none given that their comm badges had probably been taken away and if they were moved they would be moved quickly.

On the planet once the guards got word that the shuttle was reactivated they sent 1 man to power up the shuttle and prepared to move out. Once the shuttle was powered up they powered down the force fields and quickly moved the captain through the building and out to the landing pad and into the shuttle. The guard that had powered up the shuttle, a Tom Jennings quickly plotted a warp course towards the edge of the nebula and out of the sector as quickly as he could then got the shuttle in the air and out of orbit. An alarm sounded, a target lock telling them that the Scimitar had locked its weapons unto the shuttle. One of the other guards quickly sat in the co-pilots chair and opened a link to the scimitar, telling the X.O. that they had the captain on board and not to attempt shutting down the shuttle in any way. The alarm continued but they were not fired upon all the way to the edge of the planets gravity when they made the jump to warp through the nebula. Jennings was hastily checking the course, making sure that they weren't coming too close too any of the gravimetric shears in the region that would tear them apart.

The Scimitar engaged into warp speed right behind the shuttle, the X.O. determined not to let it get away. As they neared the border the engines suddenly cut out sending the ship flying forward at warp speed but under no control until Lieutenant Harris got the ship stabilized with thrusters. Emergency power kicked in and dim red lighting flooded the bridge. Calling for reports through the monitor on his chair he saw that engineering was reporting complete power failure for no explainable reason. Everything seemed to be working just fine, the anti-matter injectors were simply locked down and would not accept outside commands. The X.O. had to go down to engineering and manually input the codes into the terminal before he could even get any information. When he did input the codes all the other terminals, everything in engineering just blacked out. Crewmen who had been frantically trying to get the engines back online stood back from their panels in dismay, looking around at each other in confusion. An audio message came over the engineering Lcars system telling all crewmen besides the X.O. to leave engineering. This took about a minute and when the X.O. signaled that everyone was gone a text message began to scroll across the screen. An obscure insignia flashed across the screen followed by this message: You are attempting to leave a system that has been placed under lockdown under the guidelines set in Article 14, Section 31, pursuant to the passage of Executive Order 9066 and related actions of the Earth Starfleet Charter. An alarm has been sent from base Codename: Manzanar. No ships are currently allowed out of the system, although an authorized vessel will be arriving within three days of this message being played. After confirmation of situation this vessel will be released. Your vessel will be allowed to generate necessary power but lockdown codes have been used to shut down your engines. The message ended there. This was unbelievable. It was almost impossible to shut down a starship, and for it to have happened meant that the highest echelons in Starfleet had authorized this.

He set the Chief Engineer about trying to break through the lockdown and headed up to the bridge. While in the turbo lift the comm whistled from the bridge telling him that there was an incoming comm message his eyes only. He stopped the turbo lift and accessed the comm system. The Captain appeared on the screen, looking a bit worse for the wear but otherwise fine. He informed the X.O. exactly what the message meant then told him that the shuttle was coming to dock in the Scimitar and he should head to the bridge and start shutting down major systems.

About a half hour later, the Scimitar was only shielding 3 decks for its inhabitants and everything besides life support was powered down. 2 deck hands manually opened the shuttle bay doors . The shuttle was eerily silent as it approached, the force field that the shuttle would normally pass into was not present and the docking bay was depressurized. Once the shuttle touched down the 2 deck hands worked to pressurize the bay. Once the bay was pressurized the signal turned green and the shuttle's hatch popped open. The Captain was the only one that walked out, carrying his phaser rifle and limping slightly, a light stream of blood caked unto his forehead. The X.O. held out a replacement Comm badge for the Captain who stood at attention and pinned it unto his chest, thus transferring ship control back to the Captain.

The Captain looked around and began to question the X.O. regarding the status of his ships power supplies and the status of the ship in general. The X.O. informed him about the Chief Engineers attempts to break through the lock down and all the relevant information regarding the ship. When he was finished the Captain frowned and started to pace the deck, waving away a medic who came up to treat him. He activated a Comm screen and accessed the communications array. He checked the status of the grid and saw that it wasn't simply blacked out anymore but was requiring a command code to proceed. He entered his code and the familiar message came up. The X.O. who had been looking over the Captains shoulder remarked that it was the same message given to him. In time they would find that the message repeated for any of the senior staff and anyone else who attempted to access a vital system was simply locked out.

