Commander Barker arrived on the Bridge after the mission, still dressed in his black body armor. He'd wanted to report on the success of the mission as soon as possible, only stopping to return his weapons to the Armory before heading straight to the Bridge without changing.

Captain Devore turned to look at his first officer, who just smiled back.

"We have them ?" Devore enquired.

"Both the Cardassian traitor and the half-breed." Chu replied. "The EMH has them secured in sickbay, he's going to try and extract the information that we need."

Devore smiled at the news, he knew how 'efficient' the EMH was at extracting information from prisoners. Devore enjoyed a good interrogation, but using the EMH caused for less mess and the prisoners usually survived.

"And the plans that they stole ?" Devore asked.

"Mister ASHER is examining their ship as we speak. If the plans are there, he'll find them." Chu replied confidently.

Just then Major Phanan wearing his Marine Green uniform arrived on the Bridge, his right arm in a sling.

"It looks like you had a little trouble capturing our prisoners ?" Devore remarked.

"Just a minor fracture, that Cardassian is quite strong you know. The doctor says that the nanoprobes have already repaired the bone, the slings just for show. Gave him as good back, he'll not be able to hold a phaser for a while" The Major replied, smiling sadistically.

Devore knew his senior Marine all too well and knew that if he was making jokes, then the injury was far more serious than the Major was making out. But the Major was also tough and the Borg technology still embedded in his system made him a formidable soldier. Although not indestructible, the Borg nanoprobes could repair any injuries he sustained faster than any medical facility could. Captain Devore had recovered the Major some years earlier from a decimated Borg cube at Wolf 359. The Borg had attempted to invade the Alpha quadrant whilst the Empire was at war with the Cardassians. They had however underestimated the resources of the Terran Empire. Of the thirty-nine attacking Borg vessels, only one had survived, a small diamond shaped vessel, fleeing for its life.

Devore had only just graduated from the Academy and was serving, as Ensign aboard the ISS Saratoga and Phanan was just a Marine Private. Devore had been sent across to a sphere to try and salvage Borg technology before it was destroyed. He came across an assimilation chamber, where several Terran officers and a couple of Borg drones lay dead. By rights Devore should have killed the Private he found strapped to a table, put him out of his misery. But the Marine Private had not been fully assimilated into the Borg collective and Devore felt sorry for the helpless form. So he had him transported back to the ship, where the Doctor's were able to remove most of the Borg implants.

Since that day the two had become close friends and when Devore was offered the Captaincy of the Leviathan, the Major had been his first choice to lead the Marine Corp detachment that was to serve aboard the ship.

Since the failed Borg attack at Wolf 359, no Borg vessel had ever been detected in the Alpha quadrant. The only contact with the Borg since that day had been when the ISS Voyager had been transported to the Delta quadrant by an entity called the Caretaker. Voyager had been sent to capture a group of Klingon sympathizers, who had been attacking Terran installations throughout the Alpha quadrant. The sympathizers were all captured and executed, but not before they managed to destroy the Caretaker's space station, stranding Voyager in the Delta quadrant.

However, during their trip back, Voyager formed new alliances with various Delta quadrant species. The greatest triumph for the crew was the forming of the Kazon alliance, bringing the warring factions of the Kazon together and showing them what they could achieve if they all worked together instead of fighting each other.

As for the Borg, Voyager succeeded in obtaining a truce between the Terran Empire and the Borg, which stopped the Borg entering the Alpha quadrant. In return, Voyager assisted the Borg in destroying an alien race known only by their Borg designation 'Species 8472'. The aliens had arrived from another realm and were systematically attacking the Borg.

All attempts at assimilation of 'Species 8472' had failed, leaving the Borg vulnerable through lack of knowledge. Seeing the problem the Borg had and an opportunity, Captain Janeway offered to assist the Borg and provided them with biological and technical data on 'Species 8472' and their bio-ships in return for never entering the Alpha quadrant again. This information included an idea for destroying 'Species 8472' using nanoprobes that mimicked '8472' cells. These nanoprobes once attached to an '8472' cell would 'commit suicide' taking the '8472' cell with it. The battle ended when a Borg transwarp probe was launched containing millions of enhanced nanoprobes. The nanoprobes were quickly spread over an area of five light years and all but destroyed the '8472' invasion.

In total it would have taken Voyager over seventy five years to reach Earth, but they discovered various 'shortcuts' along the way until they finally stumbled onto another Terran vessel, the ISS Equinox.

The Equinox was a science vessel pulled into the Delta quadrant through a collapsing wormhole they were studying. The Equinox had made contact with a race called the Enkarren. The Enkarren had the ability to summon extra-dimensional aliens into this universe. Although these aliens could only exist for a few minutes in our universe, the Equinox crew managed to obtain detailed information about them.

