PETE HARKINS

I didn’t join Starfleet for fame, you know. I didn’t ask for… This.

I originally signed up because there used to be an unwritten ‘soft’ requirement for postings at prestigious scientific institutions across the Federation. Whether it be Daystrom, the Vulcan Science Directorate or even the Special Projects division of the Federation Science Council. If you had a year or more of Starfleet service under your boots, you jumped up the applicant list.

It was then just my luck that by the time I had gotten through the Academy and got onto a ship, that the ‘golden age’ was fast coming to an end. My first posting was on the Gallatin. An old Soyuz class ship. It had a four digit registry, and it was the original too. No suffix, if you can believe it. The thing was falling apart. But it was old enough to have its own dedicated communications station, before that role was folded into the broader Operations role on Starships today. That’s where I was to earn my keep.

Only, my quiet year replacing subspace buoys was rudely interrupted by the Cardassians on Setlik III. The Gallatin was redeployed from maintenance to deploying new amplifiers along the border. Every time the Cardassians would sneak over to destroy one, we’d warp in to drop a replacement. It was risky, but rewarding work. I’m just glad it wasn’t fighting on the frontlines. I heard more while monitoring those comm channels than I would ever care to repeat.

Not exactly. But there was one occasion that really cemented the importance of what we were doing out there for me. There was a transport heading to one of the border colonies that had missed its check in. Despite the Gallatin threatening to shake herself apart every time the warp drive engaged, Starfleet saw fit to assign us with the mission of locating the wayward troops.

The ship still used an old style duo-tronic sensor array. Fine for short range scans, but the further the distance, the larger the information gaps. I suggested to the captain that I could rig the subspace array to boost the signal gain. Maybe then we could make contact, and shorten the search.

On a ship like the Gallatin, shunting power where it wasn’t usually routed was always a risky game. The EPS grid needed to be watched like a hawk at the best of times. But the Captain put his trust in me. I routed power from the emergency batteries to the deflector, and used it as an amplifier for our comm array.

From there, I bounced the signal through our comm buoys. We could rule out entire sectors without moving an inch. Which gave this story a happy ending. The transport had suffered a warp core failure, it had almost been torn apart when the warp bubble collapsed and they had short range communications only. When the old buoy started up to receive our transmission, they were able to use it to bounce a weak signal back to us.

A simple signal, using old Earth morse code, saved 250 lives that day. And on a personal note, it made me understand why there were so many career Starfleet officers. I had seen it as a stepping stone. I now understood it was much more than that.

But I still wasn’t cut out for the frontlines. Despite the pips on my collar, I’m a scientist. I wanted a family, and I didn’t want Angie to ever have to answer the door to a pair of solemn looking Starfleet officers bearing bad news.

While we were out there on the border, I had been working on a paper. While our sensors weren’t state of the art, one of the perks of Starfleet was that they still surpassed the capabilities of a lot of civilian models. Whenever we identified null zones - areas of space where convention communication degraded at a faster rate - I ran extensive scans. Over a period of months, I put together a hypothesis. That conventional wisdom about these zones was backward. While a standard signal degraded faster, this was because conditions within the zones varied compared to normal space. But, conditions inside the zones tended to be consistent not just within the one zone, but within all the null zones I had scanned.

So the hypothesis was that we could increase our comm ranges without the need for subspace amplifiers by using signals calibrated to the conditions inside null zones. When those signals emerged into normal space they would retain their strength. As they had been designed for the much more strenuous, but also much more consistent environments in the null zones.

The Captain encouraged me to submit the paper, and the next week I was on a transport back to Earth to present my findings at Daystrom. That trip was when I met Angie. She was also on her way back home.

That work saw me invited to be involved with a number of projects over the next few decades. Starfleet kept trying to encourage me to work on projects relating to battle communications. Countermeasures in other words, to conventional jamming #technologies. I saw the value, but I never had the passion.

