Jump 117: Star Trek TNG/DS9

Jump 117: Star Trek TNG/DS9

Location: Earth, 2360
Age: 35
Identity: Human, Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+600] Temporal Anomaly, TNG Era, Black Coat Society, Recurring Character, Alien Threat

[100/1600]  Speedy Promotions
[400/1600]  I Am Not God
[700/1600]  Space Pirate!
[750/1600]  Cosmic Awareness
[1050/1600] Q This
[1100/1600] Universal Translator
[1600/1600] Portable Replicator

As far as anyone locally is aware, I have reappeared after eighty-odd years of being missing. It's easy enough to hand-wave this as being in stasis, of course, but keeping such a thing quiet is difficult. I'm not the second coming of Zefram Cochrane or anything, but being an omnidisciplinarian that kicked the Federation's tech ahead by fifty years before I disappeared... it brings a lot of interest. That doesn't make the 'present day' that much different from what it would have been, though - the changes being implemented were incremental, logical, not vast leaps forward. Except that they were changes in virtually all fields, not just one or two.

I'm not sure I like this utopian vision, though. It's quite nice in the core worlds, but further out... well, there are colonies with more than a handful of issues. Now, this is understandable due to the core worlds being happy to share technologies and resources, but they expect policies to be followed. Usually, this is fine, but the individuals in charge may simply not want it. Or the planet's population might not. That's simply how things are here, though.

Moving from place to place kept things interesting for me, to be sure. At first it was just Starfleet Intelligence sniffing around, but the further I got away from the core, the more I'd find others looking for me. Especially the Romulans, at least at first; I'd encounter any number of alleged Vulcans, only for them to turn out to be aiming to interrogate or abduct me... so many Romulans. It wasn't until a bit later that the Obsidian Order started becoming a major issue for me. That may have been because I'd been poking around Bajor, among other territories, but then... the Federation WAS at war with the Cardassian Union, so it only stood to reason that I was a target of opportunity. And by not getting captured, the idiots in the Obsidian Order obviously thought that meant I should be promoted to a priority target. Of course, the best way to abuse the hell out of this was to do as I did on a few occasions, running the Romulans and Cardassians into each other, because of course they would have to deny me to their competitors.

I feel like I probably shouldn't have visited Farpoint Station, but it was a scheduled layover for me, and hey, I got to meet Dr. McCoy and give him a little relief from the aches and pains of old age when he wasn't looking. It doesn't help that he recognized me, but really, that's just the way these things tend to go. The whole humanity-on-trial thing on the other hand was... honestly I had forgotten that it was a thing until it came about, and lucky me, I happened to be on the bridge when the whole thing came about. Fortunately, I wasn't the center of attention and Q carried on with the crew and not myself.

I did meet him a couple of other times in the future, but he was more observing the decisions I made, asking whether I was really sure this was the way I wanted to go, whether I didn't think barbarism was perhaps not best met by equal force instead of taking a higher path like Picard would, but he seemed to like my response as well - a higher path would be ideal, but when innocents pay that price, it ceases to be the higher path.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

I didn't much help the Federation get beyond the current level of their technology - as it stands, without my interference they wouldn't have been too much worse off, but I still found it oddly amusing that the speed of their advancement actually slowed because of my interference. Or perhaps it was due in part to the fact that the closest thing they had to a war was a border skirmish with the Cardassians - a lack of pressure. But... regardless, the frontier worlds and colonies still were in pretty sad shape, overall. And so I elected to do something about it.

Many of the border worlds had various issues, and for the most part I didn't take it upon myself to sort them out unless they were particularly severe - you know, places like Turkana IV, where everyone decided to be fools for no good reason at all, where the government (or what pitiful excuse for one existed) was best dissolved and replaced wholesale. A more constructive application of what I could do, rather than simply handing out technology to be abused wantonly. Of course, there WERE places that only needed a small boost to get things up to a better standard, and when I visited those places I did so with gusto - giving out a replicator with the proper directions to bootstrap up to power generation on a sufficient scale, the only thing they needed after that point was enough time.

