I don't own Star Trek Voyager.
Prime Directives.
Cardassia and the Federation.
Both were incredibly great powers in space, both of them had expanded in their regions of the galaxy, and both of them had powerful militaries and space fleets. If there was one similarity and yet the difference between the Cardassian Military and Starfleet right now, it was both sides had their own form of Prime Directives.
As an operative of the Obsidian Order, the Prime Directive was for the agent to always plan in advance, ten or fifteen steps ahead and to look at the bigger picture. Actually, sometimes Seska was totally unsure if that was simply just her or something she had learnt in the order. Perhaps it was a mixture of both.
Seska had no respect for the Federation. She had always considered them too weak, too eager to compromise and too eager to talk. The Federation had been too willing to hand over a large chunk of space to the Cardassian Empire, and as if that wasn't enough, they had handed over some of their colonies to the Cardassian people. Sure, they had done it mostly because they had believed the ends justified the means without considering not only how it looked on the interstellar stage but also to their own people. For those people who lived in their colonies, they felt betrayed and furious by what the Federation had done. People like Admirals Paris and Nechayev spoke down to the Federation citizens and treated them like disobedient Starfleet officers, and not people with brains in their heads, and while Seska believed the Cardassian Union should dominate ruthlessly, even she felt the Military had made a fatal mistake by sending in a bunch of big booted soldiers who brutalised the Federation citizens living on the planets in the DMZ.
Was it any wonder they formed the Maquis and began fighting back, wanting their independence?
To many people who had been under the heel of the Cardassian Union, such as the Bajorans, the Maquis were seen as heroes, as freedom fighters.
To the Federation, they were seen as traitorous outlaws who had dared to go against their wonderful paradise, and they needed to be punished for it.
To the Cardassians, the Maquis were only a few steps up above the Bajoran terrorists, vermin who went against and interfered with Cardassian plans.
Seska was one of a hundred Obsidian Order agents who had been sent into the Maquis to undermine the organisation and destroy it from the inside out, but they had needed to be careful; while the Federation and Starfleet fought and wrangled with the Maquis, they were still considered Federation citizens and they would turn a blind eye so many times, so the Obsidian Order had to be extremely careful not to antagonise them.
The Federation wanted Cardassia to join them. Seska usually had a good laugh with that, since the Cardassians wanted to be more powerful, and had wanted that power ever since the days when their people were starving, forcing themselves to prey on each other, just to live another day. People like that didn't want to be pampered or given blissful freedom since they already had terrifyingly brilliant educations as it was, and they were protected by the state. Cardassians were taught never to be weak, or to seek weakness. And that was what the Federation was.
Seska had spent a long time spying and undermining the Maquis, sending information about major operations to entrap the terrorists at the last minute despite once or twice they got lucky. She had to hand it to them, they might have once been pampered, but it was clear many of the Maquis were actually adapting well to their new circumstances. She collected information wherever she could, and she worked on plans to break down the Maquis from the inside, but everything fell apart when the Caretaker snatched them and brought them to the Delta Quadrant, the other side of the galaxy.
Seska hated the Caretaker. Not only had the stupid entity ruined her life and made it clear to her it was crazy trying to return to the Alpha Quadrant, especially in such a tiny ship like the Val Jean, which had been retired decades before and either deserved to be in a scrapyard or in a museum, but they would need to play dirty to survive.
None of the Maquis had the chance to properly come up with a plan before the Caretaker transported them all off of the Val Jean. They'd barely had the time to begin the repairs to their ship; the Val Jean had been pretty badly damaged by Gul Evek's cruiser before the Caretaker brought them to the Delta Quadrant, and the Caretaker's displacement wave had not been gentle either.
The Caretaker was trying to find a being it could procreate with to look after a pathetic race who were living underground like rodents, although since their planet's desert-like conditions because the entity was so stupid it devastated the planet by removing its ability to make rain, therefore water, you would think it would be a bit gentler so the ships it dragged to the Delta Quadrant didn't fall apart. By the time Chakotay and B'elanna had gotten their acts together, and discovered where they were, it was too late, they were brought to the Array. The waiting room they encountered was nothing more than a computer simulation of one of the Maquis colonies that were empty, but in truth, you would need to be irredeemably stupid to think the simulation was real before the Caretaker moved forwards with his plans and subjected them to a really unpleasant examination.