They did finally manage to coax me to his building a few decades later, with the promise of working on a communications relay that would be deployed in the Gamma Quadrant, at the other end of the Bajoran Wormhole. Even though we had all heard the early reports about the Dominion, Starfleet was still determined to use the wormhole to expand the Federation's scientific horizons. From what they told me, the only ship they could spare for exploration didn’t have much in the way of scientific facilities. So the relay would then be used by the ship to pass research back to the Alpha Quadrant, allowing analysis to take place without delay. That was the project that bought me into Pathfinder.

Hayes tried. He really tried to persuade me to go to Deep Space Nine to do the deployment myself. He had almost convinced me, but then he let slip that I’d be working with the Cardassians. That was the end of that idea. So I transmitted my work to DS9s operations officer, along with an open invite to get in touch if they had any questions or ran into any problems.

That relay was in many ways a prototype. It paved the way for the Mutara Interdimensional Deep Space Array System. What you know as MIDAS. Which was a collaborative project between Starfleet Communications and the Vulcan Science Directorate.

The Array… After the success of the wormhole relay project, the focus shifted. Gradually at first. With the ever growing tensions with the Dominion and the outbreak of the Klingon War, Starfleet became a lot more security conscious. Where everyone at Pathfinder had previously worked together, we found ourselves siloed out into smaller groups, where our work had a much more narrow focus.

Starfleet had come to see the potential of MIDAS not just for communications, but also for surveillance. The array's ability to project a signal which didn’t deteriorate in a conventional manner, without needing to be deployed near the borders of Federation space was.. Of great interest.

The use cases were limited of course. But had their potential applications. One was to create a very basic map of Dominion signal activity. Our Starships could remain safely behind our lines, while we created rudimentary projections and deployment maps of their fleet sizes and positions by monitoring where and when we recorded fluctuations in the MIDAS signal. It was complex, imprecise work. But in the Early days of the war it was all we had.

Another possibility explored was using Midas as a spot light. Ships could divert power away from their sensor systems to weapons and shields by just following the MIDAS signal to their target.

Then the one that almost got the whole project canned. In the early days of the war the biggest issue faced was the one Starfleet tried to originally recruit me to tackle. In large fleet engagements, both sides would jam the other's communications the second the lines broke. The moment that happened, the loss rates would skyrocket.

So we proposed using MIDAS as a relay. The theory being that instead of trying to communicate with each other, Starships would communicate backwards to MIDAS, and MIDAS with its stronger signals would relay the communications to their intended audience. We were still working on the final details when we received word that Operation Return had been moved up. They were going now, so we had to be ready. We did our best. But most of our projections were using fleets of 500 ships.

But even those numbers were far beyond the scale of any Starfleet engagement prior to the previous few months.

Then the Dominion turned up with over a thousand ships in their fleet alone. MIDAS couldn’t cope. There were so many ships that the signals were getting blocked not by countermeasures, but by the sheer number of hulls. The debris. All the weapons fire. The messages were technically reaching their intended recipients, but they were so garbled that they were useless. The crews onboard didn’t have time to clear them up in the heat of battle.

It wasn’t so bad for ships in the middle and back of the deployment formations. But for any ships at the front of the charge it was hopeless.

Then that incident with the Romulans happened, and I was introduced to a bright-If eccentric- man called Reg Barclay. He was assigned to me directly from the Enterprise. Which raised eyebrows in its own right. It’s not every day that a supposedly brilliant engineer gets assigned off the flagship during war time.

Some of his former colleagues were kind enough to reach out to me, and offer me advice on handling some of his more… Disruptive tendencies. His personnel file showed he had a troubled history, which gave me cause for concern. But those conversations quelled my fears. It was clear that his colleagues cared deeply for him, and that he had built strong bonds with all of them.

That didn’t happen for us right away though. If anything. If I’m being honest with you I found he was a constant thorn in my side. As I mentioned, we were siloed in those days. By the time Reg joined I was running day to day operations and reporting directly to Admiral Hayes. Hayes had told him that he would be working on keeping in touch with Voyager.

