Before we get started. You’re going to have to promise me that you’ll publish this without redacting anything. I don’t want my words edited and twisted. If the Federation really wants to hear what happened out in the DMZ I’ll say my piece. But you have to promise that they will hear it.

Good.

I started, like many Maquis, in Starfleet. I had a respect for the values, the discipline, the traditions. I was practically a zealot. I saw it as an institution that helped those that were lost, that gave guidance. Purpose.

I held those beliefs over 8 years before I hung up my uniform. But I didn’t hang it up to become an outlaw, I hung it up for love. I got married, settled on a lovely planet near the Cardassian border. Riva Prime. It was for its rich Pergium deposits.

I didn’t blame Starfleet back then. They tried to protect the planet during the war. But now the whole quadrant knows what the Cardassians are like. You turn your back for a second, and they’re behind you with a knife in one hand, and a bag of latinum in the other. Then they’ll leave it to a coin flip as to whether they sell you out or leave you bleeding out on the ground.

I had children too. They were all killed in a single raid. If there's one thing you can rely on the Cardassians for, it’s cowardice. They didn’t even beam down to look them in the eye as they vaporised them. They did it from orbit.

I was left with nothing except a void in my heart where love once lived. But it didn’t take long for that void to fill with vengeance. Vengeance that gave me a reason to keep living.

The worst part of it all is that my story is far from unique. The Federation made out that the Maquis were evil terrorists, doing everything they could to tear apart a fragile peace because we were looking for a fight. The Federation put more effort into cleaning up the Cardies image than finding out what we were actually fighting for.

Our homes. Our families. Our children. Real peace. Not whatever the treaty was meant to be. The type of lasting peace that can only be achieved by punching a bully like the Cardassians square in the nose and telling them to back off. The type of diplomacy that the Federation didn’t used to be afraid of before it became more preoccupied with the ideal, rather than the reality of interstellar politics. We’d all love for every species we meet to want to play fair but the Cardassians don’t. They never have. They proved that over and over again.

I even wrote to a few of my old Starfleet colleagues after the attack on Riva. I asked for help, introductions. A chance to sit in front of an Admiral and plead my case. A few responded at first, but eventually they all stopped replying.

But by then, I’d been lurking around the civilian bars in the sector long enough that I’d been noticed. I was approached by a woman called Kalita, she told me about a resistance movement that was forming, calling themselves the Maquis.

I signed up on the spot.

I spent a lot of my early days with the Maquis on Bajor. Talking to the locals and other displaced colonists. Turns out there was more than enough sympathy for our cause there. They knew what it was like to live in fear of Cardassians. It was a rich environment for recruits.

Some only went out for a few weeks, gave us crash courses in resistance strategies. Others stuck around for the long haul. Chakotay was the last person I expected to run into there. But I was glad I did. When I spoke to him, I already knew what had happened to his home but he clearly didn’t. It wasn’t my place to say. But curse Starfleet for keeping that from him.

He was always leader material and leadership was a talent that the Maquis were sorely lacking in the early days. I made sure he got a ship, the start of a crew and he did the rest. Losing the Val Jean was a huge setback for our plans. But now I know that Starfleet had a spy onboard, probably for the best. There was me thinking Vulcans couldn’t lie.

It might just be me. But I felt like that was the first domino to fall. The Maquis never really seemed to recover after that. We were used to tragedy, but mystery and anger aren’t a good mix. We went through leaders faster than Starfleet goes through uniforms. Things seemed to begin to come back into focus when an ex-Starfleet officer called Eddington rose through the ranks. He had quite the ego. At one point people were saying he was a ‘vice commander’ as though we had an actual rank structure. Eddingtons methods were more extreme, and got a more extreme response from both Starfleet and the Cardassians. If it hadn’t been for him, maybe the Maquis would still be around today.

Now, I must be honest with you. There is another reason that I agreed to speak with you.

I mentioned Chakotay. I heard that Starfleet has made contact with that lost ship. Voyager. He’s alive?

I wrote this letter, to let him know what happened to us.

Could you make sure he gets it?