"No One came to get me."

Conduct after Capture – CAC, in their love of acronyms, is a required course of study for every Federation Marine that walks through the gates of Camp Nath. The 20 day course aims to teach a Marine the skills, tools and mindset they need to successfully implement the SERE Doctrine – Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape capture by the enemy.

In the Resist part of the course, Marines are taught to memorize and burn into their souls the "Code of the Fighting Federation Marine," which is printed verbatim below:

1) I am a Federation Marine. I stand guard over the Federation and protect our way of life. I am prepared to die in its defence.

2) I will never surrender of my own free will. If I am in command, I will never surrender the Marines under my command if they still have the ability to fight.

3) If I am captured by the enemy, I will continue to resist the enemy by any means available to me. I will make every effort to escape and to aid my fellow Marines to escape. I will accept no favour or parole offered by the enemy.

4) If I am a Prisoner of War, I will keep faith with my fellow Marines. I will give no information nor act in any way that could harm my fellow Marines. If I am senior, I will take command of my fellow Marines. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of my commanding officer and support that Marine in every possible way.

5) If I am questioned by the enemy, I am required to give my name, rank, service number and date of birth. I will refuse to answer any further questions. I will make no statements disloyal to my nation or my fellow Marines.

6) I will never forget that I am a Federation Marine, entrusted with the defense of the United Federation of Planets and its people. I will trust that the Federation Marine Corps intends to rescue me at the earliest possible opportunity, and I will never forget that no Marine is left behind.

"You burn that code into your mind, yeah? The instructor sits you down and makes you repeat those six rules over and over and over again until you're saying it in your sleep. You don't think about it, it just happens, like breathing," Mike Bagsley tells me in a quiet room of Camp Nath, "And night after night, no matter what those bastards did to me, I'd repeat that code three times before I went to sleep. But after a while, I started wondering if point six was actually true."

For 370 days, Colonel Mike Bagsley was held captive on Rura Penthe, a Ceres-class asteroid rich in dilithium located in the Beta Penthe system, deep inside Klingon Space. The asteroid does possess an M-Class atmosphere, but only barely. The average surface temperature in "summer" is -80 Celsius. At that temperature, most humanoid lifeforms will succumb to hypothermia and death within minutes.

"On Rura Penthe, there is no stockade. There is no guard tower. There is no electronic frontier. Only a magnetic shield prevents beaming out," explained the one-eyed Warden Harbok, who has managed the prison for nearly 150 years, "When I am forced to punish a prisoner for misbehaviour, I exile him from prison to the surface. On the surface, nothing can survive. I am fair and even handed Warden. Work well, and you are treated well. Work badly… and you will die."

I asked Harbok if that included torture and abuse of a Federation Marine who had the status of POW. Harbok's gruff response was almost a mirror image of the official response of the Klingon Government.

"Colonel Mike Bagsley of Federation Marines was never prisoner on Rura Penthe. He was treated correctly as Prisoner of War on Ty'GoKor. After resigning of Khitomer Accords, Colonel is released without conviction as part of prisoner exchange."

"Prisoners of Klingon Empire who are sent to Rura Penthe are dangerous offenders with high risk of escape status, or who have assaulted and killed officers of the Empire. Prisoners of Rura Penthe are required to mine dilithium, which serves Klingon Economy in vital ways. All mining is done to standards of Klingon Mining Code. I say no more on this question."

I told Mike about that, and for one of the very few times in our interview, he smiled at me.

"Yeah, I mined dilithium alright. That was every Tuesday and Friday. You take that little laser torch they give you and stand around for 16 hours blasting at rocks and trying not to freeze to death. The required quota for prisoners is 3 tones per tunnel per workday."

"Not even the most advanced mining drones on Tellar Prime can do that. So, you have to steal rocks from the other prisoners to make sure you have enough for your part of the quota, and make sure no one steals your rocks."

"Oh, and you can't let the Screws catch you either, cause theft is against the rules, and that gets you a whipping, or exile if the Screws are in a bad mood."

So, I asked him what he did on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. He didn't answer right away. His face hardened, and he rubbed his arm and his eyes went dark, as if the pain was happening right now.

"Knives. Electrical cables. Branding irons. Whips," Mike's voice gets lower with each word, "They'd stick drill bits through my fingernails. One time… the Warden threw bits of stew in the cell and set his targs on me."

He takes a minute, rubs his left arm again, almost like he's bracing himself. "Waterboarding. Their bare hands. The mind probe… too expensive to use often, the Warden said."

"Ten hours a day, Kirin," Mike says, his tone as cold as the ice on Rura Penthe, "I could count the hours. They'd hang a little clock in the cell, right in front of me. Day starts at 0530. At 1300, they take an hour for lunch. At 1500, I'd get fed and thrown into the sonic shower. Washes away the physical evidence."