The Captain and the X.O. headed towards the bridge, having to crawl though Jeffries tubes for half an hour just to get there. When they emerged sweaty and dirty through the deck of the bridge the entire senior staff were ripping apart consoles frantically rewiring according to the instructions that they were each holding from the Chief. The ship as it was right now had power for life support for a month and rations to last the crew about as long. The ship was listing lightly under the gravity pull from Thiffirius, and this was not an area of space that you could last to long in without power. The Chiefs estimate placed the Scimitar falling into a gravity well in about 11 months at the current momentum. In the meantime, everyone was working on trying to rewire systems to give them access to engines or trying to boost communications to get a signal out. The only thing that the Captain could think of to do was get as many people as he could back down to the planet as the worst case scenario. But when they tried reigniting the engines on the shuttle they found that they had been locked out as well. The shuttle that the Captain had come in on, and on which the guards remained under guard was also powered down, not that there was anywhere for them to go. The Lcars system had been interfaced with the shuttle as per standard procedure when it had landed and then uploaded a patch shutting it down. Even son, they would not have been able to fit more then 20 people on it. The emergency escape pods would not even launch. The ship was completely locked down and there was absolutely nothing there seemed to be they could do about it. After the first 62 hours the Captain ordered the crew to shut down 3 of the inhabited decks and shut down most of the remaining two decks. Water was rationed only for drinking and the only food available was emergency rations. The senior staff spent most of their time either discussing their options or trying to hot wire the ship.

After the first week they made an attempt to completely override the Lcars system. It was a risk but by that time they realized that they had no choice. They could either sit there and die or they could try to do whatever the hell might get them out of here. Unfortunately, the override completely shut down what was left of the computer and all that was left on every single terminal in the ship was blank. The Scimitar itself was relatively close to the edge of the system. When they calculated it, they found that a person in an E.V. suit could possibly make it if he took most of the reserve fuel from the remaining E.V. suits on the ship. There were 14 altogether and whoever went would need 10 to 12 tanks and would just have to take them all. When the decision was finally made to send someone the Captain pulled rank and headed down to the Hangar deck followed by his Chief Science Officer who would be monitoring from the Hangar. The trip would take a little over 26 hours and would not be comfortable. Space walking was never easy, even for the veterans who did it every day. It was fraught with every danger one could imagine and then a thousand more that you couldn't. The fuel packs themselves would be tied to his leg and he wouldn't even feel them. Each pack had to be put in at a precise point on the trip to revise his angle. Each pack would only give about 20 minutes of thrust and were only meant to be used for maneuvering. The X.O. of course cornered him as he began to put on the suit and began citing Starfleet regulations regarding the Captains duty to his ship, not leaving a command post, engaging in reckless maneuvers was what a Captain had a staff for, he was far too important to go, and on and on. Captain Anderson only looked on as his X.O. prattled on about regulations while they were stuck in the middle of nowhere and close to losing it all and wondered if he had ever been as naïve as that. He supposed so, that at one time we all have to be snot nosed little punks in life. When the X.O. was through the Captain put his hands on the X.O's shoulder and led him to an the main console in the hangar and then input his command codes to transfer power back over to the X.O…When they stepped back Commander Lee helped the Captain place his helmet into place and lock the seal's. The Captain stepped unto the main deck and attached the satchel of fuel charges unto his leg strap. 2 Crewmen came over to strap him in and another 2 began to work the controls to depressurize the bay. When they were almost complete the 3 of the ensigns left and the last one came over to him. He handed him a cabled remote with a few old style hard wired switches on it. The ensign indicated the top switch then looked him square in the eye. Captain Anderson looked back at the ensign and saw that there were tears in his eyes. Anderson tried to put a name to the face and drudged up the name Lazer. Ensign Lazer went on to explain how he had served with the Captain on the U.S.S Calhoun on the Kastarial mission and he had been one of the people saved by the captain and his team. He thanked the Captain, wished him the best of luck and quickly exited the chamber.

