JEREM PEYT

Through my lifetimes, I’ve observed the Federation follow a cyclical pattern. Tensions rise, technological development accelerates and so far at least, the Federation ends up coming out on top.

After that, the development drops off. The politicians and the Admirals behind desks get complacent. They begin to care more about appearances, polls and sentiment than the galaxy as it is. It’s a rise of idealism that inevitably comes crashing down when confronted with the fact that the stars out there aren’t always surrounded with species and civilisations that play by the same rulebook and moral code.

That’s where Starfleet Intelligence has always come in. We’re the canary in the coal mine. We raise the alarm, and try to give those politicians and admirals a swift kick in the rear end before a fleet of hostile vessels ends up in orbit around Earth with disruptors powered and torpedoes loaded.

Which brings us onto why I know you’re here today. Pathfinder.

Yes, yes. Pathfinder is interesting like that. It became associated effectively by accident with one of the largest news stories of our time. A splash of good news in an era that desperately needed it. Voyager making contact with the Alpha Quadrant from deep in the Delta Quadrant. Through a type one EMH of all things!

But before that, like most intelligence projects it wasn’t something that sat in the public eye. Quite the opposite.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways for people to connect some of the dots though. If there’s one thing that Starfleet loves, it’s iconography. Once they have a symbol for something, they don’t like to change it.

So you end up with little hints at there being more to Starfleet under the surface. Like this:

This first symbol. I assume you’ve read about the V’ger incident?

So you’ll likely remember that Starfleet first found out about V’ger after a monitoring station on the Klingon border reported the destruction of the IKS Amar and her escorts.

This station was part of the Epsilon program, a series of monitoring posts built in the 23rd century along the Klingon Border.

Then-

We move to the current century. The collaboration between Starfleet and Cardassia before the war used this symbol for the Gamma Quadrant Wormhole relay project.

Notice anything?

Exactly! Which brings us too…

Precisely.

So we have monitoring posts along the Klingon border, a monitoring post in the Gamma Quadrant and… The Pathfinder Project. Which as far as the public knows was working on deep space communications research and stumbled onto Voyager.

It doesn’t quite… Line up. Does it?

The truth is... And I’ll do my darndest to get this cleared for publication for you, is that Pathfinder stretches back long before the 2370s.

In fact, it dates right back to the founding of the Federation and Jonathan Archer’s Enterprise. It began with the design and development of the subspace amplifiers used by the NX-01 to maintain communications with Earth. A trail of breadcrumbs behind Starfleets first warp 5 starship and a path they could find and follow to get home.

After the Xindi attack, the project was repurposed and its mission was effectively flipped. Instead of designing technology to help Starships stay in contact when they were out on the frontier, they were instead tasked with developing Starfleets ‘early warning system’. A way of keeping an eye on the galaxy from afar so there would always be time to assemble a response to tackle any inbound threats.

And not just that. They also worked on refining Starfleets ability to tell ships where to go and what to target if conflicts broke out. Much like the original Pathfinders of Earth’s 20th Century.

Which is why you’ll find Pathfinder iconography on the (now retired) Epsilon stations, on the Argus Subspace Radio Telescope Array, on MIDAS. All of them are strategically developed and placed installations.

Although, the project has had its share of interesting collaborations with other Alpha Quadrant powers over the years…