When the Equinox crew shared this information, the Voyager crew soon realised that the aliens (A nucleogenic lifeform) stored a massive amount of energy within their molecular structure. If they could extract the base proteins and infuse the resulting crystallized matter into the warp core, they could increase the power output of the warp drive. All they had to do was capture about sixty of the aliens. The EMH onboard Voyager soon devised a method using a polaron grid and a sub-molecular re-sequencer to convert the aliens into the 'fuel' they required.

Horrified at the Voyager crew's actions, the Equinox crew first tried to seize control of Voyager and when that failed, to destroy the ship itself. Their attempts failed and the Equinox was destroyed. Using the aliens and the warp modifications, the ISS Voyager managed to traverse the remaining distance to Earth in just over a year, instead of the forty that it would have taken them.

One of the most important pieces of technology the ISS Voyager brought back was Quantum Slipstream propulsion. They had first encountered this form of propulsion when an alien called Arturis came aboard. In fact he was one of the few surviving member of his race, most of which had been destroyed during the war between 'Species 8472' and the Borg.

His homeward had been on the front-line of the final battle, made uninhabitable by the bio-weapons developed by Voyager and the Borg to attack Species 8472. The enhanced nanoprobes had continued to function long after '8472' had been destroyed. The nanoprobes mutated and then started to destroy any living matter that they came into contact with. Arturis's world had been turned from a lush green oasis into a barren life-less desert within a week.

Driven by grief and a need for revenge he tried to trick the crew of Voyager onto his ship. At the time his ship using advanced holographic systems appeared to be Terran in origin was powered by new form of interstellar propulsion called a quantum slipstream drive. His hope was to capture the entire crew and send them out into unknown space, before destroying the slipstream drive and escaping in the single shuttlecraft.

The deception lasted for a few days whilst the Voyager crew examined the ship, until the true nature of Arturis's ship was discovered. In the end after nearly a day of being pursued by Voyager, Arturis destroyed the ship to stop Voyager from obtaining slipstream technology.

But Voyager already had most of the alien ship's database and a detailed schematic of the slipstream drive. They even made an attempt to create a slipstream drive of their own. Although in the end their efforts failed, the ship did manage to travel over 20,000 light-years closed to home. The drive was deemed too technical to operate without massive engineering and scientific resources and was dismantled.

When they had arrived home, the schematics and the prototype drive were looked at again. It had taken nearly ten years for the Terran Scientists and Engineers to master the problems of slipstream propulsion and now they were reaping the rewards.

The ISS Leviathan was the first ship to be powered by this new drive and had only recently returned from the Delta quadrant, meeting with another of Voyager's new allies the Hirogen.

Now a Cardassian slave and a Bajoran-Romulan half-breed had stolen the blueprints and all the technical information about the Leviathan, probably hoping to sell the information to the highest bidder.

The Bajorans were annexed to the Romulan Star Empire, who had assisted the Bajorans when the Cardassian Union had attempted to invade Bajoran space. The Romulan's stopped the Cardassians, only to occupy Bajoran territory for the next sixty years, whilst they mined the system dry and turning the Bajoran people into a slave race.

While the Cardassians were weakened by the defeat at the hands of the Romulans, the Terran Empire had ceased the chance and took over all of Cardassian space, enslaving the Cardassian's, just like they had the Klingons over half a century earlier.

That had been over fifty years ago, but even now there were still pockets of resistance, along with Terran sympathizers willing to free both Cardassian and Klingon slaves. When the Romulans discovered the Bajoran wormhole some ten years ago, they unleashed a new force into the Alpha quadrant from the other side of the wormhole. The Dominion was the ruling force of the Delta quadrant formed over two thousand years ago and covering seventy thousand sectors of space. Quickly the Dominion forces invaded and took over first the station close to the wormhole and then the rest of the Bajoran system. The Bajorans embraced the new arrivals and joined with the Dominion to fight the Romulans.

The Romulans abandoned all of their Bajoran territory and fled back into their own space, where they could defend themselves. The Dominion attempted invading Romulan space, but the borders were now too well defended.

The Romulans went into a self-imposed state of isolation.

Having managed to establish a foot-hold in the Alpha quadrant, the Dominion abandoned their attacks on the Romulan Empire and turned their attention to the other system bordering Bajoran space.

Their first target was the former Cardassian territory now occupied by the Terran Empire, taking the Seventh fleet by surprise. (A mistake they wouldn't forget.) This attack lead to a five-year war between the Dominion and the Terran Empire. Slowly however the Terran Empire pushed the Dominion forces back into Bajoran space.