After the destruction of the Val Jean, their alliance with Voyager, a Federation ship sent to find the Maquis because Tuvok was a Federation spy, they were forced to become members of the crew. Seska hadn't liked it, in fact, she had argued about it, but later she had come to see that they had no choice if they wanted to get home. Voyager was a far superior ship to the Val Jean, faster and capable of greater sustained warp speeds than the Maquis ship which had shaken itself to bits each time its engines hit warp 4, but the compromise of wearing Starfleet uniforms offended Seska as well as the other Maquis.
Unlike hotheads like Dalby even though she respected his dislike for Federation stupidity or chatterboxes like Chell, Seska knew how to keep her head down so she'd largely go unnoticed. She needed to do this so then she could think and assemble her plans. Seska had no intention of spending the rest of her life on a Federation ship, and sooner or later someone might become suspicious; with all the attacks on the ship, she might get injured and while her Bajoran disguise was outwardly good and even perfect, she knew the Doctor would discover the truth and she would be exposed as a Cardassian. That was the last thing she wanted.
Her disguise was paramount, but to avoid such a possibility from occurring, Seska knew she would need to either find some way of getting the crew home instead of wandering aimlessly through space, or she would negotiate for technology or weapons.
It was in the Delta Quadrant that the differences between the Cardassians and the Federation became more apparent.
The Federation's Prime Directive was to peacefully explore while not interfering in the development of other races.
The Cardassian Prime Directive was to survive, at all costs. Like many of her kind and indeed so many others in the galaxy, Seska understood the reality that the Federation ignored or chose to acknowledge; kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, beat or be beaten. The Kazon understood that. The Vidiians understood it, that was why they had spent 2,000 years stealing organs, throwing away their ideals and morality for the sake of surviving the Phage. Seska appreciated and understood that knowing if push came to shove, some of Voyager's crew would do the same thing, although they would never admit it. Survival was a choice, if you weren't prepared to survive, you deserved to die. If the Vidiians didn't have the guts to do what it took then they would have died long ago rather than stealing organs and body tissue from other races.
Seska knew if this was a Cardassian ship, the Gul in command would have made overtures with the Kazon, giving them transporters and replicators, to forge alliances and protection, making the journey easier and less dangerous. Instead, they were on a Federation ship, commanded by a captain who often tried to get them killed in insane acts of adventure. What was worse, she had a brainwashing effect on so many people. She had Chakotay eating out of the palm of her hand, like a pet slobbering.
As time passed, Seska's lack of respect for Janeway grew more and more intense when she saw the woman was just as pathetic as the majority of her race. Seska had learnt that humans a few centuries before had once been no different from the Cardassians. Ruthless, violent, hard to the core, and prepared to do whatever was needed for them to do what needed to be done. It wasn't until they nearly wiped themselves out and encountered the Vulcans they became more peaceful, but sometimes the humans past bled through. It usually happened when the humans were pushed into a corner, and they ruthlessly fought back, combining terrifying violence with cold-blooded ruthlessness that would put a Klingon to shame.
She had seen it before, with Chakotay and some of the humans on the Val Jean.
But while Janeway had her moments, Seska was usually left disgusted by how soft the woman was. But it was not until that business with the Sikarian spatial trajector that Seska was prepared to put in a plan to use an illegally procured trajector to get them home. But it didn't work. The lack of information because Janeway refused to send anyone to the planet to learn how it worked from observations and from the planet's libraries to give B'elanna a better idea of what they did, meant they were ill-prepared for the anti-neutrinos. The warp core nearly breached.
Janeway was a fool. For some reason she had leashed both Chakotay and B'elanna to her whims, in the past both of them would have done whatever it took to acquire a technology that could have sent them 40,000 light-years; the trajector could have sliced a massive chunk of their journey home, but that stupid fool was so taken with rules, she didn't stop to think that it was their survival that was important.
Seska was left so incensed that she had no hesitation in forming an alliance with the Kazon Nistrim. As one of the most savage sects in the Kazon Collective, she felt it made sense to approach them.