Mike turns his gaze out of his small office window before he finishes. "Three hours of rest. Then, at 1800, they'd start the cockfights with the other prisoners. By 2200, if I wasn't knocked out, the Screws dragged me back to my cell. Four hours of sleep, rinse, and repeat."

Mike rubs his left arm again as he continues to tell me what happened during that year, and he leaves no detail out. "They call it phantom pain, yeah? Like, even though I know its not happening, there's times where I'm lying in bed or sitting on the couch, and I'll feel like I'm getting hurt again for no real reason, and I have to take a minute to stop and understand that I'm home. I'm not a weak man, Kirin. I'm a combat veteran of the Corps. I'm the OC-FR. And I'll freely admit that if I'd been stuck in that frozen hell one more night, the Klanks would have broken me."

"It was the only way to survive. I'd repeat the code three times before I went to sleep. I'd remember that Tuesdays and Thursdays I had to work in the mines, and I'd get Saturday and Sunday off to recover. Those were the worst days. Because I'd be all alone, and I had to time to think. And I kept thinking, why am I still here?"

"The Corps should have gotten me out by now. No one came to get me. By the end, I started wondering if the Corps, or the Federation, decided that I just wasn't worth it. What's the life of one Marine to the Dominion War?"

Mike slides over a PADD to me. It might just be a PADD, but to him it feels like it holds the weight of wedding ring, or a picture of family, the last physical connection between the prisoner and the outside world.

"A week before I was released, someone slipped that into the cell while I was sleeping. And all of sudden, I felt worth it again. They tried to get me out of there, Dan, the Corps… God Damnit, they fucking tried. They never left me behind. They tried everything they could. God love Dan Beckenridge, eh? He was ready to hijack a civilian transport just to get me out of there."

The tears fall from the eyes of this battle-hardened, battle-scarred Marine, so I calmly suggest that Mike and I take a break for lunch. My treat at the River Café in NYC, the best restaurant in the city and probably on Earth.

While I have a fairly elaborate fire and ice salad with raspberry vinaigrette and a dry martini, all Mike orders is a BLT and a glass of Root Beer. I tell him to relax and live it up a little, and that I'm paying for lunch, and that I won't even bill the FMC for it.

After taking a long time to think about it, he laughs, and in a show of uncharacteristic bravery, orders a second glass of root beer and a bowl of vanilla ice cream for desert.

Why did he take so long to make up his mind? "In jail, you get fed what you're served, or you die. Its… still weird for me that I'm allowed to decide what I want to eat."

After lunch, we go for a walk along the pier works of the Hudson river and end up at a bench in the Brooklyn Bridge Park. You can see right across the river and downtown Manhattan from this bench, which gave us a pristine view of the One World Trade Centre, still the tallest structure in the western hemisphere even in the 24th century.

Mike, who grew up in the tiny and flat town of Medicine Hat, Alberta, points at the glass tower while we sat on the bench.

"Just look at that! I don't even think the Rocky Mountains are that big! That's so amazing. I think that really shows what we can do when we put aside our bullshit and work together. Can we go to the top and see what it looks like from up there?"

His almost child-like enthusiasm is impossible to say no to, so I walk him across the Brooklyn Bridge and take a left down Park Row past New York City Hall. We walk up Barclay Street past St Peter's Church for two blocks until we take another left down West Broadway for two more blocks, until we take the final right at Fulton Street and into the OWTC lobby.

As a uniformed Federation Marine, Mike gets us free admission, and we take a two minute turbo lift to the top of the tower and look back towards the River Café, where the sun is just starting to go down behind the cityscape of Brooklyn.

"Wow," Mike says to me, as looks up towards space, "You can see ESD from down here. This is one hell of a view. The only thing you'd see on that frozen shit hole was more snow. If it came down to having to go back there or jump off this tower… Glory glory, what a helluva way to die."

It's a testament to the resilience and strength of a man, of a Marine, like Mike Bagsley, that even after a year of surviving barbaric, savage torture at the hands of Klingons, he can still smile at the simple things in life.

But his last comment to me, that he'd rather die than face that experience again, its also proof that he's human, and that what happened to him will be with him until the end of his days.

Who was this mysterious source that gave him the PADD that let Mike survive one more week? He doesn't know.

But with a little digging, I was able to confirm that the particular source who helped Mike was the same man that I call The Source, the same man who provided me confirmation of what prevented Dan Beckenridge and the FMC from rescuing Mike from that frozen hellhole.

Blackjack Ashcroft. By charter, the Federation Marines are not allowed to operate their own starships. So, any rescue mission would have required Starfleet resources. And each time the request came in for a ship, a shuttle, or anything else that Starfleet had that the FMC lacked, the reply was simple and devastating.

Request Denied.

Admiral Thomas Ashcroft, Starfleet.


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