The final defeat of the Dominion came when a Captain Sisko made a daring attack on the station close to the wormhole and managed to lay a field of self-replicating, cloaked mines across the apex of the wormhole. This cut off the Dominion's supply lines and stopped them obtaining re-enforcement's.

With now limited resources, the Dominion forces were easy prey for the Terran Empire. Six months after he had laid the minefield, Sisko returned and took over the wormhole station. Now that they had the station, they could study the wormhole more closely and within a month a way of sealing the wormhole for good was discovered.

Sisko took a single ship through the wormhole and discovered a Dominion fleet waiting on the other side. Sisko turned his vessel the ISS Defiant around and re-entering the wormhole, followed closely be the Dominion fleet. Once back in the Alpha quadrant, Sisko dropped a specialized mine at the very entrance to the wormhole, which was detonated as soon as the first Dominion ship emerged. The resulting explosion collapsed the wormhole all the way back to the other side, trapping and destroying most of the Dominion fleet in the process. A few ships did escape and managed to reach Bajor, where they joined their trapped forces. Rather than make a final stand at Bajor however, the Dominion forces fled back to the Gamma quadrant. Even at the ships maximum speed, it was going to take the Dominion fleet nearly sixty years to reach their own borders.

Bajor and the people who remained were destroyed as an example to others, when the Terran Empire launched an experimental torpedo device at the planet. The device re-sequenced the entire planet on a molecular level. The new planet however became unstable and ultimately broke apart through volcanic and tectonic disruption, because the Terran engineers used unstable protomatter in the Genesis matrix.

Having spend eight years in hiding, the Romulans were back and a new war had broken out with the Terran Empire. The Romulans had been busy making new allies in the Breen and the Bariens over the years and now Romulan controlled space blocked off most of the Terran Empire's access routes to the Delta quadrant, stranding the Terran allies in the Delta quadrant without support.

Slipstream drive was the only way to reach the Delta quadrant now. The Romulans had no ships fast enough to pursue a vessel powered by slipstream technology.

But now these two prisoners may have passed on the knowledge to the Romulans, Devore had to find out. If he had to, he'd beat the information out of the prisoners.

"I'm going down sickbay." Devore announced. "Mister Barker, you have command."

Chu said nothing, just nodded his approval.

Devore walked into the turbolift and headed towards sickbay.

[ASHER to Bridge.]

"Go ahead ASHER. What have you found ?" Chu asked.

[Commander, I'm afraid I can't find any trace of the blueprints and information T'Kul and Dukal stole. If they were in the database, they've been wiped clean.] ASHER replied.

"Did you check the navigational and sensor logs ?" Chu enquired.

[Yes Commander. The ship appears to have rendezvoused with a Romulan Warbird a few days ago, close to the Cardassian border.] ASHER stated. [I have the sensor readings and I'm heading to Astrometrics now. Hopefully we can get a trace on the warbird.]

"Good work." Chu praised ASHER. "Send the co-ordinates of the rendezvous to the helm. Let me know if you get any results. Bridge out." "We have the co-ordinates Commander." Brayden Devore, the Captin's son acknowledged.

"Proceed to co-ordinates, warp twelve, enter the stream." Chu replied.

Almost immediately the ship went into slipstream mode and headed towards the position where the prisoners had met with a Romulan warbird. Chu sat in the command chair and smiled. He knew that having the hologram ASHER stationed aboard the Leviathan would be an asset. He'd seen it's potential whilst working with Doctor Zimmermann, when the disabled ASHER had been brought to Jupiter Station.

The Protector's database file that had been loaded into the Enterprise-E's computer core was huge. Captain Picard had allowed the download to finish, but had soon regretted it. The database had infiltrated the entire ship's computer system and managed to create a hologram that had attempted to take over the ship. Only by shutting down the holo-emitters had the crew been able to stop the take-over.

The database had then been transferred into an isolated computer core designed by Chu and brought back to Jupiter station. Once there, Doctor Zimmermann managed to 'graft' the database onto a modified holo-matrix and ASHER was 'born'.

By grafting the database onto the matrix, Zimmermann had managed to create a hybrid hologram that was both advanced and stable. The database contained a wealth of knowledge gathered over millennia by the Protectors, including a device capable of allowing a hologram to be independent of a holographic projection system.

ASHER was allowed to leave Jupiter station and decided that he wanted to continue the Protector's quest to obtain all knowledge and explore the galaxy. He joined Starfleet and became an Astrometrics specialist. When Chu had been assigned to the Leviathan and learned of it's mission to keep in contact with the Terran allies in the Delta quadrant, he'd sought out ASHER and persuaded him to join the vessel. He'd never regretted that day.