But then that communications network collapsed after we sent the first message and… He spiralled. His ideas became more and more outlandish with every revision. I’m ashamed to say that it got to the stage where I began to dismiss him out of hand. I tried of course, to redirect his clear abilities towards some of the more pressing projects but he wouldn’t have it.

But we didn’t reach our boiling point until after the war.

Coffee?

The story known today is that Reg Barclay came up with a great idea to contact Voyager, and with the Pathfinder team he managed to establish the first trans-galactic real time communications. Which is completely true, and he deserves the credit for that achievement.

No. This was when MIDAS was in its official testing phase. Time on the Array was limited, and we were running stress tests. So it was important that the array was allowed to ‘cool off’ between tests, during which time we would run diagnostics.

Diagnostics that I assigned to Reg, that he hadn’t submitted by the deadline I set.

I found him exactly where I had come to expect to find him, on the hologrid running another scenario for one of his schemes. As I said, I’m not proud of the fact that I came to dismiss his suggestions by default, and in this case it was a good job that he didn’t listen to me.

Despite my clear disinterest, he began telling me about this latest idea of his. To push the Array far beyond its recommended specs. So it could fire a tachyon beam at a pulsar to create a wormhole.

I should also mention that one of the significant barriers I encountered with Reg was that he wasn’t the most… Eloquent communicator. Most officers would submit a proposal in writing, Reg. He would get so excited about his current idea that he would just… Stumble over himself trying to explain it to anybody in the lab who would listen, usually me.

We had a big meeting with Admiral Paris the next day. It occurred to me that part of the issue might be that Reg just didn’t have much of a social life. As far as I was aware he hadn’t made any friends on the team, nobody had even seen his home. Not even to stop by for a coffee. So I tried to reach out. Angie’s sister was in town, I thought maybe the prospect of a date might snap him out of his current obsession. It didn’t. If anything, It made him worse.

He looked chipper enough the next morning, but I could see the bags under his eyes. He had clearly gone to bed late refining this idea, and interrupted the meeting with the Admiral. In doing so, suggesting that the admiral might have forgotten that the ship with his son on it was stranded half way across the galaxy.

I’ll be honest, I was tempted to resign there and then out of pure embarrassment. Reg didn’t even apologise. He just disappeared again.

You’ll never guess where I found him.

The Hologrid. Playing with holographic versions of the Voyager crew. He claimed it was a diagnostic program, but it was plain as day that it was more than that.

While this was serious at the time, I do understand that he actually showed Commander Paris, Lieutenant Kim and Voyagers EMH the program after they had returned home. Fortunately, they found it more amusing than I did.

After I had found him, I had no choice but to relieve him of duty and put the lab off limits until he had got some help.

But, that still didn’t stop him. He tried to go over my head and took his theory straight to Admiral Paris. The man that only hours earlier he had accused of forgetting his son was stranded in the Delta Quadrant… To this day I’m surprised he even took the meeting.

But he did, and Reg went all in. Threatened to resign if his plan didn’t pan out. Admiral Paris, as level headed a man as you’ll ever meet, talked him down by agreeing to review his work. Then sent him packing.

That’s where things really went off the rails.

I had a nagging feeling, so decided to stay in some on premise quarters that night. I’m glad I did, because I got an alert early in the morning that somebody was breaking into the lab. Reg.

I confronted him there with a security team. But he slipped into the hologrid before we could stop him. Then he led us on a wild goose chase around his holographic Voyager, buying time while he tried out his plan.

I eventually had him backed into a corner. It had gotten quite dramatic. We had the holographic ships self-destruct counting down… He eventually relented and shut it down.

As we were leaving the lab, the Admiral entered. Approving his plan.

Just as I was breaking the news that unfortunately he had already tried it, and that it had failed. It turned out that this time, I was wrong. He had done it, and I got to be there to see Admiral Paris get to speak with his son.

It was a beautiful, deeply personal moment.

But I was still furious at Reg, even if I did feel terrible the entire time I was writing up my report and recommendations after we had all gone home.