It was inevitable that my travels would take me to other scenic locales such as the front lines of the Cardassian war, where I accidentally gained a bit of infamy because the Obsidian Order decided an entire infantry division ought to be tasked to my capture, and instead ended up running in circles before the Order's men on the ground met with mysterious deaths and the infantry were set into a retreat because all of their equipment malfunctioned, leaving the Federation to mop up. Not that the Order's attempt to steal me was actually known since I was a target of opportunity, but... sending a military division chasing its tail for a week? They were not happy with me.

They also were pretty unhappy with me somehow singlehandedly hijacking one of their ships and smacking it into a cloaked Romulan warbird, but at least that got them off my back for a while as they thought I had died as a result. I don't imagine they would have ended up going through with the armistice and treaty as they did, otherwise. Of course, that only meant that I had to help the worlds under the sword of Damocles that was the demilitarized zone. And despite my travels after that point, things became much less my story and much more about this conflict.

Treaties were made, and yet the Cardassians happily brought in their own citizens to try to push Federation citizens out, smuggled in weapons, and were overall acting in incredibly poor faith. Shocking, I know. But when the Federation turned a blind eye to their own citizens' struggles, I stepped in. The Maquis. Well, there's no accounting for taste; instead of smuggling in weapons, I worked to help them with alternatives. You don't need to bring in outside resources when you can replicate what you need there, after all; there's nothing wrong with trading your phasers for coilguns, especially when dampening fields will let the latter work while keeping the enemy's disruptors from functioning. And when the Cardassians try to enact punitive measures, and the Federation again turns a blind eye, there's nothing wrong with escalating in kind.

The colonies didn't officially cede from the Federation until one of their captains carried out a biological attack on humans on a colony, but that action was caught and retransmitted throughout the frontier. It did a fantastic job of turning everyone against the Federation, even more strongly than they were against the Cardassians. When the Federation finally did lift their protections from the colonies - because, after all, how could they claim to protect people who didn't want to be protected? - the Cardassians found the newly independent confederation better defended than they expected... and using kitbashed ships that punched above their weight class. The Cardassians certainly couldn't claim that the weapons were smuggled in from the Federation, considering the confederation ships were outfitted with heavy disruptor cannons of the same design used on Galor class ships, but on corvette class hulls. Glass cannons, perhaps, but effective nonetheless; they ran interdiction, and while the 'little war' was a stalemate, they kept the planets from orbital bombardment.

Of course, when the Dominion became a factor, that changed things. By 'changed things' I mean the status quo went unaltered; a Dominion fleet came in force to try and obliterate the confederated colonies after having run the Klingons out of Cardassian territory, only to run into a cloaked minefield and an ambush, suffering total casualties. At that point the limitation had been raw material, but the Dominion ships were salvaged for technology and raw material, and the next generation of cutters were sent forth in a matter of days. Less glass cannons, closer to ships of the line, if not quite. Many of the conflicts afterward were less decisive, but the war with the rest of the Alpha Quadrant powers had started in full, and the confederacy was more or less ignored in favor of the rest of the Alpha Quadrant powers; it was felt that they were a tougher nut to crack but a quarantine and occasional raids would work until they could have the Dominion's full gaze turned upon them. And the Cardassians in confederate territory, seeing the horrors that the Cardassian Union was forced to endure under the Dominion, quietly defected to the de facto government of their homes. The two sides, formerly bitter enemies, made surprisingly effective allies by the necessity.

And this held until, years later, a fleet of 2,800 Dominion ships came out of the Bajoran wormhole, and were promptly ambushed by Confederate ships that were cloaked and laying in wait, in a victory that absolutely should not have been possible. Hundreds of ships turning disruptor turrets and polaron lances on thousands of attackers - a target-rich environment, to be sure, but the attack was so utterly unexpected that it was more effective than it had any right to be. Oh, the Confederate losses were notable, that was for certain, but when a fleet of cutters and gunships can annihilate thousands of Dominion ships in a victory that is beyond decisive... well, the Federation didn't regret their decision to leave the colonies alone after having had back-room dealings with myself. Everything went better than planned, frankly.

And the Federation arsenal expanded to include all of the Dominion's weapons, a couple of which were particularly effective against the Borg.

(Oh no, I accidentally butterflied away Voyager, what a shame)