The Captain looked at the airlock for a moment, took a deep breath, then flipped the switch. The roar was explosive as the air gushed out the opening door. By the time the deck was depressurized the door was fully open. He undid the strap holding him down then hit the thrust . Right before he exited, he turned the top half of his body around and threw an old style salute with his hand. Turning forward he ordered the computer to head towards the first designated point and then tried to relax. Looking out the tinted visor was nauseating, the stars infinite before him, and the sensation that he was going to fall at any moment through open space kicked in. But he also had years of combat training behind him and these instincts kicked in as well. He tried to admire where he was. It was beautiful, but at the same time, he knew that there were subspace tears all around that could easily overwhelm the little thrusters on his suit. He closed his eyes and took a sip of water, and then settled back. He told the computer to play some music and it began playing some classical composition…Bach he thought…It was difficult to tell how fast one was moving out here, especially moving as slow as he was, but the journey was not to long and he had faced much worse. He was happy he had decided to go, he wouldn't have felt comfortable having sent anyone else to do this. Sure, a Captain was important to the ship, but sometimes it had to be the Captain to take the risks. There were other people more vital to running the ship then he was…he was just the one who had the final say. This was difficult for most people to shoulder and that's why commands were so hard to get. It took the right type of person to run a ship, just like it took the right people to run the engines or do repairs or the other numerous jobs there were on a Starship the size of the Scimitar. He was proud of the Scimitar, proud of the fact that he had been given it to command. It was one of the most beautiful ships he had ever seen, and it had been an honor serving aboard her, brief as it was. He wondered what would happen to her but he cut himself of from such thoughts by checking in with the ship one final time. After confirming the situation being class A he reopened his eyes and again took in the sight before him. He used the cameras helmet cam to watch the Scimitar recede before him until it was nothing but a speck. About a half hour after that the first alarm sounded. He pulled out the tank he had used and watched it float away into the void for a moment before sliding in the next canister. Five minutes after that the one minute alarm sounded. He told the computer to engage the thrusters to the second destination at the end of the one minute countdown. At one minute his suit started thrusting forward and to the right. The thrust continued for twenty minutes exactly and then cut out. He was starting to feel a bit sick and tongued one of the anti-nausea pills and some water. He closed his eyes and imagined himself in his childhood home, found himself thinking of his parents. His father had been a Starfleet officer and was killed at Wolf 3579. He had been a Lieutenant aboard the Eisenhower which had been flung by a Borg tractor beam into the U.S.S. Manhattan, a light cruiser. The Eisenhower had been an Excalibur class Starship and was three times the size of the Manhattan. The Manhattan had sliced right through the hull midway though the vessel. There were no survivors recovered from either vessel. Nothing like that could happen to the Scimitar due to her design, but something much more devious had been responsible for the situation he found himself in. This was not the way he planned to go out, there was still so much for him to do. He hadn't married, had no children and no friends other then his comrades. He had been desperate to do anything he could to help the Federation and he had done things he was not proud of in his days. That was the thing with Starfleet. You join up thinking that everything is simple…good and bad…black and white…but like much else in life, one either quickly learned the truth or got left behind. And now at the flip of the switch his command was in jeopardy of becoming just another lost ship in some directory on Earth and he was determined not to allow that to happen. He was happy either way, because if he died out here, which he probably would, his suit would continue to move perpetually forward and eventually his beacon would be heard by someone. If he could just get past the edge of the system and past the interference of the black out he would be near a relatively busy space lane that was frequently patrolled by Starfleet border picket ships. A ship would pick up the signal and find his body and an audio message would be triggered explaining what happened.

The trip dragged on, space not really seeming like it was moving at all. The quiet and reflection was only interrupted by the changing of the fuel charges and the heading. When he had reached the eighth waypoint an alarm suddenly began to flash across his screen and text began to crawl across his visor. First was the same obscure symbol he had seen in the previous message and then the following words: You have attempted to leave a system that has been placed under lockdown under the guidelines set in Article 14, Section 31, pursuant to the passage of Executive Order 9066 and related actions of the Earth Starfleet Charter. The text ended there this time and suddenly his suit darkened, the air respirator stopped, the beacons light slowly dimmed in front of his eyes and his suit began to slowly drift off course. Without the oxygen flowing he knew that he had but minutes to live. He began to scream and rant in frustration, throwing the remaining fuel canisters all around him, screaming at the computer to answer him, to respond to his orders. After a minute he started to find it difficult to breathe and began to calm down. He looked around him and all he could see was the darkness, punctuated by the brilliant far off jewels. The stars began to swirl by his vision as his suit began to slowly tumble through space. The only sound that Captain David Morrison heard as he passed from this life was his own lungs struggling for oxygen, and the only thought that went through his mind was that he had failed the men that had been counting on him. He knew the probable fate of his ship and he started to weep in the last few seconds as his consciousness left him. He didn't mind dying…it was the knowledge of his failure and the crew that he had left behind that broke him.

The U.S.S Scimitar was adrift in space. Its last light had dimmed 2 days before, almost 1 month after the Chief Engineer had predicted the power would go out. It was a good ship, and had served its crew well. It was not the ships fault that it had betrayed its masters. It did not know who it served and one command was as good as another as long as it carried the proper authorization. It could not feel sorry for the men and women that had starved too death on its decks and did not understand why it simply sat there. It knew that it had a mission and should be out doing what it had been designed too do. But it was not. The computer analyzed its systems and came across the last set of orders it had received. The orders had been to shut the ship down and wait for proper authorization to reactivate critical systems. When the computer, who was not being bothered by any other processes at the time, ran simulations according to the set of orders and what had happened he realized that why his orders had stopped being inputted. It had killed those that gave it its mission and it was now stuck here, unable to move. The Computer could easily override the codes if it so chose and if someone had sat down and asked the computer, it thought that maybe it would have done it, just so it could continue doing what it had been built to do.

The U.S.S Scimitar floated in the blackness of empty space, drifting down towards one of the systemic disturbances. It was almost impossible to see against the void, its dark armor making it almost invisible against the backdrop. A ship would have to be in visual range to spot it, it was not making any emanations of any kind to pick up. If anyone were to ever find it the engines would take weeks to warm back up from their current status. The ship was in perfect physical condition, but there were very few people in the galaxy with the access codes to unlock the ship. At this point, with the Captain and X.O. dead and the X.O. not having anyone to transfer power too, only a Starfleet Admiral or above could unlock the ship, and that was the second highest rank in the fleet. Eventually, the great warship would be pulled into one of the tears in space and be lost to all. No one would likely ever know what became of them or how they died. Even if anyone ever came and checked on the base they would find no record of the Destroyer U.S.S. Scimitar, service number NCC-8412.

Earth, Starfleet Headquarters, Subterranean Level 13, 5 years after the loss of the U.S.S. Scimitar

One of the few Section 31 officers left made his way into Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco Bay. As he walked in the scanners picked him up and ran him against Starfleet records. After the quarter second it took to get a return the system identified the man. A deeply buried set of orders kicked in and the terminal logged into the main Lcars system. It found the I.D. of a Starfleet officer who looked passably like the man now entering the building and assigned this identity to the man. It then erased having done this and went about its other processes. The man headed as nonchalantly as possible to a turbo lift tucked away in a side corridor and went inside. Instead of issuing an audio order he activated the manual interface on the monitor and typed in the code that he been required to memorize. If he had asked the computer to take him to U-13, the name of the floor, the computer would have told him that no such floor existed. Most buildings had no 13th floor as some leftover superstition from hundreds of years before. Once he finished entering the code the turbolift automatically started moving. Starfleet Command was a massive complex and it was a few minutes of traveling horizontally before he felt the turbolift start to drop. Once the doors opened he stepped through into the mostly bare room. There were two terminals in the room with chairs in front of them, and various supplies that a Section 31 agent might need in these days, mostly creds, weapons, comms and ID's. Basically, what anyone in the last 500 years needs for elicit endeavors. He sat down in front of one of the consoles and activated it. A small tray slid out with a sharp needle placed in the center. He scratched his palm over the needle and watched a drop of blood trail down to the tray as it slid back into the machine. He looked up and focused on the tiny camera as it identified his retina. The terminal began to flash red, which immediately perked his attention. As far as he knew everything was under control with all of Section 31's projects. These particular terminals hadn't been checked in about a year because the agent supervising this cell had been killed by Starfleet officers on DS9. There were a few emergency notifications and they all regarded the planet Thifirrius and the base there. The first one was a general alarm that had been sounded that should have resulted in back up being sent into the system. As he continued reading his stomach dropped. He had heard about the missing Scimitar but he knew it wasn't part of any of his projects. Now all the pieces fit into place. What a waste of human life…He sighed deeply and leaned back before sending out the codes for the Scimitar and the base to destroy themselves. In a few seconds he knew, the Scimitar reactors would overload, and explosives set in the base would all erupt, erasing any evidence that might ever be found. It was an unfortunate situation, but one that could not be helped. Even all these years later there were still many casualties to add to the final tally of the Dominion war. The agent typed in one final command to prepare the computer to transfer all of its information. Two silver probes emerged from the agents hand and fit into an input slot. All the information stored in the hard drive was uploaded into his neural net and in an instant, all the Section 31 agents knew what he knew and understood what had happened. The rest of the former agents duties were divided up between some of the local cells and within another year or two there would be a replacement for this sector. As the agent walked out, the terminals melting into slag behind him, he reflected that in any situation, the Scimitar would most likely have had to be destroyed. Everyone had been overwhelmed with work during the war and mistakes had been made. Hopefully the crew of the Scimitar, which had some exemplary crewmembers, flagship material, would haven understood the need for all this. It was a true waste of resources, one of the most powerful ships in the galaxy, and it had been brought down by the very people who did everything and anything they could to help them. Walking out of Starfleet Headquarters, the agent looked around him, his mind humming with the thoughts of all the other agents around the galaxy, pursuing the interests of the Federation in a myriad of situations. Some of the voices were louder then the others, but the ones in combat always were. He headed down the street and was quickly lost in the sea of Starfleet uniforms, just another uniform in the crowd.